John Fury, the film says, is like Marmite: people love him or hate him. What nobody denies is that he was a fighting man. He was a professional boxer, fighting as Gypsy John Fury while working full time on the shovel, and for about five years, by his own account, he was a gangland enforcer who worked alone. Out of that period came a rumour that he was beaten, twice, by a powerful figure from the North West. Fury says the opposite happened. The film puts the two accounts side by side and asks which one to believe.
The rumour
The story was put out by Mickey Theo, described in the film as a one-time best friend of Lenny McLean. His version, as the film relays it, is that Fury started on the North West man in a workshop and came off second best; that he started on him a second time with the same result; and that the man then turned up at a Gypsy site looking for a third fight, and Fury would not come out of his caravan.
Theo said all this while he was in a public feud with Fury and trying to goad him into a fight. The film is careful about the other man too: well known in the North West as a powerful figure, never convicted of any serious crime, and, as a matter of fact, a successful businessman.
Fury's first answer was short. He said he had given the man a beating and left him for dead, and gave no details until his autobiography came out. There, he gives the story a chapter of its own, and the film reads it.
Fury's account
By his own telling, Fury was an enforcer between the ages of about thirty and thirty-five. People would call about a debt or someone bullying them, and for a fee he would sort it out. He insists he never used a knife or a gun. His fists and his head, he writes, were the only weapons he needed. The film adds that he was sent to prison over a fight with a boxing trainer who had once been his friend.
In the book Fury does not name the man. He describes him only as a gangland boss from the north. Fury says he had an issue with him over a friend. One day he went to a garage to collect a car and found the man there: six feet tall, around twenty stone, with five of his men.
Fury says he walked straight over, hit him with a right hand and put his head through a glass coffee table. The fight carried on outside, and by his account the other man was clearly beaten by the end, with police sirens getting closer. Bodies landed on top of them, and, unsure whether they were plain-clothes officers or the man's own people, Fury says he slapped one rather than knocked him out.
The Osman warning and the handshake
A few days later, Fury writes, two senior plain-clothes detectives came to his house. They told him the man had put a contract out on him, and they served him an Osman warning, the notice police give when they know of a threat to someone's life. They also told him that if the man died in hospital, he would face a murder charge. Fury told them the man would not die.
His brother Peter, who by John's account was in prison in York at the time, sent word to the man's people and calmed things down. Later, out of jail and with a liking for expensive cars, Peter began doing business with the man. Peter told John the man was frightened of him and wanted to put it all behind them. A meeting was set up at a shopping centre. Fury says the police had got wind of it: plain-clothes officers everywhere, a helicopter overhead. The two men shook hands. A year or so later, Fury writes, the man came to his garage and bought a few old cars from him. "I wish him no ill," he says.
Two stories, no witness
The narrator does not pretend to settle it. He says he made discreet inquiries and was told there had been a couple of fights, but that this was second- and third-hand. He is not suggesting Fury is lying, and he points out that Theo's claim was made in the middle of a feud.
He also defends Fury against the people online who mock him for being knocked out in old fight footage. Fury, he notes, was working on the shovel and doing bare-knuckle and enforcer work at the same time, and one of the men who beat him in the ring held a version of a world title. Bartley Gorman, the film says, claimed in his book that Fury never lost a straightener, though the narrator adds that a book only gives one side.
That is where the film leaves it. Theo has had his say and Fury has had his, in print and in detail. Peter Fury is not going to speak against his brother. Unless someone who was actually there comes forward, the narrator says, nobody is really going to know.