A NOTORIOUS criminal who used to traffic drugs with "Britain's Pablo Escobar" has revealed the fatal mistake that ended his career. Stephen Mee was born into a large family in Northern Manchester in 1958 and began his life of crime in 1967 at just nine years old, burgling his own school and shoplifting from the local Tesco. Mee was one of nine children - although two of his siblings died at young ages - and his family struggled to make ends meet.
His mother suffered from Parkinson's and his father was an electrician. He was 11 years old when he started stealing cars, having pinched 13 by the start of his teeenage years. Mee was caught asleep in a vehicle he had stolen, and at age 13 was in Foston Hall young offenders institution in Derbyshire .
He would go on to run a "legit" bicycle shop for a few years in his early 20s, but then got together with some friends as part of a plan to buy cannabis in bulk from Amsterdam. While the Dutch coffee shops would turn them away, eventually they secured a kilo of the drug from a Hell's Angels chapter, and within months they were trafficking hundreds of kilos per trip. He would smuggle cannabis from Holland into the UK via trains and boats, before expanding to cocaine .
Mee's first task was carrying a suitcase packed full of 24kg of cocaine to Ecuador , dressing like a businessman to seem inconspicuous and slathering the drugs in mustard and piccalilli to mask the smell. But in the early 1990s, undercover cops caught him smuggling cannabi.