cannabisnews.com: Agents Luck Into Giant Pot Gardens 





Agents Luck Into Giant Pot Gardens 
Posted by FoM on June 13, 2000 at 08:41:02 PT
By Ty Phillips, Bee Staff Writer
Source: Modesto Bee
A team of Stanislaus Drug Enforcement Agency detectives armed with machetes began hacking their way through the heavy weeds and underbrush alongside the San Joaquin River Monday morning.  They were looking for a methamphetamine lab, but a funny thing happened along the way. 
 They stumbled onto an intricate series of marijuana gardens -- believed to be the county's largest outdoor pot gardens to be uncovered in at least five years. The gardens, camouflaged in a dense grove of willow trees and surrounded by tall nettles and dill weed, contained 1,600 young pot plants, SDEA Sgt. Tim David said. The plants, which would have reached maturity in several months, had an estimated street value of $3.2 million, David said.  "We just don't find too many big grows anymore," David said. "This is an oddity, really. ... It's definitely going to hurt someone (financially). This is a substantial haul, that's for sure."  No arrests were made. No one was in the gardens when SDEA detectives found them, but fingerprints were lifted from a campsite set up near the plants, David said. It was unclear who owned the property.  Detectives discovered the gardens at about 9 a.m. Nine hours later, the plants all had been chopped down and piled in a heap burned by the Newman Fire Department.  As the thick smoke rose into the air, SDEA agents shook their heads and laughed at their good fortune. Luck helps solve many crimes.  It started Sunday evening with Joe Mello, a state Department of Fish and Game warden, patrolling the fence line along the river. He was looking for signs of people illegally netting fish.  Mello found no illegal fishing, but at about 8:30 p.m. heard what sounded like a generator and several men's voices coming from a remote spot. He figured it was a methamphetamine cook and notified SDEA that night.  "It was getting dark by the time we were notified," David said. "We weren't going to send anyone in under those conditions. We'd be at the disadvantage, so we decided to wait until morning."  It took detectives about two hours to find the gardens Monday morning. Considering the terrain, that's no small feat.  They were hidden in the swamplands north of the river. Mosquitoes and ticks rule the area. To get there, detectives forged small streams and lagoons, and cut through weeds taller than they were.  The clues revealed themselves along the way. Two gasoline- powered water pumps and a two-gallon can of gas were found concealed in brush. Closer to the gardens were hoses used to transport water from a pond approximately 30 yards away.  The gardens were as elaborate as they were hidden. Ditches were constructed so excess water flowed from one garden into another, much like a vegetable garden. A 15-foot-deep well, dug by hand, also was used for irrigation.  The tallest plants there likely were planted in January, SDEA narcotics Detective Mark Ottoboni said. Others looked as if they had only been in the ground a few weeks.  "This is the biggest outdoor grow I've seen," Ottobonim said. "We just usually don't do that much marijuana anymore. We're overwhelmed by meth."  The incident reminded Mello of a man he met last year a few miles from the marijuana garden. It was 10 p.m. and the man was wet up to the waist of his pants. Mello asked the man what he was doing out there.  "He said he was out hunting with his dog," Mello said. "We figured he could have been hunting raccoons, so we let it go. I didn't think about it too much, but now I'm not so sure he was out there hunting."  David said there were reports last year of a large marijuana grow in the area. His detectives spent parts of two weeks looking for it, but simply couldn't devote too much time hunting a marijuana crop while the county was being overrun with meth labs.  "You go where the business is," David said. "When you're chasing labs, you've got lab fires right and left, and people are calling in chemical (buys). The need has been in meth." Newman, California Published: Tuesday, June 13, 2000 Copyright © The Modesto Bee. Related Articles:Officers Seize 4,400 Marijuana Plantshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread5839.shtmlOfficials Seize $10 Million in Marijuana at Gorge http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread3338.shtml
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Comment #2 posted by legalizeit on June 15, 2000 at 06:53:26 PT
Burn baby burn!
>It's definitely going to hurt someone (financially). This is a substantial haul, that's for sure." >As the thick smoke rose into the air, SDEA agents shook their heads and laughed at their good fortune.These people are absolutely the sickest and most sadistic our society has to offer. Their livelihood depends on ruining someone else's livelihood. Worse yet, they think an opportunity to do so is a "good fortune" and laugh about it as they do it! What type of depraved mind does this? It's the same type of mind that ran the Nazi death camps.Of course, it never works both ways. What if someone came in and burned their "drug" enforcement equipment, then laughed as it burned? Far from going home laughing, those people would be doing hard time for destroying government property.>Luck helps solve many crimes. Yeah, gardening is some crime. Washington and Lincoln would do back flips in their graves if they knew that growing a plant had been declared a crime.I have a better idea for something to burn: the drug laws. Let these racist redneck jack-booted jerks find a living doing something productive instead of making life hell for others.
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Comment #1 posted by Dan B on June 13, 2000 at 11:30:20 PT:
Telltale Signs--Generators and talking
Since when is men talking and the sound of generators the sign of anything but men camping? Seems to me that hearing people talking and hearing a generator are not signs of drug production. Using this reasoning, every house in America would be subject to searches ("I heard people talking in there!")."The plants, which would have reached maturity in several months, had an estimated street value of $3.2 million, David said." No, these plants had not yet reached maturity, so they had a street value of $0. "'This is the biggest outdoor grow I've seen,' Ottobonim said. 'We just usually don't do that much marijuana anymore. We're overwhelmed by meth.'" There you have it, folks! Crack down on the soft drugs, and where do people turn for their next high? More proof that the WoD encourages the use of harder drugs.When will these people get a grip?
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