Yardie' Derek McDuffus, the drug dealer who stabbed to death one of Manchester's most notorious gangsters, has been freed from prison. McDuffus, then aged 41, was sentenced to life in jail after murdering Desmond Noonan in Chorlton in 2005.
He was ordered to serve a minimum of 15 years before being considered for parole after being sentenced following a trial at Preston Crown Court. Now the M.E.N. can reveal McDuffus was freed in April 2020 - at the height of the first coronavirus lockdown - following a Parole Board hearing.
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In a statement the Parole Board said: "We can confirm that a panel of the Parole Board has directed the release of Derek McDuffus following a hearing in April 2020. Parole Board decisions are solely focused on what risk a prisoner could represent to the public if released and whether that risk is manageable in the community.
"A panel will carefully examine a huge range of evidence, including details of the original crime, and any evidence of behaviour change, as well as explore the harm done and impact the crime has had on the victims. Parole reviews are undertaken thoroughly and with extreme care. Protecting the public is our number one priority."
Here we look back at the killing which rocked gangland Manchester....
Clutching a wound to his leg, 'Yardie Derek' made a stabbing gesture and an 'oomph' noise. 'I don't mess about', he said. Those four words would be closest the crack dealer ever came to admitting he had just murdered one of Manchester's most reviled gangsters.
The night before, McDuffus had stabbed to death Dessie Noonan, a man who believed he was so untouchable that just a few weeks earlier he'd boasted to a TV crew he had 'more guns than the police' and hinted he was responsible for 27 murders.
McDuffus was born in Manchester but grew up in Jamaica, before moving back to the city in his 20s. The father-of-three did a bit of DJing at clubs in Manchester and Ashton-under-Lyne, but mainly earned his living selling crack and heroin from his home on Chorlton's Merseybank estate.
But, his real passion was cooking - and he would often invite the addicts who came to his house to try his speciality - curry goat. McDuffus had even made plans to get out of the drug trade, and hoped to open a food truck with a pal.
But their dream hit the buffers when Manchester council apparently wouldn't give them permission for their preferred pitch in Chorlton, instead offering them a spot in Moss Side. By that time McDuffus had already started buying the equipment, including a colour-coded chef's knife block.
Police believe it was a blade from the set that McDuffus used to stab Noonan before throwing him out into the street to bleed to death. The Noonans - Dessie and his brothers Damien and Dominic - were a feared crime family in 80s and 90s Manchester.
Having worked as bouncers during the 'the 'Madchester'-era, they rose up the gangland ranks to control a large part of the city's drug trade through a ruthless regime of violence including stabbings and shootings. They first came to notoriety following the shotgun murder of Cheetham Hill-gangster 'White Tony' Johnson in a pub car park.
In 1991 Damien and Dessie were put on trial along side three other men for the murder . But a jury failed to reach verdicts and a retrial was ordered which saw Dessie tried again alongside two other people. This time one defendant was cleared and the jury failed to reach a verdict on Desmond Noonan and another defendant.
But at the time of Dessie's death they were about to come to national prominence. Eighteen months earlier Damien died in the Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, in 2003, four days after falling off a quad bike on a family holiday in the Dominican Republic.
Almost a fortnight later he was given a huge send-off at All Souls RC Church in Liverpool Street, Weaste. Hundreds of mourners lined the streets of Salford, where he lived, to watch his coffin being carried on a horse and carriage, led by an 18-piece bagpipe band, followed by a wagon full of floral tributes.
The scenes caught the eye of investigative journalist Donal McIntyre, who would go on to film Dominic and Dessie for the TV documentary 'A Very British Gangster'. "Dessie was a hitman and a volatile crack addict. Very, very dangerous," MacIntyre would later say in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.
'Complex', and the product of deprivation, was another way the journalist described Dessie Noonan, in a chat with the M.E.N. Six ft tall and 20 stone, Noonan used his size and reputation to intimidate drug dealers.
Among those he had upset was McDuffus. Around Christmas 2004, he blamed Dessie Noonan for the theft of some drugs, and so refused to sell to him.
Arguments and threats had gone back and forth between the pair. On one occasion McDuffus told Dessie 'f*** off, I'll kill you."
Dessie got round this ban - and the fact that other dealers had been warned by his brothers not to sell to him - by sending friends to McDuffus's house at Merseybank Avenue to buy drugs for him.
But on the night of March 18, 2005, after a night of drinking, dancing and karaoke at The Park pub in Northern Moor, Dessie couldn't find anyone to go for him, and so stumbled there himself in a drunken haze.
He knocked on the door three times. After the third knock, McDuffus went out with a kitchen knife and confronted him. Pushed from the doorstep and into the street to die, 45-year-old father-of-two Noonan managed to call his wife and tell her he had been stabbed.
He was found bleeding on the pavement from a stomach wound. McDuffus was arrested a few days later and went on trial for murder in October 2005.
A ring of steel was placed around Preston Crown Court during the hearing. Extra police officers were deployed to stand guard, and airport-style body scanners were used outside the court-room to ensure no one entered with a concealed weapon.
Despite coming under intense cross-examination, McDuffus never revealed what exactly happened. He told the jury he had nothing to do with the murder, denied had never met Dessie Noonan, and insisted he had never dealt drugs.
Witnesses, however, told a different story. In court one revealed how McDuffus had made the 'I don't mess about' comment the morning after Noonan's murder. Another described how he had been given a pair of blood soaked shoes by McDuffus the same day, which he dumped in a bin in Stretford Arndale.
The knife and the shoes were never found. McDuffus, then 41, was found guilty of murder and jailed for life with a minimum of 15 years to serve before parole could be considered. Judge Mr Justice Davies told him: "It is true Desmond Noonan is no stranger to criminality and the world of crime, but like any other citizen he has the right to live.
"You unlawfully took that life. You murdered him. He was very drunk. I doubt if he was in much of a position to defend himself against you."
'Noonan killer: Life in solitary', read the front page of that night's M.E.N, adding McDuffus was 'likely to be separated from other inmates to protect him from revenge attacks'. But within hours of his arrival at prison he was battered so badly that he was hospitalised for weeks.
The motive for Noonan's murder remains a mystery. Those close to the case believed it was a 'respect' killing, that McDuffus had reached the end of his tether and was determined to show he wasn't scared of the 20st gangster. Whatever the reason, 'Yardie Derek' has never revealed it.
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