Playa Del Rey : Pot Growers Sentenced

Two men who built a secret underground marijuana farm at the Scattergood generating station in Playa del Rey were sentenced this week to a year in County Jail and ordered to repay the Department of Water and Power more than $31,000 for the supplies, equipment and work time they stole to build the farm.

Boyd Duffin and Richard Viduka were ordered to return to court May 5 to begin serving their sentence, possibly under a work furlough program.

According to testimony, two 10-by-40-foot rooms, each about nine feet high, were constructed and concealed under a construction slab. The chambers were painted white to reflect more light back on the marijuana plants, Viduka told investigators. Each room had a sophisticated air-conditioning and air-filtration system, running water, plastic-lined reservoirs and pumps to catch and redistribute water, and more than two dozen ceiling-level electrical outlets for light fixtures.

Investigators estimate the facility eventually could have produced three $50,000 crops of marijuana each year.

After sentencing, Duffin said he was grateful for the judge’s leniency.

“I made a mistake,” he admitted in a brief interview outside court. “I just kept making that mistake. . . . It became like a challenge to see if we could get away with it, more than the greed for the money.”

Viduka, distraught and near tears after the sentencing, said “it’s only obvious” that Duffin, his boss at the time, coerced him into helping build the subterranean chambers.