On this day in 1993 English mobster and heavyweight boxer Viv Graham is ambushed while walking back to his car in New Year’s Eve.

He was shot 3 times, one leaving a large hole in his back. Despite receiving 30 pints of blood at a hospital he would lose his life aged 34. There is still a lot of controversy surrounding the events of that night, and what actually happened to him.

Viv Graham was one of the most feared and respected hard men ever to emerge from the North East of England, a towering figure in the Newcastle underworld whose reputation for violence and iron-fisted control of the region's door security trade made him a marked man long before that fateful New Year's Eve in 1993. Born on August 23, 1959, in Gateshead, Graham grew up in an environment where physical toughness was both a survival skill and a calling card, and he quickly established himself as a formidable presence in both the boxing ring and the streets.

Standing over six feet tall and built like a siege engine, Graham developed a fearsome reputation as an unlicensed boxer, reportedly never losing a bare-knuckle fight throughout his career. But it was his grip on the Newcastle and Gateshead nightclub door trade that truly cemented his legend. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, he effectively controlled which doormen worked which venues across the region, taking a cut from the security operations and ruthlessly removing anyone who challenged his authority. Unlike the American mob structures of the Five Families or the precision business operations associated with figures such as Lucky Luciano, Graham operated through personal force and sheer intimidation rather than any formal criminal hierarchy — yet his dominance over his territory was every bit as absolute.

His control inevitably bred enemies. Rival firms from Sunderland and elsewhere in the North East resented his stranglehold on the lucrative door trade, and throughout the early 1990s tensions escalated to dangerous levels. Graham survived several earlier confrontations and threats, seemingly bulletproof in both reputation and reality — until New Year's Eve 1993, when he was ambushed outside a pub in Wallsend, North Tyneside, and shot three times at close range. Despite receiving a staggering thirty pints of blood during emergency surgery, he died from his wounds, aged just 34. No one was ever convicted of his murder, and the identity of those responsible remains a subject of fierce debate and speculation among those who knew him and those who have studied the case in the years since.

Viv Graham's murder sent shockwaves through the North East criminal fraternity and left a power vacuum that sparked years of violent conflict over control of the region's underworld. He remains a complex and controversial folk hero in the North East, remembered equally for his brutality and his fierce loyalty to those he considered his own.