How operation 'Crayfish' to take down Manchester gangs netted top drugs baron

The number one target for Interpol was asleep in bed when Dutch police stormed his hideaway armed with stun grenades and automatic weapons. The crack police unit had spent months watching him before they swooped.

It was the culmination of a secret operation codenamed Crayfish and billed as one of the defining police investigations of the 1990s. Crayfish was led by the north west regional crime squad and based in a secret location off the M62 motorway, known to police on the unit as 'Fraggle Rock'.

Initially, it was launched to target the powerful drugs gangs which had emerged in Liverpool and Manchester, but Toxteth man Curtis Warren soon became its 'target number one', reports the Liverpool Echo.

When Warren switched from Liverpool to Holland the Crayfish team shared intelligence with their Dutch counterparts. The Holland based police operation, codenamed Prisma, was determined to smash Warren's gang which included veteran criminals from across the north west.

Some of Warren's conversations with his criminal associates were bugged by police. However the Dutch based team had problems understanding Warren's unique brand of back slang he picked up on the streets of Toxteth. In one conversation with a man identified as TB, Warren was heard ordering his associate to beat a man up:

CW: "You'd better get round to that Jamie's and smash his kipper in"

TB: "Oh I'm going round there"

CW: "Don't let him talk his way out of it you know."

TB : "Oh I know he's not going to. I'm going to hammer him."

The bug also overheard Warren discussing rival criminals such as John Haase and Paul Bennett. The two north Liverpool men received life sentences in 1995 after being linked to a plot to flood the country with Turkish heroin. Haase and