Police Stage Raids After 2 Warehouses Go to Pot

When Louis Wingo and his son-in-law built an industrial warehouse building a couple of years ago, their first tenant said he held a patent on a machine for placer gold mining.

Maybe so, maybe not.

The building was raided Tuesday night by narcotics agents who discovered an indoor marijuana plantation--a soilless, hydroponics operation equipped with sophisticated irrigation, lighting and climate control systems that operated automatically.

The drug busters confiscated 2,300 high-grade sinsemilla marijuana plants--the largest haul in years if not in the county’s history, authorities say.

The discovery was virtually a carbon copy of a similar drug raid last Thursday just two blocks away, in which another small industrial-warehouse building was found to be housing a thriving marijuana operation.

Last week’s bust led to the one Tuesday night. Combined, the two operations are believed to have resulted in more than $30 million--and perhaps more than $50 million--in illicit marijuana sales over the last three years, said Lt. Al Fulmer of the county’s multi-agency Narcotics Task Force.

“Someone out there will be out some money, and someone will be out of smoke,” Fulmer said. “Whether this is part of a statewide or national operation, we don’t know. The investigation is in its infancy.”

If nothing else, the discoveries have other landowners in the industrial section of town wondering where else the illegal weed may be growing in their neighborhood.

The first of the back-to-back busts was sparked by a tip to Escondido police from a worker in the area. The information led narcotics agents to 222 Vinewood St., a small, unmarked and undistinguished building with aluminium siding and a fake rock front, just a few blocks from the city’s Auto Park collection of car dealerships.

Inside, police found a maze of irrigation hoses, automatic pumps and holding tanks where fertilizer was added to the the recirculated water. Timers activated lights and fans turned on automatically when it got too warm inside.

“It’s the most sophisticated growing operation we’ve ever seen,” Fulmer said at the time.

An estimated 1,300 marijuana plants--some which were ready for harvest--were thriving inside the building. Each mature plant would yield one to two pounds of high-grade marijuana, worth $2,000 a pound to the grower, Fulmer said. And because of the controlled environment, plants reached maturity in 120 days, enabling the grower to harvest three crops a year, versus the annual crops harvested outdoors, Fulmer said.

James F. Noble, 35, of Escondido, was arrested on the day of the raid and charged with the cultivation and possession of marijuana for sale. He is free after posting $5,100 bail. Fulmer said federal charges against Noble were being considered on Wednesday.

But, Fulmer said, the operation was more than a one-man show and more arrests are expected.

Based on information obtained during the Vinewood Street raid, narcotics agents began staking out a warehouse at 116 Market Place on Saturday night. Finally on Tuesday night, with no one having entered the building, police moved in and uncovered the strikingly similar--but larger--marijuana growing operation.

“It was the same kind of setup with the same sophistication, but the equipment was even better,” Fulmer said.

At both warehouses, the tenant had illegally hooked up to buried San Diego Gas & Electric Co. power lines at the curb, bootlegging an estimated $70,000 in electricity at the Vinewood building and an unknown amount of electricity at the Market Place building, an SDG&E; spokesman said.

The utility likely would not have uncovered the theft of electricity had it not been for the drug raids, the spokesman said, noting that the company estimates that it loses more than $7 million a year in energy theft.

Fulmer said the raids on the two indoor plantations were the first of their kinds in the county.

“It’s very possible that a lot of people are growing marijuana indoors, because of the pressure being put on them because of the overflights (aerial observations by law enforcement agencies in aircraft). They’re moving indoors, but that’s not cheap. It takes a lot of sophistication, and you need a lot of money for the initial investment in equipment and a building,” Fulmer said.

“That’s bad for us because we can’t spot the marijuana growing, and we can’t go inside a building unless we have probable cause. So we have to rely on tips.”

The owners of the building on Market Place said they had no idea what was going on inside.

“It shocked the heck out of us when the police called to tell us,” said Jeanne Wingo. “The guy we leased the building to said he had a patent on a slushing machine for gold mining. But then he subleased the building to someone else, which he wasn’t supposed to do.

“We’d drive around the building to make sure it was being maintained, but we never went inside. And he never missed a rental payment. He always paid well ahead of time.”

A man who works near the Market Place building, who asked to remain anonymous, said he has seen two men and a woman around the building during evening hours, sometimes carrying hat-box size containers back and forth. “They always seemed secretive--they always looked around and never walked under the lights,” he said. “My boss figured he must be working on some secret manufacturing process.”

Wes Carter, a neighbor near the Vinewood building, said he had talked infrequently to the tenant of the building, who usually would appear on weekends, accompanied by “a couple of Doberman dogs.”

“We’d talk back and forth but I never asked what he did,” Carter said. “I just figured he had a little manufacturing or assembly business going on. I knew he had to be doing something to pay the rent. And he always kept the place looking real nice out front. Just a couple of weekends ago he was out here, picking up clippings and stuff.”