Spanish
An 80-year-old British man who won £2.4 million (€2.77 million) in the lottery has been sentenced to 16 years in prison for leading a drug trafficking gang that "flooded" the region of Manchester, in the northwest of England, with barbiturates valued at up to £288 million (€332 million).
According to reports this Thursday, John Eric Spiby, his son, and two other individuals were part of an organized crime group that manufactured etizolam pills disguised as diazepam (Valium) and trafficked them between 2020 and 2022.
The four appeared this week before a Bolton court also accused of possessing and trafficking firearms from the "rural and tranquil" surroundings of the elderly man in Wigan, in the metropolitan county of Greater Manchester.
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"Despite having won the lottery, you continued to lead a life of crime beyond what would normally have been your retirement years," the judge told him at the sentencing, referring to the prize obtained in 2010. During the trial, the prosecution showed that Spiby bought "machinery" valued at thousands of pounds and made available to the gang facilities adapted to manufacture barbiturates on an "industrial scale" and "flood" the market of that region of the United Kingdom. The prosecution presented, among other evidence, text conversations between the criminals in which Spiby boasted about the huge profits obtained: "Elon (Musk) and Jeff (Bezos), watch out." In this regard, the judge repeatedly alluded during the trial to the magnitude of the criminal operation, describing it as "the largest drug production of this nature that the police have ever discovered." According to law enforcement, the gang may have distributed millions of pills during the aforementioned two-year period at a price of 65 pence (75 euro cents) each, generating between 56 and 288 million pounds sterling (332 million euros).
