Dino Gardiakos was sentenced to 6 years in jail for trying to smuggle 14 kilos of ketamine he bought in London.
A co-owner of Spybar, one among Chicago’s best-known nightclubs, was sentenced to 6 years in jail after pleading responsible to bringing 14 kilos of ketamine into the nation by means of O’Hare Worldwide Airport, CWB Chicago stories.
Dino Gardiakos, 46, was arrested in March 2024 after arriving on an in a single day flight from London with six kilograms of the drug hid inside six containers packed in his baggage, together with further ketamine in a smaller container, the Prepare dinner County Sheriff’s Workplace introduced on the time. Decide Timothy Joyce imposed the sentence Tuesday after Gardiakos entered his responsible plea to manufacturing or delivering narcotics.
The arrest got here whereas Gardiakos was nonetheless on probation from an earlier drug case, which started with a raid on his West City house in Could 2021. In that investigation, prosecutors mentioned U.S. Customs brokers intercepted a bundle shipped from the UK and addressed to Gardiakos, which they discovered to comprise greater than two kilos of ketamine.
Brokers reportedly resealed the bundle and had undercover officers ship it to his house. When investigators obtained an alert that the field had been opened, they executed an anticipatory search warrant {that a} decide had already accredited.
That search turned up an estimated $240,000 price of medicine, prosecutors mentioned, together with greater than 11 kilos of hashish, practically 9 kilos of THC focus, a couple of pound of psilocybin mushrooms, and one other quarter-pound of ketamine. Investigators additionally reported discovering roughly $25,000 in money together with packaging supplies, a scale and ledgers they mentioned have been according to drug distribution.
Regardless of the scope of these allegations, Gardiakos in the end pleaded responsible to a single depend of possessing a managed substance. The decide had ordered 30 hours of group service and sentenced him to 2 years of probation, however formally terminated the latter and characterised that end result as “unsatisfactory” earlier than issuing the jail sentence.
Spybar, a longtime fixture of Chicago’s nightlife scene that has hosted DJ units from iconic DJs resembling Carl Cox and Eric Prydz, distanced itself from Gardiakos after his 2024 arrest. A assertion launched by the membership’s proprietors on the time trivialized his possession stake as “solely passive.”
“Spybar has a zero-tolerance coverage for illicit or unlawful actions,” they wrote. “Mr. Gardiakos’ possession has been solely passive and he has not been part of Spybar’s operations for greater than seven years.”
