It wasn’t a tip-off from a neighbour. It wasn’t suspicious banking activity. The operation that produced millions of fake Valium tablets from a converted stable in Wigan was cracked by French police reading encrypted messages sent by someone who thought he was untouchable.
From the outside, the building behind John Eric Spiby’s farmhouse cottage on Lower Green Lane, Astley, looked like what it had always been: a rural stable on a quiet plot outside Wigan. The windows had been frosted — easily explained as a privacy measure. The noise from inside was consistent with the kind of mechanical activity you might expect from a working farm outbuilding.
Inside, between November 2021 and May 2022, was something entirely different. The converted stable contained an industrial-scale tablet manufacturing setup capable of producing tens of thousands of counterfeit pills every hour. Statista The tablets looked identical to standard pharmaceutical diazepam — the same shape, the same markings, the same packaging conventions. They contained etizolam, a sedative roughly six to eight times stronger than the diazepam they were sold as. Statista
The question of how such a large operation stayed hidden for so long is more interesting than the machinery that ran it — and the answer reveals as much about modern policing as it does about modern organised crime.
The Cover Story That Almost Held
In August 2020, gang member Lee Drury created a front company called Nutra Inc, complete with a professional website advertising tablet presses, mixers, packaging machines, and powdered supplements. TechAfrica News This was the operation’s primary camouflage layer. Industrial pharmaceutical equipment — the same machinery used by legitimate generic drug manufacturers — is not inherently illegal to purchase. It has obvious lawful applications in the supplement and nutraceutical industry. A company that appeared, on paper, to be in that business could acquire presses, mixers, and raw binding agents without immediately triggering regulatory scrutiny.
Drury rented a shipping container on Chaddock Lane in Astley, controlled by the group, to store materials and millions of counterfeit tablets awaiting distribution. Statista The physical infrastructure — stable, container, later an industrial unit — was dispersed enough that no single property presented an obvious red flag.
This is the structural gap the operation exploited: the supply chain for industrial tablet production is largely unmonitored once a business can present a plausible legitimate purpose. The precursor chemicals and binding agents used in counterfeit pharmaceutical production are the same ones used in lawful supplement manufacturing. Without active intelligence suggesting criminal intent, there was no mechanism to distinguish one from the other.
How EncroChat Unravelled It
The operation wasn’t caught through financial surveillance, customs flags, or community intelligence. It was cracked after French law enforcement infiltrated EncroChat — an encrypted communications platform with a reputation for use by organised crime — in a Europe-wide investigation in 2020. Wikipedia
EncroChat operated on modified Android phones with hardened encryption, remote wipe capabilities, and no GPS hardware. It was marketed, in effect, as a communications platform for people who needed to ensure their conversations couldn’t be recovered. By 2020 it had tens of thousands of users across Europe, a significant proportion of whom were involved in serious organised crime.
When French and Dutch authorities cracked the platform’s encryption in mid-2020, they harvested tens of millions of messages. The data was shared with law enforcement agencies across Europe, triggering hundreds of investigations. Messages linked to Callum Dorian’s handle on the platform revealed both the supply of firearms and the orchestration of large-scale counterfeit diazepam production. African Exponent
This is the detail that reframes the entire Spiby case. The operation wasn’t detected because it made a mistake visible in the physical world. It was detected because one of its members used a communications platform that investigators had already compromised. The industrial camouflage — the frosted windows, the fake company, the dispersed properties — worked. The digital opsec didn’t.
The Two Factories
The operation ran across two sites. The first was Spiby’s converted stable on Lower Green Lane — the original manufacturing hub, retrofitted by the gang with industrial equipment and concealed behind frosted glass. In 2021, Spiby expanded into a second facility: an industrial unit on Albion Street in Salford TechAfrica News, which gave the operation the kind of production capacity that moves from “significant local supply” into something approaching industrial distribution.
Each gang member had a defined role. Drury, described in court as someone who was skilled with machinery, handled the technical manufacturing side. Spiby Senior provided the premises, capital, and operational seniority. Spiby Junior handled hands-on production work. Callum Dorian, operating through EncroChat, managed criminal connections and the firearms supply. TechAfrica News
The firearms element is worth dwelling on. The arsenal associated with the operation included AK-47s, an Uzi, Tec-9s, a Scorpion submachine gun, a Grand Power pistol, silencers, and ammunition. African Exponent Two revolvers and ammunition were found at Spiby Senior’s home. This wasn’t a white-collar pharmaceutical fraud operation that happened to be illegal. By its later phase, it carried military-grade firepower — the standard transition in organised crime when the financial stakes grow large enough to require physical protection of the supply chain.
The Intercept That Ended It
On April 2, 2022, a significant shipment of drugs was intercepted en route to a hotel in Manchester — over 2.5 million tablets with a wholesale value estimated at £7 million and a potential street value of up to £67 million. TechAfrica News This was the operational breakthrough, but by that point investigators already knew what they were looking for and where to find it. The EncroChat intelligence had given them the map; the intercept confirmed it.
The prosecution told Bolton Crown Court that expert analysis described taking these pills as “a highly risky form of Russian Roulette for drug users” — because buyers believed they were taking a dose-controlled pharmaceutical, while in reality they were taking an unlicensed substance at an unknown concentration, six to eight times stronger than what they thought they were getting. TechAfrica News
The harm wasn’t hypothetical. Evidence presented at trial linked an increase in drug-related deaths, particularly around the Bury New Road area, to the increased availability of counterfeit pills of this type. TechAfrica News
What the Case Actually Reveals About Counterfeit Pharmaceutical Crime
The Spiby operation is significant not because of its scale alone — though the potential street value of £57.6 million to £288 million places it among the largest of its kind in UK legal history Statista — but because of how it was structured.
This was not a traditional drug operation in the Breaking Bad sense: a clandestine chemistry lab producing a controlled substance from scratch. It was a pharmaceutical manufacturing operation producing a product indistinguishable from a legitimate medicine, using largely legitimate equipment, hidden behind a legitimate-looking business, distributed through an established criminal network. The only technical tell — the substitution of etizolam for diazepam — required forensic chemical analysis to detect. Visual inspection, even by experienced law enforcement, would not have caught it.
The operation exposed a specific regulatory blind spot: the pathway from “legitimate supplement company purchasing industrial tablet presses” to “counterfeit pharmaceutical manufacturer” is technically identical until you test the product. No single transaction in the supply chain was inherently suspicious. The criminality existed entirely in the intent and the final product.
Detective Inspector Alex Brown of Greater Manchester Police said at sentencing: “They operated a fully industrialised drug manufacturing business capable of producing millions of counterfeit tablets containing a highly dangerous substance. These four individuals showed absolutely no regard for human life or public safety.” World Bank
Judge Clarke told the defendants that what they had done “created a high risk of Russian Roulette for vulnerable drug users who are unsure whether the drugs were more or less potent than the drugs they were replacing.” Wikipedia
John Eric Spiby, who had a prior drug conviction from 2004 and who celebrated his lottery win in 2010 by eventually building one of the most sophisticated counterfeit drug operations Britain has seen, will likely remain in prison until he is 96. His son, who grew up in the shadow of his father’s criminal career, will be released in his mid-forties. The stable on Lower Green Lane, with its frosted windows and its industrial hum, is silent.
Sources: Greater Manchester Police, Bolton Crown Court proceedings (November 2025/January 2026), SWNS, LBC, The Guardian, Lottery Post.
