If you can get five to ten years for selling a few thousand pills of fentanyl, it stands to reason that you may get fifty or thereabouts for running a marketplace where hundreds of such sales took place.

I'd also say that there's a significant moral difference between a first time offender, and a 'first time caught offender'. Al Capone and Bernie Madoff were also 'first time offenders' when they went to prison.

You don't whoops one-time-bad-lapse-of-judgement stumble into running a gang, a decade-long fraud... Or the biggest drug marketplace in the world.