TWENTY years ago the Spanish Costas were a haven for gentlemanly villians, but now a frightening new generation of British criminals are using the resorts as their base.

Two notorious drug barons were recently captured on the Costa del Sol and Interpol has said that some of Britain’s most wanted have moved there to run their empires.

This week three Britons were arrested in an undercover operation around Marbella, to smash Europe’s biggest cocaine smuggling ring. The operation prompted many in Spain to call for a clean-up of what locals are calling the Costa Nostra. Villains such as Ronnie Knight, the actress Barbara Windsor’s former husband, Frederick Foreman and their associates behind heists such as the £28 million Brinks Mat bullion robbery at Heathrow fled to Spain to escape extradition.

They were careful never to put a foot wrong. They opened restaurants and golf resorts, knowing that if they broke the law they could be flown back home. The present bunch have no such qualms. There have been shoot-outs and contract killings as rival British gangs fight for their stake in the drugs trade. Almost all the cocaine and much of the cannabis smuggled into Britain travels through Spain.

The tobacco smugglers who made their money in Galicia, in northwest Spain, now realise that there are far more generous profits in handling cocaine shipments from Colombia and have formed alliances with foreign gangs. Spanish police and British customs officers allege that this is precisely what the latest three British detainees were up to. Timothy O’Toole and James Carabini were arrested in Marbella and Ian Davenport was detained up the coast in Frigiliana, near Nerja.

A trawler, allegedly chartered by them and their accomplices, was apparently headed for Ireland when it was intercepted near the Canary Islands. On board was around five tons of cocaine with a street value of £225 million. With 350,000 British home owners on the Costa del Sol and 4.5 million holidaymakers each year, the 530 local arrests of Britons last year hardly suggests a UK-led crime wave, but senior police officials have said that they are struggling to deal with the influx of foreign villains.

The civil guard in the regional capital, Málaga, admits that it does not have the manpower to check each of the 15,000 Interpol inquiries received this year concerning European crooks being sought on their patch. Only last month Michael Walsh, 62, on the run from Britain since March 2000 for drug trafficking, was tracked down to his villa on the Costa del Sol, but only after being spotted with other traffickers. In March police tracked down Brian Wright, who is alleged to have smuggled more than £300 million worth of cocaine into Britain.

The area’s decline accelerated after the election, in 1991, of a corrupt Marbella mayor, the late Jesús Gil y Gil. Gil and his successors up and down the Costa welcomed mafia and drugs money to make millions from illegal construction. David Baird, a long-time local resident and author, said: “These days British arrivals have no interest in Spain. In the old days British crooks came to retire. Now they see Spain as a step closer to the drugs trade and a bigger share of the cut.”

Britain’s criminals are not alone in moving to Spain. The Russian Mafia is there; so too armed gangs from Albania, Kosovo and the former Soviet republics. Yesterday police further along the coast in Almeria arrested 13 suspected gangsters accused of laundering £75 million from extortion, drug running and contract killings in buying hotels, property investments and art treasures.

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