Britain’s silver crime wave: The lottery successful pensioner turned drug kingpin, an 80-year-old cocaine smuggler – and a ‘Gangster Debbs’ gran…consultants reveal why variety of over-60s in jail has tripled

If you were 65 and had just won £2.5million on the lottery, what would you spend it on?

Dream holidays, sports cars and houses spring to mind, as does ditching any remaining work for endless days on the golf course.

But pensioner John Spiby made a rather different choice, using his 2010 windfall to build a ‘Breaking Bad-style’ £288million drug empire from his red brick cottage in Astley, Greater Manchester – right under the nose of his unsuspecting wife.

Now 80, he was jailed last month for 16 years and six months alongside three accomplices including his 37-year-old son, John Jnr. Golf fairways? More like concrete prison corridors…

While his case may sound extraordinary, one aspect of it is not.

Spiby is only the latest of a series of pensioners to be jailed for involvement in major drug plots.

Others include ‘gangster gran’ Deborah Mason, 65, a grandmother and mother of seven children who ran an £80million trafficking network in London.

In Manchester, 80-year-old Malcolm Hoyland was found to have shifted £13million of cocaine for the notorious Byrne organised crime group, considered the UK wing of the Kinahan Cartel.

And in Gateshead, 66-year-old Peter Lamb masterminded a conspiracy to smuggle £120million worth of the Class A drug inside rolls of artificial grass.

They are far from the only old-age criminals, with the number of prisoners who are 60 or over increasing by 82 per cent in the last decade and by 243 per cent since 2002. So what is going on?

Louise Ridley, a senior lecturer in Criminology at Northumbria University who has studied the rise in older prisoners, said the phenomenon partly reflects broader social trends.

Just as law-abiding Britons are retiring at an older age, others are using longer healthy lifespans to engage in crime later in life.

For those involved in the manufacture or selling of drugs, money is an obvious factor.

John Spiby settled on fake diazepam as his money-making venture of choice; with a pill lab he set out in a stable block opposite his home churning out tens of thousands per hour.

Alongside his son and two associates, the career criminal set up a second drug factory in Salford to flood the streets with ‘unregulated, unlicensed and unchecked’ tablets.

Desperate people who bought the Valium – which is used to treat anxiety but can be abused – were playing ‘Russian roulette’ with their lives, prosecutors said, and there was an increase in drug-related deaths in the area.

Discussing his illicit business, Spiby boasted that ‘Elon and Jeff best watch their backs’ – a reference to US tech billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

But the conspiracy was busted by police in May 2022 and he was jailed for 16-and-a-half years.

In some cases, elderly drug barons appear to exploit their advanced age as a way of avoiding suspicion.

When she was arrested by officers during a dawn raid on her £1.5million London home in 2024, Deborah Mason played on her innocent appearance by telling an officer reading out the charges: ‘Me? No, come on!’

The grandmother recruited her sister, four of her children, their partners and friends to ferry around a metric tonne of cocaine worth £80m from ports such as Harwich to make deliveries in Bristol, Cardiff, London, Leicester, Birmingham, Rotherham, Sheffield and Bradford, paying relatives £1,000 a trip.

Mason revelled in her underworld status, instructing her own family – some of whom she recruited as drug runners – to call her ‘Gangster Debbs’ and ‘Queen Bee’.

In July, she and her 10-strong family gang from Islington, North London were jailed for more than 100 years at Woolwich Crown Court.

Father of three Peter Lamb seemed equally unlikely to be involved in serious organised crime, with one neighbour of his saying they would have ‘laughed’ if someone suggested he was smuggling drugs.

Described as quiet but ‘friendly’, Lamb was regularly seen pottering in the back garden of his modest Gateshead home and would often stop to pass the time of day by walking his dogs, a placid German shepherd and a springer spaniel puppy.

However, unknown to locals on his quiet street of housing association homes occupied mainly by retirees, he had become a major player in organised crime responsible for smuggling one-and-a-half tonnes of cocaine over just a year.

In another suburban twist, his chosen method was to hide these drugs in rolls of artificial grass brought in by two garden supply companies that served as fronts for his operation.

His downfall came in May 2024, when customs officers in Holland searched two consignments of fake turf and found £13m of cocaine hidden inside the empty plastic tubes at the centre of each roll. He is now serving a 17-year sentence.

The likes of Spiby, Mason and Lamb inevitably attract attention due to the dramatic and surprising nature of their offending, but drug offences are far from the main factor fuelling the rise in older prisoners.

Criminologist Louise Ridley points out that the increase has primarily been driven by an increase in the number of older adult men sentenced for sexual offences.

Around 45 per cent of male prisoners over 50 are serving sentences for sex crimes, rising to around 80 per cent for those over 70, official figures show.

This compares to around 18 per cent of the general prison population, reflecting the influence of convictions for historic sexual abuse.

One of the worst offenders, 69-year-old Carson Grimes, was handed seven life sentences for abusing 22 boys aged as young as five at his home in Luton between the 1980s and early 2000s.

A recent episode of Channel 4’s 24 Hours in Police Custody revealed he was being held inside HMP Rye Hill, a category C prison for sex offenders near Rugby.

Grimes preyed upon vulnerable young people by pretending to be a friend and inviting them to his house, before he abused them after plying them with drink and drugs.

Another serial paedophile, 81-year-old Richard Burrows, was jailed for 46 years in 2025 after being put before a court 27 years after fleeing to Thailand.

Burrows carried out the earliest attacks while working as a housemaster at Danesford Approved School in Cheshire.

He also abused boys through his involvement in the scouting community and radio clubs where young boys were keen to learn about radios and obtain their badges.

Burrows was convicted of offences against 24 boys between the ages of 10 and 15.

In addition to a rise in convictions for historic sex offences, Ms Ridley said another factor for the increase in elderly prisoners was a shift towards longer sentences and a ‘lower tolerance by courts of deviant behaviour by older people’.

Others are repeat offenders who ‘come back to prison time and time again’ after breaching license conditions or those serving a sentence of imprisonment for public protection (IPP).

IPP sentences, which see an offender locked up indefinitely until the Parole Board deems them safe for release, have now been abolished, but thousands of inmates are still serving them.

Ms Ridley said elderly inmates often struggled behind bars because prison was ‘very much a young man’s place’.

Could the same be said for the world of crime? Apparently not…