Peter ‘Fatso’ Mitchell was being treated in a hospital on the Costa del Sol for two gunshot wounds to his shoulder, which were not serious, after a hitman tried to whack him in a bar outside Puerto Banus on Thursday night.A year ago it was all so different as he settled down with his street dealer wife Sonia and their two children in a luxury villa worth around €1.5 million.Last August he and Walsh, who had been his girlfriend since the early 1990s, were about to open the Paparazzi bar and restaurant in Nueva Andalucia.
The bar, which was a front for money laundering, is situated in the hills a few miles from Puerto Banus and Marbella which was once a playground for the rich and famous.These days, however, the once trendy ‘port’ is a sleazy centre of prostitution and drug dealing thanks to the likes of Mitchell and his international cronies.Some of the biggest names in organized crime from Ireland, the UK, Holland and Spain received printed invites to the gala opening from “Peter and Sonia” last September.And for a number of months the Paparazzi bar became a popular meeting point for drug traffickers, hitmen and money launderers including the likes of Fat Freddie Thompson and his pal Paddy Doyle.Then Doyle was shot dead by gunmen last February as he was travelling in a jeep in the company of Thompson and Gary Hutch, a nephew of armed robber Gerry the Monk Hutch, near San Pedro on the Costa.It has since emerged, however, that Doyle, a dangerous hitman and bully boy, was shot by a local gang from whom he had ripped off a shipment of cocaine.