Brian Charrington

Brian Charrington (born 1956) is an English drug trafficker and owner of a car dealership in Middlesbrough who, along with Curtis "Cocky" Warren, operated in North East England during the late-1980s and eventually built a criminal empire with links to Germany, France, Spain and Austria as well as connections in South America and the United States.

Using his personal yacht, the two sailed to France on visitor passports and, with 10-year passports, traveled to Venezuela in September 1991 where they arranged with neighboring Colombian drug cartels to smuggle large amounts of cocaine in steel boxes concealed in lead ingots into Great Britain. Although one ingot was examined in the first shipment, customs officials allowed the shipment to pass through.

However, later notified by Dutch police, customs stopped a second shipment which contained 907 kg of cocaine and had Charrington, Warren and twenty-six others placed under arrest in early 1992. Despite Charrington's status as an informant for the North-East Regional Crime Squad, customs officials went forward with their prosecution despite protests from his "handlers" Harry Knaggs and Ian Weedon. Eventually, through Tory MP Tim Devlin, a meeting was arranged in which Customs was ordered to drop charges against Charrington on 28 January 1993 (several months later, Knaggs was allegedly clocked by customs officials driving a £70,000 BMW registered to Charrington) [1].

Although British authorities were unable to bring him to trial in Manchester on his involvement in the smuggling of cocaine worth an estimated £150 million,Britain's security forces - who admitted he was their "supergrass" on Colombian cartels - re-homed him in Australia where his visa was revoked shortly after his arrival. Traveling to Spain, he resided at the Costa Blanca resort in Calpe and later, from a fortified villa, laundered millions of pounds which he used to bring hashish from Morocco across the border which he continued to sell.

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