A notorious drugs baron with links to Manchester is due out in November - and will emerge to a very different underworld. Curtis Warren, 59, was jailed for 13 years in 2009 over a plot to smuggle £1million of cannabis into Jersey and is now due for automatic release.
He can expect to be welcomed by offers to tell his life story on one side - and never-ending police surveillance on the other. He will also discover an underworld in turmoil due to the hacking of the Encrochat network.
Sources close to the Liverpool-born drug baron, whose operation included a number of Manchester-based criminals, claim that he has been inundated with letters and promises of a big money deal for screen adaptations of his life story.
“There’s no chance Curtis will get back in the game once he’s out. Not only would it be a daft move as he will have eyes on him everywhere he goes, he’s just not interested," an underworld source told the Daily Star Sunday.
“He’s actually had loads of offers from film and documentary makers. Big names in Hollywood. Big streaming giants have also been offering big numbers for his story.
“I mean it’s a cracking story isn’t it. Kid from Toxteth rises through the ranks to become one of the biggest drug dealers in the world doing business with the Cali Cartel in Colombia and is even named on the Sunday Times Rich List. And that’s just the stuff that’s already out there. There’s so much more that people don’t know. Who wouldn’t be interested in that?”
Warren, reputed to have £198million squirrelled away, will be hit with a string of other curbs on his lifestyle under a serious crime prevention order, including restrictions on foreign travel, his financial affairs, his use of the internet, phones and vehicles.
The source said: “The only thing possibly holding him back is that he’ll be thrust into the limelight and that’s something he hasn’t been used to as he’s had to stay in the shadows, and he was very good at it.”
Through the 1980s and 1990s, ‘Cocky’ Warren, as he became known, graduated from running nightclub doors to armed robbery and then international drug trafficking.
In the 1990s, as a Toxteth drug dealer, Warren included a number of veteran criminals from Manchester in his operation. Warren was comfortable working with Mancunians - reserving most of his antipathy for rival crooks from L8.
The underworld Warren left behind when he was caged is in a state of confusion. Many gangsters in the UK have been exposed and prosecuted, are on the run or sweating about their doors going in thanks to the hacking of the EncroChat phone network.
The encrypted messaging system, believed by the National Crime Agency (NCA) to have been used almost exclusively by organised crime groups, was infiltrated by French police in 2020 and enabled law enforcement across Europe to watch in real-time as gangsters struck drugs and weapons deals, arranged distribution and even plotted murders.
Merseyside Police have described how EncroChat has put a vast swathe of senior organised criminals in prison or on the run. Detective Chief Superintendent Mark Kameen, head of investigations at Merseyside Police, was recently asked whether the 'vacuum' created by EncroChat was resulting in violence in Merseyside.
"Encro has been absolutely phenomenal, and from my point of view has been the single most impactive tactic against serious and organised crime that policing has ever experienced," he said.
"We have taken out lots of serious and organised criminals. You're right, that can create a vacuum, but what we're not seeing for example, is the firearms discharges that you might have seen in the past as a sort of battle went on as to who was going to control a particular area or drugs graft. We're not seeing that at this time.
"I would like to be able to say that is due to some effective local policing in terms of visibility, we're arresting and charging people effectively. I know that some of our Encro criminals have now left the country. So that might be a contributing factor, they're not here to have physical disputes that maybe then triggers firearms discharges."
Despite the hundreds of convictions secured on the back of EncroChat, demand for Class A drugs has gone nowhere.
The drugs trade in Europe is a complex picture. Albanian mafia groups are understood to dominate much of the cocaine supply into Britain, Irish crime families sit amongst the elite criminals of Europe, violent street wars involving Moroccan 'Mocro Maffia' groups are raising fears of the Netherlands becoming a "narco-state" and Scouse firms continue to rake in profits, with a history of collaboration with Greater Manchester's criminals. And, as always, doing deals with all of the above, are the cocaine cartels of South America.
The reappearance into this market of Warren, who made a fortune by cutting out the middlemen and forging direct links with Class A suppliers from Colombia to Turkey, is a concerning prospect.
Detectives will be alert to the reality that a fractured underworld, combined with an insatiable demand for cocaine in the UK, could give an experienced criminal operator with a web of contacts across the globe an opening.
Two Manchester men were jailed along with Warren in 1997. He got 12 years back then - having masterminded a £125million drugs shipment from the Netherlands into the UK. Then, while he was serving time in the Nieuw Vosseveld maximum security jail in the Netherlands, Warren was attacked by Turkish prisoner Cemal Guclu, a convicted killer.
Warren kicked his attacker in the head - killing him in self-defence - and got a further four years’ jail. The gangster was released in the summer of 2007 and sent back to Liverpool.
But, by 2009 he had been jailed for another 13 years over a plot to smuggle £1m of cannabis into Jersey. Then, following that conviction, he got another ten years - after failing to pay a £198million confiscation order, one of the largest ever made in Europe. He has spent almost all of the last 25 years in jail.
According to one of Warren's former drug-trafficking partners, Manchester-born Stephen Mee, he is a skilled 'diplomat' and a master of forging contacts and spotting opportunities.
Speaking as part of a newly released BBC podcast on Warren's life, called 'Gangster', Mr Mee said of Warren: "He never walked about with his chest out or anything like that, he was just normal, you wouldn't notice him. He just melted into the background.
"I think it was a deliberate thing, you keep as low a profile as you can if you're doing something like this [drug trafficking]. You have to be a bit of a diplomat as a drug-dealer, you can't be shouting it out everywhere because otherwise people will just come and take it off you."
However, Warren's notoriety would also be his biggest enemy. He will remain a man firmly on the radar of the country's most sophisticated police units, and he will be the subject of stringent conditions under the terms of a Serious Crime Prevention Order (SCPO)
Warren is on a list, published by the National Crime Agency in 2021, of organised criminals who have been issued with SCPOs. For five years, Warren's ability to use cars, property and phones, travel abroad, borrow money, make transfers, hold trusts or shares and use foreign or virtual currency will be monitored and restricted.
He will also be forced to declare any assets worth more than £1,000, meaning he would find it extremely difficult to access the alleged £198m the authorities believe he has hidden away. Any breach of those strict conditions could see Warren returned to prison. In addition, any new drugs trafficking offences would likely attract an especially severe prison sentence, due to his litany of previous convictions.
Stephen Mee told the 'Gangster' podcast he hopes his old partner in crime will choose a new path. He said: "If you sit in prison and rot away, and you come out and technology is flying everywhere, you're just going to be like a caveman.
"And you'll have no choice other than to go back to your old ways and go back to prison. I hope he creates a life other than crime because if he gets caught again it's not just a prison sentence, it's a death sentence."
Warren hit the headlines more recently, in 2020, when prison officer Stephanie Smithwhite was jailed for two years at Durham Crown Court after she had a sexual relationship with Warren behind bars.
Smithwhite, who a court heard cut a hole in her uniform trousers for sex with Warren, admitted two counts of misconduct in public office. She was said to be 'infatuated' with him, having a tattoo of his name next to a rose.
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