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'Property, yachts and millions', Is the British, 'Pablo Escobar' ready for another big deal with Albanian gangs?

2022-07-24 09:06:07Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
'Property, yachts and millions', Is the British, 'Pablo
Curtis Warren

The British "Pablo Escobar" has been placed by the Sunday Times on Interpol's most wanted list, after his international drug trade, thus becoming the most wanted man

Curtis Warren, whose drug empire gave him a fortune of £200 million, making him one of the most successful criminals Britain has ever seen. 

Warren, now 59, is the subject of a new six-part BBC 5 Live podcast - Gangster - which documents his life and times, describing his crimes on the streets of Toxteth in Liverpool to a key figure in Europe for Colombia.

His wealth once landed him on the Sunday Times Rich List. In Liverpool you can still buy t-shirts printed with his picture. Warren is part of Merseyside mythology, a cross between a Scouse Pablo Escobar and Robin Hood.

At the age of 34, his drug empire included properties in Wales, Spain and Gambia, a winery in Bulgaria, and blocks of flats in Turkey, a private yacht, a 16-room mansion in the Netherlands and a luxury apartment in Liverpool as well by the castle, more than 200 houses for rent in his hometown.

That may have been a boast, but such a fortune would be easily affordable for Warren, a former Interpol most wanted criminal known as Target One. "If I spent $50 a day, I wouldn't fail," he said.

But who is Warren? What brought him here? Why do Merseyside Police, buoyed by their recent success in fighting organized crime, fear his return to the drug trade?

Warren, nicknamed the headstrong "Watchman" for his profanity and knack for sniffing out surveillance, grew up on the streets of Toxteth. For starters, he had a photographic memory, meaning he could remember phone numbers and Swiss bank account numbers, undocumented.

He punched and stabbed a Turkish hitman to death in a Dutch prison, cracked a mother-of-four's skull with a shotgun during an armed robbery and sparked a violent gang war in Liverpool that left five people dead - not to mentioned that thousands more were hooked. the cocaine and heroin he brought into the UK, as well as Brazil, Russia, Australia and Zealand.

Warren's story begins in early 1960s Liverpool, when the Beatles were busy conquering the world, the shipyards were still busy and Curtis Aloysius Warren, a black seaman with the Norwegian merchant navy, met Antonia Chantre, the daughter of a shipyard boiler attendant. She gave birth to three children: Ramon, Maria and Curtis. They grew up in Toxteth, a deprived part of the city.

Warren left school at age 11, but taught himself Spanish and Dutch. He loved chess and began his criminal career by burglarizing houses at the age of 12. Friends say he was small for his age and good at going through windows.

"Curtis Warren was a local thief," says Peter Duggan, a former beat bobby in Toxteth, on the BBC podcast presented by Livvy Haydock, who spent months tracking down some of Warren's closest associates and enemies.

At the age of 16 he assaulted two police officers, although close associates say he is not a violent man.

In 1983, Warren was jailed for five years for armed robbery after holding up a security van driver outside a post office and making off with £8,000 in used notes. He was 20 years old and his criminal education was about to begin.

While Warren was in his cell, crime was changing in Liverpool. Bank robberies stopped and drug trafficking took over as criminals looked to capitalize on the city's demand for heroin.

When Warren got out of prison, he worked the doors of Liverpool's bars and nightclubs, befriending Mike Ahearne, who rose to fame as the Gladiator in the TV show Gladiators. Ahearne would later become embroiled in a corruption plot involving a crooked copper, DCI Elmore Davies.

Warren also became familiar with the drug trade and began making trips to Holland, buying cocaine in Amsterdam and bringing it to the UK. In contrast, his sister, Maria, studied mathematics and physics at university, while his brother Ramon played chess for Wales. It was during his trips to Amsterdam that Warren became known to the Cali cartel.

He met with their European representative and won the trust of the cartel. This was the big league and criminals in the UK were starting to get noticed. One of them was Brian Charrington, a used car dealer and fellow drug dealer based in Middlesbrough.

In 1991, Warren and Charrington sailed on the latter's yacht to Venezuela, where they arranged to import cocaine sealed inside lead bars.

By going straight to South America and cutting out middlemen, Warren is seen as a pioneer in underworld circles. He did the same with Turkish heroin traffickers and Moroccan hashish growers, establishing direct supply lines.

He would negotiate the price with the supplier and then sell some of the cargo at a high price to other criminal organizations, so the profit from those deals meant he was getting the rest for next to nothing. He made 100 percent of every drug he brought into the UK. However, a British customs team had become interested in Warren's travels around the world.

Justice officials expect Warren will be banned from entering Liverpool as part of the conditions of his release in November. Merseyside Police are concerned that he will try to fill the void left by their successes in bringing down organized crime - largely thanks to the cracking of Encrochat, known as WhatsApp for criminals. A number of high-profile Encrochat drug gang cases are pending in British courts, some of them delayed by the Covid backlog.

Merseyside Police have said many senior organized criminals are now in prison or on the run. It means that the discharges of firearms are down, as the gangs have been broken up and are no longer fighting for turf. Warren's return could boost Liverpool's underworld.

Times have changed while Warren has been in prison and Colombian cartels now rely on Albanian mafia groups to distribute their product. Albanian gangs now control most of Britain's cocaine supply, writes The Times further.


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