Curtis Warren has been freed from prison after 14 years and is understood to be back in Liverpool.
The Toxteth native once dubbed 'Target One' by Interpol was released from the maximum security HMP Whitemoor, in Cambridgeshire, on Monday. Liverpool's most infamous gangster is now subject to a strict raft of restrictions including a ban from instant messaging apps WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, being in possession of more than £1,000 in cash, giving police a day's notice if he wants to use a friend's car and a ban on travel outside of England and Wales without giving seven days notice to police.
Those measures are part of a Serious Crime Prevention Order imposed by the courts after an application from the National Crime Agency (NCA). An NCA spokesman said: "Action against serious and organised criminals doesn't end with a conviction.
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"Many serious offenders have had lifelong criminal careers and are likely to reoffend. These restrictions protect the public but will have little impact upon those who are genuinely reformed.”
The ECHO has been told Warren, who was once included in the Sunday Times Rich List with a £200million fortune, is already back in Liverpool and national reports suggest he told associates of his plans to return to his hometown before his release.
Warren, now 59, was jailed in Holland in 1996 for a £125million cocaine importation scheme. While in the Dutch Nieuw Vosseveld jail, Warren killed fellow prisoner Cemal Guclu by kicking him in the head, after the Turkish convicted killer launched an unprovoked attack in the prison yard.
A Dutch judge accepted Guclu was killed in self-defence but found Warren used "excessive violence" and convicted him of manslaughter, landing him an extra four years. He was briefly a free man upon his release in 2007, and returned to the UK.
However he only managed five weeks on the outside before being arrested over a plot to smuggle cannabis worth £1million into Jersey. He later had 10 years added onto his sentence failing to pay back £198million as part of a Proceeds of Crime Act (POCA) confiscation order.
Warren was in the headlines again in 2020 when a sordid affair with prison officer Stephanie Smithwhite came to light while he was serving time in HMP Frankland. Smithwhite, then 40, had cut an "intercourse hole" in her trousers and was so infatuated with Warren she got his name tattooed on her next to a picture of a rose.
She was jailed for two years at Durham Crown Court after admitting two counts of misconduct in a public office.
What Warren will turn his attention to next is unclear, and whether he could access any of the illicit profits allegedly squirrelled away in property and money laundering schemes across the world is unknown.
Some suggest that Warren has no interest in returning to the business that put him behind bars and there are reports he could be set to reap the profits of a major TV or film deal on his astonishing life.
However if Warren fails to resist the temptation of the criminal life, the underworld he would be returning to is in turmoil. Many of the biggest gangsters in the UK are either behind bars, on the run or sweating about their doors going in thanks to the hacking of the EncroChat phone network.
The encrypted messaging system, believed by the National Crime Agency (NCA) to have been used almost exclusively by organised crime groups, was infiltrated by French police in 2020 and enabled law enforcement across Europe to watch in real-time as gangsters struck drugs and weapons deals, arranged distribution and even plotted murders.
On top of the seismic implications of the EncroChat hack, which has seen hundreds of arrests and convictions in Merseyside, there has been heavy police pressure on organised crime groups in the wake of the atrocious gun violence in the city since August - in particular the murder of nine-year-old Olivia Pratt-Korbel in Dovecot.
After the series of shootings, which also included the murders of 28-year-old Ashley Dale and 22-year-old Sam Rimmer, Detective Chief Superintendent Mark Kameen, head of investigations at Merseyside Police spoke of organised crime "baring its teeth" and said policing would do the same. Since then there has been a further fatal shooting, the murder of 53-year-old Jackie Rutter in Moreton.
The drugs trade in Europe is a complex picture. Albanian mafia groups dominate much of the cocaine supply into Britain, Irish crime families sit amongst the elite criminals of Europe, violent street wars involving Moroccan 'Mocro Maffia' groups are raising fears of the Netherlands becoming a "narco-state" and Scouse firms continue to rake in profits. And as always, doing deals with all of the above, are the cocaine cartels of South America.
The release into this fluid market of a man who amassed a estimated £300m fortune, by cutting out the middlemen and forging direct links with major cocaine and heroin suppliers from Colombia to Turkey, is an intriguing and concerning prospect.
The fractured underworld, combined with the seemingly endless demand for cocaine in the UK, could give an experienced criminal operator with a web of contacts across the globe an opening. According to one of Warren's former drug-trafficking partners, ex Manchester crook Stephen Mee, he is a skilled "diplomat" and a master of forging contacts and spotting opportunities.
Speaking as part of a newly released BBC podcast on Warren's life, called 'Gangster', Mr Mee said of Warren: "He never walked about with his chest out or anything like that, he was just normal, you wouldn't notice him. He just melted into the background.
"I think it was a deliberate thing, you keep as low a profile as you can if you're doing something like this [drug trafficking]. You have to be a bit of a diplomat as a drug-dealer, you can't be shouting it out everywhere because otherwise people will just come and take it off you."
Warren has always embraced a high-risk, high-reward philosophy. But could the years of his life wasted behind bars, and the intense scrutiny he would face from police at the slightest hint of suspicion, finally put him on the straight and narrow?
Stephen Mee told the 'Gangster' podcast he hopes his old partner in crime will choose a new path. He said: "If you sit in prison and rot away, and you come out and technology is flying everywhere, you're just going to be like a caveman.
"And you'll have no choice other than to go back to your old ways and go back to prison. I hope he creates a life other than crime because if he gets caught again it's not just a prison sentence, it's a death sentence."
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