You probably walk past it every day without knowing...

Every drug empire produces one thing above all else: cash. Mountains of it. The International Monetary Fund estimates that between two and five trillion dollars is laundered around the world every year - and at least half a trillion comes from the drug trade alone. But how do you clean dirty money?

From the black market ‘peso exchange’ to purpose-built deposit windows at high street banks, offshore shell companies, and cryptocurrency: the methods have evolved, but the goal never changes.

In this episode, we follow the money with three men who spent careers tracking it: Terry Burke, former head of security at the Bank of England; Martin Dubey, former UK customs drug liaison officer; and Phil Matthews, who worked the money trail from Washington alongside the DEA, FBI and CIA.

And the answer to where the money hides might surprise you. It could be the nail bar on the corner. The barber shop you walk past every day. It could be your high street.

But the cartels didn’t always have it their own way. Here’s the real sting from the investigstors on the front lines.

These are the Narco Warriors.
New episodes every Monday.

This is what it means for British drug liaison officers who live with the beast.

By the mid-1990s, a small and largely unknown cadre of British customs officers were living and working at the heart of the global cocaine trade. Not in surveillance vans in south London, but in Colombia, sending their children to school in armored cars, carrying sidearms for protection, and running informants in a country where the choice for many was simple: “lead or silver.”

In this episode, insider Steve Reynolds takes us inside the Drug Liaison Officer network at its most intense. The brutality of the Cali and Medellin cartels, and the operation that put seven and a half tonnes of cocaine on the front pages of every Spanish newspaper. A record that stood for more than 25 years.

Joining Reynolds are Narco Warriors resident experts Phil Matthews and Graham Honey, two of the most senior figures ever to run Britain's drug intelligence operations abroad.

These are the Narco Warriors.
New Episodes every Monday.

In April 2026, Europol announced the interception of eight vessels in the Atlantic. Eleven tonnes of cocaine were seized, and 54 people were arrested. They called it a cocaine highway - a sophisticated network moving drugs from Latin America to Europe, deliberately circumventing major ports to avoid detection.

It sounded new and unprecedented. But it wasn't.

25 years earlier, a team of British and American investigators ran one of the most ambitious international drug enforcement operations ever mounted against the South American cartels.

They called it Operation Journey. And this is the story told by the people who lived it.

Graham Honey was the British customs investigator who coordinated the operation from a desk in London, running weekly intelligence meetings that combined the DEA, U.S. Customs, British intelligence, and the Royal Navy. He spent two years of his life helping build the case.

Nigel Brooks was the U.S. customs special agent who became Graham's closest transatlantic ally. He ran the intelligence operation from Houston, protected a source whose life depended on secrecy, and held back pressure from his own side to blow the operation early.

Alberto Morales is the commissioner in charge of the drug unit of the Spanish National Police. He's been fighting the Galician cocaine networks since 1999, the same coastline where Operation Journey's shipments were headed. He explains why Spain is only the door, not the destination.

And Luis Navia, one of the men they were hunting, who helped build a shadow shipping network out of Greece, and evaded law enforcement for years. His undoing would eventually come down to one glass of water…

Operation Journey netted 22-thousand kilos of cocaine, and dismantled one of the most powerful cocaine trafficking organisations in the world. But did HM Customs really get the credit it deserved?

These are the Narco Warriors.
New episodes every Monday.

If you want to go deeper on Operation Journey, Luis Navia's full story is told in his book Pure Narco, written with Jesse Fink.

He spent 10 years living as someone else.

He infiltrated heroin gangs, cocaine cartels and cannabis networks. Now, thanks to a hit Netflix drama, the world is finally getting to know one of Britain's most extraordinary undercover officers.

“Guy” talks to Narco Warriors about the art of the “legend”, the golden rules of undercover work, and the operations that took him from the streets of West London, to meeting Pablo Escobar's cousin, via a boat that sank in the English Channel.

His unbelievable story is also chronicled in The Betrayer: How An Undercover Unit Infiltrated The Global Drug Trade, written by Guy and Peter Walsh, which inspired Legends.

These are the Narco Warriors.
New episodes drop every Monday morning.

For 25 years Luis Navia was one of the most wanted cocaine traffickers in the world, and almost nobody knew his name. Cuban-American, Georgetown-educated, he moved as much as 300 tonnes of cocaine from the Colombian cartels to the streets of Europe, working alongside Pablo Escobar and surviving everything the Medellín cartel, the Cali cartel, and a 12-nation operation could throw at him.

This is his life as a drug trafficker, told in his own words.

The plane that cartwheeled into the ocean. The sicario he invited to dinner with his parents, the kidnapping at gunpoint in Cancún, and the crocodile farm he nearly didn't leave.

And finally, the fingerprint on a glass of water in a Venezuelan restaurant that brought everything crashing down.

Joining him is Jesse Fink, author of "Pure Narco" - the book that took five years to write and verified 95 percent of everything Luis told him.

This is the cocaine trade from the inside.

📖 "Pure Narco" by Luis Navia and Jesse Fink is available now: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pure-Narco-Luis-Navia-Jesse/dp/178946336X

They joined the same institution, in the same era, in a world that was almost entirely male. But Aimee Lisle and Natalie Reynolds took very different paths.

Lisle became one of Britain's top surveillance officers, tailing drug couriers, planting listening devices, and spending months secretly building a corruption case against a colleague she passed in the corridor every day. The target was Gatwick Airport's highest-seizing customs officer.

As an intelligence officer at Heathrow Airport, Reynolds stopped hundreds of passengers, profiled flights from Bogota, and helped target the couriers bringing Colombian cocaine into the UK. So when her husband was posted to Bogota as a drugs liaison officer, she didn't just go along for the ride, she learned to drive defensively through a city still shaking from the cartel wars, and was trained by the SAS to grab a wounded bodyguard's weapon and shoot her way out if it came to it.

Just don’t ask her to lob any grenades.

Two careers. Two completely different versions of what it meant to work in drug law enforcement. Both of them would do it all again.

These are the Narco Warriors.

Insiders: Aime Lisle & Natalie Reynolds

They were train robbers, bank raiders and drug lords. And they'd found the perfect hideout. A sun-drenched strip of southern Spain, where Britain's most wanted went to disappear.

No extradition, no questions asked.

The Costa del Sol was a sanctuary for some of the biggest villains. And this week we're going inside it.

Former UK Customs drug liaison officer "Colin" reveals a world tourists never saw. Investigative journalist Paul Lashmar traces it all back to its roots: the post-war streets of northwest London, and a gang of armed robbers who saw bank heists as just another day at the office.

These are the Narco Warriors.
New episodes every Monday.

Host: Lindsay Charlton
Insiders: Paul Lashmar & “Colin”

***Lashmar’s latest book “Drax of Drax Hall: How One British Family Got Rich (and Stayed Rich) from Sugar and Slavery” is on sale now.