Blues parties were very dangerous places where you could get stabbed or shot, but Duffy chose them as his hunting ground for rich pickings from drug dealers. Soon his reputation went before him and he was a force second to none in the Middlesbrough area. Just the mention of his name would make drug dealers run a mile.
A look at Duffy’s past will show that he was much more orientated towards violence than his Newcastle counterpart Viv Graham ever was, and because of this he would receive a series of threats to his life.
Back in the 1980s, when Duffy was in his early twenties, he thought he could use his boxing prowess to carve out a reasonable living from crime. For people who make a decision like this, crime becomes a normal, accepted way of life. Court appearances were an occupational hazard for Duffy and, by 1988, when he was sentenced to four years for affray by Teesside Crown Court, he had seen the inside of a court over a dozen times, and more than once in connection with charges of violent crime.
No sooner was Duffy released from prison than he was in trouble again. This time, though, it was different. He was usually the one to dish out the punishment, but now he was on the other end of violence.
The early hours of a December morning in 1990 saw the industrial district of Middlesbrough disturbed by the noise of a shotgun. In the typical underworld way, Duffy had been shot in the knee. A man was later charged with the shooting and, because the damage was not as serious as it might have been, Duffy started to believe he was invincible. Over time he was called many names because of his violent behaviour, ‘thug’ being one of the milder ones.
At the time of this assault on him, Duffy shared a home with his girlfriend, Lisa Stockell, in Eston. Gangsters of the old school tended to consider the home as a place of refuge, out of bounds for causing trouble, because innocent people could be hurt. The unwritten code of conduct that included this rule may have applied years ago, but it was certainly not observed by the two black men who came looking for Duffy.
The two men who broke into the home of Lisa Stockell on 31 January 1991 – she was nine months pregnant at the time – were clearly expecting to find Duffy at home, as they had come tooled up. As usual when cowards are given the job of real men, they had with them some equalisers in the form of a shotgun and a ‘leg breaker’, an iron bar.
Not finding Duffy, these two hairy gorillas vented their frustration on the four people in the house, three women and one man. The intruders ripped gold rings from Lisa’s fingers and threatened all sorts of things in their determination to know where her boyfriend was. Feeling full of themselves, they finally left in search of their intended victim.
In the early hours of the morning, a time that he loved, Duffy was attending a blues party in a former wedding boutique in Harrington Road, Middlesbrough, unaware that his girlfriend, her sister, her mother and another man had been the victims of two thugs earlier that night. When he heard what had happened, he was determined to seek out those responsible and got hold of photographs of the pair involved in the raid; rumours have it that a police source passed them on to him.
Soon afterwards the two men who were on Duffy’s trail turned up at the party and got into a fight with him. One of them pulled out a shotgun and leaned over the bar pointing it at Duffy, who snatched the weapon, making it go off and blast his foot into a gory mess. He had to have skin grafts taken from his thigh to close up the hole in his foot. As a party piece, Duffy would show the sole of his foot, which still had pellets visibly embedded in it.
In a similarly macabre stunt, when the gunman was on remand in prison, he came out of his cell during association, took a draw on a cigarette, blew the smoke into a trainer he had just taken off and asked people what it was. No one knew until he said, ‘Duffy’s foot, after it was shot!’
Duffy must have been getting used to being shot at. Just over a month before that incident he had been confronted by a gunman who made the first attempt to murder him. That night, 27 December 1990, Duffy was called out from a club in Middlesbrough’s Princes Road, only to be forced to dive over a car for cover when he realised he was in danger. He escaped death but was blasted in the knee with a shotgun. After spending four days in hospital he signed himself out.
From this first attack onwards it was clear that there was a violent campaign to take Duffy off the scene in Middlesbrough by killing him. Because of his stand against drugs on his territory, dealers were losing a lot of money. His situation mirrored Viv Graham’s in Newcastle, where his life too was under threat because he was stopping a lot of dealing going on.
In Duffy’s case, no fewer than ten men faced charges of attempting to murder him relating to three different incidents. All were acquitted, however, as we will see later on.
Nevertheless, the scale and persistence of the onslaught on Duffy indicates the chilling resolve of the drug barons to get him off what they saw as their domain.
It was in April 1991 that three men from Blyth, about ten miles north of Newcastle, were charged with the attempted murder of Duffy in relation to the shooting in January of that year. Raymond Palmer, Robert Charlton and Anthony Cole were from this Northumbrian town well known for the drug dealing among its small population and for the high number of deaths from illegal drugs. Charges against Palmer and Charlton were later dropped. Cole was acquitted in October 1992 of the attempted murder of Duffy in a trial that heard that there was no real chance of securing a conviction.
Birmingham has a connection with this story through the involvement of Marnon Clive Thomas and Leroy Vincent Fischer, both from that city, who were charged with robbing Duffy’s girlfriend of a large quantity of jewellery shortly before Duffy was shot in the foot. A third man from Birmingham, John Leroy Thomas, was charged, along with Marnon Thomas and Leroy Fischer, with conspiring to murder Duffy on that same occasion. All three were charged within a few weeks of the shooting.
John Leroy Thomas was given bail. The net was widening and four more people, all from Teesside, were pulled in and charged with conspiracy to murder: Shaun Thomas Harrison, Paul James Bryan, Kevin James ‘Beefy’ O’Keefe and Peter Corner.
Then, in April 1991, it was nearly a case of third time unlucky for Duffy when another attempt was made on his life. If shooting could not put paid to him, surely petrol would! In this incident, which had all the horror of a video nasty, Duffy was doused in petrol by a man who chased him with a lighter, according to underworld sources.
The Commercial pub, in South Bank, was the scene of this attack, in which Duffy reacted violently, breaking a man’s jaw. For this retaliation Duffy was charged with GBH (grievous bodily harm).
Only a week before the assault in the Commercial, in connection with another charge against Duffy, a judge in chambers had freed him on bail with conditions that barred him from entering any licensed premises in Middlesbrough. On this occasion Duffy had been remanded for GBH with intent on a man called Peter Wilson. It was alleged that he had offered Wilson £2,500 to drop the charges and he was consequently charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice. (A further charge of ABH, actual bodily harm, was brought against Duffy for an attack on Islam Guul, whom he had threatened to kill.)
There was a history of acquittals in cases involving attacks on Duffy. First, Patrick Tapping, who had been charged with attempting to murder him, was acquitted at his trial in May 1992.
All seven men charged with conspiracy to murder after the shooting of Duffy in January 1991 were eventually bailed. Conditions of bail were strict, but they had won their freedom. Subsequently, charges against all seven were revised, with the result that they faced, instead, a lesser charge of conspiracy to commit GBH. At their trial in October 1992 all of them were acquitted.
Meanwhile, the attacks on Duffy had gone on. In August 1991, on licensed premises in Middlesbrough, he was set upon by a group of men armed with baseball bats. With weapons ranging from iron bars and baseball bats to shotguns and petrol having been used against him, it can safely be assumed that Duffy was aware that people wanted to hurt him at the very least! And, in doing so, they were no less violent than people were claiming he himself was.