Police Say 5th Pot Farm Tied to Antelope Valley Ring : Drugs: A diesel truck leads investigators to the unfinished plantation near Barstow. Officers had uncovered two near Lancaster and two in Arizona.

Narcotics investigators have discovered an indoor marijuana farm under construction near Barstow linked to a multimillion-dollar network that dug four elaborate marijuana farms under the desert in the Antelope Valley and Arizona, authorities said Friday.

Two men were arrested, bringing to 12 the number of people being held in California and Arizona as the result of a widening probe into the drug network. Authorities have seized $77 million worth of plants from the organization, calling it the most sophisticated, well-organized marijuana ring ever discovered in Los Angeles County and a major supplier of California’s marijuana market.

Two San Diego-area contractors were arrested late Wednesday at a desert house near Daggett, where federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents and San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies found an almost complete cultivation site in a building designed to look like a horse ranch, deputies said.

No drugs or weapons were found, sheriff’s Sgt. Del Wiedeman said.

John McIntosh, 38, and John Ralston, 49, were being held at the Barstow sheriff’s station in lieu of $1-million bail on suspicion of conspiracy to distribute marijuana, Sgt. Jerry Tesselaar said.

Last week, two subterranean farms were raided in the Antelope Valley and four men were charged, including Lancaster contractor Frank Gegax. Investigators describe Gegax as the central figure in the operation.

Unlike the Antelope Valley farms and two others discovered in Arizona last month, the Daggett site, about five miles from Barstow, was still under construction and intended as an aboveground plantation, Wiedeman said. But he said that there was no doubt the farm was part of the same network. “It’s definitely connected to Gegax,” Wiedeman said.

He said employees of a Needles fuel distributor, after seeing news reports of the Arizona arrests, identified a diesel fuel truck that reportedly had been used to supply fuel for generators for the underground farms. They told investigators that they had seen the truck in Daggett while passing through there earlier this week.

Investigators searching the area for the truck located it at the Daggett farm, Wiedeman said.

Wiedeman said investigators found the same type of pipe at the Daggett farm that was used to supply the watering system at the other four farms.

The other four were dug beneath remote desert houses. One operation near Lancaster was concealed in a thick concrete bunker beneath a basketball court. Water was pumped from tanks with capacities up to 5,000 gallons. The farms used diesel generators for supplemental electricity to conceal massive power consumption by hundreds of plant-growing lights, valued at $500 each.

Three of the farms also employed hydroponic--liquid solution with no soil--growing methods and fully automated watering and fertilization systems in which the water was recycled.