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.