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Bonus episode: The Artist

2024/7/6
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Stephen Mee
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Stephen Mee: 本集讲述了Stephen Mee从童年到成年,从参与毒品交易到成为艺术家的经历。他详细描述了其参与欧洲最大可卡因交易的细节,包括与Cali贩毒集团和Curtis Warren合作的经历,以及在波哥大与Cali贩毒集团头目会面的惊险过程。他还讲述了其越狱的经历,以及在监狱中学习艺术并最终成为职业艺术家的转变。最后,他表达了对过去犯罪行为的悔恨,并反思了毒品交易的危害。 Fiona Hamilton: 本集介绍了Stephen Mee的经历,并强调了他对全球可卡因走私的宝贵见解。 David Collins: David Collins作为记者,与Stephen Mee进行了深入的访谈,并对他的故事进行了客观报道。 Will Rowe: Will Rowe作为执行制片人,参与了本集节目的制作。

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It's always there in the background, what you've been through. Even now when somebody knocks on the door, you know, if I don't know who's coming, it's always a bit of a shock, even though I've got nothing, anything to worry about. I've not done a single thing since I came out. But it's still there, that constant thing of looking behind your back. Hey there. Today we're bringing you the first of our two bonus episodes. While making the series, David got in touch with one of his contacts, Stephen Mee.

Stephen's a reformed criminal who once helped run one of Europe's biggest cocaine operations in the 90s, from making business deals with the infamous Cali cartel to escaping from prison. Stephen's insight into how global cocaine trafficking worked during the trade's burgeoning years is well worth a listen. I'm Fiona Hamilton, and from The Times, The Sunday Times and News Corp Australia, this is Cocaine Inc.,

Episode 9, The Artist. Hi Stephen, it's David. Hi mate. You alright? I'm here, but I've come to where the postcode is. Can you see the big... I've come to an industrial estate on the outskirts of Manchester to meet Steve and me. Right Stephen, how are you? Good to see you. What are you up to? Er...

Stephen is in his mid-60s, he's bald, stocky and looks like a pretty typical bloke you'd see on any high street around the UK. You could say he has a bit of a gruff exterior. Do you want a brew? Oh go on, if that's alright. Just a tea. But he's also very friendly, accommodating, gentle even. These days he's a vegan.

I'm here with Will, one of the executive producers on this series. - Do you like soy, mate? - I'm a bit black, is that alright? - Cheers. - Do you like soy? - No. - Meeting Stephen now, it's a far cry from his former life. Stephen was born in 1958 in Newton Heath, an area of North East Manchester. As a young boy, he was involved in petty crime.

By the 80s, he moved to the Netherlands, got into the cannabis trade and soon moved on to smuggling cocaine. Then, in the 90s, Stephen teamed up with an infamous Liverpudlian drug lord, Curtis Warren, who was known as the Cocky Watchman, the Teflon Gangster and Britain's Pablo Escobar.

Together, Stephen and Warren ran one of Europe's biggest drug trafficking operations. Eventually the law caught up with Stephen and he went to jail for 16 and a half years. He's no longer involved in crime and these days he's a professional artist. Is this all your studio then? Yeah.

Leading us into his studio, there's a big comfy sofa with lots of cushions and a 24-hour news channel that's playing on the TV. Well, we've turned it off. I'll just put it down, it's alright. There are dozens of canvases, colourful portraits, pop culture references with a hint of surrealism and abstract landscapes. It's the first time I've been to this studio. It's a painting that I've earned good money from because people like it. Yeah.

That one there is the original one that I painted but in a really trippy thing. Stephen's had solo exhibitions in London, he's won awards, he's hoping to release a book of illustrations. His art also reflects his years in prison where he would paint portraits of other inmates. Donald Nielsen, I was his barber for about five years. When I first got there he never spoke to anybody.

He used to just go in his cell and he used to go on the exercise yard for two, three hours and march because he was a proper soldier type of person. Donald Nielsen was a prolific burglar, kidnapper and murderer, mainly in the north of England. He was nicknamed the Black Panther. His most notorious crime was in 1975 when he kidnapped and murdered a 17-year-old girl, Leslie Whittle.

Stephen says when he knew him, he was an old man, emaciated and close to death. I was a wing barber, so he used to come, used to cut his hair, and then eventually he caught motor neurones disease, and then he agreed that I could paint his portrait. And we had to carry him up the stairs and prop him up in the corner, the way the picture shows.

Can you just visually talk me through what you're looking at and how you painted it and just describe it to a listener? That's Will asking a question there. Yeah, just paint a picture of it. I did a few sketches. Got a little black pamper in the top corner to depict who he is. We put the decaying fruit to show end of life. And on the right, you've got the single bed and a little table on the left. You've got the big bars behind it. And then you've got Donald. I think he weighed about 45 kilos at the time.

And I'll never sell it, but I will donate it. Why do you not like it? It's who he is. He's a monster. It's like putting a picture of Adolf Hitler up in your house or something. Well, not as bad as him, but he was on them lines. So why do you paint it, if you don't mind me asking? To capture the image. It was a one-off thing. I knew about Maltesey Rose. I knew he only had a matter of time left and nobody had ever managed to take pictures of him.

After showing us some of his portraits, Stephen and I sit down in his studio to chat about his life and how he once ran a cocaine smuggling business. Let's begin with an incident in 1996 when Stephen was in Bogota, the Colombian capital. A meeting was arranged for me to go meet Lucho, the head of the Cali Cartel. I bought Lucho, a wire mechanism that you could move for directors to play with.

And you could move it about and it'd make different shapes and all that. And I bought that to give him as a gift because I was told that you should always take a gift to Colombians if you're going to meet them. The Cali Cartel is one of the most notorious and influential organised crime groups in history. As Pablo Escobar's Medellin Cartel imploded, the Cali Cartel rose up to take control of the cocaine market. At the height of the group's power, they controlled 90% of the coke coming into Europe.

A 1991 cover story for Time magazine described police referring to the leaders as Los Caballeros, the Gentlemen of Cali. It's like a board meeting. They've got their own directors. You know, people might see cocaine as people in the corner. But when I've gone into this boardroom, it's a boardroom on the top of a multi-storey shopping centre. And we walked in, there's about six top Colombians.

I've got my translator there. First thing they wanted to know was what happened to the cocaine. So 3,000 kilos they're asking about. Before Stephen got to Colombia, 3,000 kilograms had gone missing on the way to Europe. The cartel wanted accountability. As the conversation went on, Stephen and the translator started to get nervous. So I've had to explain where I've come from.

They're saying, well, how did it get knit? So I've told them everything about, you know, you can check the papers and you can check who I am and you've got these people walking in and out, coming back, whispering in their ears, telling them, yeah, yeah, that was him. He got knit for this and we know about that. This Colombian's telling me and he's nudging me, you know, because he's panicking as well now because this could be just a meeting or it could be an assassination meeting for the 3,000 kilo.

And Lucho sat there all suited up and everything. These are all immaculately dressed with top suits on, you know. You've seen the films. That's what they look like. Stephen's talking about the Carly cartel leader, Luis Hinaldo Cusino Botero. He calls him by his nickname, Lucho Palmeira.

And the meeting went on, a lot of mumbling, me giving references about what happened and timeline as best as I knew. But they also knew that I wasn't involved in it. I only came into it afterwards. But I was the first one there to explain what had happened to the 3,000 kilo. Everybody else was still either nicked or in prison. So that was a scary moment. At the back of your mind, as you're on the plane on the way to Bogota, you must have been...

thinking to yourself, I am the first person in? No. Have I got to explain myself? I didn't think I was going there to explain anything. I thought I was going there to create a deal. And it was over within 20 minutes or something. You know, he said, yeah, okay, well, what's going on now? And then it just literally went into, well, what have you come for? What have you got now? You've got transport, yeah, got this, et cetera. But do you think that 20 minutes basically decided whether you would live or die? Yeah.

Yeah. What did your childhood look like, Stephen, kind of growing up? Well, there was nine of us, nine kids. I was a big family. We grew up in a place called Newton Heath, which was a poor area. I was born in the corner of the house. I literally fell out of my mum. So I was, I think, the fifth, yeah, fifth along. She got up from one chair and went to another and I was born. Fell on my head, apparently. But I weighed 13 pounds, 12 ounces. So I was a monster of a kid.

My dad always worked, but my mum was a... She had Parkinson's and was an alcoholic as well. So the combination of the Parkinson's drugs and alcohol was horrendous. She'd go missing for days on end. She used to send us shopping with a fiver and give us a shopping list for a tenner sort of thing. And if we didn't come home with the goods, we used to get battered off her. She was either always drunk or...

I was sort of off my head on these really strong chemicals. And shoplifting became a normal thing for me. Me and my younger brother and sister used to go about with one of them old trolleys. Remember them tartan trolleys that you used to pull along? We had a little compartment in the bottom and we used to put the food in and hide it under there. And this is at eight years old. He was seven and six. So it was done out of necessity. My dad never knew about any of this.

But we used to steal as much as we could and that gave us food as well. What did your dad do? Dad was an electrician. He had a good job. He ended up working for the railway for 30 years or something. He was quite high up in the railway back then. What were you like at school? Apparently a terror, I suppose. I became a criminal at a very early age. Nine, I think, was my first registered warning and conviction was at nine for...

burglar in my own primary school on my own. I got caught for stealing cars when I was 13. I stole the Lord Mayor's car from Oldham from off the top of Saddleworth Moor. I'd gone down to a club in Manchester called the Reno, been in there at 13 years old and came out, stole another car to get home with, fell asleep in the car and got woke up by a local Bobby from the police station sergeant

We were a few of his mates. He kicked us all the way down the hill to the police station and phoned my dad up. My dad kicked me all the way home. My mum kicked me all the way to the bedroom. So it was violent times. What do you think was the trigger for you in terms of it escalating from the shoplifting, then the stealing of the cars, and then what got you into the drugs trade?

Well, my first smuggle, we stole cars. So I got a few grand together for that and decided to go to Holland because I'd started seeing people smoking cannabis for the first time. That was '82, I think it was. And seeing what sort of money they were paying for this stuff. And three of us went over. I supplied the money and was sort of the boss of it.

We went to Felix store and got them three-day passports from years ago. We could just get them out the dock. And went to Amsterdam and started walking in coffee shops and asking them, could we buy a kilo of cannabis? And we got chased out of about 10 of them. And we ended up with the Hells Angels. They sold us a kilo. And we brought it back. Sold it more or less instantly in bits. Made about £5,000 out of it. We paid £1,300 for it at the time, which was a lot of money, but it was good quality.

And then we went back and did the same again, doubled it up and went back and doubled that up and doubled that up and just kept on doubling it up and then started selling it into Germany as well. And then when I got to the 87, I think it was, we did the cocaine smuggle. That's when it all expanded. Why did you move from the marijuana to cocaine? The opportunity. I wasn't involved in cocaine and somebody offered me a job to carry from Ecuador to Europe and

and I went for it. I carried 24 kilos through and because of the contacts had built up doing the cannabis, I ended up with people in France, Switzerland and I ended up taking all my stuff and everybody else's stuff down all through Europe and Switzerland. How did you take 24 kilos through from Ecuador? How did that work? It was all completely corrupt in those days.

It was organised by the Ecuadorian side, by the military. I think it was a two-star general who took my bag onto the plane. I took it to the airport and walked it in the airport and then they were stood there while it was being put on and they followed it all the way onto the plane. So they made it safe on that side of it. And then you just have to kamikaze it through the customs.

So when it come off the European side, it just went onto the carousel. So you had to walk up and pick it up like anybody else, just one bag. So I got a trolley, put it on. I was suited up and everything. I had a proper briefcase. And I devised my own little plan where I was going to drop my briefcase in front of the customs. So I opened my briefcase out and all pens fell out all over, which distracted... Well, I thought it did distract them, obviously, because I got through.

And I just had to walk through about eight customs blocks down the middle, try and not show any fear. Obviously it worked, and we got through. But it was in the days, I forget, 1987, they weren't that much focused on cocaine and things like that. So I got 24 kilos through. Other people did it and got 21 kilos through. But there was nothing in the case. It was just cocaine and a bit of polystyrene foam around the outside of it. So had they opened it, it would have been...

They weren't even pretending to have clothes being in there. It was just cocaine. What did it feel like on the other side as you arrived at the airport? What's going through your mind as you're walking through? Everything. I'm going to get nicked. I'm going to do this. But I calculated it before we even went. I thought, well, if I get caught here bringing that through, they're going to class me as a mule, which I was, and I'll get three or four years if that. And for that sort of risk at the time, I found that well worth it.

The only risk was the other side, you know, of lunatics in South America. But this side, all it's going to do is take you into the cells and that's it, you're going to do your sentence. So even though it's scary as you're doing it and you work out that, well, the risks are there to be taken. So it was a risk worth taking at the time. And just from that smuggle, from that point, how did it develop? How did the cocaine business develop from that point? Once it got back with that,

The reputation had built up of the group that had done it. And how all these things come, it's through reputation. But the thing at the time was that the Colombians wasn't formed properly. They've got the cocaine. They've got the transport to get it into Europe, but they didn't have the people to sell it to, who they could trust or who they could literally just sell it to. And I think that's where I came in. I'd just got people to come and pick it up, took it to a safe place.

and then sold it within a matter of weeks. It was gone. Then the next time they came, they came with 3,000 kilo. Would you describe yourself, you were kind of a middleman between street gangs that are selling it and the Colombians? Were you the link in that chain? No, I wasn't anywhere near any street gangs. I was dealing with the big dealers in Holland. And how would you collect up...

the money and give it back to the Colombians? Very carefully. By that time, we was at a certain level and we had special houses just for money, which people would sit there with guns and protect it. We'd have special houses separate for the cocaine. The Colombians would have their own. And I used to take bin bags full of money to certain places and there'd be Colombian people there and they'd just say, I'll put it in there with the rest of it.

I only went once to the money house and it was just ridiculous. It was just full of bags of money everywhere you looked, just thrown in. But there was Columbians there with hand grenades and machine guns. So nobody was going to get in and if they did get in, it caused such a mess. How much would you say was going through? Oh, millions. Hundreds of millions. Hundreds of millions. Thousands of kilos. And we was just one.

The amount of Colombians that was trying to get it in was ridiculous. Even when I was in Bogota with the Cali cartel, I was still getting propositioned by other cartel leaders. Can you do it for us as well? But yeah, the money was just in bin bags, literally. Did you spot a gap in the market, I guess, because you recognised that the Colombians couldn't distribute? Yeah.

So you identified a gap in the market and set up a business? Yeah, well when a well-known Colombian comes up to you and says, "We've got this but we can't sell it." For someone like me that's just flashing lights all the way through. There's a business here, these people have got the ability to bring it here but not the ability to sell it. But that didn't last for long, that only lasted for about a year or so, maybe two years until they established themselves.

It was perhaps to the end of the 80s and early 90s that they started to organise themselves and get their own groups there. In the early 1990s, Stephen was arrested for smuggling cocaine and cannabis into England. But a couple of years later, on his way to being sentenced at Manchester Crown Court, he would do something that made national headlines. It was a strange day. Normally when you get transported... And we're talking about April 1st now, 1993.

So I was waiting all morning for the transport to come and take us to sentencing. And then the coach had come to pick us up, but it was an old coach. So you're talking about the old things that used to go to Blackpool Inn, you know, with a sloping back on it. So like a three-quarter coach. And we were taken to court by the prison guards. I was supposed to be attached to someone else who was going to help me get off.

And instead of them attaching me and him together, which they'd done for a couple of years, me and him had been put together. And then all of a sudden, this big guard came from nowhere, fucking 7'10 or something like he was, he was a monster, and attached this other lad to him. And this other little lad has been attached to me. It was nothing to do with anything. So they took us outside to the coach, and as I'm walking up the steps, I've told him something's going to happen in a bit. And he just sort of mumbled and...

Scurried up the stairs so I'm cuffed to it. That's the prisoner you're attached to? Yeah, the prisoner I'm attached to. And I'm sat on the window side so that the person in the car could recognise it was me because I had a special coat on. See all these things have to be planned because there's loads of coaches coming out all day long, getting from prison so they've got to know which one. So there's a special mark on my coat. He spotted it, come out in front of the coach. So there's one person in a car pulled out in front of the coach

The coach has screeched to a halt. I've jumped up and shouted, nobody move. And me and this other lad have dragged him to the front of the coach, pulled the emergency exit. The doors have opened and the guards are still sat down, really. Why were the guards not doing anything? I think I was about 21 stone at the time. I was about 18% body fat. So I was pretty big. And the reputation was already there with...

The guards were just earning money. They didn't know what was going on. And you got handcuffs attached to you? Yeah, I got handcuffs. So you've got to pull him with your right arm and he's cuffed across you, so it's hard to pull him. Everything's pumping now, isn't it? Your adrenaline's going and everything. We managed to get into the car. Guards had just stood there, drove off, changed car within a couple of hundred metres to another car, covered in the back, changed to another car further up.

and then taken to a house in Toxteth. But then the problem started again then because the people who was receiving us in Toxteth only knew that they was picking up me and a black man. That's all they knew. Now they've got two white men, right? So they don't know anything about anything because they've not got contact with the people who are controlling anything. They've got a job to cut the cuss off and that's it. And what's this lad who's attached to you? What's he saying? He's not saying anything. He's only a petty criminal.

They're arguing now what to do, whether to just drop us off somewhere and get rid of us or to cut the cuffs off. They're all screaming at fucking each other, saying they got it wrong, they got the wrong people and all that. And then one person that I knew has walked into this melee and said, no, that's right, he's right, get rid of him. So cut the cuffs off. So he's free now, even though he didn't want to be.

So he phoned his girlfriend. She's come and picked him up. They've gone to a hotel, spent the night together, and he's handed himself in the following morning. She got pregnant that night, and she's had the baby and everything. He went to court and got off with his charges. So he's had a story for the rest of his life to tell. And then I was then just put into a little flat in Toxteth, and the Liverpool gangsters, if you want to call them that, was feeding me every other day, and I was just waiting for...

a private plane to take me out. We had to travel to the other side of Yorkshire and went into a little airport and a twin-engined plane which took off on the grass. Me and this other bloke got in and we flew to Holland and just literally got off the plane and walked out. Nobody there, not a single person to stop us, just walked straight out. And that was it. I settled into becoming a criminal on the run.

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Join this spell as a fugitive in the Netherlands. Stephen got a phone call from a mate he'd made in prison. It was Curtis Warren, the drug trafficker. He was ready to recruit Stephen as one of the top executives in his international smuggling network.

Did you ever do the drugs that you smuggled? No, no, you can't be doing that. You never get high on your own supply, especially that stuff. If you start taking it, you're not going to get anywhere. Nobody trusts you, they see it on you. Whenever I had people working with me or when me and Curtis had people working with me, we insisted on it. No drinking, no drugs. Carrying too much money, too much danger involved in it. You just cannot be doing that type of thing, doing what we was doing. Not at the level we was doing it at anyway.

So it's quite professional. You're almost like an HR department. In that way, yeah. You and Curtis. Yeah, yeah. Screening people. We've had problems where people have gone to places and got drunk and missed the meeting. It's dangerous things. You're dealing with Colombians or any South American or whoever you're dealing with, and they arrange meetings to pick things up or drop things off, and they're not there because they're pissed. You can't have it.

So we were quite strict with all that stuff. It was in those years, running with Curtis Warren, that he was sent to Columbia to make deals with the Carly cartel. Stephen would be invited to stay at one of the leaders, Lucho's, country ranch. He had a tiger, a full-sized tiger, and that just roamed about. Talking about a ranch here now, that you see like Dallas,

So he's got a set of stables where we're tacking it for thousands of horses because he's got hundreds of thousands of acres. Loads of cattle men. He had a full-sized chimp that he'd had from a baby and that jumped on me, that thingy, and it started screaming. It opened its mouth. That was terrifying. And the tigers used to walk about.

just sit down and lie down and not really interact with anybody but it was always eating so it was always satisfied the tiger. It still had its teeth and its claws? The tiger was a full grown, full bloody tiger yeah but you just used to walk about. Like a dog or a cat? Yeah but the chimp was a full grown male chimp and it seemed to attach itself onto me for a bit so once I got it off I got in the car and told them to get rid of it or else I'm not getting out of the car and then that night was a full uh

bullfight. I think they brought four top of the range matadors from Spain for the day, flew them in and flew them out in private jets. They was earning big money at the time. And there was about maybe a thousand people there on that occasion. Killed a few bulls, which goes against my veganism now.

But those wild parties with the Carly Cartel had a shelf life. Because when you're on top of an organised crime group, the cops will always be watching you. In 1996, Dutch police tapped Stephen and Curtis Warren's phones and learnt they were bringing in a shipment.

When it arrived, officers swooped. The hall was massive. They found everything from guns and hand grenades to large amounts of cash and, of course, cocaine. It was estimated to be worth £125 million. While awaiting trial, Curtis Warren even made the Sunday Times rich list back in 1997.

He was listed as a property developer with a £40 million fortune. In June that year, Warren was sentenced to 12 years in a maximum security prison in the Netherlands and the Sunday Times removed him from its rich list. But back to Stephen, who that same year in 1997 was sentenced to seven years in the same Dutch prison. He also had to serve time in jail in the UK afterwards.

It was during his prison years where Stephen took a university course in fine arts. And in 2012, he was released. I had about 30 paintings to carry. And all my family was outside waiting and they'd been waiting for a couple of hours in the rain and the snow. But it was surreal, you know, getting the paintings in the car and all my other stuff that I've collected over the 16 and a half years. And just from what you've been through in prison, how does it affect your life day to day now?

It's not so bad now, but it's always there in the background, what you've been through. Even now when somebody knocks on the door, if I don't know who's coming, it's always a bit of a shock, even though I've got nothing, anything to worry about. I've not done a single thing since I came out. But it's still there, that constant thing of looking behind your back. Plus the game that I was in was dangerous anyway. It's nice not to look behind you. There's no friends in there, they're all associates.

Even in there, you're always looking over your shoulder. I've seen three or four people killed in prison. And in hindsight, looking back on the cocaine trade and the businesses that you ran, what do you think about what you did? Do you regret it? Do you wish that, you know, you'd have stayed on and become the graphic designer, the artist? When I came out, so I've come out after all that, all the millions and all that,

The money that got taken and everything that got took off us, and on the day of release I've come out and then I've started meeting all my friends from school and thinking all of them are doing well. Quite a few millionaires involved who've done it legitimately through their own hard legal work. Even the people who have just had a job and just worked, have got their own nice house, a nice car, go on a holiday three times a year. I've got none of that.

in the end when you look at it all. And even when you do get to the top, one tiny mistake and it's all gone. As time's progressed, it's become a lot more violent, a lot more desperate people involved in it. Dirty, horrible, miserable trade. All trust has gone from the criminal gangs. In any business, you've got a head of the business and then all of a sudden somebody comes away and takes your managing director away.

And then you've got the people below wondering, what's happened there? How do we get our cocaine now when the boss has gone? So then the next group move up into that position and then every group below them moves up into that position. But what the police have done unwittingly is taken away any semblance of power. Eventually you're going to get to people who don't give a fuck about anything, who are ten times more violent than

maybe 50 times less clever because you've got to think of them people at the top. If they wasn't doing cocaine, they'd be at the top of a multinational business. We was talking about hundreds of millions when we was moving stuff. So you're talking about major CEOs. And if you take any major CEO of any company on the planet at the moment, the people below are going to feel it. And with the crime, I think it's the same thing. I'm not saying you can't keep arresting people because that's what you've got to do.

But the consequences of that is every time you do it, the next layer is going to be more violent and care less about anything. And they're just in for it for the money. What do you think of Ellie Edwards, a young 26-year-old beautician murdered outside of a pub on Christmas Eve by Connor Chapman? Yeah. Well, first of all, condolences to the family for such a terrible loss. It's that consequences of power and money.

How do you control it? I don't think it's controllable. It's one of the things that haunts me as well, the damage that I've done in my past because of it. And unwittingly, not even thinking about it at the time. It's only later with reflection that you can look at the damage and the state of everything. But, I mean, you can point to Ellie, you know, because of what I did technically evolved into creating the monsters that killed her.

But then you have to start asking, well, how far back do you go? We didn't start the cocaine business. Other people started that. But I accept my own guilt for what I did. Just dealing in any way, shape or form, you become an outside monster to society, really, I suppose. There's no easy way to put it. There's nothing good comes out of cocaine and heroin other than misery and death.

Coming away from the interview with Stephen, he paints a picture of a swashbuckling lifestyle and a rose-tinted view of the coke trade in the 80s and 90s. I've known Stephen for two years and I've always found him very open and honest about his past. Interviewing someone who's been in jail is tricky. Stephen had a hard childhood. The way he tells it, crime was always a part of his life. But as a journalist, you want to get the balance right.

He is, after all, a convicted criminal. At the height of his notoriety, he was wanted by Interpol. He says he wasn't directly involved in violence himself. But whether that's true or not, it's inevitable that his actions, trafficking huge amounts of cocaine and transporting it through Europe, has had an impact on the prevalence of the drug today.

Although he was sent to prison, others just rose up in his place and it's still leading to fatal consequences decades later. As an older man, I feel he understands this and it's clear he shows remorse. He can never truly escape all those years in the underworld, running from the law, even after atoning in prison and turning to art. So by speaking about his former life,

Perhaps it can help us understand how organised criminals and cocaine networks operate today to understand the business model and whether the violence and destruction, the human cost, can ever be stopped. Cocaine Inc. is a joint investigation from The Times, The Sunday Times and News Corp Australia. The reporters are David Collins, Stephen Drill and me, Fiona Hamilton.

The series is produced by Sam Chantarassac. The executive producers are Will Rowe and Dan Box. Audio production and editing is by Jasper Leake with original music by Tom Birchall.

We still have one more bonus episode for you, a question and answer session with myself, David and Stephen. Please do email any questions you want to ask us at cocaineincatthetimes.co.uk or get in touch with us directly on our social media profiles. We've put a link to them in the description notes of this episode.

Are you ready to get an inside look at crime from someone who has investigated some of Australia's worst crimes? It was like Aladdin's cave. The luminol found bloodied footprints and bloodied handprints on a wall. So it's just like a horror movie. Former homicide detective Gary Jubiland sits down with cops, crims, addicts, victims, small-time cheats and big-town lawyers...

as they tell their incredible stories. My house got raided. Next thing you know, I got bail refused. Next thing you know, I'm on a truck to Park Lane Prison. Listen to I Catch Killers early and ad-free on Crymax Plus on Apple Podcasts today or wherever you get your podcasts.