A drug lord who has spent most of the past 25 years behind bars has been released with strict conditions including being banned from WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, it is reported.
Curtis “Cocky” Warren, 59, once worth an estimated £300 million, left Whitemoor maximum security prison in Cambridgeshire on Monday after a latest 14-year jail term.
He is expected to return to Liverpool where he built up a drugs empire that led him to be compared to Medellin cartel boss Pablo Escobar.
Nicknamed “Cocky Watchman”, Warren has had just three weeks of freedom since 1997 and is now leaving jail with strict rules to follow that include being unable to use WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger or buy cryptocurrency.
Conditions also prevent him from travelling in a friend’s car - without giving a police handler a day’s notice - or going to Scotland, with a failure to comply possibly seeing him returning to jail.
The conditions were given Warren in the UK’s in 2013 but he will be able to return to Liverpool where he is understood to still have support from senior crime figures who control the illegal drugs trade.
A source close to Warren told The Sun : “Cocky always planned on coming back to Liverpool.”
His barrister Anthony Barraclough also told the newspaper: “The first thing he wanted to do was to see his mother. He just wants peace and quiet. He is allowed to have a decent, ordinary life.”
Warren was arrested by undercover police in 2007 just days after he had been released from jail for a previous offence.
He got a 13-year term in 2009 over a plot to smuggle £1million of cannabis into Jersey, and was later handed another 10 years, of which he had to serve half, for failing to pay a £198million confiscation order, one of Europe’s biggest ever.
One insider has now said: “There’ll be eyes all over Curtis when he gets out and he knows he’ll be restricted as to where he can go and who he can see.
“He’s an intelligent man so I’m sure he’ll be keeping a low profile on his release.”
