The remarkable tale begins in 1992 when Wilkins escaped from a low- security prison in East Anglia where he was serving 10 years for drugs smuggling. He emerged a few months later in southern Spain on the "Costa del Crime", where he was approached by one of the Yard's top undercover detectives to help set up the sting.

The idea was that Wilkins, well-connected in the murky British expatriate underworld, would introduce cops posing as dodgy businessmen to major crime figures operating in Spain and Gibraltar. They would be lured into trusting their ill-gotten gains to a money- laundering scheme that was really a police "front".
It was the beginning of a five-year operation that snared dozens of people accused of laundering money from drugs and tobacco smuggling rackets. But it has resulted in years of legal wrangling and appeals over the use of entrapment.

Last Monday the key case against 10 men was thrown out at Southwark Crown Court after 414 days in court, with the judge denouncing the sting as "massively illegal".

But the failed sting is only the most recent controversy surrounding Wilkins, whose Houdini-like ability to evade jail has caused the underworld to suspect him of being an MI6 and police informant. This ubiquitous south Londoner is said to have "grassed up" the M25 road-rage killer, Kenneth Noye, and to have had an underhand role in the 1989 Death on the Rock affair in which three IRA members were gunned down by the SAS in cold blood while travelling through Gibraltar.

It is now even suggested that the authorities "helped" Wilkins abscond from prison and that he has been given some kind of immunity to stay in Spain in return for acting as an informant.

At 6ft 3in tall, Joe Wilkins is a larger-than-life character. A good- looking man, affecting Michael Caine style glasses, he was married for a time to the glamorous dancer Pearl Read who later modelled in her bra, at the age of 56, as part of Age Concern's 1998 advertising poster campaign.

In 1972 Wilkins, at the centre of Soho turf wars, was shot at his office by a rival gangster. He took two bullets, but survived. By the mid 1980s, Wilkins was spending a lot of his time on the Costa del Sol and neighbouring Gibraltar, organising frauds.