Gang Wars of the North - The Inside Story of the Deadly Battle Between Viv Graham and Lee Duffy. Stephen Richards
‘Viv had an uncanny knack to spot trouble and get people out of tight spots. It was as if Viv could read what people were saying by just looking at them. I used to flinch when I could see that Viv had spotted trouble. But you could look and see nothing happening, and then you would see him stepping back and making his way to wherever. The next minute a fist would be thrown. He knew what was going to happen before it actually happened.’
You can take the boy out of the city but you cannot take the city out of the boy. This old piece of wisdom underlines the difference between Lee Duffy and Viv Graham. Viv was from a little village and, even though he tried to make inroads into the underworld scene on Tyneside, he still had a bit of the country boy in him.
As for Duffy, by contrast, his streetwise instinct helped him to survive whatever situation he found himself in. He was a chameleon, adaptable to whatever life threw at him, even if still a fatally flawed character!
In one of the many stories told about Duffy, a large van pulled up outside the Empire pub in Middlesbrough with about 30 mountain bikes in it and the driver got out and asked him if he or his mate knew where Bobby’s Cycles was. Duffy told the driver that they didn’t but said, “They’ll know in there,” and pointed to the pub. When the driver, leaving the engine running, went into the pub, two men hanging about nearby who had nothing to do with Duffy and his mate jumped smartly into the van and drove off at high speed. At that time a good mountain bike would fetch about £500.
That very night, Duffy’s friend went to see his mother, who said to him, ‘Have you heard about your mate Duffy? A man pulls up from the handicapped kids’ place with a load of bikes asking for directions, Lee Duffy knocked him out, broke his cheekbone and took all the bikes off him that were for the kids.’ Tales like this helped build the wrong kind of reputation for Duffy, but then powerful characters always attract exaggeration.
But many believe it is no exaggeration to say that Duffy had such a presence that he could go into a nightclub containing a thousand people and within ten minutes there would only be a hundred left in the place. He would not need to hit anyone with his fists: his fearsome aura was enough.
When Duffy was in jail, his girlfriend and his friend visited him, and when they eventually got in to see him he was walking around alone in a big caged yard. Why, you might wonder. The answer: 18 people in that prison wanted to murder him. To the prison authorities it was easier to ensure his safety by locking him up in secure surroundings rather than putting him in with a mob of would-be assassins.
Another story of Duffy’s time behind bars also shows his forceful character. As he was brought out of a door from a little tunnel, he had one joint in his mouth and another one tucked behind his ear. Puffing vigorously on the joint, he seemed oblivious to the prison officer on either side of him. The screws escorted him into a little room hastily assembled as a makeshift visiting area.
‘Fuck off!’ he said to them.
‘Lee, on a visit we’ve got to stand over you,’ they explained.
To this he shot back, ‘Look, you’ve got me out of the cell, but you’ve got to get me back in the cell. Fuck off!’
The two screws walked briskly out of the room, in no mood to argue with this particular prisoner.
Another time, Duffy’s friend Neil Booth decided to climb on to the roof of the Havana nightclub. Off his head with drink, he started to throw roofing tiles on to the street below. Duffy, unaware of this, was in a house around the corner and the police went there to ask him to get Booth down off the roof.
‘Now then, now then, now then’ was Duffy’s way of saying, ‘I’m here.’ Sure, he had no need to make such grand entrances, but that is how Duffy was. When it came to being involved in running things on Teesside, he could not be bothered with menial issues, but making a grand entrance was always important to him.
Duffy was forever being discriminated against, from the age of six right up until the day he died. He knew he was not going to see the other side of 30, so what did he have to lose by being himself? In time the very mention of his name would bring terror to people around Teesside, but only to those with good reason to be scared of him. Everyone who suffered at his hands had some connection to the underworld, either directly or indirectly. The people who tried to kill Duffy on a string of occasions did not know him personally; they were contract killers working for others.
After Duffy was shot the second time and was hospitalised for a few days, he would smoke dope to help him overcome the pain. ‘Come here. Do you want a go of this?’ he would say to his armed police guard as he held out a joint mockingly.
Yet Duffy was also a sensitive man, and an extract from a letter he wrote to Lisa Stockell reveals this side of him. Here was a man who had had half his foot shot off in an assassination attempt and his skull beaten with a crowbar. And yet all he speaks of in this letter, written on one side of a greetings card, is the pain and suffering his girlfriend must have gone through when she went into hospital to have their daughter Kattieleigh, obviously without his being able to witness the birth. Not once does he fall into self-pity for his own predicament.
The neat handwriting points to someone who is methodical and artistic. Some of the text slopes down from right to left, an indication he was depressed. The neatness of the hand leads me to believe he was a bit of a perfectionist, and it’s well known that perfectionists can become frustrated. Maybe this helps explain why Duffy would sometimes fly off the handle. But, despite these outbursts, he was also someone who thought a lot.
It’s clear that his chosen lifestyle also brought with it a degree of paranoia, though maybe this was just a state of heightened vigilance. Anyway, one day Duffy was on his way to a blues party and became paranoid, thinking the people that had previously shot him were there. He drove to a house in Stockton, went in and within minutes returned to the car carrying three guns. To one of his associates he said, ‘Here, get one of them.’
‘Fuck you with your “get one of them”,’ the man replied. ‘I don’t mind having a fight with someone, but if I get caught with this and you shoot someone, the frame of mind you’re in, I’m getting 15 years here.’
As they were leaving Stockton, their car was nearly hit by a police van that raced through traffic lights.
‘He goes through and misses the car, a Sierra, doing about 60mph,’ recalls an associate of Duffy’s. ‘I said to Duffy, “Go for it, go for it, and let’s get out of here. He’s got to turn around, he’s in a transit van, let’s offski.”
‘Duffy says to me, “Let’s fucking offski.”
‘He pulls up, and at that time he’s got three loaded guns and ammunition in the car. I’m wiping the guns and the door handles of the car down.
‘Duffy jumps out of the car, goes straight over to the bobby’s van and says, “What the fucking hell do you think you’re doing, you?”
‘Martin Shallows [the police driver] says, “All right, Lee, what’s the matter?”
‘Duffy says, “I’ll tell you what the fuck’s the matter with me: you’ve just nearly crashed into me, you daft cunt.”
‘The reply was: “Lee, howway, just get yourself out of Stockton, mate, no problem, no problem.”
‘Another time, someone had a load of cannabis resin in the car and the coppers pulled Lee for a routine check because it was Duffy. He went off his head like he was a loony and they brought a squad car out to give the car a full checkover. They never found the cannabis that was hidden underneath the seat. Instead of him keeping his mouth shut he couldn’t.
‘Duffy and his friends – one of them was Lee Harrison