2 men arrested in Norco home pot operation

The two men guided a moving van into the hillside Norco community under the darkness of a January night. After that, neighbors said, they rarely saw them until another late evening about four months later.

That was when Lin Jie, 40, and Han Wan Cheng, 45, were led out of their rural-area home by authorities, accused of harvesting 1,447 marijuana plants worth $8.5 million on the street. The pair were arrested in a raid early Friday after an anonymous tip, Riverside County sheriff’s investigator Jerry Franchville said.

The stash of marijuana they allegedly cultivated is the latest of more than a dozen uncovered in typically quiet Southland neighborhoods in recent weeks. Most were housed in the eastern San Gabriel Valley cities of Diamond Bar and Chino Hills, though a Riverside man was also arrested at his residence Monday on suspicion of growing more than 675 marijuana plants.

Detectives are investigating whether the various finds are linked, possibly to Asian organized crime.

Whether the Norco operation is connected remains unclear. It “hasn’t been linked to any of the others, but we aren’t ruling out the possibility that it might be,” Franchville said.

“This one, in particular, was very sophisticated, I’ll give them that.”

The new owners of the 2,400-square-foot, one-story stucco home in the 400 block of Mount Shasta Drive stuck out in a community where many residents maintain horses in their backyards.

Although the lawn was in pristine condition and the flowers well manicured, Jie and Cheng were seldom around, neighbors said.

“It’s a shock for the whole neighborhood, but others said they had their ideas about them,” next-door neighbor Raven Wilson said.

Wilson added that Jie and Cheng seemed like good people the few times she saw them, usually waving before quickly going inside their home.

“But they never really talked,” she said.

Recently neighbors noticed a lot of water running from the house into the storm drain which, according to Franchville, was likely caused by the installation of a new irrigation system.

The house was gutted, with several interior walls torn down, Franchville said. Except for the master bedroom, he said, the entire structure was full of marijuana plants in various stages of growth.

The operation used 70 1,000-watt sunlamps and more than 200 gallons of liquid fertilizer, with drip-irrigation and water-recycling systems rigged through every room.

“One of the bathtubs had been covered with a board, and there was a light above it,” Franchville said. “It looked like they started growing the marijuana there and as it got bigger, they moved it to other parts of the house.”

The electricity had been tapped directly from power lines, with about $17,000 worth bypassing meters over a three-month period, Franchville said.

Jie and Cheng were arrested on suspicion of cultivating marijuana and other drug-related charges.

Both were booked into the Robert Presley Detention Center in Riverside.

“From what I understand,” Franchville said, “this is one of the largest busts in the county. Obviously these guys were spending some big bucks to run this operation.”

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jonathan.abrams@latimes.com