We all want to enjoy food that tastes great and is sourced responsibly, but it's not always easy to know where your favourite foods come from. McDonald's works with more than 23,000 British and Irish farmers to source quality ingredients. Sophie Bambridge grows quality potatoes for McDonald's iconic fries in Norfolk.
I think McDonald's are one of the biggest supporters of British farming. They have a real commitment to British potatoes. The Sustainable Fries Fund is a collaborative investment by McCain and McDonald's to help us understand and try different growing techniques.
for potatoes so that we can understand what we can do to help reduce our impact on the environment but still produce a good quality potato. It helps enable us to try things without having the risk and cost of potentially it going wrong. The support from McCain and McDonald's is really useful to us. Change a little, change a lot. Find out more about McDonald's Plan for Change on the McDonald's website.
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 you 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 Me. 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 to Sunday Times and News Corp Australia, this is Cocaine Inc. Episode 9, The Artist. Hello. Hi, Stephen. David. All right. You're all right.
I'm here, but I've come to where the postcode is. I've come to an industrial estate on the outskirts of Manchester to meet Steve and me.
Stephen is in his mid 60s, he's bold, 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. 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. Meeting Steven now is a far cry from his former life. Steven 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, Steven teamed up with an infamous liver puddly and 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?
Leading us into a studio, there's a big comfy sofa with lots of cushions and a 24-hour news channel that's playing on the TV. 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
And good money from people like it. Yeah. That one there is the original one that I painted, but in a really trippy thing, that's a shame. Stevens 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 we paint portraits of other inmates.
Donald Nielsen, how was he bad for about five years? When I first got there, he didn't have a spot to any of it. He used to just go in his cell and he used to go on the exercise yard for two or three hours and match 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 I used to come. I used to cut his hair. And then eventually he caught molten urine 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 as 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, it's paint a picture really. I did a few sketches, got a little black pamper in the top corner to do picture is we put the decaying through 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 to think you weighed about 45 kilo at the time. And I'll never sell it, but I will donate it. Why did I like it?
It's who he is, he's a monster. It's like putting a picture that I've had off it, a little pin, you know. You're also some, well, not as bad as in, but it was on them lines. So why do you paint it if you don't? I'm asking. To capture the image, it was a one-off thing, and I knew about multidulums. 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 Lucio.
the head of the Cali Cartel. And I bought Lucho, a wire mechanism that you could move for directors to play with. And you could move it about and they'd make different shapes and all that. And I bought that to give him as a gift, because I was told that he should always take a gift to Columbian. So if you're going to meet him. The Cali Cartel is one of the most notorious and influential organised crime groups in history.
As Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel imploded, the Carly 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 Cabieros, the gentleman of Carly.
It's like a board man. 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 at the top of a multi-storey shopping center. And we walked in with about six top Colombians. I've got my translator there. First thing we want to know is what happened to the cocaine. So 3,000 kilos they're asking about.
Before Stephen got to Columbia, 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 do they get in it? 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 the day and tell them, yeah, yeah, that was him. He got knit for this. And we know about that, that this club is telling me, 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 3000 kilo.
And Lucho sat there and 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, Louis and Aldo Quasino-Buttever. He calls him by his nickname, Lucho Palmyra.
And the meeting went on, a lot of mumbling, giving references about what happened and timeline as best as a new book. 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 3000 kilos. Everybody else was still even next to our imprisoned.
So that was a scary moment. They're back to your mind as you're on the plane on the way to Bogota. Yeah. You must have been thinking to yourself, I am the first person in. No, if 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 all with within 20 minutes or something.
You know, he said, yeah, OK, well, what's going on now? And then it just literally went into, well, what have you come for? What have you got now? Have you got transport? Yeah, I've 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, Steven, 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 East, which was a port 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, the fifth along. She got up from one chair and went to another and I was born. Fell on me, had a panel there. But I weighed 13 pound, 12 ounces. So I was a monster of a kid.
My dad always worked, but my mum shared 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 the tenor sort of thing. And if we didn't come home with the with the gods, we used to get battered off of our, you know, because she was either always drunk or that sort of off-red on these really strong chemicals. And shotlifting became a normal thing for me, me and my younger brother and sister.
You should go about with one of them old trawlers. Remember them tat and trawlers that used to pull along. We had a little compartment in the bottom and we used to put the food in and add it under there. And this is at eight years old. It was seven and six. So it was done out of necessity. Me 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 you dad do? Dad was an electrician.
Yeah, he had a good job, he ended up working for the railway for 30 years or something. It 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 when we first registered warning and conviction was at nine for a builder who made me on 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 the saddle with more, but I'd gone down to a club in Manchester, Colorado, 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 with a few of his mates. He kicked us all the way down the hill to the police station and formed me dad up, my dad kicked me all the way home, my mum kicked me all the way to bedroom, so it was violent times.
What do you think was the trigger for you in terms of escalating from the shot lifting, then the stealing of the cars? And then what got you into the drugs trade? Well, the first smuggle with stole cars. So I got a few grand together for that and decided to go to Holland.
because it started seeing people smoking cannabis for the first time. That was 82, I think it was. And seeing what sort of money they're 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 Stone, got them three-day passports from years ago. We could just get them up 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 elves' 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 £1300 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 it got to the 87, I think it was in the cocaine smuggle. That's when it all expanded. And 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 I went for it. I carried 24 kilo through and because of the contacts I'd 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 organized 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 sort of walked it in the airport and then they were stood there while it was being put on and they followed it all around to the plane. So they made it safe on that side of it.
and then you just had to camera-causing 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 on one bag. So I got a trolley, put it on, I had, I was suited up and everything.
and a proper briefcase, and I devised my own little plan where I was going to drop the briefcase in front of the customs. So I opened the briefcase out and all pens fell out all over, which distracts it. Well, I thought it did distract them, obviously, because I got through. And I just had to walk through about eight customs, blocked down the middle. So I'm not showing any fear. Obviously it worked. And we got through.
But it was in the days that I would get in 1987, they weren't that much focus on cocaine and things like that. So I got 24 kilo through, a lot of people did it and got 21 kilo through. But there was nothing in the case, it was just cocaine and a bit of polystyrene form around the outside of it. So I had the open day, it would have been, there weren't even tens of 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 we're walking through? Everything, everything. I'm going to get nets, I'm going to do this. But I calculated it before we even went. You know, I thought, well, I forget car air bringing that through. They're going to plasmill as a mule, which I was. And I'd 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, lunatics in South America.
But this side, all you're going to do is take it 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 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 farmed 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. They could trust or literally just sell it to. And I think that's where I came in. I 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 3000 kilo. Would you describe yourself, you were kind of a middle man between street gangs that are selling it and the Columbians? 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 Columbians?
Very careful. 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 Columbus had had their own, and I used to protect bin bags full of money to certain places, and there'd be Colombian people there, and they'd just say, I've 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 look. Just pruning. But there was climbing there with anger and aids and machine guns. So nobody was going to get in and if they did get in it, it caused such a mess.
How much would you say was going through? A million. Hundreds of millions. Thousands of kilos. And we was just one. Now, the amount of Columbians 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 recognized that the Colombians couldn't distribute? Yeah. So you identified a gap in the market and set up a business? Yeah. Well, when a Colombian, well-known Colombian comes up to you and says, we've got this, but we can't sell it.
with someone like me, that's just flashing lights all the way through. You know, there's a business here, these people. I've got the ability to bring it here, but not the ability to sell it. Well, that didn't last so long, that only lasted for about a year or so, maybe two years, until they established themselves. It was perhaps 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 the 1st now, 1993.
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 in, you know, with a sloping back on it. So like a three quarter coach. And we was 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 would be done for a couple of years, me and him have been put together. And then all of a sudden, this big guard came from nowhere, looking seven foot ten or something like he was, who was a monster. And attached this overhead to him. And this other little lad has been attached to me. It was nothing to do with anything. So the tuckers outside to the coach. And as I'm walking up the steps, I've told him so much going to happen in a bit.
and each sort of mumbled and scurried up the stairs. So I went off to it. That's the prisoner you're attached to? Yeah, the prisoner I'm attached to. And sat on the window side so that the person in the car could recognise it was made 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 there 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 the car pulled out in front of the coach. The coach has screeched through a halt. I've jumped up and shout, nobody move. And me and this, I'd 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 was it hard not doing anything? I think I was about 21 stone at the time. We were about 18% body fat. That was pretty big.
And the reputation was already there with the cows. The cows are just earning money. They're not going to put the lives. They didn't know what was going on. And you've got handcuffs attached to the ground cuffs. So you've got to pull him with your right arm and he coughed across you. So it's out to pull them. Everything's pumping now and adrenaline's going and everything. We managed to get into the car.
Guards have 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 tokster. But then the problem started again then because the people who was receiving as in tokster only knew that they was picking up me and a black man. That's all they knew. But now they've got two white men.
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 cuffs off and that's it. And what's this lad who's attached to you? Is 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.
and I was 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 was 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 three now in thinking even though I didn't want to be. So he's 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 putting to a little flat in tok stuff. And the Liverpool gangsters, if you walk on that, was feeding me every other day. And I was just waiting for a private plane to take me out. I had to travel to the outside of Yorkshire.
and went into a little airport and to an engine plane which took off on the grass. Me and this other block got in and we flew to Holland and just literally got off the plane and marched out. Nobody there, not a single person to stop us, just walk straight out. And that was it, I settled into becoming a criminal on the run.
We all want to enjoy food that tastes great and is sourced responsibly. But it's not always easy to know where your favourite foods come from. McDonald's works with more than 23,000 British and Irish farmers to source quality ingredients.
Mike Allward is a dairy farmer from Cheshire who supplies organic milk to McDonald's in the UK for its teas, coffees and porridge through Arla. We're involved in a network which has been set up by Arla to look at the possibilities for farming regeneratively. One of the things we're doing here is moving our cattle and giving them a fresh piece of grass every day to help regenerate the soil.
We're very lucky that we've had a long-term relationship with McDonald's. And I think often people don't realise how seriously McDonald's take their relationships with farmers. Change a little, change a lot. Find out more about McDonald's plan for change on the McDonald's website.
During this spell as a fugitive in the Netherlands, Steven got a phone call from a mate he'd made in prison. It was Curtis Warren, the drug trafficker. He was ready to recruit Steven as one of the top executives in his international smuggling network. Did you ever do drugs that you smuggled? No. No, I really can't be doing that. I never get out of your own supply, especially that stuff.
if you start taking it, you're not going to get anywhere. Nobody at Russia did say 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 was doing that anyway. So it's quite professional. You're almost like an HR department. In that way, yeah, yeah. Screening people. We had problems where people have gone to places and got drunk and missed the meeting and, you know, it's dangerous things. You're dealing with Columbians 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 always can't strip 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 false house tiger.
And that's just to roam about. Talking about a ranch here now that you see like Dallas. So he's got a set of stables we're tacking it for thousands of horses because he's got hundreds of thousands of acres. Loads of cattle, man. He had a full-sized chimp that he'd had from a baby. And that jumps on there, that thingy and that scream in it opened its mouth.
That was terrifying, and the tiger just 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 had still had its teeth in its claws. The tiger was a full grown, full bloody tiger, yeah? But he just used to walk about? Not 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, I was not getting out of the car. And then that night was a full bullfight. I think they brought four top of the range, Mathadors 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 me. We're 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 off as a suite. 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 the Army family was outside waiting and they'd been waiting for a couple of hours in the rain and the snow. But it was surreal getting the paintings in the car and all the other stuff that I've collected over the 16 and a half years. And just for 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, 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 you back. Plus, the game that 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, I was 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'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 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 a nice house, a nice car, gone on on these three times a year. I've got none of that in the end when you look at it all. And even, you know, even when you do get to the top, one tiny mistake and it's all gone. As the times 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 ahead 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 moves up into that position.
and then that every group below 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. They were 10 times more violent, maybe 50 times less clever. Because you've got to think of them people at the top. It was if they wasn't doing cocaine, they'd be at the top of a multinational business.
you know, 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?
First of all, condolences to the family for such a terrible loss. It's that consequence of power and money, and 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 in 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 over the misery and death.
Coming away from the interview with Stephen, he paints a picture of a swathbuckling lifestyle and a rose-tinted view of the coke trade in the 80s and 90s. I've known Stephen for two years and have always found it 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 for the law, even after returning in prison and turning to art.
So by speaking about its former life, perhaps it can help us understand how organized criminals and cocaine networks operate today to understand the business model and whether the violence and destruction, the human costs, can ever be stopped.
Cocaine Ink 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 Chantarasak. The executive producers are Will Rowe and Dan Box. Audio production and editing is by Jasper Leake with original music by Tom Virtual.
We still have one more bonus episode for you, a question and answer session with myself, David and Steven. Please do email any questions you want to ask us at cocaineinkathetimes.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.
We all want to enjoy food that tastes great and is sourced responsibly, but it's not always easy to know where your favourite foods come from. McDonald's works with more than 23,000 British and Irish farmers to source quality ingredients. Sophie Bambridge grows quality potatoes for McDonald's iconic fries in Norfolk.
I think McDonald's are one of the biggest supporters of British farming. They have a real commitment to British potatoes. The Sustainable Fries Fund is a collaborative investment by McCain and McDonald's to help us understand and try different growing techniques for potatoes so that we can understand what we can do to help reduce our impact on the environment but still produce a good quality potato. It helps enable us to try things without having the risk and cost of potentially it going wrong.
The support from McCain and McDonald's is really useful to us. Change a little, change a lot. Find out more about McDonald's Plan for Change on the McDonald's website.
