Area Rallies Behind Unusual Suspects

For more than 40 years, the antique cash register at Granicy’s Valley Wide Feed Store has rung up sales on everything from steamed rolled oats for hogs to Wild Cat fuel for radio-controlled airplanes.

But it’s the tiny $16 jars of iodine crystals that have caused trouble for the proprietors--three sisters known as the “Lancaster Grannies,” plus one grandpa.

With the community rallying behind them, all four will face a criminal hearing this week, charged with failing to keep proper records on the sale of the crystals, which can be used to make methamphetamine, a powerful stimulant often associated with violent behavior.

A 20-month-old law requires merchants to log detailed information--including driver’s license and vehicle license numbers--on all iodine-crystal buyers. Prosecutors say the Granicy Four are the first defendants to stand trial under the law, which they say is needed to combat illegal meth labs.

But the feed store proprietors say the law is invalid because it forces unqualified private citizens to act as front-line drug informants.

“I don’t know what a drug dealer looks like,” said Armitta Mae Granicy, 60, the lead granny in the fight. “Do I look for a big, old-time biker? Or is it more the long-haired hippie type who hasn’t taken a bath in ages? Or does he drive a big car, carry a wad of money and wear a gold chain? There’s no way I would know.”

Iodine crystals, sold by the ounce in little jars, have been used for decades to treat hoof disease in horses and purify stored water. More recently, they have been used to manufacture methamphetamine.

Granicy’s sold about 16,000 ounces of iodine crystals in a 15-month period--or triple the amount typically sold by similar outlets, according to Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Tom Holeman.

By comparison, all the horse trainers combined at the Santa Anita Race Track purchased a total of 8 ounces of the crystals during a three-month period, he said.

Holeman, a member of a task force formed two years ago to crack down on a suspected cottage industry of meth labs in the Antelope Valley, said investigators pushed for criminal charges after becoming frustrated by Granicy’s refusal to “comply with the law.”

“We have had no problem with other stores,” Holeman said.

“Since Granicy is not gathering the information, we don’t know who they are selling to,” he said. “There were feed dealers combined who didn’t sell as much as Granicy and worked very hard to try to comply with the law.”

A trial is set to begin Thursday in Lancaster. If convicted on the misdemeanor charges, the owner-operators of Granicy’s face up to a year in jail.

*

Hundreds of friends and supporters have rallied to the defense of the family, which represents five generations of business, community and church leaders. On the old bar sits a stack of petitions signed by more than 1,000 people urging that charges be dropped.

“We’re not politically minded,” said Granicy, who has operated the ranch and feed store with her husband, Robert Roy Granicy, 63, since they married in 1958.

“I’m from the Show Me State,” she said, describing the migration of the Herman Lewis family from its Grace Point farm in Missouri to Lancaster in the 1950s. “I don’t think we should have to do the job of law enforcement.”

Also charged with misdemeanor violations are Armitta’s sisters, Dorothy Jean Manning, 67, and Ramona Ann Beck, 62, who operate a gift boutique out of the converted mustard-colored barn at 43040 N. 20th St. East.

The four were arrested and briefly jailed during a Sheriff’s Department raid in March. More than a dozen deputies in SWAT-team fashion surrounded the store, rounded up the sisters (Robert Granicy turned himself in later) and ordered them to jail. The women said they sat for four hours, barefoot, on a concrete bench in a cell, singing church hymns until deputies released them.

“There was no call for all of that,” Armitta Granicy said. “It’s not like we just moved in.”

The 10-acre Granicy Square ranch, reminiscent of a decades-old general store, is a popular draw for youth groups and schoolchildren who go there to learn about farm animals and implements that are fast disappearing into a landscape of new housing tracts.

Robert Granicy’s parents bought 80 acres in 1943 for alfalfa farming. It was later used for dairy farming, then much of it was sold because the high cost of electricity made farming infeasible, Robert Granicy said. Converted to a feed store in the 1960s, it is now the oldest one in the Antelope Valley.

Its most popular feature is a wide variety of antiques displayed about the property, much of it farm implements and household items handed down by generations of the family. None of the antiques is for sale, but a tour through the grounds and store unveil the family’s role in American history from before World War I.

*

Funky items of the past are everywhere. There are farrier tools, washboards, an old stove, dentist’s chair and drill and an ironing board. An old wood toboggan, hood of a jalopy and weathered trunk lay scattered on the roof of a barn, as if they were catapulted there in a collision on the adjoining two-lane, straight-as-an-arrow desert roadway.

Customers address the proprietors by their family nicknames: Dottie, Monie, Mimie and Grandpa. During two scheduled pretrial hearings, supporters donned T-shirts depicting the foursome as mice wielding fry pots and rolling pins and the warning: “WANTED! Lancaster Grannies Armed and Dangerous. Call for Backup!”

The Granicys say their expertise is in selling chicken feed and canine kibble, not sizing up their customers as possible drug traffickers and sneaking out to the parking lot to jot down license numbers on dusty pickup trucks.

Armitta Granicy said she believes she irked deputies when she suggested they assign an undercover investigator to monitor customers at the store. “They have to pay a cop anyway. They could put someone here who knows what to look for.”

The charges against the four were sought by the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.

The law under which they were charged “was brought about because iodine crystals are one of the common elements in the manufacture of meth,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Sherwood, who is prosecuting the case. “We thought it would be a good idea if we could track certain chemicals.”

He said deputies “went by and advised everybody in the Antelope Valley area of the new law,” but only the operators at Granicy said they “had no intention of complying.”

He said deputies then “did subsequent investigative work” that led to the filing of 14 misdemeanor charges against the Granicy operators.

Defense attorney Alison Bloom of Los Angeles counters that the law “makes no provision for the protection of feed-store owners from reprisal attacks from drug dealers.”

Concerted enforcement efforts by sheriff’s deputies and the Drug Enforcement Administration have prompted many Southland feed dealers and saddleries to quit carrying the crystals, distributors say.

*

More than half of the 50 or so feed and equestrian shops that Armitta Granicy serves in Southern California have quit ordering the crystals, said Darlene Gilbert, a sales representative for Western Saddlery, a California distributor.

“We don’t sell as much of the crystals any more because of the regulations,” Gilbert said. Retailers “don’t want to be bothered with the paperwork. It’s too troublesome for them.”

She said retailers reported visits from sheriff’s deputies in San Bernardino County shortly after the law went into effect in January 1999. The latest crackdown by the DEA, Gilbert said, is underway in Norco.

“I’ve heard from about a half-dozen or more [customers],” she said. “There’s been talk about not distributing it any more. They say, ‘It is just such a headache that maybe we should drop it.’ ”