Dark secrets of brutal ‘British Escobar’ who killed murderer with bare hands & charmed female officers into seedy romps
WITH car bomb explosions, gory stabbings and a kidnap plot that sees a man kill himself in exchange for his girlfriend’s safe release, This City Is Ours has chilled viewers to the core.
But behind the BBC drama are chilling real-life stories from the drug scene in Liverpool, which was once dubbed “smack city” due to the high levels of heroin that flooded the streets.
Among the many influences will be ‘Britain’s Pablo Escobar’ Curtis ‘Cocky’ Warren, now 61, who infamously forged a £200million drug smuggling empire during the Nineties and Noughties.
The gangster was named “Target One” by Interpol after working with Colombia’s infamous Cali Cartel, who controlled 80 per cent of the world’s cocaine supply.
Described as “30 years ahead” of his rivals, Warren smuggled large stashes of drugs and amassed giant weapons stashes including guns, cannons, tear gas and grenades.
He was a notorious womaniser according to insiders, who claimed he had to be moved between multiple prisons due to seducing several officers on the wings.
It’s also claimed Warren rejected “hundreds of thousands” for his life story as part of “mega-money deals” from the likes of Netflix, filmmakers and publishers.
Reformed drugs baron Stuart Reid, who met him in HMP Bellmarsh, explained: “Curtis was ahead of the game, super-armed, super-equipped, super-intelligent, super-everything.
“He was a different level to everyone else, not your stereotypical mafia drug don or cartel leader… he was very intelligent, if he was born in Oxford, I reckon he would be head of MI5.”
Raised in Toxteth, Warren forged a criminal path from an early age, regularly bunking off school to scout houses to burgle.
By the age of 12, he was caught stealing a car and later he had a three-month stint in a detention centre for burglary and five years in prison for armed robbery.
While “turning his life around” working as a bouncer, Warren learned the drugs trade and due to his skills was nicknamed ‘Cocky’ – based on local slang “cocky watchman”, referring to who is on the ball.
Soon Warren would become the “main in Europe” for the infamous Cali Cartel – Colombia’s biggest cocaine producers and rivals of Pablo Escobar.
A skilled diplomat with a photographic memory, he forged direct contact with the group and willingly arranged shipping and smuggling operations himself.
In 1991, Warren hatched a plan to conceal cocaine in lead ingots, inside large steel boxes, that would earn him millions but also lead to his eventual incarceration.
The crook was said to be “so sophisticated” that he knew the length of the biggest drill bit owned by HM Customs and so hid drugs deeper than they were able to reach.
“I knew the highest levels of criminality and Curtis was always ahead of the game,” reformed crook Stuart explained in his memoir 10 Years A Cat A.
“He was second to none and commanded the utmost respect, which is difficult in the criminal world without resorting to serious violence which he didn’t.
“While everyone else was scratching their ass, picking their nose and doing whatever, he was importing tons and tons of cocaine.”
One shipment, supposedly worth nearly £100million, passed through undetected but a second, containing 1,000kg of cocaine, was discovered – leading to the arrests of Warren, his business partner Brian Charrington and 26 others.
But the 1993 trial was ultimately thrown out after charges were dropped against Charrington, who was revealed to be a police informant and described as Britain’s “supergrass” on Colombian cartels.
‘Target One’
Two years later Warren fled to the Netherlands and then Holland amid escalating violence in Liverpool including gang shootings at traffic lights, on the streets and even inside gyms.
However, Interpol had been watching him and placed him on their most wanted criminals list.
His wealth also attracted unwanted attention when he ranked 461st on the Sunday Times Rich List, with an estimated £40million fortune.
Warren was listed as a ‘major property player and trader in the North West’ and after details of his crimes emerged, his name was swiftly removed.
That wasn’t Curtis’s beef, he was just stopping this bully. It developed into a life-or-death fight
Stuart Reid
Stuart said: “There would have been a lot of kudos from that but in the drugs game you need to be as undercover as you physically can be.
“You don’t want notoriety or publicity, and for anyone who is like ‘look at me’ it’s not going to end well, it didn’t for Pablo Escobar and won’t for the others cruising around the world.”
Interpol assigned him the code name Target One and soon raided multiple villas he owned, unearthing a £125million treasure trove of drugs, weapons and cash in various currencies.
The haul included 1,500kg of cannabis, 400kg of cocaine, 50kg of ecstasy alongside three guns, ammo, nearly 1,000 tear gas canisters and three grenades.
The weapons stash signified the risk posed to Warren at that time – especially due to machine guns and artillery guns being “readily available to criminal gangs” through former Eastern Bloc countries.
A source previously close to Warren’s circle tells us: “When you accumulate wealth in the drug world, you’re offered surprising things and you’ll take anything. Warren had everything going.
“There may have even been things like a howitzer (a cannon). Tear gas would have been for personal protection in certain areas he couldn’t take other weapons.
“No doubt Warren was dealing in vast amounts of drugs but if you need to have all of those things you’re dealing with the wrong sort of people.”
Killer brawl
In 1997, the thug was sentenced to 13 years at Nieuw Vosseveld maximum security prison and two years later, another four years were added after he killed fellow inmate Cemal Guclu.
“That wasn’t Curtis’s beef, he was just stopping this bully. It developed into a life-or-death fight,” Stuart explained in the Criminal Connection Podcast.
Turkish killer Guclu had reportedly regularly picked on inmates and on that fateful day yelled abuse at Warren before trying to punch him.
It led to a scrap that saw the gangster boot him in the head four times and land a final blow that saw him fall backward and hit his head off the ground. He died in hospital.
You get a measure of him very quickly, he’s really quiet but emits this aura of authority that says, ‘Don’t aggravate me, p*** me off or challenge me’
Stuart Reid
Stuart studied Warren while they spent three years together on HMP Bellmarsh’s High-Risk wing and said the thug was so tough that “he didn’t need weapons” .
“He could kill a man with his bare hands, he didn’t need a makeshift knife or a gun and in that instance, he had a fight and killed him,” he explained.
“All the time I knew him in prison, I never, ever, ever saw him with a weapon because he didn’t need one.
“Even the prisoners who considered themselves to be quite hard always carried a homemade weapon on them but Curtis was never concerned with that.
“He was never frightened or intimated by anyone. Even when he met people in the drug trade it was on his own, he didn’t need a big gang, it was just him.”
Prison officer flings
In 2007, Warren was released early from prison but within months was arrested again, this time at his girlfriend’s home in St Helier, Jersey, for his part in a cannabis smuggling plot.
During his 13-year prison sentence, Warren was moved to HMP Bellmarsh, where he met Stuart, who found him “very intelligent” but intimidating without needing to resort to violence.
He previously explained: “You get a measure of him very quickly, he’s really quiet but emits this aura of authority that says, ‘Don’t aggravate me, p*** me off or challenge me’.
“There were a lot of big people and big personalities in prison but he didn’t care how big they were, he wasn’t intimated or shaken by them, no matter what they said.”
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Warren had multiple unsuccessful appeals and caused havoc while behind bars, according to a former prison officer – however, it wasn’t due to drugs but his constant wandering eye.
They told us: “He was always a real ladies’ man, they were very much drawn to him. He was charming, extremely fit, extremely articulate and not your typical squash-nosed growler.
“As far as I was aware, he had been moved at least twice because of, shall we say, his ‘familiarity’ with female staff there.”
Among them was Stephanie Smithwhite, 40, who was jailed for two years in 2020 for their seven-month fling while he was caged at HMP Frankland.
She became so besotted with the “major league offender” that she tattooed his nickname ‘Cocky’ tattooed beside a rose on her skin.
It was claimed Smithwhite cut a hole in her prison uniform to facilitate sex acts and performed sex acts on Warren in his cell, the kitchen and laundry room.
They spoke 213 times on an illegally smuggled-in phone and she sent raunchy photos to him, including a snap of her in a catsuit.
In 2022, Warren was released under strict stipulations, which he broke in August last year, leading to a 14-month sentence suspended for 18 months.
Now he’s trying to live a quiet life and put criminality behind him, according to former prison pal Stuart, who said: “Curtis just wants to be forgotten, absolutely forgotten.
“He 100 per cent does not want anything to do with criminality, he already spent too long in prison and lost too much of his life there to risk going back inside again. He wants a normal life.”
While Warren wants to slip away into the shadows, this may be harder than imagined with shows like This City Is Ours still shining a light on the UK’s most notorious crooks.