Homes turned into high-tech hothouses

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A DEA official says indoor operations increased 50 percent in 2005.

ELK GROVE, Calif. (AP) — Leon Nunn stepped out his front door one recent afternoon only to be waved back by a squadron of drug agents using a battering ram on a neighbor's home.

The half-million-dollar home in the quiet subdivision was found to be stuffed with high-grade marijuana plants, growing in soil-free trays under bright lights.

More than 40 similar busts have been reported over the past two months in neighborhoods in and around Sacramento, exposing what has become a new battleground in California's battle against marijuana cartels.

Suspicious ties

Pot growers with suspected ties to Asian organized crime in San Francisco have been buying suburban homes to the east because of the anonymity the neighborhoods offer, and because the houses are relatively affordable by California standards. The owners then they close the blinds and convert the homes into marijuana hothouses.

"We had no idea. I was shocked," said Nunn, an associate minister at Elk Grove's Progressive Church of God in Christ. "We never saw them or heard from them. It was just a real quiet house on the block."

The Nunns have since installed security lights and cameras and said some of their neighbors are talking about moving away.

"Now we're just suspicious every time we see something around here," said the minister's wife, Patricia. "You pay this much money, you don't expect those things to happen."

Until now, West Coast law enforcement agencies have been more concerned about large-scale outdoor marijuana gardens, which often are planted in public forests or parks by Mexican drug cartels.

The Drug Enforcement Agency saw a 50 percent increase nationwide in indoor operations in 2005 from the year before, said Gordon Taylor, who heads the Drug Enforcement Administration region in central and Northern California.

Indoor advantages

Growing marijuana indoors has certain advantages: The operations cannot be spotted by an airplane or a hunter, and the plants can be grown year-round.

Police from Sacramento to Stockton, about 40 miles to the south, are bashing in doors at homes virtually every day as they develop new leads or are tipped by suddenly wary neighbors. "I've been doing this almost 20 years, and I have never seen this many indoor grow operations in such a small area in such a short period of time," Taylor said.

Wednesday, September 27, 2006