A notorious British drug trafficker once listed in the ‘top 10 criminals in Europe’ has died on the Costa Blanca.
Brian Charrington, an ex-associate of former international cocaine baron Curtis Warren, passed away in the early hours of yesterday morning at Marina Baixa Hospital in Villajoyosa near Benidorm.
The 68-year-old was waiting to hear whether he had to start a prison sentence in Spain over a 2013 cocaine seizure.
His defence lawyer had requested the suspension of the eight-year jail term on health grounds.
Charrington started out as a car dealer in Middlesbrough but went on to own a Rolls-Royce, Bentley, private jet and fleet of yachts thanks to his international drugs empire.
In 2011, his fortune was put at £20 million.
In the eighties, he teamed up with Curtis Warren, whose personal fortune was so large he appeared on the Sunday Times Rich List, to import cocaine to the UK from Venezuela.
The pair were arrested in early 1992 after a shipment of more than 900 kilos of cocaine sealed inside lead ingots in steel boxes was discovered.
The subsequent trial collapsed after it transpired that Charrington was a police informant for the North-East Regional Crime Squad.
Britain’s security forces went on to re-home him in Australia but his visa was revoked shortly after his arrival.
He went on to build up links with North African drug dealers after relocating to Spain and laundered millions of pounds from a fortified villa on Spain’s Costa Blanca which he used to bring hashish from Morocco across the border.
He was acquitted in two drugs trials in the UK before being extradited to Germany and sentenced to seven years’ jail in 2003 for conspiracy to smuggle cocaine into the country.
Charrington was extradited to France following his release in 2006 to serve a two-year prison term over the discovery of 650 kilos of hashish found on his yacht in the English Channel in 1995.
In 2004 he lost a civil suit against the Assets Recovery Agency over more than £2 million found in his loft, which he and Curtis Warren disputed the ownership of.
The civil recovery order against him and Warren was described at the time as the largest of its kind.
Spanish police described Charrington after his 2013 arrest in Spain as ‘one of the ten most investigated criminals’ by European police forces and ‘leader of an international gang of drug smugglers.’
Spanish police held Charrington in 2013 along with a number of other people, including his French girlfriend Isabelle Robert and son Ray, after a long-running investigation sparked by a tip-off from French police that he and Robert were smuggling cocaine into Europe from Venezuela.
Their luxury villas in Calpe near Benidorm on the Costa Blanca were among a number of homes raided by police on July 4 2013.
In a subsequent indictment in which prosecutors initially demanded an 18-year prison sentence for Charrington, they claimed he tried to erase information he had chalked on a blackboard in his office about amounts of cocaine and sale prices during the raid on his home.
Police revealed at the time of the operation they had seized 220 kilos of cocaine worth £10 million at another apartment in Albir near Benidorm, said to have been smuggled into Spain through the nearby port of Altea.
Britain’s Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), Venezuelan police and a regional 18-member-state police organisation called Ameripol set up to fight drug trafficking, were also involved.
Drug lord Charrington’s original 2018 trial and conviction following the 2013 drug bust were quashed by Spain’s Supreme Court over impartiality issues, and a second trial had to be held.
That resulted in an eight-year five five-month prison sentence for the Brit criminal, which his lawyers were trying to get him exempted from serving because of his poor health.
The Spanish courts had yet to rule on Charrington’s lawyer’s request when he passed away.
One of Brian’s three grown-up children wrote on social media late last night: ‘Rest in peace Dad.’
The Brit criminal is understood to have been admitted to hospital shortly before his death.
