Diazepam
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Most people who’ve played the lottery have spent some time fantasizing about what they’d do if they suddenly ended up with millions of dollars at their disposal. “Building a massive drug empire” usually isn’t on the list of priorities, but one man in the United Kingdom decided to go that route and could spend the rest of his life in prison as a result.
Half of the thrill of playing a lottery with a sizeable amount of money up for grabs is thinking about how you’d spend that massive fortune if you won before almost inevitably dealing with the crushing realization you’ll never get to follow through.
A lavish mansion, a private island, and a fleet of fancy cars tend to be some of the more popular hypothetical purchases for people who find themselves daydreaming about their unrealized winnings, although there are plenty of cautionary tales about lottery winners going broke that suggest it’s a good idea to be a bit more practical if you manage to defy the odds.
Most experts would tell you that you should figure out a way to invest your money to set yourself up for success in the long run, and while one lottery winner in England did exactly that after striking it big around 15 years ago, he has landed in prison over the decidedly illegal route he decided to take.
A British man was sentenced to more than 16 years in prison for using his lottery winnings to fund a counterfeit pill mill
According to LBC, John Eric Spiby, who resides in a “quiet, rural home” in the English town of Wigan, won £2.4 million in the lottery in 2010 (around $3.7 million at the time).
That windfall came after he’d been sentenced to three years in prison in 2004 for his role in a drug ring that was caught selling large amounts of ecstasy, marijuana, and amphetamine, and he apparently decided to return to the well after finding himself with a sizeable sum of money to invest in a new operation.
The outlet says Spiby, who is now 80 years old, used some of the winnings to construct a pill factory in the stables across from his home while working with his son and some associates to produce and sell fake tablets of the anti-anxiety drug diazepam.
They eventually opened another pill factory in the city of Salford, but a spike in drug-related deaths in the region sparked a police investigation that led to raids that recovered millions of fake pills with a street value of £288 million (close to $400 million).
Spiby denied he had any involvement in the scheme after being charged, but he was recently sentenced to 16-and-a-half years in prison after being found guilty of various drug and firearm charges and “perverting the course of justice.”
Bummer.