1,000 Pot Plants Seized, 2 Men Arrested in Raid

Authorities Tuesday raided a luxury home they said was packed with more than 1,000 high-grade marijuana plants and arrested two men on suspicion of cultivating the illicit crop.

The plants were nourished by timer-controlled ultraviolet lamps, a sophisticated irrigation system and environmental controls that created tropical conditions inside the home, authorities said.

One man was arrested after he tried to escape out the back door of the house, authorities said.

Police said at least two other possible suspects may have driven past the house in a black Durango even as law enforcement officials mopped up the crime scene.

“They drove right past us,” one investigator said in frustration. “But we have the main guy.”

The “main guy,” identified as a 62-year-old Bel-Air man, drove up to the house hours after the bust and was promptly ordered at gunpoint out of his late model pickup truck, police said. Investigators said Los Angeles detectives found a $6,000 stack of bills in the man’s pockets.

Authorities did not immediately release the names of the suspects.

One detective was injured during the raid, suffering a jammed finger as he used a battering ram to break open a locked bedroom door. He suffered nerve damage to a finger, police said.

Situated in the residential, tree-lined 13500 block of Morrison Avenue, the two-story house is within walking distance of two schools.

The suspects rented the home about a year ago for about $2,000 a month and converted it into an indoor pot plantation, complete with four bedrooms used as greenhouses, authorities said. One room nurtured seedlings and another served as a harvest room, in which buds were plucked off the plants, weighed and packaged for sale, investigators said.

Police Department officials refused Tuesday to identify the two people arrested in the raid.

The bust came one day after Los Angeles County sheriff’s detectives, acting on an anonymous tip, found and destroyed a field of 350 marijuana plants camouflaged under a large brown and green tarp in Topanga Canyon.

The field in the 1700 block of Sycamore Drive was found by a patrolman acting on a tip concerning one of the growers, officials said.

LAPD officials said the two incidents are unrelated.

The Sherman Oaks raid culminated a monthlong LAPD investigation. But one source said Drug Enforcement Administration agents had been following the suspects for even longer.

LAPD Det. Robert Holcomb said the plants were mature and nearly ready to harvest. Holcomb said several garbage bags full of marijuana leaves led him to believe the suspects had already harvested one crop this year. He estimated the plants inside the house were worth about $300,000.

Authorities said water was pumped upstairs with a system of hoses and pipes, and that plant-growing lights and humidifiers created optimum conditions. The plant-filled upstairs bedrooms were also flooded with carbon dioxide and fans sucked oxygen out through the chimney, authorities said.

“That way neighbors couldn’t smell it,” Holcomb said.

Once investigators braced open the front door, the pungent odor could be detected from the street in front of the home.

Department of Water and Power officials were also investigating the home because the suspects allegedly tapped into power lines to steal more than $1,000 worth of electricity a month for their crop.