'My life with Curtis Warren and the Cali Cartel'

Stephen Mee's life of crime started small. As a child growing up as one of nine siblings in 1970s Newton Heath he would go shoplifting just to help put food on the table.

Growing up 'poor' in north Manchester, Mee says he committed his first crime aged nine when he burgled his own school. Then he began shoplifting in the local Tesco. Realising there was a lot of money to be made in cannabis, Mee teamed up with some pals and put together an audacious but naïve plan to travel to Amsterdam to buy the drug in bulk from the city's coffee shops.

"I was smartly dressed, I just looked like a businessman. As you're going through you’re just trying not to look at anybody, just keep walking.In 1991 he was caught by undercover police smuggling cannabis and cocaine into the UK from Colombia. While on remand in Strangeways he formed the friendship that would catapult him into the big leagues.

Described at the time as Britain's biggest criminal investigation, it was alleged Warren had set up a deal with the Colombian Cali Cartel to import £250m of cocaine into the UK. Now a free man, Warren also headed for the Netherlands where he hooked up with his prison pal Mee. But, back home in the UK, the drugs Mee and Warren were helping to import were fuelling an explosion in violence on the streets of Manchester and Liverpool as gangs battled for a slice of the lucrative cocaine trade. Police in the Netherlands and the UK joined forces with customs in a bid to crack the higher echelons of the importation and distribution network.

"Face downwards naked, they carried you by your hands and feet across the gravel into the back of a car."

Newton Heath

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