THE number of Irish gangsters exiled in Spain has increased to such an extent that gardai now have an almost permanent undercover presence there. The area is home to hundreds of Irish criminals.

MAEVE SHEEHAN,

JIM CUSACK in Dublin

LIAM COLLINS in Alicante

THE number of Irish gangsters exiled in Spain has increased to such an extent that gardai now have an almost permanent undercover presence there. The area is home to hundreds of Irish criminals, many with paramilitary connections.

Yesterday a drugs squad source said undercover officers on "active service" in Alicante were involved in providing the intelligence breakthrough which led to the finding of the bodies of the notorious west Dublin gang leaders, Shane Coates and Stephen Sugg.

The source said that the detectives had posed as small-time criminals and construction workers in the resort over "a number of months".

By infiltrating the local Irish ex-pat scene, they managed to build on the sketchy intelligence given to gardai in Blanchardstown, Dublin more than a year ago.

Several Irish criminals, who are mostly in their 40s

ANALYSIS

and 50s, are expected to be rounded up by Spanish police investigating the murders.

The Garda Drug Squad is conducting investigations into many Irish criminals who have fled to the Costas, sharing intelligence with Spanish police through a garda liaison officer based in Madrid.

Coates and Sugg were murdered, gardai say, because they threatened to upset the low-key but lucrative lifestyle of the expatriate criminals.

Within weeks of moving to Spain, the so-called 'Westies' had started to throw their weight around, something for which they were notorious in northwest Dublin. They threatened an ex-Dublin criminal who had a good working relationship with one of John Gilligan's associates, Liam Judge, who died last year of a heart attack.

Gilligan's gang, which was responsible for the murder of Sunday Independent journalist, Veronica Guerin, is among the biggest and most active criminal groups in Alicante, working in conjunction with republicans and criminals from Munster and the UK.

The ex-Dublin criminal was able to call on the help of his middle-aged gangster friends. The west Dublin pair were lured to a warehouse and captured there. Gardai say it is likely the two were tortured and made to give information about their drugs and crime links in Dublin before being shot.

Detectives said that bullets holes in clothes suggested that the men were shot in the torso before they were dumped in the grave. Police are still awaiting post-mortem results.

At least five men were involved in the double murder. The bodies were found buried in six feet of concrete in a Spanish holiday resort.

An Irishman who rents the warehouse where the bodies were found was arrested by Spanish police last week in connection with the murders.

Tony Armstrong, 35, who has lived in Spain for several years, has no serious criminal convictions in Ireland, although Garda sources say they do want to question him about an armed robbery in Dublin five years ago.

When a Sunday Independent reporter last week called to his €550,000 villa in Los Balcones, about 20 minutes' drive from the centre of Torrevieja, a dog was set on him.

Armstrong is being held at Fontcalent Prison, Alicante, and will appear before a Spanish magistrate tomorrow.

Spanish police have been reluctant to give out any information about the burly, heavily tattooed Dubliner, who has lived with his girlfriend in the Spanish resort for a number of years.

Garda sources disclosed more details of the macabre deaths of the 'Westies' this weekend. They said they received intelligence more than a year ago that Coates and Sugg had been murdered, but did not have the exact location of the bodies.

Detectives were told Coates and Sugg were brought under false pretences to a meeting in a warehouse on an industrial estate in Torrevieja. There, they were shot in the chest and upper body.

The intelligence was gathered by detectives in Alicante and Blanchardstown in the past two years, describing the warehouse on the industrial estate.

On a trip to Torrevieja last year, gardai and Spanish police identified the correct industrial estate but pinpointed the wrong warehouse, where they dug up the ground in a fruitless search for the bodies.

Gardai received a more detailed description in recent months, enabling them to pinpoint the exact location of the graves.

A senior garda source described an "accumulation of intelligence from a number of sources indicating that the two men were shot and buried beside a warehouse".

He said that they were not given the exact location of the men's bodies and detectives from Blanchardstown spent a number of months trying to identify the right premises.

"We believe they were shot in the warehouse and then their bodies were buried in the laneway and covered with clay and then a shed built over that," said a senior source.

Garda sources said the motive for the men's death was drugs: they were moving in on a rival gang that had a lucrative business shipping cannabis from Spain to Ireland for other dealers. Coates and Suggs were asked to a meeting at the warehouse to discuss the drugs row when they were shot.

Although republican and loyalist paramilitaries play an important role in smuggling everything from counterfeit brand clothing to cigarettes and drugs from Spain to Ireland, the big players are still Dublin criminals, well organised and with connections to South American and Eastern European crime syndicates.

Gardai say the Munster gangsters have become increasingly important in the expatriate underworld.

One of the biggest players is a man on the run from the Criminal Assets Bureau who is now believed to live between Alicante and Morocco.

He has had links with foreign criminal networks for over a decade and was probably Ireland's biggest contraband goods smuggler in the early Nineties.

He is now believed to have control of one of the biggest gateways for smuggling drugs into Ireland.

He is said to be a highly dangerous figure whose gang was involved with up to 10 murders in the Limerick area in recent years. He works closely with a major drugs trafficker from Cork and both are known to socialise with leading Dublin criminals.

The exodus to Spain of the Republic's criminals, prompted by the introduction of the Criminal Assets legislation, is now the key feature of organised crime in Ireland.

Many of the criminals have worked out a modus vivendi with other criminals who would formerly have been rivals in both the criminal and paramilitary worlds.

"Everyone is making money," one garda source said. Years ago the criminals agreed that they would create as little controversy as possible in Spain in order to avoid the attention of the local police, the source said.

Violence is rare and when there is a perceived need to murder someone, it inevitably involves the disappearance of the body - as was the case of Sugg and Coates and another Dublin criminal, Sean Dunne, who was believed to have been shot dead and secretly buried in September 2004.