Curtis ‘Cocky’ Warren walked free from Whitemoor jail in Cambridgeshire on Monday (Picture: AP)
A notorious drugs baron nicknamed Britain’s Pablo Escobar has been released from maximum security prison.
Curtis ‘Cocky’ Warren walked free from Whitemoor jail in Cambridgeshire on Monday after spending 14 years behind bars.
The 59-year-old, once worth £200 million, will be subject to strict conditions, including a ban on the use of WhatsApp or Facebook, and must alert his police handlers a day before getting in a pal’s car.
He is also prohibited from possessing more than £1,000 in cash and his finances will be closely monitored by the National Crime Agency (NCA) for five years, The Sun reports.
Failure to comply with the bail conditions could land him back inside for a further five years.
Warren is reportedly going back to Liverpool, where he built his drugs empire in the late 1980s.
A source close to Warren told the Sun: ‘Cocky always planned on coming back to Liverpool.’
His barrister Anthony Barraclough said ‘the first thing he wanted to do was to see his mother’, adding: ‘He just wants peace and quiet.’
READ MORE: Curtis ‘Cocky’ Warren’s life of crime
Once a criminal mastermind with links to the top of the Colombian cartels, Warren was thought to have amassed a hidden fortune estimated at between £180 million to £300 million.
It was claimed that at his drug-dealing peak, the former street dealer from Toxteth, Liverpool, was putting more than £1 million a week into money laundering schemes.
He even appeared on the Sunday Times Rich List in 1997 when he was listed as a property developer worth £40 million.
Warren was serving 13 years for conspiracy to import drugs and a further 10-year sentence for failing to pay back £198 million in proceeds of crime.
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Curtis ‘Cocky’ Warren, once worth £200 million, will be subject to extremely strict conditions – including a Facebook and WhatsApp ban.
