British drugs baron who was in ‘top ten most investigated villains in Europe’ is jailed for 15 years on the Costa Blanca

Brian Charrington, 61, a former associate of notorious gangster Curtis Warren, was handed a 12-year jail sentence after being convicted of drugs trafficking.

He was sentenced to an additional three and a half years in prison for money laundering.

As well as a lengthy prison term the former Middlesborough car dealer was ordered to pay a fine of more than 30 million euros (£26 million).

Charrington's criminal biography is mapped out on a lengthy Wikipedia page he is rumoured to have updated himself as a hobby,

His son Ray, one of nine defendants tried in April over a massive £10m cocaine seizure in Albir near Benidorm in 2013, was also handed a three and a half year jail sentence after being convicted of money laundering.

They learnt their fate nearly seven months after their trial started at a criminal court in the Costa Blanca capital of Alicante.

The three trial judges announced their verdicts and sentences today in a 66-page written document.

Five of the nine defendants, including Brian’s French girlfriend Isabelle Robert and a Brit named as Wayne Sherwin, were acquitted.

Police held Charrington after a long-running investigation sparked by a tip-off from French police revealing he and Robert were running a drugs-smuggling operation and bringing cocaine into Europe from Venezuela.

Their luxury villas in Calpe near Benidorm on the Costa Blanca were among a number of homes raided by police on July 4 2013.

He allegedly tried to erase information he had chalked on a blackboard about cocaine shipments and prices during the raid on his home, prosecutors claimed.

Police revealed at the time of the operation they had seized around 200 kilos of cocaine worth £10m at another apartment in Albir near Benidorm.

The Class A drug was said to have been smuggled into Spain through the nearby port of Altea.

Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), Venezuelan police and a regional 18-member-state police organisation called Ameripol were also involved.

Charrington started out as a car dealer in Middlesborough but went on to own a Rolls Royce, Bentley, private jet and fleet of yachts thanks to his international drugs empire.

In 2011 his fortune was put at £20m.

In the '80s he teamed up with Curtis Warren - whose personal fortune was so large he appeared on the Sunday Times Rich List - to import cocaine to the UK from Venezuela.

The pair were arrested in early 1992 after a shipment of more than 900 kilos of cocaine sealed inside lead ingots in steel boxes was discovered.

The subsequent trial collapsed after it emerged that Charrington was a police informant for the North-East Regional Crime Squad.

Britain's security forces went on to re-home him in Australia — but his visa was revoked shortly after his arrival.

Charrington went on to build up links with north African drug dealers after relocating to Spain and laundered millions of pounds from a fortified villa on Spain's Costa Blanca.

He was acquitted in two drugs trials in the UK before being extradited to Germany and sentenced to seven years jail in 2003 for conspiracy to smuggle cocaine into the country.

Charrington was extradited to France following his release in 2006 to serve a two year prison term over the discovery of 650 kilos of hashish found on his yacht in the English channel in 1995.

In 2004 he lost a civil suit against the Assets Recovery Agency over more than £2m found in his loft.

The civil recovery order against him and Warren was described at the time as the largest of its kind.

Spanish police described Charrington after his 2013 arrest in Spain as "one of the ten most investigated criminals" by European police forces and "leader of an international gang of drugs smugglers.”

His girlfriend Ms Robert is the former lover of Alain Coelier, a French drugs trafficker and right-hand man of Charrington's who was shot dead on the Costa Blanca in June 2010.

Charrington, who insisted at his trial he made his living from property sales and pays his taxes had pleaded not guilty as did his son.

The pair have been given five days to appeal their convictions and sentences.