Curtis Warren - once dubbed 'Britain's Pablo Escobar' - has been freed from jail after serving a 14 year sentence. Here, the M.E.N's Damon Wilkinson looks back at the plot that landed him in jail.
Curtis 'Cocky' Warren had been a free man for just five weeks. But the notorious drugs trafficker - once dubbed 'Britain's Pablo Escobar' - was keen to get back to business as soon as possible.
While serving time in Netherlands' highest security prison he'd been cooking up what he described as 'just a little starter' - a plot to smuggle more than £1m of cannabis into the Channel Islands. His plan was to buy 180kg of the drug in Amsterdam, where it would then be taken to an isolated stretch of coast in Normandy, France.
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From there it was to be hidden in a small boat and shipped overnight to Jersey before being smuggled ashore under cover of the imposing cliffs near St Catherine's Breakwater. As the ringleader of the plot, Warren stood to take a sizeable chunk of the proceeds.
And, as the street value of cannabis in Jersey was three times higher than on the UK mainland, he expected a decent payday. But what Warren didn't know was that detectives were tracking his gang's every move.
The Liverpool-born druglord was Interpol's number one most wanted criminal in the mid 90s. At the height of his powers it was claimed he was putting £1m a week into money laundering schemes.
A criminal mastermind with links to the Columbian cartels, Warren made so much money from drug trafficking he once featured in the Sunday Times Rich List, where he was listed as a property developer with a £40m fortune.
By the age of 34 the one-time nightclub bouncer's empire reportedly included properties in Wales, Spain and Gambia, a winery in Bulgaria, petrol stations and apartment blocks in Turkey, a yacht, a 16-room mansion in the Netherlands and more than 200 rental properties in Liverpool.
The son of a Norwegian Merchant Navy seaman, Warren's rise to notoriety began in 1993 when he was accused of smuggling £250m of cocaine into the UK, hidden inside lead ingots. But the trial at Newcastle Crown Court collapsed and Warren walked away.
Although he disputes it, he was reported to have ventured back into the court, approached customs officers and said: "I'm off to spend my £87m from the first shipment and you can't f****** touch me."
He returned to Liverpool, but, concerned by a bloody gang war raging in his home city - and the intense police scrutiny that came with it - he relocated to Holland, moving to the sleepy village of Sassenheim deep in the Dutch countryside. Holed up inside a farmhouse called Bakara, Warren and his associates assumed they had evaded the scrutiny of the police.
Officials in the UK and Holland had other ideas, joining forces to smash Warren's drugs' business.
On October 24, 1996, an elite police unit stormed the farmhouse and seized a huge haul of drugs and weapons, including MDMA, 1,000kg of cannabis, guns, three hand grenades and 940 canisters of CS gas. Warren was convicted of trying to mastermind a £125m drugs shipment from the Netherlands into the UK and sentenced to 12 years prison.
Warren was moved to the formidable Nieuw Vosseveld maximum security jail. Four years were later added to his sentence when he was convicted of the manslaughter of Turkish inmate Cemal Guclu by kicking him in the head, after the convicted killer launched an unprovoked attack in the prison yard.
Despite his incarceration, authorities suspected Warren continued to run his empire from behind bars. The UK's Serious and organised crime squad, along with the Dutch prison authorities, gathered what it described as 'first class intelligence material indicating that Warren was still engaged in drug trafficking activity whilst in prison'.
It was clear that Jersey was to be the focus of Warren's first big job on his release. In June 2007 he walked free from prison, was put on a ferry and shipped back to the UK.
All the while he was being kept under close surveillance. During his five weeks of freedom he made 1,500 phone calls, 112 from public phone boxes, and was secretly recorded talking about what he stood to gain from the Jersey plot.
On June 30, Warren flew from Manchester Airport into Jersey for the first time, where he visited the secluded location on the island's east coast being earmarked for the drop-off point. It was around this time he was recorded referring to the plan as a 'just a little starter', suggesting that, if successful, bigger jobs would follow.
The plot involved Warren's right-hand man catching the ferry from Jersey to St Malo, France, before driving to Holland in a Citroen C1 through France and Belgium. But what the traffickers didn't know was that Jersey police had bugged the car, illegally, as it later emerged.
Warren and his five-strong gang were arrested on July 21, 2007, before any drugs made it to Jersey. And on October 7, 2009 he was found guilty of conspiring to smuggle £1m of cannabis onto the island.
Warren showed no emotion as the foreman of the jury delivered the guilty verdict at the royal court in St Helier in Jersey. In December of that year he was sentenced to 13 years in prison.
Warren watched by video link from Belmarsh prison in London as judge Sir Richard Tucker said: "We do not sentence him because of his record or notoriety. Nevertheless he has been shown to be the mastermind behind the planned importation."
Speaking after the sentence Bill Hughes, the director general of Soca, said Warren was a 'career criminal for whom prison was a temporary setback'. "He was already planning his next operation from inside prison, and when he was released Soca was waiting, watching and listening," Mr Hughes added. "Together with our partners in the States of Jersey police we've stopped Curtis Warren's plans in their tracks. Criminals need to know that this is a different world now – lifetime management is a reality."
Those words could well be ringing in Warren's ears now. On Monday November 21, he walked free from the maximum security HMP Whitemoor, in Cambridgeshire into a very different world.
Warren, now 59, is now subject to a strict raft of restrictions including a ban from instant messaging apps WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, being in possession of more than £1,000 in cash, giving police a day's notice if he wants to use a friend's car and a ban on travel outside of England and Wales without giving seven days notice to police.
Those measures are part of a Serious Crime Prevention Order imposed by the courts after an application from the National Crime Agency. An NCA spokesman said: "Action against serious and organised criminals doesn't end with a conviction.
"Many serious offenders have had lifelong criminal careers and are likely to reoffend. These restrictions protect the public but will have little impact upon those who are genuinely reformed.”
Understood to be back in Liverpool following his release, it's unclear what Warren will turn his attention to next, or whether he could access any of the illicit profits allegedly squirrelled away in property and money laundering schemes. Some suggest that Warren has no interest in returning to the business that put him behind bars and there are reports he could be set to reap the profits of a major TV or film deal on his life.
One former associate, Mancunian ex-criminal Stephen Mee, hopes his old partner in crime will choose a new path. He told a newly released BBC podcast on Warren's life: "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."
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