ShareThisOrganized crime rings that stretch from Sacramento to San Francisco to China, independent investment groups, connections to legitimate business -- they've all come into focus as authorities dig deeper into the mystery behind the region's indoor pot farms.
Three years into their probes, state and federal prosecutors have filed seven cases that mostly have targeted the Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants caught tilling the neighborhood marijuana factories.
But law-enforcement officials say they're still looking for the power players who created the multimillion-dollar grow-house industry.
"In some instances, there are definite ties to organized gangs in the (San Francisco) Bay Area," said Drug Enforcement Administration Special Agent Gordon Taylor, the supervisor of the agency's Sacramento-area office, when asked to identify the kingpins behind the local grow houses. "There also are independent traffickers who have learned to operate indoor grows through organized Asian groups. And we've found more sophisticated groups that have the capacity to infiltrate the real-estate and mortgage industries."
Taylor said the business is "still being dominated by Asian drug-trafficking organizations."
Taylor said local grow houses these days are fetching between $3,200 and $3,500 per plant, despite a moderate downturn in the industry, and the Sacramento product is turning up in bong bowls as far away as the East Coast.
"It brings in huge profits," Taylor said.
The suburban marijuana factories first came to the attention of federal and local law-enforcement agencies in mid-2006 in an investigation that turned up 1,875 pot plants in five houses in Sacramento County. Investigators also confiscated thousands more plants in the same probe at additional locations in Stockton and Stanislaus County, Calif.
Since then, authorities have filed three more major indoor-pot-growing cases in Sacramento Superior Court as well as three additional ones in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of California.
Altogether, 53 defendants have been charged. An estimated 11,603 marijuana plants worth at least $37.1 million have been seized at about three-dozen grow houses in Sacramento, Placer and El Dorado counties.
Besides the plants, authorities have confiscated dozens of pounds of processed marijuana and at least $743,000 in cash from an estimated 45 houses they have raided in the region, according to state and federal court documents.
They've also found Chinese passports, monthly mortgage statements, receipts from the Bank of China, a couple of medical marijuana certificates, even a player's card to a casino.
In each case, they're seeing houses refashioned from the inside out, to wholly or partially encompass grow zones stocked with lights, timers and exotic fertilizers. Paperwork found at the houses has documented watering schedules for plants that can grow several feet high and produce the sticky purple buds that bring in major cash.
Agents commonly find circuit breakers and other equipment the growers use to steal electricity and conceal its use. In one case, investigators concluded that growers had ripped off the Sacramento Municipal Utility District for more than $24,000 worth of power.
Twenty-nine defendants in the seven cases have pleaded guilty or no contest and five more have indicated they intend to do the same. Cases are pending on 18 more people, including seven arrested just last month. One defendant fled Northern California and returned to China, according to court documents.
Jail and prison terms for the convicted pot-house growers have ranged from 330 days to five years. Foreign nationals have been deported.
In the most recent case, the seven defendants included middle-age mothers and fathers. They huddled in a Sacramento Superior Court holding cage and stood on tiptoes trying to make eye contact with their children and other relatives who attended one of their arraignment hearings. Some of the defendants needed Mandarin or Cantonese-speaking interpreters to understand the proceedings against them.
(Contact Andy Furillo at afurillo(at)sacbee.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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