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.