Britain's Pablo Escobar is set for release after 20 years behind bars

Britain’s Pablo Escobar is set for release after 20 years behind bars: Liverpool’s notorious drug baron Curtis ‘Cocky’ Warren, 59, who was linked to Colombia’s feared Cali cartel and earned £200m fortune will be freed in November

• Curtis Warren could be released from jail in November after a 13-year jail term 
• The career criminal has spent around half his life in prison for different offences 
• Warren, 59, is understood to be at a high-security prison in Worcestershire

A drug baron known as the Pablo Escobar of Britain who earned a £200million fortune and has been linked to Colombian drug cartels is set for freedom after spending nearly half his life in jail.

Curtis Warren, 59, is set to be released in November after serving his latest 13-year minimum term and could be banned from Liverpool, where he used to be based. 

Warren, known by the nickname the ‘Cocky Watchman’, spent the early 1980s as a nightclub bouncer before moving on to armed robbery and international drug trafficking through the 1990s which is believed to have involved Escobar’s rivals the Cali Cartel. 

He was first sentenced to 12 years in 1996 for trying to move a £125million drugs shipment from the Netherlands to the UK, given another four years for killing a fellow prisoner and just weeks after being released in 2007, was arrested again for a plot to get drugs into Jersey, and jailed for a further 13 years.

Warren is expected to be released in November under a serious crime prevention order, according to the Times. He is currently at a high-security prison in Worcestershire, believed to be HMP Long Lartin. 

Curtis Warren, 59, could be released in a few months after serving his latest 13-year term – but will face curbs

Warren (pictured arriving at The Royal Court in St Hellier, Jersey) after he was found guilty of a £1million drug smuggling plot by a jury

Warren has been linked to Colombian drug cartels and called Britain’s Pablo Escobar (his mugshot from 1977 when he was arrested in Medellin) after the notorious drug criminal

Warren, the only drug dealer to ever make it on to the Sunday Times Rich List, who once had an estimated fortune of £200million, was jailed for 13 years in 2009 over a plot to smuggle £1million of cannabis into Jersey.  

He also failed to pay a £198million confiscation order and was told he would face another 10 years in jail. 

The drug baron is also on the National Crime Agency’s list of individuals issued with serious crime prevention orders.

The order, which will be in force for five years, will restrict his ability to buy cars and property, borrow money, make transfers, hold trusts or shares and use foreign or virtual currency. It is also to ban him from Liverpool, where people claim he has hidden £1million in plastic bags, and his old associates. 

The consequences of breaking the conditions will be a further jail term. 

Warren was 12 when he dropped out of school and launched his criminal career, by being caught by police driving a stolen car. 

By the time he was 15, in 1978, he’d been sentenced to three months in a detention centre, and at 18 was sent to Borstal for assaulting police officers.

In 1981 Warren was sentenced to two years in jail for attacking a prostitute and her client. He was 20. The judge told him: ‘But for your youth, your sentence would have been much longer’.

Pictured: Cannabis seized during a States of Jersey Police investigation that brought down a drugs plot controlled from Merseyside by Curtis Warren

On his release, the Liverpool police say Warren transformed himself into a bouncer at the city’s clubs, and then started a business organising bouncers and by the time he was 22, Warren was reported to be selling cannabis and ecstasy.

According to a BBC podcast, Warren sailed in 1991 with Brian Charrington, also from Merseyside, who owned a yacht to Venezuela. There they were behind the importation of cocaine sealed inside lead ingots. 

Don Dewer, senior investigator with HM Customs, told BBC 5 Live’s Gangster, a podcast about Warren’s activities about another incident. 

‘They left Heathrow airport in a Jaguar owned by Charrington, went to a cafe in North London, and eventually went out through Dover. They travelled to Brussels and then down to Malaga, up to Madrid and then a cash-paid one-way ticket with hand baggage to Caracas,’ Mr Dewer sid. 

‘While they were there they were seen to meet up with Mario Halley (a key member of the Cali cartel), who had travelled from Amsterdam. This was when the shipment was organised.’

After a drugs trial collapsed at Newcastle crown court in 1993, Warren reportedly told customs officers ‘I’m off to spend my £87million from the first shipment and you can’t f***ing touch me’.

Three years later he was sentenced to 12 years in jail by Dutch authorities for trying to move a £125million drugs shipment from the Netherlands to the UK.

In 1996 the Dutch police – who had been eavesdropping on his phone calls – intercepted 400kilos of cocaine (again encased in lead).

At other addresses controlled by Warren they also found 1,500kilos of cannabis resin, 60kilos of heroin and 50kilos of Ecstasy.

Warren is expected to be released in November under a serious crime prevention order from a high-security prison in Worcestershire, believed to be HMP Long Lartin, pictured

There were also 960 CS gas canisters, three guns, ammunition and £400,000 in Dutch guilders – the whole haul was estimated to be worth £125million on the open market.

Then in 1999, Turkish prisoner Cemal Guclu was killed in the Nieuw Vosseveld maximum security jail yard after Warren kicked him in the head. 

Close friend Stephen Mee, 63, said: ‘That Turkish guy was a lunatic. That same morning he was trying to bite the guards. He attacked Curtis, and Curtis fought him off a couple of times. It wasn’t Curtis’s fault, that.’

Warren said Guclu attacked him and it was self-defence, but had four years added to his sentence. 

In 2007, he was released and sent back to Liverpool, but was rearrested in Jersey within weeks on charges of conspiracy to smuggle cannabis. 

When judge Sir Richard Tucker jailed him for 13 more years Warren closed the book he spent proceedings reading and was escorted out by prison guards. 

And in 2020 Prison officer Stephanie Smithwhite (pictured) was jailed for two years after admitting misconduct in a public office over a sexual relationship with Warren at Frankland jail in Co Durham

And in 2020 Prison officer Stephanie Smithwhite was jailed for two years after admitting misconduct in a public office over a sexual relationship with Warren at Frankland jail in Co Durham between June and December 2018.

Smithwhite, denied cutting a hole in the trousers of her prison uniform for a sexual purpose, but the sentencing judge in February 2020 said it was hard to imagine why else it was there.

The court heard, she ‘fell in love with the wrong man in the wrong situation’ and exchanged hundreds of sexually explicit love letters with the infamous drug baron.

At his request she sent him a picture of herself and admitted kissing him and performing sex acts in his cell, a prison kitchen and a laundry room. In an interview Smithwhite admitted other sexual encounters. 

She also admitted a second count related to her not reporting that she knew he had access to a smuggled phone. It was understood this tiny handset was a so-called ‘prison phone’ little bigger than a £2 coin. 

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