Spokane man gets 20 years in prison in one of Eastern Washington’s largest pill manufacturing cases

A 44-year-old Spokane man who ran a commercial pill press operation and had enough fentanyl to make two million pills will spend 20 years in federal prison.

Timothy G. Maddox pleaded guilty June 12 to possession with intent to distribute 400 grams or more of fentanyl. Federal prosecutors said that was enough fentanyl to kill everyone in Spokane County almost four times over.

Colin Jackson, acting special agent in charge of Seattle’s Homeland Security Investigations, called it one of Eastern Washington’s largest pill manufacturing cases.

“With this sentencing, Maddox is held accountable for endangering a residential neighborhood by operating a makeshift narcotics lab that housed enough fentanyl to produce over two million lethal pills,” Jackson said in a news release from Eastern Washington’s U.S. Attorney’s Office. “Clearly, Maddox had no regard for public safety and was only out to make a profit.”

The release said Maddox and co-defendant Nicholas B. Adams obtained a pill press via mail from China and set up a ”pill mill” in the basement of Adams’ residence in the Hillyard Neighborhood, where they mixed powder fentanyl and other substances to make their own fentanyl pills for bulk distribution to the community, according to court documents and information presented at sentencing.

Adams is scheduled for trial in December.

Law enforcement searched multiple locations in November 2023 and found a massive amount of fentanyl powder, other substances intended to be added to the drug, pill press parts, multiple firearms and a pill press, according to the release.

According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, the amount of fentanyl powder Maddox and Adams had to produce pills was enough to make more than 2 million fentanyl pills containing a lethal dose.

In addition to the fentanyl pill production, Maddox and Adams had large quantities of methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine, MDMA and marijuana, the release said. Each man also had several firearms in their homes.

“Stopping the production and flow of fentanyl into our communities is one of the most challenging crises we face as law enforcement,” U.S. Attorney Pete Serrano said in the release. “This is a matter of importance as it will protect public health … The volume of fentanyl that this investigation took off the street is truly staggering. I cannot overstate the impact our team made here, by identifying a repeat criminal who was manufacturing vast quantities of this deadly drug while heavily armed.”

Maddox has a lengthy criminal history from the last 30 years, including residential burglary, vehicle theft, domestic violence, negligent driving, protection order violations and assault. Maddox also has a federal drug trafficking conviction from 2015, when he told officers he had been dealing drugs “for years” in the Spokane area and that he was one of the area’s largest drug dealers, according to the release.

He told police in the two years before that arrest that he was dealing about one pound of meth and one ounce of heroin every other day.

Maddox also pleaded guilty last year in Spokane County Superior Court to two counts of second-degree assault after he fired at least eight times into an occupied residence and shot about 17 times at an occupied vehicle within a two-day period in October 2023, according to court documents.

“Mr. Maddox is a career criminal who endangered the safety and health of our community with a truly lethal mix of homemade counterfeit fentanyl pills and automatic weapons,” said David Reames, special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration in Seattle. “Mr. Maddox made fentanyl even more dangerous by recklessly mixing substances at home, where he could include anything he chose into his deadly concoctions. Mr. Maddox spent years peddling misery and death for his own enrichment and I am proud that DEA and our partners could put an end to his trafficking with this sentence.”