By Paddy Clancy

SO many gangsters on the run from Irish law agencies are now operating from Mediterranean boltholes that undercover Garda officers are maintaining an almost permanent presence in Spain.

They are mainly in the Alicante province where several hundred Irish criminals run drug smuggling and money-laundering operations on the Costa Blanca.

Most fled abroad to escape tough gang-busting measures — especially the Garda power to seize assets of crime even when there isn’t a conviction — introduced after the murder of investigative journalist Veronica Guerin a decade ago.

This week the Irish detectives are celebrating the biggest success of their Spanish surveillance — the discovery of the bodies of murdered gangsters Shane Coates and Stephen Sugg and the arrest of the chief suspect for the killings, Dubliner “Fat” Tony Armstrong.

Coates and Sugg were two of the most vicious mobsters in Dublin. They specialized in drugs-dealing, armed robbery, torture and intimidation.

Their evil string of atrocities included the torture of a drug-addicted mother of nine. They used lighted cigarettes to burn their breasts because she owed them $800 for heroin. When another woman crossed them they chopped off her hair and smashed up her home and car.

Two other members of their gang threw a young junkie from a fifth floor balcony because he owed them $25. Amazingly, he survived the fall and limped away.

The pair headed a gang known as the Westies which held the Blanchardstown and Mulhuddart areas of west Dublin in a grip of fear for years. They were forced to flee to Spain as underworld feuding and police successes prompted the disintegration of their gang.

In Spain they hooked up with other Irish and British criminals on the run and became involved with Moroccan thugs in drug running operations from North Africa via Spain to Ireland.

They started to throw their weight around, as they had in Dublin, but there were soon mutterings that instead of being an asset to their new cronies they were becoming a liability.

Other expatriate criminals feared the high-profile swaggering duo were threatening to upset their low-key but lucrative lifestyle.

According to well-informed expat sources on the Costa Blanca the pair had written their own death warrants.

They vanished suddenly in January 2004. Initially, there were suspicions they had staged their own disappearance because they had been threatened by rival gangsters.

But whispers started reaching the ears of detectives back home that they had been murdered – but nobody knew where the bodies were buried.

Crack gang-busting Irish police set up a special squad to solve the mystery. Undercover officers were sent to Spain where they melted into the expat Irish and British communities in the Torrevieja area.

Their painstaking investigation paid dividends when last week, on information supplied by them, Spanish police dug up the skeletal remains of Coates and Sugg from a concrete tomb beneath a warehouse floor.

Cioates was 31 when he was shot dead. Sugg was 27.

Within hours of the discovery of their bodies, Spanish police arrested the chief suspect, “Fat” Tony Armstrong, a Dubliner wanted back home on suspicion of armed robbery. He went on the run five years ago and has been living in Spain since.

He is now under arrest in a Spanish jail. It could be two years before he is brought to trial.