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Curtis Warren (drug dealer)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Curtis "Cocky" Warren (born May 31, 1963, Toxteth, Liverpool, England) was a notorious British Liverpudlian drug dealer. At one point reportedly worth in excess of £125 million, Warren appeared on the Sunday Times 'Rich List' (documenting wealthy individuals in the UK) with his money attributed to 'property'. His extreme wealth and phenomenal success as a criminal earned him the nickname 'cocky'.
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Warren was born on May 31, 1963, in the deprived Liverpool suburb of Toxteth. He effectively left school at 11 and turned to petty crime. He soon took up drug dealing and by the early-1990s was renowned in the Merseyside area as not only a highly successful but also highly intelligent drug dealer, who did not himself take drugs.
In September 1991 Warren, in conjunction with another prominent British drug dealer named Brian Charrington, arranged for a shipment of cocaine from Venezuela, hidden inside ingots of lead. This shipment was successful but soon afterwards Warren and Charrington were arrested while attempting to orchestrate a second shipment. Warren was charged with importing around £87 million worth (street value) of cocaine into the UK; The largest UK seizure at the time, had he been found guilty he would almost certainly have faced decades in prison. He was held at Armley prison in Leeds as a category A remand prisoner for over a year However, it emerged that Charrington was a police informant and due to various complex legal issues the case was dropped; in 1993 Warren walked free.
In 1995, Warren took the decision to relocate to the Netherlands, to the town of Sassenheim. The decision was driven by a fear of another arrest by the British authorities and also in order to escape escalating gang violence in Liverpool, where several prominent gangsters had been murdered. By this point Warren had accumulated massive wealth, much of it invested legally in assets such as property and casinos. Despite having enough to comfortably (and perhaps safely) retire, he chose to continue in the drug trade. He co-ordinated his empire via phone calls to the UK, many of them tapped by British police.
Warren's rule as the UK's ultimate drug baron was ended on October 24, 1996, when he was arrested by Dutch authorities when attempting to execute a large shipment of drugs. The homes of many top-level gangsters in his organisation were raided, uncovering drugs, cash and extensive weaponry. He was later sentenced to 12 years in Dutch prison for drug trafficking. In 1999 he was further convicted of the manslaughter of a fellow prisoner following a prison yard brawl, for which he had 4 years added to his original jail term, meaning he will serve until 2012. According to many 'insiders' however, Warren remains an influential figure in organised crime.[citation needed]