Liverpool Narcos (2021) s01e03 Episode Script
Cocaine
(birds singing)
(alarm buzzing)
Wanna be like ♪
On my knees in the night ♪
Sayin' prayers in the streetlight ♪
Been spendin' most their lives ♪
Livin' in the gangsta's paradise ♪
(Stephen laughs)
- No.
Livin' in the gangsta's paradise ♪
Breakfast?
- [Sarah] Oh, yes, please.
Livin' in the gangsta's paradise ♪
Livin' in the gangsta's paradise ♪
Look at the situation
they got me facin' ♪
I can't live a normal life,
I was raised by the street ♪
So I gotta be down with the hood team ♪
Too much television watchin'
got me chasin' dreams ♪
I'm a educated fool
with money on my mind ♪
(phone ringing)
Got my ten in my hand
and a gleam in my eye ♪
- Hello.
- [Caller] It didn't get through.
(signal cuts off)
(eerie music)
(Stephen groans)
- Sarah!
(suspenseful music)
- What happened?
- The cocaine, it didn't go through.
- What, all of it?
- Yeah, all 500 fucking kilos.
Customs found the lot.
- Fuck sakes, Stephen.
- [Stephen] Be as quick as you can.
- Yes.
- Don't forget your run bag.
- [Sarah] All right.
(suspenseful music)
Okay?
- Yeah, go, go, go.
(suspenseful music)
- [Director] Cut!
Life of an international
drug smuggler, Stephen.
- Pretty Much.
Some people say a
man is made outta mud ♪
A poor man's made
outta muscle and blood ♪
Muscle and blood and skin and bones ♪
A mind that's a-weak
and a back that's strong ♪
You load 16 tonnes, what do you get? ♪
Another day older and deeper in debt ♪
St. Peter, don't you
call me 'cause I can't go ♪
I owe my soul to the company store ♪
(birds singing)
- [Reporter] Liverpool,
today, it has a drug culture
to rival that of any inner
city area in Britain.
Associated gang rivalry and shootings
have led to heavy policing there.
Much of the blame for all that
could be laid on the burly shoulders
of 34-year-old Curtis Warren,
arrested after a raid on a warehouse.
Investigators discovered
cocaine with a street value
of 75 million pounds.
Once known as Interpol's target one,
Warren led a gang who for
years had flooded Europe
with heroin, cocaine,
ecstasy, and hashish.
One of his lieutenants, Stephen Mee,
has been on the run
from Britain since 1993
after escaping a 22-year
drug smuggling sentence.
(coffee pouring)
- [Stephen Mee] Certain smells,
especially the Colombian
coffee that I have,
that smell takes me back
to a place in Colombia.
- [Director] Describe your life.
- [Stephen Mee] How
would I describe me life?
- [Director] Yeah.
- Comedy of errors, I suppose.
(slow guitar music)
It's been a life of struggle,
I suppose, all the way.
Keeps the same in all poor areas
that if you've not got
enough food, what do you do?
For me, that was a beginning,
shoplifting in Tesco.
- [Director] How old were you?
- I was about nine, yeah.
Coming up to nine, eight, nine.
My mum was, she was always poorly.
She used to send us with
a few quid to supermarket
and God help us if we don't
come back with the food.
We thought it was steal it
or get a bit of a hiding when we got home.
I robbed my own primary
school when I was nine.
I don't know what made me do it,
but took a tin full of money.
And I went to the local shop,
bought a big Toblerone with it.
And by the time I got home,
everybody knew the school had been robbed
and knew it was me.
- [Director] Not a very
glamorous start, is it?
- Gotta start somewhere, haven't ya?
(eerie music)
- [Director] How do you,
someone from Newton Heath,
get into drug smuggling?
- Well, quite a lot of people
that I knew at the time
was smoking cannabis,
so it was a natural thing for me anyway.
Put a couple of grand together
and we decided to go to Holland
to buy some cannabis.
5,000 pounds 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.
Cocaine just seemed like a
natural progression at the time.
You don't see it as a drug,
you just see it as a commodity.
That's all it was to us.
I know it did all the damage it did
and thinking about the time,
you're not thinking like that.
(eerie music)
- [Officer] Stand by, stand by,
he's coming out of the
premises, towards the vehicle.
- [Reporter] These officers
are searching for ecstasy tablets.
They estimate some 15 million pounds
worth of illegal tablets
has been prevented
from reaching the streets.
- [Peter] The legacy, I think, of ecstasy
was that it laid the grounds
for what became the cocaine market.
Ecstasy got the youth audience
used to partaking in an illegal activity.
And once you've breached that barrier,
it's then a short step
to buying this powder.
- I mean, in the '80s,
it was just too expensive
for normal people, for
working class people.
- We had speed, you see, we
had amphetamine sulphate.
- [Director] So what changed?
- The quantity, the
amount that was coming in.
- The price.
- And the price.
- The price went down.
The more you got,
the more easily is to get hold of,
the cheaper it is, more people use it.
- [Director] Is it fair to say
that the cocaine started
flooding the city at that point?
- [Alan] Oh, yeah.
- Oh, God yeah.
(upbeat guitar music)
- [Lee] It was like similar
coming up to what he was like.
Give you that confidence
made you feel good,
made you feel like you
could take on anything.
I liked what it done for me.
I liked the way it make me feel.
Started taking it, like, daily.
I'd have a brekky in the morning,
and then me and me mates
would go and get some.
So we'd end up, like, on it all the time.
- Thing is, if you weren't
doing cocaine yourself
and you were sitting with
a group of cocaine users,
it was quite hilarious, actually,
because they just start chatting bubbles.
- Just talking shit.
- Just talking shit, yeah.
We know somebody that went off
on one when he was on coke.
He actually picked up one of
these to threaten someone.
- A fish slice.
- A fish slice.
(both laughing)
- [Billy] Cocaine for me was all about, like,
sleep through the day,
up all night in nightclubs,
snorting with the lads,
telling the bouncers to piss off.
You was supercharged and you were like,
"Yeah, whatever, come on."
And it was like, "Wow, this is brilliant."
(upbeat music)
- [Reporter] Every minute of
the day, a plane touches down.
Unbeknown to the airlines,
they're carrying more
and more drug smugglers
into this country.
- The guys who arrive
with the explosion of the cocaine trade
were simply there to make their fortune.
- [Reporter] Customs officers
have targeted a flight
from Bogota, Colombia,
a country notorious
for cocaine production.
- [Peter] The money that could
be made in trafficking cocaine
was astronomical.
- [Reporter] Inside is
300,000 pounds worth.
- And this attracted a whole
new breed of drug smugglers.
These guys had a different mentality.
They were hungrier,
tougher, much more violent.
- [Reporter] With more and more
guns available on the street
and more and more people
apparently prepared to use them,
the fear is that summer
in this particular city
will be a heated, tense time.
- The result was that a lot of the people
who'd been involved in cannabis
and even ecstasy trafficking
suddenly bailed out because
this wasn't their world.
They couldn't compete.
(eerie music)
- Can I help you, ladies?
Dean, hey, nice outfit!
So it was you who raided
Barry Manilow's wardrobe.
- Says the grown man
in a fluffy track suit.
Now less of the chitchat, Boris Becker,
show me the merchandise.
(suspenseful music)
Monkeys?
- Chimpanzee.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, calm down, girls.
This their first ever drug deal?
- Carry on like this,
and it'll be your last.
(suspenseful music)
- I told you it was good, didn't I?
Direct from Colombia.
- Stephen, my lad, it's
game, set, and match.
- [Director] Cut!
Stop there.
Is that how you do a drug deal, Stephen?
- No, that was nothing like
how you do a drug deal.
You do a drug with no guns,
no suits, no flash cars,
no nothing. As quiet as possible.
- [Director] What about the chitchat?
- No chitchat at all.
Straight to the point and gone.
- [Director] It does feel a
bit wrong, to be honest, eh?
- Hmm.
The first time I started dealing cocaine
was when I got the opportunity
to carry some through customs.
Had to travel to Ecuador.
People that I knew, knew people there.
They put 24 kilo in a case.
That was all that was in
the case, was cocaine.
Then at the airport on this side,
it was down to just taking the
risk of getting it through.
- [Director] So you went through customs
with 24 kilos of cocaine
in a bag, and nothing else.
- [Stephen Mee] I had a
bit of foam around it.
- [Director] Oh, well,
that makes a difference.
What do you call that?
- It's a kamikaze.
You either get through or you
don't. There's no in between.
I was smartly dressed. Just
looked like a businessman.
As you're going through,
you just try not to look at anybody,
just keep walking.
And if you saw a sniffer dog,
I would imagine pick it up,
even though it is covered
in stuff to stop that.
- [Director] What was it covered in?
- [Stephen Mee] Mustard, piccalillis.
- [Director] Sorry, what?.
- Mustard, piccalilli.
- [Director] Piccalilli?
- Piccalilli, yeah.
Well, I was only like a mule, really,
just taking maximum risk.
Well, I didn't get caught.
I got through with mine
and I got a three kilo for my kamikaze.
- [Director] How much did
you make on that deal?
- Close to 60 for it.
I got the money, got a 60,000 for it,
got back, and even on the way back,
we got a phone call off I want eight more.
That's how good it was,
it was, well, straight from Colombia.
I was making a fortune.
- [Reporter] HM Customs are now convinced
the drug barons of Colombia
are targeting Britain,
using neighbouring
countries as loading points.
- [Interviewee] Drug barons
are in business to make money.
And so Britain and the
rest of Western Europe
are very much in the target.
- Liverpool gangsters talk
to people in South America,
cut out the middleman,
just import your own.
- [Peter] Someone like Curtis Warren.
His rise when the drugs trade
was certain and meteoric.
And that was because he
managed to forge links
with the cocaine cartel in Colombia
and then would organise
the transport into the UK,
which allowed him to
get the cheapest prices.
And as a result of this,
he became one of the biggest
cocaine dealers in the UK.
- [Lyn] There was more of
it than I've ever known.
Just seems to be like
everyone selling coke then.
I was talking to the head of
the drug squad at the time,
that coke was becoming the
real issue within the city.
And I said, "If we don't
start doing some intervention,
"there's gonna be gun
battles in the streets."
And he just kind of looked
down at me and he went,
"Lyn, this is Britain, not America."
- [Alan] And then three months later
- Three months later, there
was gun battles on the streets.
- [Reporter] Police struggling
to stop a vicious drug war
as armed gangs fight it out
to control the lucrative
back street drug trade.
Local people are too
terrified to come forward
with police left with no alternative
but to fight force with force.
- [Director] In Liverpool
alongside the growth in cocaine,
there was a real explosion of violence.
- [Stephen Mee] Yeah.
- [Director] Were you aware of that?
- [Stephen Mee] I was always
aware that it was there,
but it's down at the street level.
Like I say, I was always away from it,
but the whole game's
covered in violence, innit?
You can't say your hands
are clean of the violence
'cause you didn't take part of it.
- [Director] Do you feel culpable?
- I do, yeah, yeah.
I know people have suffered
through what I did.
I am responsible for things that happened.
- [Lee] Wherever there's cocaine,
there's gonna be violence,
whether it's people committing crime
to get money to buy cocaine
or whether people willing
to go to any lengths
to protect what they've got.
- [Director] The money involved.
- 'Cause the money involved, yeah.
(slow music)
- [Director] And what were
you spending in the height
per week on coke?
- I'd say a few grand.
- [Director] A few grand a week?
- Yeah.
It gone from going out, enjoying it
to being on my own in the
house with the telly on mute
and that being too loud.
And looking at reflections
in the window of yourself,
thinking there was someone outside.
- [Billy] That was the Charlie scene
snorting coke off samurai swords
and having weapons and no
enemies, that kind of stuff.
It's just really, really paranoid.
You could hear a pin drop
two miles away, you know?
That kind of feeling.
Hold on, shh, do you hear that?
That was in Gaston that,
and we'd be in Toxteth,
do you know what I mean?
(laughs) Shh, shh, shh.
Paranoid, you know what I mean?
Thinking the neighbours
are talking about me,
listening through walls.
Went and bought surveillance equipment,
you know what I mean?
- [Director] You bought
surveillance equipment?
- I did, yeah.
Night vision goggles and everything.
(Director laughing)
I'd look out this little window
and I'd see people walking dogs
and getting on with the life,
and that was all I wanted,
to be a part of the human race,
but I had no love, no family, no friends.
Nothing.
- [Reporter] Here on the
roof of Latin America
is the home of that
so-called elegant aristocrat
of the drugs world, cocaine.
People lose their fortunes
and sometimes their lives
in pursuit of its beguiling properties.
- [Stephen Mee] There's
thousands of tonnes of cocaine
in South America.
How do you get it from there to here?
Transport's the key.
This Belgian lad was moving
stuff all over the place
and I jumped in with a 40 kilo one for him
from Curacao and he started
asking about for couriers
to pick up in Curacao,
and it got some couriers interested in it,
but they was undercover police.
And that's when we got
caught for the 6.3 kilo
and 40 kilo of cannabis.
We got arrested and went
to Risley on remand.
(guitar music)
The trial was four or five months.
Every day I'd go to court
handcuffed to the same guy.
Same guy in the trial with me.
We were found guilty,
and I knew I was looking
at a long stretch,
22 years, my barrister told me.
That's when I decided I had to escape.
So me and my mate made a plan.
We would escape during transit
on the day of the sentencing.
Only on that day for the first time ever,
I'm not handcuffed to him.
(eerie music)
It was some totally new guy.
Obviously, my mind is racing now,
"Have I been found out?"
And I thought, "Oh, fuck it."
- Something's gonna happen in a minute.
(slow dramatic music)
- [Officer] What the--
Oh my God, get your heads down!
- Nobody fucking move!
- [Director] Cut!
- What the fuck?
That's not what happened.
- [Director] It said armed escape.
- It's not what happened, mate.
This is what happened.
(suspenseful music)
Nobody fucking move!
(prisoners cheering)
- [Officer] What the fuck?
- [Director] Cut!
- That's what happened.
- [Director] So how come
it says armed escape
on your records?
- You tell me.
(eerie music)
So I'm on the run for
a very serious crime.
I got 22 years in me absence
and I gotta start earning money.
I got a private plane over to Holland.
Got off the plane there and went to a flat
right in the centre of Amsterdam.
And it was a few months
before I make contact again with Curtis.
I met Curtis Warren while I was in prison,
he was there waiting for
his trial to go ahead.
- [Director] Well, what
was he on trial for?
- Cocaine, 500 kilo of
cocaine importation.
- [Announcer] When customs men
torched open these lead drums,
they found nearly a tonne
of high grade cocaine
in concealed compartments.
- [Reporter] Before his
arrest warrant was referred to
by Interpol as a target one.
It's claimed, he was dealing
in every type of illegal drug
from all around the world.
- [Stephen Mee] When I met
Curtis for the first time,
it was just another prisoner to me.
Once I started talking to him,
I realised that he'd done
more or less in the drug game
what I was doing. Been to
the same places I'd been to.
And me and him got on quite well.
I used to be able to get
Curtis out onto the wing
for a few hours or I could
go in a cell and play chess,
or something, and have a chat.
And then later on when
I'd already escaped,
I'm not too sure about what happened,
but his trial collapsed completely.
- [Reporter] Newspaper reports and claimed
the problem was a lack of coordination
between the police and Customs and Excise.
- [Stephen Mee] And then
all of a sudden he was out.
Made contact with him
and started up with him.
(upbeat music)
We started doing what we did.
Selling mostly into Europe.
I think we moved up quite
a few steps on the ladder,
the bigger deals, and bigger transactions,
and possibilities.
Those possibilities as well,
we could go to bed broke
and wake up a millionaire
'cause a ship could come in.
Coming in a container.
Transport company will come and pick it up
and you get it delivered to your premises.
People used to come over and
pay fortunes in suitcases.
One bloke came over and he
had 1.6, I think it was,
million in fivers, and
tenners, and twenties.
It took us days to count it.
It's when you see it all
in one place, it's
That's when I suppose you get the feeling
that you're getting somewhere.
It's just international business.
Moving tens of millions
of pounds worth of stuff about
and the stuff was cocaine.
When you take away all
the goods and the bads
and the evil and all that,
it's just a product, innit?
You're just taking it
from one point to another.
That's how we seen it at the time.
(suspenseful music)
- [Raff] We all believe in good.
But what's the opposite of that?
- [Director] Evil?
- Yeah.
And I think,
you know, if there is a devil,
I really believe that he has
a crack pipe in his hand.
- [Male Reporter] Five and a
half kilos of freshly produced,
highly addictive crack cocaine.
- [Female Reporter] With
its cheaper street value
and higher addiction rates,
crack's identified as
the drug of the '90s.
- [Raff] Crack cocaine was
the game changer for me.
Using crack, it was like
falling off a cliff.
It smashed me in pieces.
In this high rise block here,
I used to smoke crack in there.
It was a 24/7 open crack house.
I used to come here a lot.
- [Lee] What I've found
when I've been using drugs
is that I hit rock bottom
then I get a shovel
and started digging and finding a new one.
And that's what it was like taking crack.
It's like having 20 lines of punch
but lasts a fraction of the time.
- [Raff] Well, crack cocaine
is very, very moreish,
so you need more and more money
and then you are committing
more and more crimes
and the desperation level grows higher.
So your moral compass
goes to Cash Converters.
- [Lee] I went from
buying it to making it.
Put it in a spoon,
put it under a flame,
goes yellow on top,
that's how easy it is.
- [Director] If you turn
one gramme into 10 rocks,
how long would that last?
- If it would be me and
me mates, so not long,
half an hour.
- [Director] Half an hour?
- Yeah,
half an hour.
And then we'd be buying more coke.
- [Raff] A heroine addict might go
and buy heroine twice,
three times a day tops,
whereas a crack cocaine user,
might go 15 times a day.
So there's more money involved.
And then the competition
between the dealers as well.
So the violence associated
with the drug use,
it went off the scale.
- [Reporter] Five people have been shot
in just two incidents.
Scores are settled in
full scale gun battles.
With police in danger of losing control,
high profile armed
officers have now been sent
onto the streets of Toxteth.
- [Peter] Operation Crayfish began
when the first prosecution
against Curtis Warren had collapsed.
Customs met senior police
officers to form a joint team
tasked with attacking the top level
of Merseyside drug
importation and distribution.
(slow music)
Curtis Warren and Co. had
assumed that they were safe
from phone taps in Holland,
that the British didn't
know where they were,
and that nobody would be
tapping their phones over there.
But investigators had identified
that Warren was in the Netherlands.
They informed the Dutch,
and they asked the Dutch
if they would be prepared
to commence a target
operation against Warren.
They agreed and got the authorisation
to tap their telephones.
- [Steve] The Dutch thought
that they were listening
to a foreign language.
It certainly wasn't Dutch,
and it certainly wasn't
English in their mind.
Just to listen to a Scouser,
I mean, I have difficulty
listening to Scousers.
And so, they had a conversation about,
"So I'll see you at the cafe by us."
So, they thought the name
of the cafe was Bias,
where it's by us, you know, by near me.
You've got the intelligence team
and they spent hours and hours
looking for a cafe that doesn't exist.
Also, they were struggling
because they couldn't
understand back slang.
- [Director] what is back slang?
- Something that's developed
by school kids in the yard
and it's basically breaking down the word
and you add letters to it.
So my name is Steve, in back
slang it would be Stageve
or Stabeve
or Stayeve.
- [Director] How would
you say my name is Steve
and I used to be in the police force.
- Imy nagame is Stabeve and I
was in the polivice foregoce.
- [Director] No, I didn't get that at all.
- No?
- [Director] No.
- They could hear in
conversation clabiders,
so they thought that the enterprise
was gonna use gliders to
bring the drugs into the UK.
And it's actually, they're
back slanging gilders.
(director and Steve laughing)
I think that they were a month into it
before they said, "Give up.
"Don't know what they're saying.
"I haven't got a clue."
I was at home.
I had a week's vacation
decorating the front room,
and I had a phone call to say,
"On Sunday, you're flying to Holland."
And that's the first I knew about it.
I was picked because I could
speak back slang (laughs).
And I knew the players.
On a daily basis we were
getting fresh intelligence.
The telephone was so active,
there was over 14,000
telephone conversations
that we listened to.
That's a lot of telephone conversation.
And it's not listening to a
conversation like you and I,
it's an intense conversation.
With back slang, with rhyming slang.
Your insides are tight as
a knot in your stomach,
and you've gotta make
sure that you get it right
because you're passing that
intelligence to the team
and they want to act on it.
We didn't know it was Stephen Mee,
but when you hear someone sent to Colombia
to meet the Cali Cartel.
Now, there's not that many
drug dealers to do that.
When you hear that, you
know that this guy is big.
- [Peter] Stephen Mee was
now helping to arrange
what was probably the biggest
cocaine deal ever into the UK.
- [Stephen Mee] Meetings arranged for me
to go meet a bloke called
Luccio who was the Cali Cartel
in the middle of Colombia.
That's where he had his house.
It was over hundreds of
thousands of acres of land.
I flew over it a few times.
When I flew over it, I'd seen
the bullring in the middle,
a full sized professional
bull ring made out of stone,
and around it was scattered 12 houses,
properly extravagant, 10 bedrooms,
same amount of bathrooms.
Then he took us to the to the horses.
They had literally hundreds of stables.
And he also had a full-sized tiger,
(tiger roars)
a full-sized chimp.
(chimpanzee screeching)
But the chimp was enormous, he
said it was bigger than mine.
The chimp took a liking to
me instantly for some reason
and jumped on me.
When you got a full-sized
chimp on your chest
(chimpanzee screeching)
and it's screaming its head off at you,
I was absolutely terrified.
Yeah, terrifying them chimps.
So, no, I was more scared of
the chimp than I was of Luccio.
- [Steve] One evening, Stephen Mee
called Curtis Warren from Columbia.
Curtis was watching the movie "GoldenEye".
I think it had just come out in '96.
Stephen Mee was telling him
that he met with the Cali Cartel.
He said it's absolutely fantastic.
He said, "I'm in this big mansion."
He says there's lots of women.
He said there's cocaine everywhere.
He said it's fantastic.
Curtis Warren really wasn't interested,
"Okay, yeah, I'm watching the movie."
(laughs)
- [Director] Did he mention
anything about a monkey?
(suspenseful music)
- Yeah, he did.
Yeah, he did, he did,
yeah.
Now you mentioned it.
So Stephen Mee talks about
that there's loads of women,
there's lots and lots
of cocaine everywhere,
there's a stupid monkey that
scared the shit out of me.
And then they talk about
they brokered a deal.
Half a tonne, half a tonne of cocaine.
I'm listening, but I'm
telling you, it's on its own.
The whole team are euphoric.
To us, it was a massive result.
We're listening to a
guy who was in Colombia
talking to Curtis Warren
about a drugs deal
and masses and masses of cocaine.
You could work in an
interception suite for 30 years,
as police officer, and
probably never hear that.
- [Stephen Mee] You do
lie to yourself a lot
as a drug dealer.
The amount of times I thought,
"Oh, they can't fail."
But they always come
and never come when
you've got very little.
But when you've got loads, then they come.
(siren blaring)
- [Steve] In the early
hours of the morning,
the Dutch police decided to
strike Curtis Warren's house.
Consequently, they
recovered masses of drugs,
masses of firearms, grenades, CS gas,
and the 400 nought kilos
of cocaine in Rotterdam.
- [Reporter] Warren and his
gang were finally arrested
after a raid on a warehouse
at the Rotterdam docks.
Investigators discovered
cocaine with a street value
of 75 million pounds.
Once known as Interpol's target one,
Warren led a gang who for
years had flooded Europe
with heroin, cocaine,
ecstasy, and hashish.
One of his lieutenants, Steven Mee,
has been on the run
from Britain since 1993
after escaping a 22-year
drug smuggling sentence.
- [Stephen Mee] In Holland
when they come for you,
it's not the police who come.
They call the arrestatie
squad and they're ex military.
It was done within seconds, really.
Blew the windows out,
flash bangs went ahead,
and the stun grenades went in.
Face downwards, naked we were
being carried hands and feet
across the gravel into
the back of the car.
Devastating, obviously.
'Cause when they do come,
when you're at that level,
you know that you're going for decades.
When they arrested me,
I was on a false name.
It took them three months to realise
from my fingerprints who I was.
(suspenseful music)
- [Officer] Get on the floor, face down!
Put your arms out!
Get him out, move, move!
- [Stephen Mee] When
they found out who I was,
the Dutch heard from the
English police I'd escaped
with apparently an armed
gang, with machine guns,
and rocket launchers.
What the fuck, that's not what happened.
That's why they moved me
to triple Cat-A prison
for seven years.
(piano music)
- Why have they done this?
- [Stephen Mee] This is the end result
of being an international drug smuggler.
This is how it always ends, like this.
They think I'm an armed,
dangerous escapee from England.
We're on our way now to
a triple Cat-A prison.
And after everything else,
this is how it really ends.
We've now got at least eight
years of closed visits,
strip searches every day,
and all the time on your own.
And that's it, there's no way out of it.
It's the end of the road,
this is where you fall
off the end of the planet,
and don't come back for a long time.
- Fuck.
- [Stephen Mee] There was a
point when I was in Colombia
and we got on a big catamaran.
I got to use it for a few months
and that's when I started,
I think, realising
that this could be the life for me
once I've got enough money.
I thought I needed millions to keep going,
when, really, I didn't.
Should have stopped.
Should have stopped a long, long time ago.
(slow music)
You become like a shadow
in people's lives,
you float in and out of it.
You're never really part of it,
and even now, because of
it, I'm the same still.
I always feel like I'm looking in.
If you wanna be lonely, be a drug dealer.
That's what you'll end up with,
a lot of time on your own.
(dramatic music)
- [Emile] You can't tell
a story about Liverpool
without talking about
crime. Our take on crime's
always gonna be very different
because we grow up with it.
Our story is unique, we
are a unique people.
We are different.
We are entrepreneurs in our
nature 'cause we're survivors.
Whether that be from exporting
our cultural heritage
to exporting or importing drugs,
there's no real difference.
We do what we do.
But we're clever as people,
and I think that's why we've
excelled in the drugs trade
for so long, 'cause we have an ingenuity
which other people don't.
And we have a toughness inherent to us
that other people don't as well.
Combine them things, it's
a very powerful force.
And that's why people don't
like to fuck with us, I think.
Some people say a
man is made outta mud ♪
A poor man's made
outta muscle and blood ♪
Muscle and blood and skin and bones ♪
A mind that's a-weak
and a back that's strong ♪
You load 16 tonnes, what do you get? ♪
Another day older and deeper in debt ♪
I owe my soul to the company store ♪
(alarm buzzing)
Wanna be like ♪
On my knees in the night ♪
Sayin' prayers in the streetlight ♪
Been spendin' most their lives ♪
Livin' in the gangsta's paradise ♪
(Stephen laughs)
- No.
Livin' in the gangsta's paradise ♪
Breakfast?
- [Sarah] Oh, yes, please.
Livin' in the gangsta's paradise ♪
Livin' in the gangsta's paradise ♪
Look at the situation
they got me facin' ♪
I can't live a normal life,
I was raised by the street ♪
So I gotta be down with the hood team ♪
Too much television watchin'
got me chasin' dreams ♪
I'm a educated fool
with money on my mind ♪
(phone ringing)
Got my ten in my hand
and a gleam in my eye ♪
- Hello.
- [Caller] It didn't get through.
(signal cuts off)
(eerie music)
(Stephen groans)
- Sarah!
(suspenseful music)
- What happened?
- The cocaine, it didn't go through.
- What, all of it?
- Yeah, all 500 fucking kilos.
Customs found the lot.
- Fuck sakes, Stephen.
- [Stephen] Be as quick as you can.
- Yes.
- Don't forget your run bag.
- [Sarah] All right.
(suspenseful music)
Okay?
- Yeah, go, go, go.
(suspenseful music)
- [Director] Cut!
Life of an international
drug smuggler, Stephen.
- Pretty Much.
Some people say a
man is made outta mud ♪
A poor man's made
outta muscle and blood ♪
Muscle and blood and skin and bones ♪
A mind that's a-weak
and a back that's strong ♪
You load 16 tonnes, what do you get? ♪
Another day older and deeper in debt ♪
St. Peter, don't you
call me 'cause I can't go ♪
I owe my soul to the company store ♪
(birds singing)
- [Reporter] Liverpool,
today, it has a drug culture
to rival that of any inner
city area in Britain.
Associated gang rivalry and shootings
have led to heavy policing there.
Much of the blame for all that
could be laid on the burly shoulders
of 34-year-old Curtis Warren,
arrested after a raid on a warehouse.
Investigators discovered
cocaine with a street value
of 75 million pounds.
Once known as Interpol's target one,
Warren led a gang who for
years had flooded Europe
with heroin, cocaine,
ecstasy, and hashish.
One of his lieutenants, Stephen Mee,
has been on the run
from Britain since 1993
after escaping a 22-year
drug smuggling sentence.
(coffee pouring)
- [Stephen Mee] Certain smells,
especially the Colombian
coffee that I have,
that smell takes me back
to a place in Colombia.
- [Director] Describe your life.
- [Stephen Mee] How
would I describe me life?
- [Director] Yeah.
- Comedy of errors, I suppose.
(slow guitar music)
It's been a life of struggle,
I suppose, all the way.
Keeps the same in all poor areas
that if you've not got
enough food, what do you do?
For me, that was a beginning,
shoplifting in Tesco.
- [Director] How old were you?
- I was about nine, yeah.
Coming up to nine, eight, nine.
My mum was, she was always poorly.
She used to send us with
a few quid to supermarket
and God help us if we don't
come back with the food.
We thought it was steal it
or get a bit of a hiding when we got home.
I robbed my own primary
school when I was nine.
I don't know what made me do it,
but took a tin full of money.
And I went to the local shop,
bought a big Toblerone with it.
And by the time I got home,
everybody knew the school had been robbed
and knew it was me.
- [Director] Not a very
glamorous start, is it?
- Gotta start somewhere, haven't ya?
(eerie music)
- [Director] How do you,
someone from Newton Heath,
get into drug smuggling?
- Well, quite a lot of people
that I knew at the time
was smoking cannabis,
so it was a natural thing for me anyway.
Put a couple of grand together
and we decided to go to Holland
to buy some cannabis.
5,000 pounds 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.
Cocaine just seemed like a
natural progression at the time.
You don't see it as a drug,
you just see it as a commodity.
That's all it was to us.
I know it did all the damage it did
and thinking about the time,
you're not thinking like that.
(eerie music)
- [Officer] Stand by, stand by,
he's coming out of the
premises, towards the vehicle.
- [Reporter] These officers
are searching for ecstasy tablets.
They estimate some 15 million pounds
worth of illegal tablets
has been prevented
from reaching the streets.
- [Peter] The legacy, I think, of ecstasy
was that it laid the grounds
for what became the cocaine market.
Ecstasy got the youth audience
used to partaking in an illegal activity.
And once you've breached that barrier,
it's then a short step
to buying this powder.
- I mean, in the '80s,
it was just too expensive
for normal people, for
working class people.
- We had speed, you see, we
had amphetamine sulphate.
- [Director] So what changed?
- The quantity, the
amount that was coming in.
- The price.
- And the price.
- The price went down.
The more you got,
the more easily is to get hold of,
the cheaper it is, more people use it.
- [Director] Is it fair to say
that the cocaine started
flooding the city at that point?
- [Alan] Oh, yeah.
- Oh, God yeah.
(upbeat guitar music)
- [Lee] It was like similar
coming up to what he was like.
Give you that confidence
made you feel good,
made you feel like you
could take on anything.
I liked what it done for me.
I liked the way it make me feel.
Started taking it, like, daily.
I'd have a brekky in the morning,
and then me and me mates
would go and get some.
So we'd end up, like, on it all the time.
- Thing is, if you weren't
doing cocaine yourself
and you were sitting with
a group of cocaine users,
it was quite hilarious, actually,
because they just start chatting bubbles.
- Just talking shit.
- Just talking shit, yeah.
We know somebody that went off
on one when he was on coke.
He actually picked up one of
these to threaten someone.
- A fish slice.
- A fish slice.
(both laughing)
- [Billy] Cocaine for me was all about, like,
sleep through the day,
up all night in nightclubs,
snorting with the lads,
telling the bouncers to piss off.
You was supercharged and you were like,
"Yeah, whatever, come on."
And it was like, "Wow, this is brilliant."
(upbeat music)
- [Reporter] Every minute of
the day, a plane touches down.
Unbeknown to the airlines,
they're carrying more
and more drug smugglers
into this country.
- The guys who arrive
with the explosion of the cocaine trade
were simply there to make their fortune.
- [Reporter] Customs officers
have targeted a flight
from Bogota, Colombia,
a country notorious
for cocaine production.
- [Peter] The money that could
be made in trafficking cocaine
was astronomical.
- [Reporter] Inside is
300,000 pounds worth.
- And this attracted a whole
new breed of drug smugglers.
These guys had a different mentality.
They were hungrier,
tougher, much more violent.
- [Reporter] With more and more
guns available on the street
and more and more people
apparently prepared to use them,
the fear is that summer
in this particular city
will be a heated, tense time.
- The result was that a lot of the people
who'd been involved in cannabis
and even ecstasy trafficking
suddenly bailed out because
this wasn't their world.
They couldn't compete.
(eerie music)
- Can I help you, ladies?
Dean, hey, nice outfit!
So it was you who raided
Barry Manilow's wardrobe.
- Says the grown man
in a fluffy track suit.
Now less of the chitchat, Boris Becker,
show me the merchandise.
(suspenseful music)
Monkeys?
- Chimpanzee.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, calm down, girls.
This their first ever drug deal?
- Carry on like this,
and it'll be your last.
(suspenseful music)
- I told you it was good, didn't I?
Direct from Colombia.
- Stephen, my lad, it's
game, set, and match.
- [Director] Cut!
Stop there.
Is that how you do a drug deal, Stephen?
- No, that was nothing like
how you do a drug deal.
You do a drug with no guns,
no suits, no flash cars,
no nothing. As quiet as possible.
- [Director] What about the chitchat?
- No chitchat at all.
Straight to the point and gone.
- [Director] It does feel a
bit wrong, to be honest, eh?
- Hmm.
The first time I started dealing cocaine
was when I got the opportunity
to carry some through customs.
Had to travel to Ecuador.
People that I knew, knew people there.
They put 24 kilo in a case.
That was all that was in
the case, was cocaine.
Then at the airport on this side,
it was down to just taking the
risk of getting it through.
- [Director] So you went through customs
with 24 kilos of cocaine
in a bag, and nothing else.
- [Stephen Mee] I had a
bit of foam around it.
- [Director] Oh, well,
that makes a difference.
What do you call that?
- It's a kamikaze.
You either get through or you
don't. There's no in between.
I was smartly dressed. Just
looked like a businessman.
As you're going through,
you just try not to look at anybody,
just keep walking.
And if you saw a sniffer dog,
I would imagine pick it up,
even though it is covered
in stuff to stop that.
- [Director] What was it covered in?
- [Stephen Mee] Mustard, piccalillis.
- [Director] Sorry, what?.
- Mustard, piccalilli.
- [Director] Piccalilli?
- Piccalilli, yeah.
Well, I was only like a mule, really,
just taking maximum risk.
Well, I didn't get caught.
I got through with mine
and I got a three kilo for my kamikaze.
- [Director] How much did
you make on that deal?
- Close to 60 for it.
I got the money, got a 60,000 for it,
got back, and even on the way back,
we got a phone call off I want eight more.
That's how good it was,
it was, well, straight from Colombia.
I was making a fortune.
- [Reporter] HM Customs are now convinced
the drug barons of Colombia
are targeting Britain,
using neighbouring
countries as loading points.
- [Interviewee] Drug barons
are in business to make money.
And so Britain and the
rest of Western Europe
are very much in the target.
- Liverpool gangsters talk
to people in South America,
cut out the middleman,
just import your own.
- [Peter] Someone like Curtis Warren.
His rise when the drugs trade
was certain and meteoric.
And that was because he
managed to forge links
with the cocaine cartel in Colombia
and then would organise
the transport into the UK,
which allowed him to
get the cheapest prices.
And as a result of this,
he became one of the biggest
cocaine dealers in the UK.
- [Lyn] There was more of
it than I've ever known.
Just seems to be like
everyone selling coke then.
I was talking to the head of
the drug squad at the time,
that coke was becoming the
real issue within the city.
And I said, "If we don't
start doing some intervention,
"there's gonna be gun
battles in the streets."
And he just kind of looked
down at me and he went,
"Lyn, this is Britain, not America."
- [Alan] And then three months later
- Three months later, there
was gun battles on the streets.
- [Reporter] Police struggling
to stop a vicious drug war
as armed gangs fight it out
to control the lucrative
back street drug trade.
Local people are too
terrified to come forward
with police left with no alternative
but to fight force with force.
- [Director] In Liverpool
alongside the growth in cocaine,
there was a real explosion of violence.
- [Stephen Mee] Yeah.
- [Director] Were you aware of that?
- [Stephen Mee] I was always
aware that it was there,
but it's down at the street level.
Like I say, I was always away from it,
but the whole game's
covered in violence, innit?
You can't say your hands
are clean of the violence
'cause you didn't take part of it.
- [Director] Do you feel culpable?
- I do, yeah, yeah.
I know people have suffered
through what I did.
I am responsible for things that happened.
- [Lee] Wherever there's cocaine,
there's gonna be violence,
whether it's people committing crime
to get money to buy cocaine
or whether people willing
to go to any lengths
to protect what they've got.
- [Director] The money involved.
- 'Cause the money involved, yeah.
(slow music)
- [Director] And what were
you spending in the height
per week on coke?
- I'd say a few grand.
- [Director] A few grand a week?
- Yeah.
It gone from going out, enjoying it
to being on my own in the
house with the telly on mute
and that being too loud.
And looking at reflections
in the window of yourself,
thinking there was someone outside.
- [Billy] That was the Charlie scene
snorting coke off samurai swords
and having weapons and no
enemies, that kind of stuff.
It's just really, really paranoid.
You could hear a pin drop
two miles away, you know?
That kind of feeling.
Hold on, shh, do you hear that?
That was in Gaston that,
and we'd be in Toxteth,
do you know what I mean?
(laughs) Shh, shh, shh.
Paranoid, you know what I mean?
Thinking the neighbours
are talking about me,
listening through walls.
Went and bought surveillance equipment,
you know what I mean?
- [Director] You bought
surveillance equipment?
- I did, yeah.
Night vision goggles and everything.
(Director laughing)
I'd look out this little window
and I'd see people walking dogs
and getting on with the life,
and that was all I wanted,
to be a part of the human race,
but I had no love, no family, no friends.
Nothing.
- [Reporter] Here on the
roof of Latin America
is the home of that
so-called elegant aristocrat
of the drugs world, cocaine.
People lose their fortunes
and sometimes their lives
in pursuit of its beguiling properties.
- [Stephen Mee] There's
thousands of tonnes of cocaine
in South America.
How do you get it from there to here?
Transport's the key.
This Belgian lad was moving
stuff all over the place
and I jumped in with a 40 kilo one for him
from Curacao and he started
asking about for couriers
to pick up in Curacao,
and it got some couriers interested in it,
but they was undercover police.
And that's when we got
caught for the 6.3 kilo
and 40 kilo of cannabis.
We got arrested and went
to Risley on remand.
(guitar music)
The trial was four or five months.
Every day I'd go to court
handcuffed to the same guy.
Same guy in the trial with me.
We were found guilty,
and I knew I was looking
at a long stretch,
22 years, my barrister told me.
That's when I decided I had to escape.
So me and my mate made a plan.
We would escape during transit
on the day of the sentencing.
Only on that day for the first time ever,
I'm not handcuffed to him.
(eerie music)
It was some totally new guy.
Obviously, my mind is racing now,
"Have I been found out?"
And I thought, "Oh, fuck it."
- Something's gonna happen in a minute.
(slow dramatic music)
- [Officer] What the--
Oh my God, get your heads down!
- Nobody fucking move!
- [Director] Cut!
- What the fuck?
That's not what happened.
- [Director] It said armed escape.
- It's not what happened, mate.
This is what happened.
(suspenseful music)
Nobody fucking move!
(prisoners cheering)
- [Officer] What the fuck?
- [Director] Cut!
- That's what happened.
- [Director] So how come
it says armed escape
on your records?
- You tell me.
(eerie music)
So I'm on the run for
a very serious crime.
I got 22 years in me absence
and I gotta start earning money.
I got a private plane over to Holland.
Got off the plane there and went to a flat
right in the centre of Amsterdam.
And it was a few months
before I make contact again with Curtis.
I met Curtis Warren while I was in prison,
he was there waiting for
his trial to go ahead.
- [Director] Well, what
was he on trial for?
- Cocaine, 500 kilo of
cocaine importation.
- [Announcer] When customs men
torched open these lead drums,
they found nearly a tonne
of high grade cocaine
in concealed compartments.
- [Reporter] Before his
arrest warrant was referred to
by Interpol as a target one.
It's claimed, he was dealing
in every type of illegal drug
from all around the world.
- [Stephen Mee] When I met
Curtis for the first time,
it was just another prisoner to me.
Once I started talking to him,
I realised that he'd done
more or less in the drug game
what I was doing. Been to
the same places I'd been to.
And me and him got on quite well.
I used to be able to get
Curtis out onto the wing
for a few hours or I could
go in a cell and play chess,
or something, and have a chat.
And then later on when
I'd already escaped,
I'm not too sure about what happened,
but his trial collapsed completely.
- [Reporter] Newspaper reports and claimed
the problem was a lack of coordination
between the police and Customs and Excise.
- [Stephen Mee] And then
all of a sudden he was out.
Made contact with him
and started up with him.
(upbeat music)
We started doing what we did.
Selling mostly into Europe.
I think we moved up quite
a few steps on the ladder,
the bigger deals, and bigger transactions,
and possibilities.
Those possibilities as well,
we could go to bed broke
and wake up a millionaire
'cause a ship could come in.
Coming in a container.
Transport company will come and pick it up
and you get it delivered to your premises.
People used to come over and
pay fortunes in suitcases.
One bloke came over and he
had 1.6, I think it was,
million in fivers, and
tenners, and twenties.
It took us days to count it.
It's when you see it all
in one place, it's
That's when I suppose you get the feeling
that you're getting somewhere.
It's just international business.
Moving tens of millions
of pounds worth of stuff about
and the stuff was cocaine.
When you take away all
the goods and the bads
and the evil and all that,
it's just a product, innit?
You're just taking it
from one point to another.
That's how we seen it at the time.
(suspenseful music)
- [Raff] We all believe in good.
But what's the opposite of that?
- [Director] Evil?
- Yeah.
And I think,
you know, if there is a devil,
I really believe that he has
a crack pipe in his hand.
- [Male Reporter] Five and a
half kilos of freshly produced,
highly addictive crack cocaine.
- [Female Reporter] With
its cheaper street value
and higher addiction rates,
crack's identified as
the drug of the '90s.
- [Raff] Crack cocaine was
the game changer for me.
Using crack, it was like
falling off a cliff.
It smashed me in pieces.
In this high rise block here,
I used to smoke crack in there.
It was a 24/7 open crack house.
I used to come here a lot.
- [Lee] What I've found
when I've been using drugs
is that I hit rock bottom
then I get a shovel
and started digging and finding a new one.
And that's what it was like taking crack.
It's like having 20 lines of punch
but lasts a fraction of the time.
- [Raff] Well, crack cocaine
is very, very moreish,
so you need more and more money
and then you are committing
more and more crimes
and the desperation level grows higher.
So your moral compass
goes to Cash Converters.
- [Lee] I went from
buying it to making it.
Put it in a spoon,
put it under a flame,
goes yellow on top,
that's how easy it is.
- [Director] If you turn
one gramme into 10 rocks,
how long would that last?
- If it would be me and
me mates, so not long,
half an hour.
- [Director] Half an hour?
- Yeah,
half an hour.
And then we'd be buying more coke.
- [Raff] A heroine addict might go
and buy heroine twice,
three times a day tops,
whereas a crack cocaine user,
might go 15 times a day.
So there's more money involved.
And then the competition
between the dealers as well.
So the violence associated
with the drug use,
it went off the scale.
- [Reporter] Five people have been shot
in just two incidents.
Scores are settled in
full scale gun battles.
With police in danger of losing control,
high profile armed
officers have now been sent
onto the streets of Toxteth.
- [Peter] Operation Crayfish began
when the first prosecution
against Curtis Warren had collapsed.
Customs met senior police
officers to form a joint team
tasked with attacking the top level
of Merseyside drug
importation and distribution.
(slow music)
Curtis Warren and Co. had
assumed that they were safe
from phone taps in Holland,
that the British didn't
know where they were,
and that nobody would be
tapping their phones over there.
But investigators had identified
that Warren was in the Netherlands.
They informed the Dutch,
and they asked the Dutch
if they would be prepared
to commence a target
operation against Warren.
They agreed and got the authorisation
to tap their telephones.
- [Steve] The Dutch thought
that they were listening
to a foreign language.
It certainly wasn't Dutch,
and it certainly wasn't
English in their mind.
Just to listen to a Scouser,
I mean, I have difficulty
listening to Scousers.
And so, they had a conversation about,
"So I'll see you at the cafe by us."
So, they thought the name
of the cafe was Bias,
where it's by us, you know, by near me.
You've got the intelligence team
and they spent hours and hours
looking for a cafe that doesn't exist.
Also, they were struggling
because they couldn't
understand back slang.
- [Director] what is back slang?
- Something that's developed
by school kids in the yard
and it's basically breaking down the word
and you add letters to it.
So my name is Steve, in back
slang it would be Stageve
or Stabeve
or Stayeve.
- [Director] How would
you say my name is Steve
and I used to be in the police force.
- Imy nagame is Stabeve and I
was in the polivice foregoce.
- [Director] No, I didn't get that at all.
- No?
- [Director] No.
- They could hear in
conversation clabiders,
so they thought that the enterprise
was gonna use gliders to
bring the drugs into the UK.
And it's actually, they're
back slanging gilders.
(director and Steve laughing)
I think that they were a month into it
before they said, "Give up.
"Don't know what they're saying.
"I haven't got a clue."
I was at home.
I had a week's vacation
decorating the front room,
and I had a phone call to say,
"On Sunday, you're flying to Holland."
And that's the first I knew about it.
I was picked because I could
speak back slang (laughs).
And I knew the players.
On a daily basis we were
getting fresh intelligence.
The telephone was so active,
there was over 14,000
telephone conversations
that we listened to.
That's a lot of telephone conversation.
And it's not listening to a
conversation like you and I,
it's an intense conversation.
With back slang, with rhyming slang.
Your insides are tight as
a knot in your stomach,
and you've gotta make
sure that you get it right
because you're passing that
intelligence to the team
and they want to act on it.
We didn't know it was Stephen Mee,
but when you hear someone sent to Colombia
to meet the Cali Cartel.
Now, there's not that many
drug dealers to do that.
When you hear that, you
know that this guy is big.
- [Peter] Stephen Mee was
now helping to arrange
what was probably the biggest
cocaine deal ever into the UK.
- [Stephen Mee] Meetings arranged for me
to go meet a bloke called
Luccio who was the Cali Cartel
in the middle of Colombia.
That's where he had his house.
It was over hundreds of
thousands of acres of land.
I flew over it a few times.
When I flew over it, I'd seen
the bullring in the middle,
a full sized professional
bull ring made out of stone,
and around it was scattered 12 houses,
properly extravagant, 10 bedrooms,
same amount of bathrooms.
Then he took us to the to the horses.
They had literally hundreds of stables.
And he also had a full-sized tiger,
(tiger roars)
a full-sized chimp.
(chimpanzee screeching)
But the chimp was enormous, he
said it was bigger than mine.
The chimp took a liking to
me instantly for some reason
and jumped on me.
When you got a full-sized
chimp on your chest
(chimpanzee screeching)
and it's screaming its head off at you,
I was absolutely terrified.
Yeah, terrifying them chimps.
So, no, I was more scared of
the chimp than I was of Luccio.
- [Steve] One evening, Stephen Mee
called Curtis Warren from Columbia.
Curtis was watching the movie "GoldenEye".
I think it had just come out in '96.
Stephen Mee was telling him
that he met with the Cali Cartel.
He said it's absolutely fantastic.
He said, "I'm in this big mansion."
He says there's lots of women.
He said there's cocaine everywhere.
He said it's fantastic.
Curtis Warren really wasn't interested,
"Okay, yeah, I'm watching the movie."
(laughs)
- [Director] Did he mention
anything about a monkey?
(suspenseful music)
- Yeah, he did.
Yeah, he did, he did,
yeah.
Now you mentioned it.
So Stephen Mee talks about
that there's loads of women,
there's lots and lots
of cocaine everywhere,
there's a stupid monkey that
scared the shit out of me.
And then they talk about
they brokered a deal.
Half a tonne, half a tonne of cocaine.
I'm listening, but I'm
telling you, it's on its own.
The whole team are euphoric.
To us, it was a massive result.
We're listening to a
guy who was in Colombia
talking to Curtis Warren
about a drugs deal
and masses and masses of cocaine.
You could work in an
interception suite for 30 years,
as police officer, and
probably never hear that.
- [Stephen Mee] You do
lie to yourself a lot
as a drug dealer.
The amount of times I thought,
"Oh, they can't fail."
But they always come
and never come when
you've got very little.
But when you've got loads, then they come.
(siren blaring)
- [Steve] In the early
hours of the morning,
the Dutch police decided to
strike Curtis Warren's house.
Consequently, they
recovered masses of drugs,
masses of firearms, grenades, CS gas,
and the 400 nought kilos
of cocaine in Rotterdam.
- [Reporter] Warren and his
gang were finally arrested
after a raid on a warehouse
at the Rotterdam docks.
Investigators discovered
cocaine with a street value
of 75 million pounds.
Once known as Interpol's target one,
Warren led a gang who for
years had flooded Europe
with heroin, cocaine,
ecstasy, and hashish.
One of his lieutenants, Steven Mee,
has been on the run
from Britain since 1993
after escaping a 22-year
drug smuggling sentence.
- [Stephen Mee] In Holland
when they come for you,
it's not the police who come.
They call the arrestatie
squad and they're ex military.
It was done within seconds, really.
Blew the windows out,
flash bangs went ahead,
and the stun grenades went in.
Face downwards, naked we were
being carried hands and feet
across the gravel into
the back of the car.
Devastating, obviously.
'Cause when they do come,
when you're at that level,
you know that you're going for decades.
When they arrested me,
I was on a false name.
It took them three months to realise
from my fingerprints who I was.
(suspenseful music)
- [Officer] Get on the floor, face down!
Put your arms out!
Get him out, move, move!
- [Stephen Mee] When
they found out who I was,
the Dutch heard from the
English police I'd escaped
with apparently an armed
gang, with machine guns,
and rocket launchers.
What the fuck, that's not what happened.
That's why they moved me
to triple Cat-A prison
for seven years.
(piano music)
- Why have they done this?
- [Stephen Mee] This is the end result
of being an international drug smuggler.
This is how it always ends, like this.
They think I'm an armed,
dangerous escapee from England.
We're on our way now to
a triple Cat-A prison.
And after everything else,
this is how it really ends.
We've now got at least eight
years of closed visits,
strip searches every day,
and all the time on your own.
And that's it, there's no way out of it.
It's the end of the road,
this is where you fall
off the end of the planet,
and don't come back for a long time.
- Fuck.
- [Stephen Mee] There was a
point when I was in Colombia
and we got on a big catamaran.
I got to use it for a few months
and that's when I started,
I think, realising
that this could be the life for me
once I've got enough money.
I thought I needed millions to keep going,
when, really, I didn't.
Should have stopped.
Should have stopped a long, long time ago.
(slow music)
You become like a shadow
in people's lives,
you float in and out of it.
You're never really part of it,
and even now, because of
it, I'm the same still.
I always feel like I'm looking in.
If you wanna be lonely, be a drug dealer.
That's what you'll end up with,
a lot of time on your own.
(dramatic music)
- [Emile] You can't tell
a story about Liverpool
without talking about
crime. Our take on crime's
always gonna be very different
because we grow up with it.
Our story is unique, we
are a unique people.
We are different.
We are entrepreneurs in our
nature 'cause we're survivors.
Whether that be from exporting
our cultural heritage
to exporting or importing drugs,
there's no real difference.
We do what we do.
But we're clever as people,
and I think that's why we've
excelled in the drugs trade
for so long, 'cause we have an ingenuity
which other people don't.
And we have a toughness inherent to us
that other people don't as well.
Combine them things, it's
a very powerful force.
And that's why people don't
like to fuck with us, I think.
Some people say a
man is made outta mud ♪
A poor man's made
outta muscle and blood ♪
Muscle and blood and skin and bones ♪
A mind that's a-weak
and a back that's strong ♪
You load 16 tonnes, what do you get? ♪
Another day older and deeper in debt ♪
I owe my soul to the company store ♪