Lee Duffy
Lee Duffy was born in 1965 and grew up in South Bank, a hard part of Middlesbrough. Before the reputation he was a bullied kid: lanky, struggling to breathe through his nose, walking with his mouth open. People who grew up with him say he was bullied heavily until at least 12, by boys years older than him. When he was knocked down he got up, and walked away muttering under his breath.
His mother was loving. His father thought he was too soft, and the answer was violence and boxing. In his mid-teens Duffy began to fill out: weights, bag work, repetition, and a punch thrown from the hip with no warning. In his late teens, the story goes, he walked into an alleyway, met one of the lads who used to bully him and dropped him with one punch, then made it clear this was payback. He was not driven by greed. He was driven by hierarchy. He had grown up at the bottom of it, and once he could reverse it he never wanted to feel small again.
He grew to six foot four, thick-necked, with punches so fast and heavy they broke bones. Trainers told him he could go a long way in boxing. Instead, by his early twenties, he was enforcing on Teesside doors, taxing drug dealers and collecting debts. Most fights ended in one punch.
In 1988, in a Middlesbrough pub, one punch went too far: a shattered cheekbone, permanent damage and blindness in one eye. Most people were too frightened to stand up in court against Lee Duffy. This man did, and Duffy got four years. His sentence became a circuit of northern prisons: Lancaster, Strangeways, Walton, Holme House, Durham and Armley.
Durham was his local prison, and in his eyes it could have only one top man. For years that had been Paul Sykes, the former heavyweight. Brian Cockerill, who knew Duffy well on the outside, says Lee took against the way young northern lads were treated inside. In one account played in our film, Duffy called Sykes out on the landing while prisoners behind their doors chanted his name. A prison officer told the author Jamie Boyle the two were kept at separate ends of the jail. Either way, Duffy came out with his name feared across northern prisons. Even Charles Bronson would later say he liked him.
Prison freezes time. The streets do not. The men Duffy had taxed before his sentence had regrouped, and this time they did not want to fight him. They wanted him gone. Dealers are said to have pooled their money, and gunmen were brought in from Birmingham. Within months there were several attempts on his life. In a nightclub two gunmen opened fire and he dived behind the bar, shot in the foot. Outside a house he was shot in the leg. Another time petrol was thrown over him, and he knocked the attacker out before he could be set alight. Each time he refused protection. The senior detective on the case found him in Middlesbrough General Hospital polite and huge, with hands like shovels, and flatly unwilling to give a statement.
In the end it was not a hired gunman who stopped him. It was an old associate who had fought him before and never backed down. In their final confrontation Duffy was giving the man a severe beating when he was slipped a knife and stabbed Duffy once, under the armpit. It was fatal. The jury cleared the man on the grounds of self-defence.
Lee Duffy died at 26. He left a grieving family and a reputation that still circulates decades later. These are the films about him, and the ones where he turns up in someone else's story.