Fifth Pot Farm Linked to Others Found in Desert

Narcotics investigators said Friday that they have discovered another indoor marijuana farm, this one under construction near Barstow, that is linked to a multimillion-dollar network that dug four other similar farms under the desert in the Antelope Valley and Arizona.

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 alleged drug network. Authorities have seized plants valued at $77 million from the sophisticated organization, which they consider a major supplier of California’s marijuana market.

In the latest discovery, two San Diego-area building contractors were arrested Wednesday at a desert home 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 barn, 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 on $1 million bail each on suspicion of conspiracy to distribute marijuana.

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

Unlike the Antelope Valley farms and two discovered in Arizona last month, the Daggett site was under construction and intended as an above-ground plantation, Wiedeman said.

He said the farm was “definitely connected to (the) Gegax” network.

The latest raid followed a tip from employees of a Needles fuel distributor who saw news reports of the Arizona arrests and recognized a diesel fuel truck that reportedly had supplied fuel for generators for the underground farms, Wiedeman said. They told authorities that they had seen the truck in Daggett this week, he said.

Investigators found the truck at the Daggett farm, Wiedeman said.

They also found that the same type of pipe at the Daggett farm was used for the watering systems at the other farms, he said.