Three years on run was like being in a movie… but I’m glad I was caught, says drug kingpin who was Britain’s most wanted

FOR years, drugs kingpin Alex Male was one of Britain’s most wanted criminals and led authorities a merry dance across the world.

The heavily-tattooed bodybuilder, nicknamed Viking Don, posted social media snaps with beautiful women at exotic ­locations as he dodged justice over a £4.7million cocaine empire.

On the run for three-and-a-half years, Male, 32, even left anonymous comments on the Crimestoppers “Most Wanted” notice board, taunting his pursuers by messaging: “You’ll never find him.”

He slipped through cops’ grasp three times before he was finally ­captured in Morocco in January.

Male was jailed for 18 years on Monday after admitting conspiracy to supply cocaine and ketamine, plus money laundering.

His extraordinary lifestyle on the run has echoes of 2002 Hollywood blockbuster Catch Me If You Can, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as ­fugitive fraudster Frank Abagnale.

Exeter Crown Court heard how Male had collected £600,000 in cash in a single day from dealing drugs across the South West of England, Portsmouth and the Midlands.

The money funded his jet-set lifestyle as crimebusters hunted him down.

“It was like being in a movie . . . nightclubs, fast cars and beautiful women,” he says in an interview from behind bars.

More extraordinary still is that the dad-of-three claims to be happier in prison than he was living it up on the run, adding: “I feel liberated.”

‘I wasn’t worried’

Jailing Male, Judge James Adkin told him he had been at “the apex” of an organised crime group which supplied more than 130 kilos of coke between March and June 2020.

Unknown to the villain, the National Crime Agency, which was about to swoop on hundreds of Britain’s most prolific offenders, had been keeping him under surveillance.

Many crooks believed they were untouchable thanks to their £3,000-a-year encrypted Encrochat phones.

But French and Dutch authorities had hacked the network in the greatest victory against organised crime in history.

While on remand, Male said: “I threw my phone away a few days before I got arrested. Encrochat sent out a message saying their server had been hacked for 30 minutes, probably by government entities.

“I wasn’t worried, as I probably wouldn’t have used the phone in those 30 minutes.”

But in a carefully planned operation, the NCA and police pounced on hundreds of major drug traffickers in June 2020.

Male was arrested at gunpoint while leaving the Body Tone gym in his home town of Weston Super Mare, Somerset.

Officers from the South West Regional Organised Crime Unit found damning iPhones in his grey Audi Q7 in the car park, while three Rolexes, a Breitling watch, Cartier ring receipt, designer handbags and clothes were seized from his plush townhouse.

Male was released on pre-charge bail for conspiracy to supply class A and B drugs and plotting to acquire a firearm and ammunition.

The latter accusations were eventually left on file.

By January, his bail was lifted and he was released under investigation without restrictions.

He paid a ­crime associate to sail him across the English Channel to ­Holland, where he spent a month living it up in ­Eindhoven, where many of the UK’s top Encrochat fugitives were hiding out.

“It was lockdown, so there wasn’t much to do apart from having Covid parties at home,” he says.

Male hoped any Encrochat data — obtained after the platform was cloned — would be ruled illegal in Britain.

But as his hopes of evading the drug rap faded, he quit Holland and spent the next few months partying across Europe, where he was able to travel unhindered, without a passport, due to the EU’s Schengen zone allowing free movement.

He also acquired a fake travel document and went to Turkey to have his teeth fixed, as well as heading to Dubai, which has no extradition treaty with Britain.

By the time cops came looking for him in the summer of 2021, Alex was living in a luxury whitewashed villa in , on Spain’s Costa del Sol, attending yacht parties and working out at the gym. He says:

He says: “We all had our reasons for being in Marbella but, for me, it was just easier to live fast and enjoy the chaos.”

Detectives became aware Male was on the Continent thanks to the pictures he posted of his lavish lifestyle.

But he almost came a cropper when Spanish police pulled him over for speeding in his Porsche Panamera after he had watched an England v Scotland Euros game.

Male flashed a photo of a fake UK driving licence on his phone to a cop, who realised it was bogus and arrested him.

I thought I was done for but the officers didn’t recognise me, so after a night in the cells, I got bail, in the name of the guy on the passport, until a court date

Alex

He handed over a ­passport issued in the same false name, and bearing an identical photo, which police accepted as genuine.

The drugs baron recalled: “I thought I was done for at that point.

“The officers didn’t recognise me or have electronic fingerprinting so, after a night in the cells, I got bail, in the name of the guy on the passport, until a court date.”

The NCA then put Male on Crimestoppers’ “Most Wanted” list on January 6, 2022.

He says: “I couldn’t walk down the street without seeing my face on news boards outside shops.

“All the local news channels shared my mugshot. It even appeared on my own social media feeds.”

Male cheekily left his anonymous messages on police websites saying they would never catch him, and got a friend to drive him to Portugal in a Mercedes with blacked-out windows.

He settled in the seaside resort of Vilamoura, living with another of Britain’s most wanted, Callum Halpin, who was being hunted by Greater Manchester Police for murder and an attack on a second victim.

Halpin was eventually captured in May 2022, and later jailed for 30 years — but Alex had slipped away the day before and fled to Turkey, where he planned to lie low in the non-EU country.

However, disaster struck when Male landed in Istanbul and was unable to get through the airport’s e-gates as the biometric data in his latest fake passport did not match his face.

He was stopped by immigration officials, but refused to provide his fingerprints and was sent on the next flight back to Lisbon.

‘Adopted stray kittens’

Male says: “I was greeted by two van-loads of immigration officers when I walked down the steps off the plane back in Portugal.

“They’d been sent an email with a copy of my passport, but didn’t know it was fraudulently obtained yet.”

An hour later, an immigration official asked to take Male’s photo and a copy of his fingerprints.

He recalls: “Someone put a snapshot of me next to the passport photo on a screen and zoomed in, then finally twigged it wasn’t me in the passport. A guy asked for my real identity. He said, ‘You’re not the man in the passport, so who are you?’.

“I shrugged my shoulders, but he said they’d sent copies of my fingerprints to the British Embassy and were waiting for their response.

“In the end, I gave him my name and said, ‘Just Google me.’ He went away and returned saying, ‘Big fish’.”

Alex adds: “All I remember from the next three days is sleeping in a windowless cell at a Lisbon police station. I had a big box of Xanax (tranquilliser) in my bag. I told them I’m prescribed three pills a day.”

Crafty Male agreed to be extradited to the UK knowing Portuguese law only allows prisoners facing deportation to be detained for a maximum of 150 days from this point.

His lawyer appealed to Portugal’s Supreme Court to chuck out the charges, and further legal hurdles were thrown up as the clock counted down.

When the time limit expired, Brit cops made a last-ditch bid to detain him, saying he should be charged with passport fraud.

But Portugal’s President of the Supreme Court, Henrique Luís de Brito de Araujo, ordered that Male should be released on condition he signed in at a local police station.

After walking free, the crook posted another photo of himself outside the court building.

He later celebrated his legal victory with lunch at one of Lisbon’s best restaurants, along with his Spanish lawyer Ricardo Álvarez-Ossorio, known as the “lawyer of the devil.”

Within a week, Male was smuggled into Spain by Russian gangsters and ferried across the Strait of Gibraltar to Morocco, where he set up home in Marrakech and adopted three stray kittens.

He said: “Morocco was wild.

“I crashed a white Range Rover SVR after a night out. I had to pay off local police.”

Male had been under surveillance for a fortnight by Morocco’s General Directorate for National Security when he was ­captured on January 21.

He says an officer told him he had been turned in by an anonymous local, adding: “He lived in the same street as a man who owed me a lot of cash. I’ll never know for sure if it was him, but he had a lot to gain from me being out of the way.”

Male was detained in Morocco’s high-security Tiflet Prison, where ­former MMA fighter and £53million Tonbridge robbery mastermind Lee Murray is being held.

Male says of the jail: “It was full of bed bugs and cockroaches.

“The toilet was a hole in the floor and I only had three hot showers during my six-month stay."

He was extradited to the UK handcuffed to two cops in August and driven straight from Gatwick to HMP Exeter.

The NCA’s David Hucker, who led the hunt to nail him, said: “Alex Male went to extreme lengths to try and evade capture. But he didn’t count on the determination of the NCA officers seeking him out. Anyone thinking about attempting to flee UK justice should reflect on Male’s case.”

With time served on remand and remission, Alex should be eligible for parole by late 2032, but faces an assets recovery hearing before then.

Yet he insists: “Getting arrested in Morocco was the best thing that’s happened to me, as it’s allowed me to move on with my life.

“Every decision I’ve made has shaped the person I am today and brought me to where I am now.

“It’s all part of the journey helping me grow into a better person.”