Yesterday, I discovered that Tony Bray was the previous occupier of the flat in which I live. He is an associate of the Cocky Watchman himself, Curtis Warren, and is now living in Lower Heswall. Apparently, Curtis Warren himself used to be a regular visitor to the flat, and while Warren was serving time in Holland, Bray used to fly weekly to visit him and keep him informed of goings on within the 'empire'. Fascinating to know that some of the biggest drig deals in the history of world criminality could have been concocted or discussed within the walls which I now call home.
Anyway, I thought this might be a good place to discuss stories and hearsay about Merseyside's most notorious criminal and his known associates. He's certainly an incredibly interesting character, a real old school criminal.
I'm now quite interested in reading the biography : "Cocky: The rise and fall of Curtis Warren, Britain's biggest drug baron." Anyone ever read it, and is it any good?
For anyone who doesn't know about Warren, here's a couple of articles to fill you in:
Curtis 'Cocky' Warren is Britain's most successful career criminal, with a fortune estimated at £185m. But, four years after his arrest, there is still no sign of the money
John Sweeney
Sunday May 14, 2000
The Observer
Once upon a time, a Scouser in a shellsuit with the head of a bullet on the neck of an ox turned up at the Squires Gate helipad in Blackpool and went for a flying lesson in a helicopter. He paid £750 in cash. The notes were crisp and new. The chopper flew up and away over the Irish Sea, leaving the effluent plume from the Mersey and the metal prick of the Blackpool Tower far below. The chopper flew north over the grey, scudding sea to the peninsula of Barrow-on-Furnace - where they turn out nuclear submarines for the Royal Navy. The Scouser pointed to a big square of grass down below, the grounds of the non-league Barrow Athletic Football Club, and said: 'I own that.' Some boast. But it turns out that he wasn't short of a bob or a hundred million pounds.
The scally's name was Curtis Warren, his nickname Cocky Watchman, Scouse slang for a dodgy caretaker, and he was, some say, the Cali cartel's agent for northern Europe. Her Majesty's Customs and Excise had a different name for him: Target One.
He's banged up now, serving a 12-year-stretch in Vught prison in the Netherlands, a former Nazi concentration camp, for importing enough cocaine into Europe to keep the London advertising industry happy until the year 2010. Cocky had a bit of a rumpus the other day in his Dutch prison. A Turkish prisoner attacked him, according to Cocky's solicitor. Cocky hit back with a couple of blows and killed him. Meanwhile, British Customs officers and policemen, working in tandem for a Dutch judge, are beginning to unpick a fraction of Cocky's missing millions. Forget Kenneth Noye. He was just a fence, albeit for the Brinks Matt gold bullion robbers, and one with a nasty temper. Forget the Krays. They were just pathetic minnows.
Law enforcement on the track of Cocky's treasure have thus far uncovered some £20m, though they have yet to get their hands on it. They suspect that he is worth a lot more. One Customs officer on his case suspects he might have £150m buried away. Another former associate has referred to a fortune worth £185m.
Cocky, through his solicitor, says he has been fitted up by a 'wispa campaign' by Customs, that he only owns two very small properties in Liverpool and that reports of his 'multi-millionaire status' are grossly exaggerated. Well, maybe.
It is nigh on certain that Cocky is the richest criminal in British history. Some of it is stashed in tax havens and Swiss banks, some of it placed in a beautiful flat in Liverpool's fancy Wapping Dock development, bang opposite the Customs museum, a small fraction on motors - normally a quietly unfussy Lexus, aircon as standard - some of it on office blocks, some on 200 properties in the north-west, mainly let out to DHS claimants. Not forgetting, they said, a mansion in the north-west, a villa in the Netherlands, a casino or two in Spain, a disco in Turkey. The interesting question is, where's all that money now.
Cocky, with his Desperate Dan pecs, his head shaved as round and smooth as a billiard ball and his thick black eyebrows marching across his face like asylum-seeking millipedes, looks like the original children's TV arch villain - the evil 'Hood', the jerky-limbed puppet whose eyes backlit in Thunderbirds, trying but failing to throw a spanner in the works of International Rescue. The real Hood, however, was much more successful.
The first thing to realise when trying to understand why Her Majesty's Government Drugs Czar Keith Hellawell is finding it so hopelessly difficult to enforce prohibition of hard drugs like cocaine and heroin is that the opposition Drug Czars are not stupid. Yes, many dealers are short-termers, pathetic, often violent 'scrotes' who eventually end up snorting or injecting too much of their own gear, and fall foul of the law, or the competition. But the good ones are different. Smart, streetwise, yes, but subtle too and, above all, intelligent and keen to use intelligence. And Cocky was very good indeed. The second thing is that smart operators like Cocky are only in it for the (huge amounts of) money. And the third, is that honest law enforcement is failing miserably in getting to and getting hold of the drug barons' money. The story of Curtis Warren is a study in society's abject failure to do just that.
I remember vividly the first time I ever heard the name Curtis Warren. Veronica Guerin, the brilliant Irish journalist had been shot dead in Dublin in the summer of 1996, for going after the heroin barons who were making themselves rich while a generation of Irish kids were getting suckered on smack. Her mission had been simple: follow the money. The Observer sent me off to find out who, and why, and how. And what were the names of the British Mr Bigs? In Dublin, I saw a young mother, who was eight-and-a-half-months pregnant, inject herself with heroin because her craving for smack was more powerful than her love for her unborn child. The unborn baby was a junkie, too, quivering inside her stomach for the heroin. When it was born, the first thing that happened was that it was put on to baby methadone. It was one of those things you see with your own eyes, and cannot believe and never forget.
In search of the British Mr Bigs, I had gone to a pub to meet a Customs investigator, the late Bill Newall, who at that time was working for the heroin target team. Bill had hollow legs, an ear for a good story well told and a nice line on the South-East Regional Crime Squad: 'The best police force money can buy'. Bill had 'called the knock' on many heavy-duty nasties, including a number of Turkish heroin traffickers, and on some more amusing outlaws, including a judge he had nicked for smuggling scotch in his yacht. I asked Bill about the Mr Bigs, the ones that always get away. He took a pull on his pint and said: 'Then you've got to go to Liverpool. And ask them about Curtis Warren.'
Who?
'He's nothing much to look at. The usual big Scouse tough guy in a shellsuit. But this one is good. He doesn't drink, smoke or use drugs. He's got a photographic memory for telephone numbers, numbers of bank accounts and the like. We've been looking for where he keeps his stuff. On a computer? In notes? No way. He carries it all inside his head.'
Curtis Francis Warren was born at home on 31 May 1963, his father a mixed-race sailor with the Norwegian Merchant Navy, his grandfather listed as a coffee manufacturer in the Americas. His mother was Sylvia Chantre, the daughter of a shipyard boiler attendant and a mother with a Spanish name, Baptista, originally from Bird Island, South Africa. The young Warren was brought up in the Granby district of Toxteth, which wasn't then, and isn't now, the St Tropez of the north-west. It looks bomb-damaged, but then you recall that the Luftwaffe haven't been this way for more than half a century. The Toxteth riots in the 80s provided the coffin for the area's reputation. That, and the sad fact that insurance rates for the Toxteth postcodes are some of the highest in the country.
Today you can see the 'scrotes' hanging out, on the look-out for coppers, Customs, strangers. The taxi driver who took me around offered the following advice: 'It's fine for you to walk around and chat to people. Just give me all your money first.'
But from these lowly origins, Cocky became so rich he made it on to The Sunday Times Rich 500 list, the highest-placed mixed-race plutocrat in the country. The odd thing about all this wealth is that he had, as they say, no visible means of income. On the contrary, the word was Cocky had made the lion's share of this fabulous sum of money importing stupendous amounts of heroin and cocaine, guns and amphetamine tablets, the drugs direct from the Colombian narco-barons themselves.
He had left school around the age of 11, and was picked up every now and then for bits and pieces of crime. The authors of his compelling biography, Cocky: The Rise and Fall of Curtis Warren, Britain's Biggest Drugs Baron (Milo Books, £14.99), Tony Barnes, Richard Elias and Peter Walsh had no luck whatsoever in getting Cocky's family or schoolfriends or teachers in talking about his early years. Nor did The Observer.
Liverpool cops say Cocky started out life on the doors as a bouncer, then he moved up a level and began organising bouncers. It's a truism that 'if you control the doors, you control the drugs'. While still in his teens, Cocky was selling heroin. And he started making friends. A fellow bouncer, Mike Ahearne, grew up to be Warrior, from the TV show Gladiators. Another pal was Johnny 'Sonny' Phillips, a black bouncer and a ferocious enforcer. A third was Stephen Mee, who later made a name for himself by leaving a prison van, without prior consent, in the middle of the Pennines.
By the late 80s, Cocky had moved into the wrong kind of snow, big time. He teamed up with another drugs trafficker with style, Brian Charrington, who worked the north-east of England, to Cocky's north-west. Like Cocky, Charrington was enormously wealthy, but had no obvious means of wealth. Charrington had a yacht. Well, doesn't everyone?
The two of them went to France on British visitor passports. Once in France, they took out their 10-year-passports and flew to Venezuela, which is next door to Colombia and awash with cocaine. There, the two men fixed up a deal to import huge amounts of coke in steel boxes sealed inside lead ingots, which were not so easy to slice open and impossible to X-ray. Customs were suspicious of the lead ingots. They had cut open one ingot in a first shipment of lead from South America, but had found nothing and let it through. Too late, Dutch cops tipped them off that the coke was hidden inside steel boxes inside the lead ingots.
Customs stopped a second shipment and arrested Cocky and Charrington. They had them bang to rights. Oh no they hadn't. Charrington had been working as a police informer for two officers from the North-East Regional Crime Squad, DI Harry Knaggs and DS Ian Weedon. The question that troubled Customs was whether the intelligence the two policemen were getting from Charrington merited dropping a huge importation case against him. Who got the fat? And who got the lean?
Customs ploughed on with their prosecution, but Knaggs and Weedon fought hard. They got in touch with a rare beastie, a Tory MP in the north-east, one Tim Devlin. He was the PPS to the Attorney General, Sir Nicholas Lyell. And Devlin organised a meeting whereby Knaggs and Weedon made their representations for their informer to be let go. They won. Funnily enough, their Chief Constable was Keith Hellawell, now the government's drugs czar.
The effect of Knaggs and Weedon championing of Charrington was to torpedo Customs' case. When Charrington walked, the case against Cocky at Newcastle Crown Court in 1992 fell through, too. Legend has it that Cocky went back to the ashen-faced Customs officers, gnashing their teeth at this reverse, and said: 'I'm off to spend my £87m from the first shipment and you can't fucking touch me.' Cocky's Liverpool lawyer has denied this boast, but the legend is the better story.
A few months later, Harry Knaggs was clocked by Customs at Dover driving a £70,000 BMW into the country. The luxury German car was registered in the name of Brian Charrington.
Time and Cocky moved on. Liverpool descended into a terrifying gang law. In May 1995, 11 people were shot in one month. None of the gangsters behind the shootings were brought to justice. One bouncer, Stephen Cole, was sitting in the Farmers Arms pub in Fazakerley, drinking with his wife, when a gang of machete-wielding thugs set about him. A normal autopsy takes an hour and a half. Cole's took seven hours.
Cocky, ever cautious, moved to Holland. But not Amsterdam. He went to the lowly dorp of Sassenheim, where he set up shop in a fancy but not overly pretentious villa called Bakara. He hung a boxer's punchbag from the attic ceiling and checked out the world from four slits in the roof. North, east, south and west were covered. It's a substantial house with a big garden, but most of the rooms were empty. It was almost as if he was imprisoned by his own ill-gotten wealth. To kill time, he phoned his Merseyside mates on his mobile or 'portie', always keeping a sharp eye on the latest gossip.
He didn't know it, but someone was listening in to his phone conversations. But being Cocky, he didn't make anything easy for law enforcement. No names, only nicknames. So, according to Cocky the biography, he chatted about the Werewolf and the Vampire, Cracker, Macker and Tacker, the Bell with no Stalk, the Egg on Legs, Lunty, Badger, Boo, Twit and Twat, Big Foot, the Big Fella, the J Fella, the L Fella and many more.
Cocky's conversations were taped by the Dutch police and are known as the Dutch Product. The transcripts show that he was a subtle player of the gangster game, for example, gently admonishing the brother of a bouncer who was causing trouble. They provide an insight, too, into what was going through his mind. The odd thing is that, rich as he was, Cocky couldn't stop himself from shipping in more coke. Maybe it was the buzz. That must have meant more to him than the money.
The new plan was a variation on the old coke-in-lead trick. But this time the coke was going not to Britain, but Bulgaria, where Cocky had interests in a winery. There, oxyacetylene torches would cut through the lead ingots, and the coke would be retrieved. It would then be cooked into liquid and - here's the clever bit - held in suspension inside bottles of Bulgarian red wine. The Plovdiv plonk with the kick of a Colombian mule was going to be shipped back across Europe to Liverpool, from where the coke would be liberated and sold at a 2,000 per cent mark-up to the nation's grateful coke addicts. Neat, huh?
A container load of coke-in-lead arrived in Holland. And Cocky was fast asleep in his new Low Country home, when the Dutch version of the SAS moved in with stun grenades and the like and busted Cocky and his gang.
The Dutch went hunting in six addresses. They found the container and got out a pneumatic drill and the long slog of drilling into the lead started - each ingot being about one metre cubed. Eventually the drill noise changed pitch, the metal filings became lighter and a fine white powder flecked the drill head. They drilled a hole big enough for an arm to reach in, and repeated the process. Hidden in the lead was 400 kilos of 90 per cent pure cocaine. At some of the other places the Dutch cops raided, they found 1,500k of cannabis resin, 60k of heroin, 50k of Ecstasy, crates stacked with 960 CS gas canisters, a bunch of hand grenades, three guns, ammo and almost £400,000 in guilders. The coke, the heroin, the dope, the E and the rest would have netted a cool £125m. Tax free.
The Dutch judge gave him 12 years. That's much less than he would have got for major drug-trafficking in Britain. On the other hand, some law enforcement officers were concerned that friends of Cocky might do a little bit of jury-rigging: a live bullet through a letterbox here, a night with a stunning whore there, and then the threat of embarrassing phonecalls. Dreadful, really, to suggest it, but then Customs investigators have suspicious minds.
So Cocky, the Liverpool Scally who had walked free of the law once before, was banged up at last. Customs, the Dutch and the police detectives from the North-West Regional Crime Squad who had worked with them on Operation Crayfish were delighted.
Cocky was arrested four years ago. Since then, the anti-money-laundering units of the Netherlands and Britain have been working flat out to trace his ill-gotten gains. They heard about the chopper ride and Cocky's boasts that he owned Barrow Football Club's ground and started investigating. Police raided the club's offices and arrested Stephen Vaughan, a boxing promoter. Mr Vaughan's company, Northern Improvements, was the ground's major shareholder. Mr Vaughan wrote a letter to Boxing News in February 1998: 'I am sure you will be aware that I was recently arrested by HM Customs and Excise in relation to the investigation into Curtis Warren. You will be aware that the allegations centre on the laundering of millions of pounds of supposed drugs money. This is something I have categorically and strenuously denied and I cannot stress how vehemently any potential prosecution would be defended.
'Unfortunately, the rumours and stories have reached us through the grapevine and I have heard some fantastic versions of events, most of which are untrue… The investigation surrounds Curtis Warren's "missing £185m". Because I'm a past associate of Mr Warren, the HM Customs have deemed it necessary to investigate matters concerning me and some of my assets, such as the acquisition of an office block, a wine bar, Barrow Football Club's Holker Street Stadium, and to look into my land deals and residential building investments over the past six years. That is all.'
Vaughan said after his arrest: 'Of course I know Warren,' he said. 'I used to employ his security company for my boxing promotions and paid him about 28 or 30 cheques for about £300 each. He once put £17,500 into my solicitor's account to buy a council house I wanted to sell, but the deal never went through and I gave him his money back. I did buy a Toyota Land Cruiser from him.' Because of all the fuss, Vaughan later stepped down from the club. He has not been charged with any offence.
Another line of inquiry has been the amazing herbaceous border of Philly Glennon Snr. The Liverpool businessmen is the father of Cocky's one-time girlfriend, Stephanie. Glennon Snr was described at the trial of bent cop Elly Davies by prosecution QC Peter Joyce as a 'wealthy crook who made his money through drugs' and, by Elly himself, as a 'major drugs baron'. Before Elly's trial, police investigating Glennon Snr found more than a £1m underneath his nasturtiums. No charges were brought against him. Now he wants his money back. The police are holding on to it, for the moment.
But the upshot of huge amounts of casework in tracing Cocky's money is that they unearthed a pitiful £20m, small change. Remember, they've only traced this money, not turned it over to the Dutch or British taxpayers. And the rest? That's disappeared down a black hole. Dubai. Swiss banks. A plethora of dodgy accounts in Her Majesty's tax havens.
One Customs investigator told The Observer : 'It's a pig's ear of a system. The law as it stands favours the drugs baron. We have to find the money first. Then we have to prove a drugs nexus, through the teeth of a battery of lawyers arguing procedure against us. What we need, desperately, is a Civil Forfeiture Act. They've got one in Ireland, after the murder of Veronica Guerin. A CFA would mean that if we found a huge amount of cash, then the owner would have to explain how he came by it lawfully. If he can't do that, the cash goes to the taxpayer. That way we would take much of the fun out of being a drugs baron. But, at the moment, we're wondering why we bother. Until we get a CFA, we know that society isn't serious about tackling hard drugs.'
The statistics bear out the complaint. In the last available year, Customs identified assets of drug barons valued at £18m. Amounts realised against confiscation orders were a mere £4.9m, a pathetically small sum given the billions made from the drugs trade in Britain.
Meanwhile, the attempts to find Cocky's money grind on. The message Drugs Czar Keith Hellawell wishes to put out is that drug crime doesn't pay. He should ask Cocky. Nicely.
'Cocky' Warren, Rich-List drugs baron, returns to UK
Notorious underworld boss wins appeal against added four-year sentence for killing fellow convict in prison-yard brawl
By Paul Lashmar
Sunday, 17 June 2007
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Britain's most notorious drugs trafficker, and the only one to feature on The Sunday Times Rich List, has returned to the country a free man.
Curtis "Cocky" Warren amassed a £85m fortune from the drugs trade before he was jailed in Holland in 1996. Last week, he was released after a successful court appeal.
On Thursday evening, Warren, 44, stepped off the ferry at Harwich, in Essex, looking fit and well and every bit as "cocky" as his nickname suggests. He was met by two men. After a 245-mile drive back to Liverpool, Warren popped in to see his mother, who has been unwell, then checked into a city-centre hotel at 3am.
But his journey home had not been plain sailing: Warren had attempted to book on an easyJet flight from Amsterdam to Liverpool, but the budget airline refused to carry him.
Warren had been expected to remain in prison until 2012, for organising a £125m drug-smuggling operation. Jailed for 12 years, "Cocky" had an extra four years added to his sentenced for manslaughter after he killed a fellow inmate in a prison yard brawl.
"Head-butting Curtis is a bit like head-butting a brick wall," his solicitor Keith Dyson observed dryly at the time. Warren, brought up in Liverpool's notorious Toxteth area, pleaded self-defence, but was found to have used excessive force in the fight. He appealed against the extra sentence.
Mr Dyson said yesterday: "The grounds for the appeal was that the evidence that was available didn't really support the charges." After speaking to his client as he arrived at Harwich, Mr Dyson said Warren wants to "get on with his life in a positive way".
Peter Walsh, co-author of Warren's biography, Cocky, said: "News of Warren's freedom will bring a new and very unwanted headache to a police force already involved in keeping the lid on a highly-volatile situation. Everyone knows how significant Merseyside and its criminals are in not only the national, but the international drugs trade, and here you have one of the most significant narcotics figures of the past 20 years coming home."
Warren, who moved to the Netherlands in 1995 after a year on remand in Leeds until a drugs case was dropped, invested his ill-gotten gains in many countries in banks, property and casinos, a total believed to be about £85m. He apparently has a photographic memory and can memorise bank account numbers.
He was said at one point to own almost 300 properties in Liverpool, hotels and petrol stations in Turkey, mansions in Merseyside and Holland and a Bulgarian winery.
British financial investigators were able to identify only a small part of his hidden wealth. In 2004, a High Court judge ordered a record £3.5m of drug-smuggling money, which Warren claimed belonged to him, must be confiscated.
A former Customs chief, David Raynes, said: "This is one where you would think the Serious Organised Crime Agency, Inland Revenue and Customs will see what more they can do. Accountants and other people around Warren should be aware that if they sell property or investments on his behalf they may be open to criminal proceedings."
