cannabisnews.com: Elusive Marijuana Grower Gets 10-year Prison!





Elusive Marijuana Grower Gets 10-year Prison!
Posted by FoM on February 06, 1999 at 15:59:28 PT

Elusive marijuana grower gets 10-year prison sentence Rhett "Tom" Phillips, who headed a large Portland-area ring, was captured in 1997 after vanishing four years earlier. A federal judge on Friday sentenced Oregon's most successful marijuana grower to 10 years in prison. 
Rhett "Tom" Phillips has also forfeited more than $1.2 million in cash and real estate. The sentencing ends a decade-long investigation that has led to the prosecution of more than a dozen people and a global search for Phillips as he used an English passport and half a dozen foreign bank accounts to elude authorities for five years. "Tom Phillips was probably the most financially successful marijuana grower this state has ever seen," said John Deits, an assistant U.S. attorney. Deits credited Tim Welch, a special agent with the Internal Revenue Service, for his work on the case. "He did a masterful job," Deits said. "This was a massive case, and (the IRS) spent tons of time on it." Phillips, 44, grew up in Seaside and McMinnville, where he was an all-state quarterback in 1971, his senior year in high school. He began growing marijuana as early as 1976, according to a federal indictment. By 1987, he was heading a large Portland-area ring that prosecutors say operated more than a dozen grow houses. In 1990, after four years of investigating, federal authorities seized Phillips' home outside Hillsboro and found underground grow rooms accessible only by an electronic trap door. The same year, the U.S. attorney's office began prosecuting more than a dozen of Phillips' alleged cohorts, including his wife and his brother. In early 1993, a federal grand jury indicted Phillips on one count of conspiracy, eight counts of growing marijuana and four counts of money laundering. But Phillips was nowhere to be found. Phillips had bank accounts in Switzerland, Belize, Barbados, the Netherlands and Hong Kong. He spent at least part of the next several years in Switzerland, Deits said, where he met up with Thomas G. Sherrett, another Oregon marijuana dealer on the lam. Last year, Sherrett was sentenced to 20 years in prison. U.S. marshals caught Phillips in 1997 in a mall near San Jose, Calif., as he was meeting surreptitiously with his estranged wife and 10-year-old son. In October, he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to manufacture marijuana and one count of money laundering. He agreed to pay $1 million in cash to the government. Authorities also sold two of his houses for $260,000. With more than a year already served, time off for good behavior and time off for the successful completion of a drug treatment program, Phillips could be out of the prison in 71/2 years, said his attorney, Ronald H. Hoevet. By Ashbel S. Green of The Oregonian staff 
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Comment #1 posted by Dr. Ganj on February 06, 1999 at 17:41:18 PT
10 years for growing a plant!?
This guy should have received an award, not a prison term.When will we finally learn marijuana is good? It is really good. Just like alcohol prohibition, which dragged on from 1920-1933, it too, caused thousands of people to go to prison. What have we learned from that? That selling alcoholic beverages to people over 21, works a lot better than arresting them. The answer was obvious back then, and the answer to marijuana prohibition now, is even more obvious. By that I mean, have you ever heard of "medical alcohol"?Sending people to prison for growing marijuana, is about assmart as it was sending people to prison for making fine Kentucky bourbon. It didn't work then, and is really isn't working now.Dr. Ganj  
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