from: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/state/20070407-9999-1n7pothouse.html
Savvy marijuana growers are moving their operations indoors
By Matt Krasnowski - COPLEY NEWS SERVICE April 7, 2007
DIAMOND BAR - After a new neighbor moved in across the street from Betty Phillips, the block took on a distinctive odor.
"It was awful," she said. "I thought we had skunks."
Last week, Phillips learned the smell was coming from a different suburban nuisance - one that is increasingly finding its way into upscale enclaves around California and the rest of the nation.
Inside her new neighbor's $580,000, three-bedroom home, police found 1,886 marijuana plants with an estimated street value of up to $10 million.
A week earlier and a few miles across town, investigators discovered about 2,100 plants worth up to $12 million in a 3,000-square-foot, two-story home, which in January had sold for more than $800,000.
On Wednesday, two more pot-growing homes were found in Rowland Heights, a bedroom community a few miles west of Diamond Bar. The homes had a combined 1,800 plants worth up to $10 million, an investigator said.
Officials in San Diego also announced this week that they had shut down a novel growing operation in Santa Ysabel - 454 plants in a series of underground rooms accessible by elevator.
Although the indoor marijuana farms in Diamond Bar weren't quite that creative, the discoveries shocked residents of this clean, quiet, suburban city of 58,000 people nestled in the hills about 25 miles east of Los Angeles.
But law enforcement officials say the locals have simply discovered what many suburban families across North America have learned: Large-scale pot growers want to be their neighbors.
The trend should concern suburbanites, even if they believe marijuana isn't a hard-core drug, officials said. Wherever millions of dollars' worth of pot plants go, criminals and violence often follow.
Having such a criminal enterprise in a neighborhood setting is "fraught with potential danger," said Dan Simmons, an agent in the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's San Diego office.
"In the past several years, there has been a proliferation of indoor growers," he added. "If I could attribute that to anything, it would be the perceived ease with which you can grow marijuana in your own home."
The DEA said more than 400,000 plants were seized from so-called "grow houses" nationwide last year, a steep increase from the 270,000 plants discovered in 2005.
San Diego County has had several in addition to the one in Santa Ysabel.
DEA and Internal Revenue Service agents found more than 1,000 plants last year in two Oceanside homes owned by Bardia Rahimzadeh, who pleaded guilty to charges in connection with that case.
Brothers Christopher and Eric DeMatteis also pleaded guilty last year to charges in connection with 555 plants discovered in a house Eric owned in a gated Oceanside community.
In Florida, Georgia, New Hampshire and Washington state, law enforcement officials have found well-to-do residences that essentially have been gutted, rewired and turned into greenhouses with the purpose of using every square foot for marijuana production.
In the past nine months in California, law enforcement agencies have found 50 grow houses, most in new housing developments ranging from the Sacramento area to the Central Valley. Roughly 24,000 plants worth an estimated $90 million were seized and 16 people were arrested, said Gordon Taylor, a DEA agent based in Sacramento.
Law enforcement officials said they believe those houses are connected to a Vietnamese organized-crime outfit from the San Francisco area.
"Why are they picking these neighborhoods? One theory is that in these newer developments, there is a relative anonymity. People don't really know their neighbors and (they are) less likely to have suspicions raised if someone is not there that often," Taylor said.
Almost all the Northern California homes were purchased using 100 percent financing, Taylor said. The homes were so heavily financed that there was nothing for the owners to forfeit to the government.
The trend appears to have originated in the Canadian province of British Columbia, Taylor said, where Asian crime groups are suspected of having thousands of growing operations. Their product, known as "B.C. Bud," is highly potent and can cost up to $5,000 a pound.
American growers apparently "have stolen a page from the B.C. Bud handbook," turning up first in Washington and now California, Taylor said.
Although some neighbors of the Diamond Bar homes said they were worried about possible retribution from associates of the arrested growers, others said the pot operations caused little concern.
"It's not like it's a crack house," said Bill Maher, a seven-year Diamond Bar resident who lives across the street from the house raided on March 21.
Neighbors of these homes have good reason to be concerned. Some homes with indoor pot-growing operations have suffered damage from fires, possibly because of substandard rewiring. In Oceanside earlier this year, firefighters arrived at a burning home and discovered hundreds of marijuana plants in a converted garage.
The DEA's Taylor pointed out that while many people don't consider marijuana to be a hard drug, it's serious business to the people who cultivate and distribute it.
"When you have organized-crime groups where millions of dollars are at stake, it would not be unusual for there to be violence involved at some point," he said.
