They then travelled to Venezuela on British 10-year passports, and arranged a deal with the Cali cartel to smuggle cocaine in steel boxes, concealed in lead ingots.
[3] When the shipment landed in the UK in early 1992, Charrington, Warren and twenty-six others were placed under arrest in a prosecution brought by HM Customs and Excise.
In Newcastle Crown Court, it was alleged that Warren was so well informed, that he knew the length of the largest drill bit owned by HM Customs, and therefore the size/depth of the required ingots.
[11] Eventually, through Conservative MP Tim Devlin, a meeting was arranged in which Customs was ordered to drop charges against Charrington on 28 January 1993.
[3] It is alleged that on release, Warren purposefully walked past the HM Customs agents, saying: "I'm off to spend my £87 million from the first shipment and you can't touch me.
But with the combination of various ritual killings of several organised crime figures, and the police pursuing him following the high-profile case failure, he had to move.
He owned casinos in Spain, discos in Turkey, a vineyard in Bulgaria, land in the Gambia and had money stashed away in Swiss bank accounts.
The result was that he had an unlimited credit line from cartels in South America, and with cannabis traffickers in Turkey and Eastern Europe.
[3] In 1998, Warren made his only appearance in The Sunday Times Rich List, which stated that as a property developer his fortune was estimated at £40 million.
Finding Warren guilty of manslaughter, the Dutch judge commented that "the defendant had used excessive violence," sentencing him to an additional four years with release scheduled in 2014.
Moved around six jails during his trial for his own safety, he was found guilty but successfully appealed, and was released from prison in June 2007.
[7] Refused a passport by the British, Irish and Portuguese governments, the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) then followed Warren's every move as part of a "lifetime offender management" programme, under the codename Operation Floss.
[11] In November 2007, Warren's former right-hand man, Colin Smith, was shot dead while leaving Nel's gym in Speke.
In the subsequent trial, it was revealed that Warren had three UK and one Jersey mobile, and had made 1,587 telephone calls in three weeks from these and phone boxes across the northwest and North Wales, including the Wirral, Liverpool, Manchester, Llangollen and Chester to Liazid.
[6] After agreement that there was sufficient evidence from other sources to substantiate the case, Jersey Police offered him a deal for pleading guilty of an 8-year jail term and no confiscation of assets: Warren turned this down.