He started by shoplifting from Tesco and ended up as Curtis Warren's right-hand man

A man has spoken about his life trafficking millions of pounds of drugs across Europe with Curtis Warren and the Colombian cartels.

Stephen Mee grew up as one of nine siblings in 1970s Newton Heath, Greater Manchester. He would shoplift just to put food on the table for his family.

This then escalated in his teenage years to stealing cars. By the '90s, he worked with Warren - Liverpool's most notorious gangster - to move cannabis and cocaine across the continent.

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Growing up 'poor' in north Manchester, Mee says he committed his first crime aged nine when he burgled his own school. Then he began shoplifting at his local Tesco, reports the MEN.

Mee told Sky TV documentary Liverpool Narcos: "It's been a life of struggle I suppose all the way. It's the same in all poor areas, that if you've not got enough food what do you do?"

By age 13, he was in Foston Hall young offenders' institution in Derbyshire for stealing cars. And, for a time at least, the experience - he described it as 'a brutal place. It was just violence all the way through' - seemed to have straightened him out.

In his early 20s he spent about five or six years 'legit' running his own bicycle shop. But soon he got 'dragged back' into the criminal underworld.

Realising there was a lot of money to be made in cannabis, Mee teamed up with some friends and put together an audacious but naïve plan to travel to Amsterdam to buy the drug in bulk from the city's coffee shops.

Remarkably it worked. After being turned away by 10 different cafes, they ended up buying a kilo of weed from a local chapter of the Hells Angels. Within months the gang were trafficking hundreds of kilos of cannabis per trip.

"I put a couple of grand together and decided to go to Holland to buy some cannabis," he said

"£5,000 for a couple of days' work, that lit up everything in my mind, it took us less than a week to go back and buy two and do the same again." But by 1989, Mee had expanded his operation to include cocaine. His first undertaking was carrying 24 kilograms of cocaine in a suitcase to Ecuador.

"They put 24 kilograms in a case, that was all that was in the case, cocaine," he said. "Then at the airport on this side, it was just down to taking the risk of getting it through.

"I was smartly dressed, I just looked like a businessman. As you're going through you’re just trying not to look at anybody, just keep walking.

"Any sort of sniffer dog would pick it up even though it was covered in stuff [mustard and piccalilli] to stop that."

In 1991 he was caught by undercover police smuggling cannabis and cocaine into the UK from Colombia. While on remand in Strangeways he formed the friendship that would catapult him into the big leagues.

Like Mee, Curtis Warren was a drug smuggler. Toxteth-born Warren, nicknamed 'Cocky' was formerly Interpol's Target One and once made it onto the Sunday Times Rich List.

Warren and Mee soon hit it off.

"We had been to the same places - all over Europe, South America - done the same things," Mee told the Second Chance podcast in December. "I used to do food for him, we used to play chess together. I got to know him pretty well."

Facing a lengthy spell behind bars, Mee began planning his escape. Because of the Strangeways riot he was moved to HMP Risley.

But while being transported by coach to court to be sentenced he was sprung on the M62. According to police records, the gang that assisted Mee were said to be armed, apparently with rocket launchers, although Mee denies this.

He hid out in a flat in Toxteth for three months before flying by a private plane to the Netherlands. In the meantime the case against Warren collapsed.

Described at the time as Britain's biggest criminal investigation, it was alleged Warren had set up a deal with the Colombian Cali Cartel to import £250m of cocaine into the UK. Now a free man, Warren also headed for the Netherlands where he hooked up with Mee.

Almost immediately they were back in the smuggling business. Mee, who in his absence had been convicted to 22 years in prison, built a reputation as a reliable middle-man, selling drugs smuggled in from South America across Europe.

And the shipments kept getting bigger and bigger. "One one occasion I put £5m of cash in a car boot," Mee told the Second Chance podcast. "I was driving about Amsterdam with £5m in the boot. I went about eight times to Colombia.

"I was meeting with Lucho (Luis Agustin Caicedo Velandia) the head of the Cali Cartel in Bogota. I was the first person to meet them after 3,000 kilos went missing. I had to explain what had happened even though it was nothing to do with me."

But, back home in the UK, the drugs Mee and Warren were helping to import were fuelling an explosion in violence on the streets of Manchester and Liverpool as gangs battled for a slice of the lucrative cocaine trade. Police in the Netherlands and the UK joined forces with customs in a bid to crack the higher echelons of the importation and distribution network.

Named 'Operation Crayfish', 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.

"It was done within seconds really," Mee told Liverpool Narcos. "They blew the windows out, flashbangs went in and stunt grenades went in.

"Face downwards naked, they carried you by your hands and feet across the gravel into the back of a car."

Mee served seven years in a Dutch triple-A category maximum security prison. And this time there would be no escape.

In 2004, he returned to the UK to serve the 22-year sentence he had been given in 1993. After a total of 15 years in prison, he was released in 2012.

Looking back, Mee says he saw himself as an 'international businessman moving quantities of a product from one country to another'. "I know it wasn't that," he added.

"I knew I was dealing in death, but while you are doing it you are not thinking of things like that. I am completely remorseful for what I did. Not only was it a waste of my life, it caused a lot of problems for everybody else.

"None of it was worth it. I would change every bit of it for a week of freedom with my family."

Now Mee says he's turned his back on crime. A successful artist - he studied for a fine arts degree while behind bars - his paintings have been exhibited in London galleries and sell for thousands.

"I'm an artist, that's all I do," he says when asked to describe his life now. "I got more pleasure out of painting pictures than counting millions of pounds. I knew I had something to come out [of prison] to and that helped. It gave me the position where people could recognise I was trying and they would help me.

"If you are trying, which nobody could say I haven't, eventually you get into a position where you can help people to do the same - that's what I'm trying to do at the moment.

"Everybody deserves a second chance and I've taken mine."

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