Vance Miller has featured in headline news stories many times, even before the latest sensational reports covering a pre-dawn Maple Mill police raid, but not always because campaigning newspaper reporters were taking another crack at running down his 'cheaper than chipboard' home kitchens supply business.
His two houses were fire-bombed by arsonists, gunmen threatened employees at his kitchens company, and a graffiti gang painted his name in public warnings on buildings and homes in nightly attacks that spread across north Lancashire.
It began in September, when press photographers found Vance Miller standing grim-faced outside the blackened shell of his country house in Yorkshire, fire-bombed whilst he was away on a camping trip with his son, and as newspaper business page writers examined sensational reports that said he was responsible for the downfall of MFI - the UK retail furniture giant.
On September 22nd, MFI announced it was giving away its loss making retail operations to private equity group Merchant Equity Partners and paying them 65 million pounds to take the stores off their hands. MEP were to invest in the retail outlets to keep them running and MFI hoped to continue supplying the stores with kitchens.
MFI chief executive Matthew Ingle blamed changing customer demand for the business downturn.
Vance Miller says it was the "unbeatable price" of the kitchens he imports from China and Poland at his Maple Mill headquarters in Oldham, near Manchester, that forced MFI to make such a costly retreat from the retail business.
He does not believe that anyone connected with MFI was responsible for the attack on his Yorkshire home, or a later fire-bombing raid on his town house near Bury, Lancashire.
But MFI retail sales fell by more than 25 per cent in the first six months of 2006 and it is the variously-named kitchen firms based in Oldham, supplied by Vance Miller’s import delivery systems, that are reckoned to have removed MFI from its top spot in the British market, where the company vied for position with nationwide chain stores B&Q and Magnet.
As well as competing directly with MFI, B&Q and Magnet, with dramatically lower prices for the flat-pack kitchen furniture that customers assemble themselves, Vance Miller says he also supplies the kitchens that some of the big-name retailers sell, sourcing millions of components in the remotest parts of China for the big British stores.
"People don't know it, but when they buy a new kitchen from most of the big suppliers, they will usually be buying something I tracked down in the far corners of China. They may not know it. But they are still buying my kitchens".
Now a sole trader, the buccaneering owner of the largest of the remaining traditional mill premises in northern England was described in a BBC TV television documentary as the rogue of kitchen retailing.
A patchy trading record led several newspapers to campaign against him. But Miller recovered to set new records with his imports, advertised on road trailers parked in fields along the motorway network, and says that in spite of "exaggerated" reporting of complaints by "a tiny minority" of customers, the quality of his cut-price kitchens is demonstrably good enough to have humbled the MFI business, once valued at a billion pounds.
"You can't get quality materials and workmanship at low prices from behind a desk. Do you think that the bosses of my competitors would do what I do? Would they go up into the valleys in China where no European has been seen for fifty years, talk to the locals, find out what they can make, then give them the money to produce it and ship it to Britain?
"I am sometimes the first outsider these workers have ever seen. Do you think the boss of MFI, who has lost millions of pounds of shareholders' money, would do what I do to keep prices down? Live rough for weeks on end, buying direct from the men who cut the granite?.
"I go to Mongolia and right up into Tibet. They put banners up when I get to some of these places. I also buy in Poland, Turkey, Spain, Italy, South Africa, Germany, Dubai and India.
"There might be someone in Britain who knows more about granite tops than me. There could be someone who knows more about woodwork. There must be someone who knows more about bathroom fittings. But, take my word for it, no-one knows more about the complete kitchen and bathroom business than Vance Miller."
But the newspapers that reported MFI’s struggle with falling market share have also reported Vance Miller’s own problems since his two houses were firebombed.
Reporting the house fires, The People newspaper also repeated press stories from earlier years and reprinted a trade flyer in which Vance had self-mockingly referred to himself as The Kitchen Gangster.
"That's the trouble", said Miller. "Whenever my name is mentioned, the old stories start again".
West Yorkshire police are still hunting the arsonists who destroyed his converted Yorkshire farmhouse, Great Manshead Farm near Ripponden, and Lancashire police have investigated a petrol bomb attack on his town house home in the former cemetery gatehouse at Ramsbottom, Greater Manchester.
Miller says he does not believe the attackers who burned the isolated moorland property, wrecked his sports car and petrol-bombed his gatehouse home had any connection with his business.
"The house was not insured and I am offering a fifty thousand pound reward for information leading to the conviction of the culprits, but I don't think the fire had anything to do with the kitchen business.
"I think the connection is to trouble that started after an old friend of mine was killed in a quad bike accident and some local gang rivalry that followed his death."
Miller, the son of the founder of the bakery engineering firm, Millers Vanguard, which is now owned by the Aga Group, had been friends for years with David Statham, 44, who died in June of head injuries in Oldham Road, Manchester. Statham sold the house to Vance Miller after gaining planning permission in 1993 to renovate Great Manshead Farm, which had been auctioned by Yorkshire Water.
Four fire crews fought the farmhouse blaze at night on the moors above Blue Ball Road, Ripponden. A fire service spokesman at Halifax said, "It was a horrible night. We could not get water to the house and it was totally destroyed by a very fierce fire which is being investigated."
Det Insp Mark McManus of West Yorkshire police said, "We are treating the blaze as arson. Mr Miller has been interviewed by police and it was his BMW sports car that was found badly damaged at the scene. Anyone who saw anything suspicious that night should come forward."
Two fire crews saved the Ramsbottom house, which featured in the BBC TV documentary that followed Vance Miller through a typical business day, travelling with him to Maple Mill and filming staff meetings to deal with the customer complaints that had been widely reported in newspapers.
Stories by campaigning journalists led to court appearances and a 'Stop Trading' order in 2002 under then-new European legislation.
A judge who called him highly intelligent but "above all, arrogant" when he insisted on defending himself without lawyers jailed him for nine months for breaking the order, but released him from Manchester's Strangeways prison two weeks later, on an undertaking to allow management experts in to help the Oldham-based firms known as Craftsman Kitchens, RB Interiors, Maple Industries and the one best known from the trailers in fields as simply "Kitchens".
The BBC film crew recorded Miller’s return to work and revealed that although he had crossed swords with authorities before - he was once charged with diamond smuggling overseas and police at Manchester Airport used the 2002 Proceeds of Crime Act to seize 66,000 pounds in cash from him as he boarded a plane on a trading trip to China - his only income was from selling 300,000 kitchens a year in a successful fifty million pound business.
Newspapers covering the Manchester court case and airport cash confiscation did not comment on the continuing business success or report the return of the money, which police were obliged to repay in full.
"But they never miss an opportunity to mention again any of my so-called brushes with the law from years ago", said Vance, who admits to a chequered history and a stubborn personality that he believes has helped make his fortune.
"The press have one story on file that allows them to call me a kidnapper when they report anything about me today", he added, recalling a kidnapping charge that followed his 'citizen's arrest' of a gang who had repeatedly robbed his mother's house. "I staked the place out and collared them when they tried the next time. But then I was the one charged for catching them and they were let off".
Talking in a busy open-plan office on the top floor of Maple Mill, under rolled steel beam and triple brick arches, the one-time market stall operator said, "I am now only a sole trader who acts as the landlord and supplier to the firms based here. But it makes all the businesses in the mill a target when newspapers can print anything they want about me and we still don't get much protection from the law. A gun has been put to a security guard's head at the mill gates and we even had an armed robbery on one of our kitchen delivery vans.
"What the newspapers will not acknowledge is that bringing three thousand components five thousand miles and fitting them into one individual kitchen without hitches can be extremely difficult. All the big firms have had similar problems. Just look at the customer complaints about MFI and the others on the Internet.
"There is never any problem with the thousands of bathrooms we supply. They are much less complicated and much easier to distribute."
The van drivers who deliver kits direct from Maple Mill to each customer’s kitchen now carry high quality video cameras to film the final delivery and record any shortages or complaints on the video sound track.
Miller visits customers with difficult problems in person.
Despite his withdrawal from the retail market, customers have talked on Internet consumer sites of their astonishment at seeing the irrepressible entrepreneur pull up outside their home to make a doorstep delivery or sort out a stalled kitchen installation.
The standard contract on the back of each Oldham company order form quotes the telephone number of Vance Miller’s personal fax machine "in case of serious problems". The machine sits on the table by his armchair at his home, where he announced that, "The plain fact is that the price of the kitchens I bring in from around the world cannot be matched. We will always have the best prices.
"Over a thousand people in Britain, and even more in other countries, depend on the work that goes through this old mill. Perhaps it’s time that Vance Miller and his workers here and in the villages overseas had some support and encouragement from the authorities here."
Maple Mill has been a feature of the Oldham skyline since the early days of the last century.
Two corbelled rings on the chimney signify that the buildings were conceived on the drawing board of Sir Philip Sidney Stott [1858-1937] the local architect who designed over a hundred of the world’s greatest cotton mills.
When Courtaulds abandoned high-tech open-end spinning at Maple Mill in 1991, it looked as if the world of work had finished with the landmark building, the largest of its kind.
But Vance Miller says the "unbeatable price" of the kitchens he imports will keep people busy there for many more years.