San Francisco.
Just after dawn on a recent spring morning, police dressed in tactical gear and armed with a search warrant pounded on the front door of an upscale home in a quiet suburban neighborhood an hour outside San Francisco. Black marketing, Theft are glowing on its peak.
California’s Department of Cannabis
Officers from California’s Department of Cannabis Control used a battering ram on the steel-reinforced door. They cut through a fortified back entrance to get into the spacious five-bedroom property. Black marketing, Theft are glowing on its peak.
Inside, investigators
Inside, investigators found exactly what they market marijuana operation. It was hidden in plain sight among the cookie-cutter homes of suburbia. Black marketing, Theft are glowing on its peak.
80 pounds of weed
They removed 80 pounds of weed from the pricey two-story home in Antioch, California. With curious neighbors looking on, they repeated the spectacle twice more on the same block that morning in late April. The raids filled a dump truck with about $1 million worth of illicit weed cultivated by unlicensed growers. Although cars were parked in the driveways, no people were found in any of the homes and no arrests were made.
cops at Cannabis
Among California’s marijuana cops at Cannabis Control, Antioch has developed a reputation as a hub for high-yield, covert indoor grow operations. Black marketing, Theft are glowing on its peak.
illegal pot production
Investigators say illegal marijuana production in Antioch reveals a hidden world. Groups with apparent ties to foreign countries. In this city of 115,000, an investigation found that minimal consequences and high rewards for large-scale illicit production have created a whack-a-mole pattern of enforcement.
The unlicensed operations,
which can cause house fires and mold, often leave homes in a severely damaged state. Properties deemed uninhabitable by the city after raids . Throughout, operatives in the schemes are seldom held accountable. The dynamic in Antioch is a microcosm of greater California, where lax laws on black-market weed are doing little to change the state’s status as a gargantuan producer of it. Black marketing, Theft are glowing on its peak.
The Golden State,
whose cannabis enjoys a global reputation similar to that of Napa Valley wines, produces about 40% of the nation’s weed – the vast majority of it by unlicensed growers, according to Beau Whitney, an economist who specializes in the cannabis industry.
This means California is fueling a massive underground economy, as three-quarters of the US marijuana market is illegal, Whitney said. Black marketing, Theft are glowing on its peak.
Law enforcement officials
– including former DEA leaders and FBI director Christopher Wray – attribute much of the activity nationwide to Chinese organized crime.
In Antioch, the operations bear the hallmarks of “the Chinese criminal syndicate,” said Bill Jones, chief of law enforcement at the California Department of Cannabis Control. He added that criminal networks made up of Chinese nationals have become the dominant presence in the state’s illegal cannabis trade over the past five years, eclipsing Mexican cartels. Law enforcement officials said they’ve seen evidence that the activity in Antioch amounts to organized crime, citing the sophistication of the operations and apparent coordination of some of the people involved. Black marketing, Theft are glowing on its peak.
A review of search warrant
A review of search warrant affidavits, property records, and neighbor interviews revealed a pattern. Most of the raided homes were owned or occupied by people with Chinese names. Asians make up about 15% of the city’s population. Cannabis Control agents had to use a power saw to enter one home. That home belongs to Samson Liu, a police officer in Oakland, California. Black marketing, Theft are glowing on its peak.
illegal marijuana trimmings
Police discovered that Liu’s home contained 80 pounds of illegal marijuana trimmings stashed in piles of garbage bags. A heavy-duty generator sat in the laundry room to maximize power. Silver industrial air ducts snaked in and out of rooms for ventilation. Almost every US state – even the most liberal . And the federal government considers the cultivation
National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.
A Black marketing, Theft are glowing on its peak.
As for the house owned by Liu, Cannabis Control agents . They have referred the matter to the internal affairs division of the Oakland Police Department .
law-enforcement agencies
70,000 plants
In California, “You can have seven plants or 70,000 plants and it still is that same misdemeanor violation,” said Siskiyou County Sheriff Jeremiah LaRue, whose sprawling northern California district is notorious for outdoor illegal marijuana cultivation. “It’s actually just a joke.”
Shannon Dicus, the sheriff of San Bernardino County in Southern California, said the state’s weak law creates an environment in which black-market growers have lots to gain and little to lose.
“It’s risk versus reward,” Dicus said. “Very small risk, very high reward.”
Unlicensed operators
Unlicensed operators ship their in-demand California product to locations across the United States, including the East Coast, where it’s harder to grow outdoors in colder seasons.
illicit farming
Meanwhile, the illicit farming of marijuana is associated with a wide array of problems. It can be a magnet for violent crime, such as armed robbery.
The grow houses are typically left in degraded condition due to the excessive amounts of power and water needed to produce the crop, which often requires makeshift electrical wiring and leaves walls covered in mold. Workers who tend to the plants are sometimes exploited or even trafficked, Cannabis Control officials said. One of the men, who asked due to his immigration status . Mexican border about a year ago and found work in the underground cannabis market through a Los Angeles-area employment agency geared toward recent Chinese immigrants.
A Mandarin-speaking
The man, who spoke with a Mandarin-speaking producer in a series of telephone interviews, said he first spent seven months working for a friend who runs several unlicensed outdoor greenhouses near Fresno, California.
He said the drug sells for $1,000 a pound and is picked up by Chinese buyers who show up at the door. He doesn’t know where it goes from there.
independently verified,
The man’s account could not receive independent verification, but he provided photos of large bags of marijuana that he claimed were produced as part of the operation. Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert on transnational crime and nontraditional security threats at the Brookings Institute, explained that Chinese and Mexican criminal networks seem to organize the trafficking of Chinese migrants—many of whom end up cultivating illegal marijuana.
Mexican criminal networks.
It’s something she believes the US government needs to be paying closer attention to.
“We have been prioritizing China military decision . but Chinese organized crime and organized crime more broadly .” she said. “That needs to change.”
Marijuana houses sold at elevated prices
In Antioch and other nearby cities in recent years, investigators with Cannabis Control began receiving a steady flow of anonymous tips and complaints from neighbors.
As they began to investigate, one tell-tale sign of cultivation was off-the-charts usage of power.
“There was one neighbor, she got her PG&E (utility) bill and it was for $40,000,” said Jones of Cannabis Control. “And she’s like, ‘Whoa.’”
The bill, it turned out, had landed in the wrong mailbox: It belonged to a grow house across the street.
In one raid this spring, authorities found about $1 million worth of illegal weed in a spacious five-bedroom home on Shell Ridge Way. City records show that an inspector deemed the house uninhabitable on the day of the raid in March, citing a fire hazard and “a lot of chemicals” that he believed were ending up in the house’s drainage system.
McAnarney of Cannabis
The idea, he said, is to supplement the current narcotics-investigation, approach of surveilling suspicious characters and banging down doors, – the “fun stuff,” .
Bill Tillson,
who lives on the same block where three homes were raided this spring , removing marijuana-growing equipment and putting one of the houses up for sale, price tag: $900,000. The whole dynamic struck him as unfair.
“It’s like, yeah, we’ll buy these houses, we’ll use them as a grow house … it’s a misdemeanor. No big deal,” Tillson said. “Where are the higher-up people, the politicians?” he asked. “I mean, they’re letting them get away with this?”