Lottery winner uses millions to set up drug empire
An 80-year-old man from Wigan, UK, has been convicted of using the millions he previously won in the lottery to build a multimillion-pound drug empire.
John Eric Spiby led a drugs operation worth up to £288million, centred on his “quiet, rural” home near Wigan. The empire involved manufacturing counterfeit tablets at an industrial scale.
Though Spiby denied any knowledge of the conspiracy, a trial at Bolton court convicted him of conspiracy to produce class C drugs and conspiracy to supply class C drugs.
The jury also found him guilty of two counts of possession of firearms, possession of ammunition, and perverting the course of justice.
Subsequently, he was given a jail sentence of 16 years and six months. His sons, Lee Drury, John Colin Spiby, and Callum Dorian, were also jailed. Drury was jailed for nine years and nine months, and Spiby Jr for nine years. Dorian was jailed for 12 years in 2024.
Spiby won £2.4million in 2010; along with his sons, he raked in £288 million after expanding from the cottage warehouse to a second lab at an industrial unit in Salford.
Bolton Crown Court heard that Drury used his company, Nutra Inc, as a ‘front’ to cover up the illicit business. However, things came crumbling down when French law enforcement officers uncovered encrypted messages on the messaging platform EncroChat.
Judge Clarke KC told Spiby: “Despite your lottery win you continued to live a life of crime beyond what would normally have been your retirement years.”
Without the lottery win, it would’ve been unlikely that the gang could’ve put so much money into the operation; between June 2020 and May 2022, £200,000 worth of machinery and ingredients were bought, with pills sold for 65p each.
The judge also concluded that it was “the largest production of drugs of this nature that has ever been uncovered by the police”.