Meet the British millionaire stockbroker whose illegal drug empire landed him in one of America's most dangerous jails

Quietly trading the stock market online at his girlfriend's apartment in Arizona in 2001, Sean Attwood felt like he had gotten away with murder.

Attwood did not kill anyone, but he had been the mastermind behind an international drug smuggling operation that was responsible for bringing Europe's ecstasy-fuelled rave scene to Arizona in the mid-to-late '90s, using wealth built from a successful career on the stock market in the sunny state.

His girlfriend at the time, Claudia, had convinced Attwood to give up drug dealing. "The love of the relationship made me see the error of my ways," Attwood told Business Insider.

The reformed drug dealer had even enrolled in a course  to learn Spanish. But Attwood's transformation came too late.

On May 16, 2002, he was arrested and charged with conspiracy related to numerous drug offences. Attwood spent two years locked up at the notorious Maricopa County Jail, which he says had the highest death rate in America at the time, before being moved to serve the rest of his nine-year sentence at the Arizona Department of Corrections.

We interviewed Attwood to find out why a British-born stock market trader and millionaire would risk his fortune, freedom, and family life to sell class-A drugs in a foreign country on an industrial scale.