A crime boss who fled to Brazil for 14 years has been jailed after police smashed his multi-million-pound operation. Mark Robert Witchell, 61, organised car thefts in Staffordshire from 2003 to 2006, totalling over £280,000, by using hire purchase agreements to acquire high-value vehicles, including Mercedes and Porsche models.

Stoke-on-Trent Crown Court heard that three of the vehicles were transferred to Spain, and in 2011, Witchell was charged but fled to Brazil to evade justice. The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) then found Witchell had run an online drugs and medicine supply chain from 2013 to 2015, directing three people in the UK to sell the drugs and making £3.7m in profits.

The money was transferred to Witchell's accounts in Mauritius under the company Next Day Pharmacy Solutions, but he was finally arrested after entering Britain via Holyhead Port in North Wales in August 2025.

He has now admitted five counts of theft, three of transferring/removing criminal property, money laundering, supplying Class B and Class C drugs -codeine, alprazolam, diazepam, tramadol, zolpidem and zopiclone - illegally selling prescription-only medicines, and selling unauthorised medicines.

Witchell, originally of Nantwich, Cheshire, was sentenced to a total of 10 years in prison on Tuesday, March 3.

Staffordshire Police described his offending as a "highly sophisticated criminal operation."

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Police said the three other people had also been sentenced for their roles in selling the drugs in March 2023.

Detective Constable Gareth Reynolds, from Staffordshire Police's Economic Crime Unit, said: "This was a highly sophisticated criminal operation which generated millions of pounds by profiting from other people's vulnerability and belongings.

"While Witchell may have spent 14 years on the run, it is through our evidence and the action of everyone involved in this investigation which has ensured that he was not able to escape his offending, no matter how hard he tried.

"Cases like this show the scale that organised crime can reach.

"It is a business which preys on the vulnerable in local communities and something which we are working robustly to identify and act against every single day in Staffordshire."