Digging Up Details on Pot Farm Scheme : Law: Two men are sentenced to a year in County Jail for building an elaborate underground pot garden at a DWP plant.

Sure, Boyd Duffin admits now, the money was a lure when he decided to build a secret underground marijuana farm at the Scattergood generating station in Playa del Rey.

But the really intriguing part, he said, was whether he could figure out how to get away with it.

He almost did.

Duffin and his partner in the scheme, Richard Viduka, were sentenced 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 that illicit dream.

After the former DWP workers were ordered to return to court May 5 to begin serving their sentence, possibly under a work furlough program, Duffin said he is grateful for the judge’s leniency.

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

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

“I needed a job,” said Viduka, who had been working as a carpenter at the steam plant on a day-to-day basis for more than four years.

Grand jury transcripts and other court documents outline how the two men proceeded with the bizarre scheme.

Duffin, a construction supervisor at Scattergood for seven years, began talking to Viduka about building the rooms in early 1990 while the two men commuted to work from their Canyon Country homes.

In a written statement to the court, Viduka said he was dubious.

“I thought it was crazy to go ahead with such a plan, but I was faced with a dilemma,” Viduka said. “If I turned him in, I would have no proof of what he had proposed.

Because Duffin decided whether Viduka would work each day, “I felt there was no doubt that . . . he would have only had his hands slapped, my employment would be terminated and the whole thing would be covered up by the department,” Viduka said

Outside court, Duffin dismissed Viduka’s contention. They were in it together, he said.

Duffin submitted a work order for construction of three gravel and dirt storage bins on a concrete slab near the southeastern corner of Scattergood, according to court records.

After the work order was approved, Duffin secretly ordered two backhoes brought to the site. During night and weekend hours, he had overtime workers dig a 20-by-40-foot hole where the slab was to be installed.

Evidently, none of the workers on the site knew that they were working on an illegal project, court records show.

The workers added a long wall down the middle of the hole, separating it into two chambers, and Duffin and Viduka set up a framework over which the slab could be poured.

Duffin and Viduka dug an access hole to the chambers in the corner of a storage room next to the site. Duffin then set up an employee weightlifting area in the room and used a set of lockers to conceal the entrance hole.

When the work was done, two 10-by-40-foot rooms were hidden beneath the construction slab. Painted white to reflect light, the rooms had air conditioning, running water, irrigation pumps and nearly 40 ceiling-level electrical outlets for light fixtures. Investigators estimate that the facility eventually could have produced three $50,000 crops of marijuana each year.

But Duffin’s boss, supervisor William Liatti, became suspicious. Duffin, he said, had been asking him when he would leave each day and whether he would be back. In addition, Duffin had changed the lock on the weightlifting room several times without telling Liatti.

Exasperated, Liatti testified that in December, 1990, he told Duffin he was leaving for the day but returned. Using a penknife to jimmy the storage room door, Liatti entered and saw light filtering from behind the lockers.

When he looked behind them, he heard music wafting up from underground and saw a ladder jutting from a hole in the ground.

Liatti climbed down and discovered Duffin and Viduka listening to a radio and working inside one of the chambers.

In an angry confrontation, Liatti ordered them to seal the entrance, he said. He told a colleague about the find but did not report his discovery to plant managers.

“I said: ‘I have worked too hard to acquire the work that we have here at the plant for our section. I don’t want to be embarrassed by it,’ ” Liatti testified he told his friend.

“I didn’t want the city to have a big scandal.”

Duffin and Viduka sealed the entrance, and Liatti hoped that was the end of it.

It wasn’t.

Liatti testified that Duffin arranged for a large toolshed to be moved to the site. Instead of setting the shed directly on the ground, however, Duffin had it propped nearly a foot off the ground on a concrete foundation.

Over time, Liatti noticed, the airspace between the shed and ground was filled up with dirt.

Three months after his confrontation with Duffin and Viduka, Liatti became suspicious that they might be digging a new tunnel, he testified.

In late February, 1991, he told the plant manager about the chambers. DWP investigators were called in to look for an entrance.

On the night of March 1, a team of officials broke into the toolshed, on which Duffin had also been regularly changing the locks. Behind an inside door, in which someone had punched a peephole and drawn a crude sketch of an eye around the hole, investigators found a tool cabinet.

Putting it aside, they found a hinged, wooden trapdoor concealing the entrance to a narrow tunnel.

Carrying flashlights, they lowered themselves into the dank shaft and began slithering forward on their bellies. After crawling about 60 feet, a cavern opened up in front of them.

Although there was no marijuana in the rooms when officials found them, soil tests revealed that marijuana had been grown there recently. Two 100-foot rolls of irrigation hose were beside a special seedling table. A large jar of nitric acid, used as a base in fertilizers, also was there.

The scope of the scheme shocked even the judge who sentenced the two men to jail.

“I find very disturbing the audacity of the defendants,” Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert O’Neill said. “This was outrageous conduct.”