Curtis Warren's drug empire came crashing down after 'lucky' phone call to gangster

Curtis Warren and his ex criminal associate Stephen Mee were finally caught in the Netherlands after a "lucky" phone call, the former drug lord has revealed. Drugs smuggler Mee first met Toxteth-born Warren on remand in Strangeways in 1991 when the Manchester-born criminal was facing a lengthy spell behind bars.

While being transported by coach to court to be sentenced he was sprung on the M62 before flying by a private plane to Holland. Warren, whose court case for allegedly conspiring to smuggle 1,000kg of cocaine into the UK collapsed in 1993, also headed for the Netherlands and hooked up with Mee. Almost immediately they were back in the smuggling business until police finally caught up with them in 1996 thanks to 'Operation Crayfish'.

Speaking to the Anything Goes With James English podcast, Mee explained how police were able to finally catch the criminals. He said: "People on them phones, just normal phones, they were all over Curtis.

"About six months before we got caught, we were living in a nice little house, one of my friends had come early in the morning to go play a round of golf and he'd spotted a couple of strange looking cars with strange people in them. There were two cars in a line with eight blokes in them and straight away just police.

"I just drove to Paris that night, never went back to the house, left everything behind. Stayed in Paris for a few days then went back to a different part of Holland in the north."

Dutch police tapped into Mee and Warren's phone conversations. At first, they struggled to decipher their accents and backslang.

But they made a big breakthrough when they discovered Mee had been sent to Columbia to meet the Cali Cartel in one of the biggest cocaine deals known to the UK. When the half tonne of cocaine arrived at Warren's house, Dutch police moved in and arrested Warren, Mee and several other gang members.

Mee told James English that police were able to get enough information on the drugs gang after a "lucky" phone call he made to Warren. He said: "It was triangulations with phones, I was on the phone to Curtis.

"At that time when I was on the phone, where we was, it was a farm, there was another farm about a mile away and another farm that was but there's nothing, there's no reason for any cars to come up there to go anywhere but to these two other farms that were there.

"I knew everybody that was there. This car had come past and you know when somebody just looks at you for that split second? I should have just gone, just started running across the field and carried on because he only came the following morning. But it's that intuition isn't it, I didn't abide by it and just carried on.

"But I was on the phone to Curtis so driving up the road, getting the triangulation or getting as close as he can and luckily for them I was stood outside in the garden talking, so I think that's how they got us."

Warren was sentenced to 13 years for drugs smuggling and possessions of firearms in the Netherlands before he was released in June 2007.