In case we forget:
Kattieleigh Duffy
Dean and Viv Graham Jnr
Callum and Jodie Annie Graham
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword: A Tale of Two Rivals
1 Introducing Lee Duffy
2 Introducing Viv Graham
3 Memories of the Duffer
4 Respect
5 The Duffer versus the Tax Man
6 Working the Doors
7 An Empty MFI Unit
8 Riding the Tiger
9 What Makes a Man Tick?
10 Harem Nights and Fights
11 The Grasshopper and the Squirrel
12 Gentlemen Prefer Guns
13 The Last Tango
14 When You Lose It Completely
15 They Call Him Viv
16 Russian Roulette
17 No More Good Times
18 ‘Viv No More ’94’
19 Getting Away With Murder?
20 After Duffy
By the Same Author by this publisher
Copyright
| Lee Paul Duffy | Viv Graham |
| Weight: 245lb Height: 6ft 4in Age: 26 Job: Taxing drug dealers Background: Violence Attempts on his life: Numerous Death: Stabbed to death in a fight | Weight: 252lb Height: 5ft 11in Age: 34 Job: Protection Background: Boxing Attempts on his life: Two Death: Shot dead by gangland assassins |
Two men whose names stood for violence – Viv Graham and Lee Duffy, aka the Duffer – fiercely resented each other. Sworn enemies, they ran parallel lives as pub and club enforcers, raging their gangland turf wars in a frenzy of brutality and unremitting cruelty. Engaging each other in a vicious gangland winner-takes-all fight was the ultimate challenge. Their clash ended in bloodshed, but in the end each man would meet an untimely and violent death at the hands of others.
Lawrie and Brenda Duffy welcomed their newborn son, Lee Paul, later to be known as ‘the Duffer’, into the world on 11 June 1965. The boy was raised on a council estate in Middlesbrough’s South Bank. After his first school, Beech Grove Primary, he attended Stapylton School in nearby Eston.
As early as the age of six, Duffy was repeatedly assaulted by much older boys – if you can call lads of up to 19 ‘boys’.
And in 1979 a gang of older teenagers brutally attacked 14-year-old Duffy and knocked him unconscious. He was awarded £80 in compensation, but the taste of blood set him on the road to developing his skills as a boxer. Initially these were for self-defence but later, when he became a man mountain of six foot four and 16 stone, he dished out vengeance beatings to those involved in that assault.
West Indian Shandy Boyce is credited with teaching Duffy how to box, although many say that he never really took to boxing. But later Duffy would train at the gym and spar with any boxer. Every two or three weeks he would turn up on ‘senior nights’ and knock someone out.
Duffy often recalled the bullying he suffered as a child and during his formative years this clearly played a part in traumatising him so that he wanted to fight. Psychologists say that the bullied becomes the bully.
By his teens Duffy was indoctrinated in the rough-and-tumble outlook that estates like his breed into youngsters and in December 1980, not yet 16, he received convictions for burglary and car theft and was sent to a detention centre for three months.
Duffy left Stapylton School in 1981 with a CSE Grade Three in woodwork.
The following year violence landed him in a detention centre for six months. Then, in April 1983, he was given a youth custody order lasting two and a half years for attacking and robbing a nightclub doorman.
Charges of affray and assault against Duffy were dropped in 1984 when no one would give evidence at court. (Four similar charges were dropped on separate occasions for the same reason.) That year Duffy met a single mother of one, Carol ‘Bonnie’ Holmstrom, a South Bank girl three years older than him, and they began a turbulent five-year relationship.
Duffy was jailed in March 1988 for four years after pleading guilty to a vicious assault on a man in the Speakeasy nightclub (later the Havana) in Middlesbrough. The attack deprived his victim, Martin Clark, of an eye. While serving his sentence Duffy was moved to 18 different prisons. When strip-searched during these moves he became very aggressive. At each jail he wanted to take over and be ‘top man’.
In August 1988, while Duffy was behind bars, Bonnie gave birth to their second daughter, Michelle, and soon afterwards she told him that it was all over between them.
However, on being released from prison in May 1990, Duffy visited Bonnie in hospital, where she was being treated for stress. He broke down in tears and then went on holiday. On his return he broke the news to Bonnie that Lisa Stockell was pregnant with his child.
Duffy’s childhood hero was another of Teesside’s hard men, Kevin ‘Ducko’ Duckling. He idolised the man and wanted to be like him when he got older. Duffy modelled himself on Ducko and similar hard men and maybe this is what helped mould him into the man he eventually became, although, as a family man, he was undoubtedly compassionate and cared about the two daughters he had with Bonnie and his daughter born to Lisa, Kattieleigh.
In June 1988 Ducko was charged with manslaughter and given a four-year prison sentence. He had shoved a partially disabled man from Sheffield, causing him to hit his head on the ground and die. The death of 21-year-old Paul Dallaway occurred at a ‘blues party’. These unlicensed gatherings, often organised and frequented by black people, sold alcohol and usually took place in terraced houses or disused commercial premises that had been converted in a rough-and-ready way. Once the pubs and clubs closed, people wanted the fun to go on and that is how blues parties developed. At one time, some cans of booze and a few grams of white powder or cannabis would get things going, but then the parties became commercialised and people started to make money out of running events where hundreds of paying guests would pack in.
Curry and rice would be served and drugs would be on sale to keep the party in full swing, while reggae tunes would blast out at full power. Usually an open fire was kept going to quickly burn drugs if the police raided.