Geoffrey Wansell: Daily Mail, 23rd June 2007

Britain's most successful gangster is out of prison and seems intent on reclaiming his empire.

Just after 8pm last Thursday, a stocky, shaven-headed 44-year-old man wearing a tracksuit swaggered down the gangplank from the Hook of Holland ferry just as the rain stopped falling on the worn, stone flagstones of Harwich docks in East Anglia.

He looked like the archetypal star of any recent British gangster film. But this wasn't Daniel Craig in Layer Cake, Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast or even Vinnie Jones in Lock Stock - this was a real villain.

Curtis Warren, one of Britain's richest gangsters - a former drug baron with an illegal fortune estimated to exceed £100 million - was returning to Britain after almost 11 years in a Dutch jail - and he could be out to reclaim his empire.

There was just a trace of an icy smile on his round boxer's face as Warren - always known to his friends as Cocky, The Cocky Watchman or just The Cock - acknowledged a small party of police and Customs men who had turned up to watch him disembark to let him know that his return was not going unnoticed.

Curtis 'Cocky' Warren

He then climbed into a waiting silver Lexus to take the seven-hour drive back to his native Liverpool.

By 3am the following morning, Warren, a man Interpol once called Target One and whose bleak, eagle-eyed stare had chilled the blood of hundreds of lesser criminals in this country over two decades, was comfortably ensconced in a city centre hotel on the banks of the Mersey, ready to begin the rest of his life as a free man.

Perhaps inevitably, given the best gangster traditions, Warren spent the following morning visiting his elderly mother, Sylvia, who hasn't been in the best of health since his father died at the age of 65, in 2000.

But however well he plays the part, there is nothing in the least glamorous about Curtis Francis Warren, who has just completed two-thirds of his 16-year sentence for drugtrafficking and the killing of a Turkish fellow inmate in the Hoorn prison in Holland.

Quite the reverse. This is a determined, ruthless career criminal who has been called 'the richest and most successful British criminal who has ever been caught'.

Forget Kenneth Noye, he of the M25 murder and the Brink's-Mat gold bullion robbery.

Forget Reggie and Ronnie Kray, or even the monstrous Charlie Richardson and 'Mad' Frankie Fraser. Warren's success overshadows them - even if comparatively few people in this country have ever heard of him.

Some certainly have, however. Last Thursday, the security officials at the budget airline easyJet were so aware of his reputation that they reportedly declined to let him book the short journey from Amsterdam to Liverpool because of his past.

And there is no doubt the Dutch authorities were only too pleased to see him return to Britain. A source at the Ministry of Justice in Holland says: "The Netherlands were glad to see Mr Warren leave."

Four, maybe five, times in the past six months, he has been moved around prisons for his safety and that of other prisoners. So eager were they to see the back of him that the Dutch authorities escorted Warren to the Hook of Holland and on to the boat for Harwich.

But this burly, 5ft 9in, brown-eyed man, with a wrestler's neck and softspoken Scouse accent takes great care never to give the impression of being a fearsome criminal.

He doesn't go in for the flash or the flamboyant and never takes unnecessary risks.

Even his enemies describe him as 'personable, humorous, clever and fearless'. He spent part of his time in prison in Holland teaching himself Dutch.

In fact, Warren is the very opposite of a stereotypical crime boss. He does not waste money on gambling or women. He has had a girlfriend, but no permanent relationships or children, so far as anyone is aware.

He doesn't smoke, drink or take drugs and goes to considerable trouble never to commit anything, not even a phone number, to paper, as he is blessed with a 'remarkable memory'.

"The Cock never forgets, never, not anything," one former colleague says.

The Kray Twins

All he needs to operate, says the Merseyside folklore, is his mobile phone - his 'portie' as he calls it - but even then he takes care never to put any numbers into the memory and to change it almost daily to avoid police listening in.

Streetwise to a fault, he delights in a subtle world of subterfuge, where all his contacts have nicknames to make the job of any police or Customs officer eavesdropping on his calls all the more difficult.

So when Warren talks to his contacts - the Werewolf and the Vampire, The Bell With No Stalk, The Egg On Legs, Big Foot, Badger and Boo, Twit, Cracker, Macker and Tracker - he takes great care never once to mention a real name.

"And Cocky never loses his cool," says one former local villain. "Even when he's angry, he stays absolutely calm on the surface. But his mind never stops working."

It certainly doesn't. For learning Dutch when he was in jail wasn't the only thing Warren spent his time there doing - at least according to the authorities in the Netherlands.

In February 2005, the Dutch police charged him with running a drugs smuggling cartel from his jail cell, but the case was eventually dismissed by the Appeal Court because of insufficient evidence.

What is not in doubt is that everywhere he goes, Warren attracts the attention of the police. This week, that has certainly been true in Liverpool, where he has been touring the streets in his trademark Lexus.

Although no official police action has been set in motion, some officers on Merseyside are privately convinced he will try to reclaim his position as the city's - and this country's - most successful drug dealer.

Not that Cocky Warren would suggest such a thing. His solicitor, Keith Dyson, explains carefully that his client "simply wants to get on with his life in a positive way".

Indeed, he adds: "Obviously he is delighted to be free and just wants to take things quietly for a time, and think about what to do next."

Dyson insists there are no criminal charges or matters outstanding against Warren. That may come as something of a surprise to the Assets Recovery Agency - established by the Government under the Proceeds of Crime Act in 2002 and charged with reclaiming major criminals' profits of crime.

In 2004, the agency managed to confiscate £3.6 million in cash that had been linked to Warren - the biggest haul since its inception - and it is reported to be searching for other parts of his financial empire.

That money was part of the proceeds of an £87 million haul of cocaine. Its importation had allegedly been masterminded by Warren in 1991, when half a ton of the drug had been brought into Britain hidden inside lead ingots.

Warren was arrested after the interception of a second huge cocaine importation, this time worth £150 million, but the case against him collapsed when it was revealed that one of his associates, former Middlesbrough car dealer Brian Charrington - who had flown in from his villa on the Costa del Sol by private jet for the trial - was a police informer.

As he walked free from court, legend has it that Warren cheerfully told Customs officers he was "off to spend my £87 million from the first shipment and you can't f****** touch me".

The £87 million was just the latest part of Warren's fortune - one that saw him make it onto the Sunday Times Rich List in the early Nineties as a result of his 'property portfolio'.

Many of those properties are rumoured still to be in his hands.

Indeed, an investigation carried out by the Dutch authorities suggested he still has an impressive portfolio owned through an intricate web of companies, which includes buildings in Wales, Spain, Turkey and the Gambia, a winery in Bulgaria, as well as a yacht, 200 houses in Liverpool - most of them let out to short-term tenants - not to mention the ground of the Barrow-in-Furness football club.

Warren calls these allegations 'ridiculous' and claims he owns only two small flats and a house in Liverpool.

He also insists his ' multimillionaire' status has been 'grossly exaggerated', though there are some who find this a little difficult to believe.

Writer Peter Walsh, co-author of a best-selling biography of Warren, also fears that his return to Liverpool could be explosive.

"New faces have established themselves," he says. "And while they may be aware of Curtis's standing, they will not, under any circumstances, welcome him trying to re-establish himself.

"Some of the players today are young and volatile. And reputations, even those of a man like Warren, mean nothing to them - especially after a few lines of cocaine and with a Tokarev (a Russian handgun) in their waistband."

But how exactly did Warren get his fearsome reputation? For that, we need to travel back to the Liverpool of The Beatles, where Warren was born on May 31, 1963, the second son of Curtis Aloysius Warren, a black seaman with the Norwegian Merchant Navy, and Sylvia Chantre, the daughter of a shipyard boiler attendant.

He and his elder brother, Ramon, were brought up in the Granby district of Toxteth.

Warren was just 12 when he launched his criminal career. He was stopped driving a stolen car by the police.

Though barely big enough to see over the steering wheel, he was charged with unauthorised taking of a motor vehicle.

He was brought before the Juvenile Court and placed under a supervision order for two years. That had no effect.

A year later he was at the local magistrates' court, for burglary, and was ordered to spend 24 hours at an attendance centre.

As Walsh and his co-authors put it in their biography of Warren: 'His freckled face and stocky frame were becoming all too familiar to the local beat bobbies, to whom he showed none of the normal childhood deference and certainly no fear.'

By the time he was 15, in 1978, he'd been sentenced to three months in a detention centre. By the age of 18, he had been sent to borstal for assaulting the police and, in the summer of 1981, he'd been embroiled in the race riots that gripped Toxteth.

The following March, Warren was sentenced to two years in jail for attacking a prostitute and her client. He was running a scam where he blackmailed hooker and client.

The judge at his trial told him: "Men like you blackmail people and think they will not go to the police. This unfortunate girl did. But for your youth, your sentence would have been much longer."

On his release, Liverpool police officers said that Warren rapidly transformed himself into a bouncer in the city's clubs, and then started a business organising nightclub security.

As the old saying goes 'if you control the doors, you control the drugs' - and by the time he was 20, Warren was reported to be selling all kinds of stimulants.

In 1983, he was jailed for five years for armed robbery, but it wasn't until he teamed up with Brian Charrington, who was based in the North-East of England, that his horizons truly started to widen.

In the late Eighties, the two men travelled to Venezuela, where they arranged to import cocaine in steel boxes sealed inside lead ingots - which made the drug difficult for the authorities to detect by X-ray.

After the cocaine importation trial collapsed in 1993, life in Liverpool became a little more, shall we say, complicated for Warren, and in 1995 he moved to the sleepy village of Sassenheim in Holland.

But that didn't stop him shipping more cocaine to Bulgaria, where he'd bought a share in a winery.

Warren planned to suspend the coke in red wine, ship it to Liverpool and liberate it from the liquid using a chemical extraction process. But the plan was foiled.

In 1996, the Dutch police - who had been eavesdropping on his mobile phone calls - intercepted 400kg of cocaine.

At other addresses controlled by Warren, they found 1,500 kilos of cannabis resin, 60kg of heroin, 50kg of ecstasy, 960 CS gas canisters, three guns, ammunition and £400,000 in Dutch guilders.

The whole haul was estimated to be worth £125 million.

The Dutch court sentenced Warren to 12 years and he was to receive a further four years after being convicted of the manslaughter of a Turkish fellow prisoner after a fight in the exercise yard in 1999.

Warren served two-thirds of his sentence on both counts, a total of ten years and eight months. And then, last week, came the release he had longed for. Within a matter of hours, he was back in Britain on his way to Liverpool.

But no matter how Cocky Warren may feel this week about his newfound freedom, he might be well advised to remember the fate of his fictional counterpart, the sleek cocaine dealer played by Daniel Craig in Layer Cake - who is shot and killed in the movie's final scene, just as he seems to have everything.

As one source on Merseyside put it bluntly this week: "There are some in Liverpool who wouldn't be unhappy to see The Cock go the same way."