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Halley, jailed for six years for his part in a 1991 £80 million cocaine importation from Colombia to Britain masterminded by ex-bouncer Warren, was held at his six-bed £5,300-a-month rented mansion near Marbella.

Detectives in Spain seized more than £75,000 in cash from the property he shared with his wife and daughter as well as three designer watches and several credit cards linked to cryptocurrency accounts.

Another £128,000 in virtual currency were confiscated by Dutch police at Halley’s home in Delft near Rotterdam, following a joint operation with Spanish officers.

Spanish police described the Colombian, a sort of European salesman for the feared Cali Cartel formed as a breakaway from Pablo Escobar and his Medellin associates in the late 80s, as Warren’s ‘long-time’ associate.

Curtis ‘Cocky’ Warren, 57, is a Liverpool-born gangster who became an international drug trafficker worth tens of millions of pounds

They did not name Curtis or Halley officially in a statement on the arrest, but gave away his identity by calling him an associate of ‘Interpol’s Target One’ when the Liverpool-born gangster was the most wanted international criminal. Well-placed sources confirmed Halley was the man arrested.

Halley also had close connections with former car salesman Brian Charrington, another historic British drugs trafficker who was jailed for 15 years for cocaine trafficking by a court in the Spanish city of Alicante in November 2018.

The Cali Cartel was a drug cartel based in southern Colombia. Its founders were brothers Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela and Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, and José Santacruz Londoño.

They broke away from Pablo Escobar and his Medellín associates in the late 1980s, when Helmer ‘Pacho’ Herrera joined what became a four-man executive board that ran the organisation.

At the height of the cartel’s reign in the mid-nineties they were said to control more than 80 per cent of the world’s cocaine market.

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