Minneapolis police bust suburban grow ops, invent term "pot palace"
This article seems to be another case of the media resorting to scare and shock tactics in an effort to gain readers. It outlines a series of pot grow-ops busted in the Twin Cities metro area in recent years, emphasizing their suburban location as a reason for readers to be alarmed. They even go so far as to create the term "pot palace" to describe these suburban grows. It's unfortunate that in the midst of increasingly progressive marijuana legislation in Minnesota that the news media still feels compelled to portray marijuana as a neighborhood destroying menace. The article also makes the "higher THC" claim and inflates dollar values in an effort to make marijuana seem like much more of a hard drug than it really is. Authorities quoted in the article also seem to feel that marijuana laws are too soft. This article is a little long, but it's an interesting and amusing read.
Quote:
Who’s the quiet, new neighbor? It could be a big-time marijuana grower. Across the country, large suburban homes are increasingly being revamped for use as secret greenhouses.
By PAM LOUWAGIE, Star Tribune
Last update: January 6, 2008 - 7:11 AM
On the outside, the gabled beige house on Eagan’s Rusten Road looks like a model of suburban splendor. With more than 4,000 square feet, brick accents and a three-car garage, it sits in a neighborhood where children run playfully home from the school bus and neighbors stroll past with their dogs.
No one realized that for months it was being used as a marijuana greenhouse.
Pot gardeners had covered windows in the basement and upstairs bedrooms to cloak an elaborate system of wired lights, timers and ventilation. When authorities raided the house, they found more than 1,100 highly potent marijuana plants with a potential value of nearly $4 million.
Pot palaces — large-scale, year-round gardens of marijuana inside big houses — are a growing problem around the country.
They are infiltrating suburban neighborhoods from the Pacific Northwest to California to Texas to Florida. In the Twin Cities metro area, there have been busts in recent years in Blaine, Bloomington, Forest Lake and Apple Valley, to name a few.
Growers are drawn to the suburbs by the modern wiring and large unfinished basements of the big, newer houses, as well as by the unsuspecting neighbors in low-crime neighborhoods, authorities say.
“As long as they seem to lead a fairly normal life, no one’s going to question their existence,” said Dan Moren, assistant special agent in charge of the Minneapolis office of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration.
“I couldn’t believe it. I was shocked,” said neighbor Alan Tauer, still shaking his head in disbelief recently as he looked at the house from his driveway. “It’s that close and we had no clue. ... Everybody was like, ‘What?’”
Sometimes, the growers live elsewhere and the houses end up destroyed and abandoned. Sometimes the growers are part of rings, making it difficult to catch everyone involved, authorities say, because the people running the business aren’t necessarily the people tending the plants.
Last month , Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek announced that his office and cooperating task forces seized nearly $29 million worth of marijuana in the past two years. He said he was seeing “large increases” in the number of local operations.
The crop is worth more on the streets than ever. Most of what’s grown indoors is more potent — containing more of the psychoactive ingredient THC — than the marijuana of old.
“Somebody said, you know, ‘It’s not your daddy’s pot of the ’70s,’” Stanek said. “It’s made a resurgence because of the higher THC, and it’s come back into fashion.”
Stanek and some others say low criminal penalties and social attitudes toward the drug are likely playing a part, too.
For surprised neighbors like Tauer, the phenomenon is hitting close to home.
Elaborate systems
The Rusten Road house in Eagan now sits as a musty-smelling testament to how these indoor marijuana farms can trash a place. The empty house is littered with soil, scattered plastic containers, dried-up stalks and dismantled equipment. It had some key features that pot gardeners look for: an attached garage, where the growers could drive right in and close the door, and an unfinished basement easily converted to a greenhouse.
Leafy plants in plastic pots carpeted the basement, and wires were strung from the ceiling beams, suspending lights above the crop. A cement block in the basement wall is missing — chiseled out to tap into the electrical line before it hit the meter on the house. Inside, big umbrella-shaped metal lamp shades hang from cords attached to lines of transformers and timers. Metallic tubes have been punched through the basement ceiling to ventilate heat and humidity out through the laundry room.
“It is a lot of work that they go through to convert these places into grow operations,” said Dakota County Attorney James Backstrom.
Nils B. Tomasson , a citizen of Iceland, was living there and pleaded guilty to first-degree attempted controlled substance crime . He told authorities that he was recruited to tend marijuana, the county attorney’s office said. He was sentenced to 43 months, but spent a year in jail and now will be deported.
Authorities have started forfeiture procedures on the house, whose owner lives in California.
Anthony Spector, an attorney for the owner, said that the house was a rental property and that the owner had no idea what was going on. Because forfeiture procedures have started, he can’t get into the house without permission, Spector said.
Even if the county gets the house, it might be difficult to sell in a tough market, county officials acknowledge. Houses used in this way can grow so much mold that they sometimes need gutting.
“It’s going to be very difficult to break even on a resale of the homes,” Backstrom said.
Authorities working with law enforcement in Washington County found the house because the gardener there is an associate of people running another one in Oakdale, they said. Both houses were busted on the same day in May.
A national trend
Authorities say growers are moving indoors for a number of reasons. It allows them to grow more potent crops year-round, and there’s less danger of detection than when plants are grown outdoors. There is also tighter security on the Canadian border where potent “B.C. Bud” marijuana — cultivated in British Columbia — was smuggled into the United States.
A Justice Department report said Canada-based drug trafficking organizations are “increasingly producing high-potency marijuana in the United States at indoor sites.” The report cited an 85 percent increase nationwide in indoor marijuana plant eradication from 2000 to 2006.
In Florida, the problem has become so pronounced that lawmakers are considering legislation creating new penalties for those who own a house for the purpose of growing marijuana and for those who live in such houses.
The overall number of plants seized in Minnesota jumped from a total of 5,095 plants in 2006 to 8,925 plants in the first nine months of 2007, according to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
State and county authorities say they are seeing some larger, more advanced operations.
“They’re bringing in crews to redo these houses,” Backstrom said. “Somebody has to understand electrical wiring systems and heating systems to do all this stuff. These are experts.”
One man, Dung A. Nguyen, bought a 4,300-square-foot house on Hunters Way in Apple Valley, records show. After paying $391,500 for it in September 2006, he gave his neighbors fruit baskets, authorities said.
In June, law enforcement seized 1,264 marijuana plants there, after the power company checked a transformer there and noticed something wrong. Nguyen was arrested and is fighting the case in court. His attorney, Steve Tallen, maintains his client’s innocence.
“He rented his house to someone and this is what they did,” Tallen said. “He was going to collect his rent and they saw him leaving and they arrested him.”
In Forest Lake, a yellow six-bedroom rambler tucked behind tall trees on a 5-acre lot seemed as tranquil as the neighborhood around it.
Passing by it on his evening walks, neighbor Tom Olson never saw much activity there. “The house was always calm,” he said.
Then, one day nearly six months after it was sold, a mass of cars showed up to what Olson assumed was a heck of a party.
Turns out they were unmarked police cars.
Authorities found more than 650 highly potent plants and a hydroponic system using giant wheels to slowly rotate plants around growing lights. A generator in a nearby shed supplied power, authorities said.
John G. Payton, who had bought the house for $371,000 in July 2005, pleaded guilty to a charge of manufacturing marijuana and is in federal prison in Duluth. Technically, the Washington County Sheriff’s Office now owns the house after winning it in forfeiture proceedings. But it has a high mortgage and they are letting it go back to the mortgage company, said James Zuleger, assistant Washington County attorney.
“Technically we own it, but we told the bank we’re not going to do anything about the mortgage ... go ahead and foreclose on it,” Zuleger said.
Olson, who has lived in the area with his family for 23 years, said the house, now with a broken garage door left ajar, “is a perfect haven for the rats.”
“We’re kind of wondering what’s going to happen with it,” Olson said.
Sue Deiman lived in the house for 17 years, raising a family with her husband before downsizing and moving down the road. She said it’s hard to watch her old place go to ruin. “We have had all our memories there,” she said.
The marijuana houses — and the deterioration that goes with them — aren’t likely to go away soon, authorities say.
“Marijuana is big business,” said Chris Dellwo, coordinator of the Southwest Metro Drug Task Force, which covers Scott, Carver,
McLeod and a portion of Hennepin counties. “They get crazy money for it nowadays and so it’s very attractive to grow it yourself. ... I would imagine we’ll see a lot of it.”
Staff writer Jim Buchta contributed to this report.
Truly reviving the lost art of spying on ones neighbor one news article at a time.
11-01-2008, 05:58
Hybrid Mode
