Marijuana grown in suburban basements, linked to Vietnamese gangs

A rising number of lawbreakers are seeking the quiet haven of Northeast Ohio's suburbia to set up giant indoor marijuana nurseries.

Since 2006, 15 people have been arrested in Northeast Ohio in connection with large indoor marijuana-growing operations. The growers are Asian immigrants - some of whom are legal Canadian residents - who raise the crops to sell in the United States, police and prosecutors say.

These growers, with links to organized crime, have seeped southward from Canada and eastward from the West Coast, where a web of interconnected crime cells has operated for years, law enforcement officials say.

Their trademark: They modify large, expensive suburban homes and use sophisticated techniques to turn basements into what police call "grow operations" or "grow-ops."

Local authorities say the phenomenon is planted firmly here and point to the recent crackdowns as proof.

This summer, police uncovered three basement nurseries in Geauga, Portage and Lake counties. Last year, police discovered a network of houses in Medina and Lorain counties. Most of the homes contained hundreds of marijuana plants nurtured in complex cultivation setups.

The 15 people arrested are Vietnamese immigrants, three of whom are legal residents of Canada. Seven people have been convicted; one man's trial is under way in Medina County Common Pleas Court.

In recent years, local drug agents have focused on detecting and shutting down small mom-and-pop methamphetamine houses.

But now, many train with Canadian police to recognize this new surge of grow-ops, said John Sommer, who directs the Ohio High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a federally funded regional drug task force.

"This is our new problem," Sommer said.

Canadian Mounties discovered prototype

The movement appears to have roots in the western Canadian province of British Columbia, authorities on both sides of the border say.

Superintendent Paul Nadeau, director of drug enforcement for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, recalls seeing his first basement grow-op as a drug agent in British Columbia in the early 1980s. Upon finding about 30 plants in a suburban Vancouver house, his sergeant proclaimed: "This will never catch on."

Yet, by the middle of the next decade, British Columbia police saw about 500 grow-ops, Nadeau said. There were so many that it became almost too much for investigators to handle. Growers even put a tag to their product that has become synonymous with high-grade marijuana: "B.C. Bud."

This was not pot for private use, Nadeau said. The marijuana cultivated up north made its way to the lucrative U.S. market, where a pound of pot worth about $3,000 in Canada doubled in value, Nadeau said.

About four years ago, Canadian police also began to notice a change in whom they were arresting in connection with the grow-ops. A study done two years ago highlighted a growing number of Vietnamese suspects in British Columbia.

By 2003, one of every three suspects arrested for large-scale cultivation was of Vietnamese origin, according to the study conducted by researchers at the University College of Fraser Valley in British Columbia.

Noting the similarity in the arrests and structure of the grow-ops, investigators conclude that Asian organized-crime groups - particularly Vietnamese and Chinese gangs - were heavily into international marijuana trade, possibly working with other organized crime groups such as biker gangs or the Mafia.

"It's quite clear we're talking about organized crime groups," Nadeau said.

The desire to reap the advantages of the American market have probably pushed the enterprise farther into the United States, law enforcement officials say. Establishing grow-ops in the United States also cuts out the risk of being busted while trying to move marijuana across the border, where security is tighter after Sept. 11, 2001.

While outdoor marijuana growing by Mexican drug gangs has always been a concern, U.S. drug agents saw a spike in the number of indoor sites busted and plants confiscated from 2001 to 2006, according to a report released this year by the National Drug Intelligence Center.

The report also notes growing activity among Asian gangs in Ontario, Quebec and New England. They are said to use larger homes with modified ventilation, timed watering and fertilizing systems, and bypassed electric meters.

The modifications to the house's electrical system have created risks of house fires, Nadeau said, an issue that gave authorities more freedom to follow private utility use and prompted British Columbia authorities to form police units dedicated solely to quashing indoor grow-ops.

Police never know where an investigation will lead

Still, grow-ops usually are uncovered when police are investigating another crime.

It was a house fire that led police to a Wadsworth cannabis factory in April 2006. Firefighters came upon 236 plants in the suburban basement, and soon out-of-state investigators were calling local drug agents about a possible drug ring in the area.

By that June, local drug agents had arrested 12 Vietnamese immigrants, including three married couples and one engaged pair. Seven of the suspects either have pleaded guilty or have been convicted by juries, according to court records.

Authorities said they believed the pot raised in Medina County was being taken out of state or that the suspects had international ties.

The opening arguments in the trial of 40-year-old Khuong V. Hoang in Medina County Common Pleas Court last week offered a glimpse into the nature of a highly structured marijuana-growing enterprise, Assistant Medina County Prosecutor Anne Eisenhower said.

The ring of suspects controlled nurseries in new, suburban hideaways in Brunswick, Brunswick Hills Township and Avon, typically purchased for well over $200,000, authorities say.

The growers drilled into the basement wall to connect electrical lines that would bypass the meter, which disguises tell-tale heavy electric use, authorities say. They also created a ventilation system with foil air ducts that channeled smelly, moist air from the basement into upper-level closets and through the roof.

Eisenhower told jurors that the 12 held barbecues to mask suspicious smells and give the impression of normal activity. They did not live in the homes, but in three Brunswick apartments.

While they had no jobs, they drove Lexus SUVs, wore Rolex watches and diamond rings and paid off the expensive mortgages, she said.

Drug agents - some of whom had trained with Canadian police - used heat-detecting surveillance gear to measure heat coming from basements and exhausts. When police moved into the homes, they found more than 600 plants and $60,000 worth of grow equipment, including 1,000-watt bulbs and a variety of plant nutrients. They also found more than $70,000 wrapped in a Vietnamese newspaper in the home of one man prosecutors described as the group's "banker."

One of the twelve, 32-year-old Tuan Do, was to testify against Hoang. Eisenhower said Do was an apprentice who was being taught the ways of the organization.

Last month, law enforcement authorities swooped down on barely furnished houses in Geauga, Portage and Lake counties. Those busts yielded a total of 1,500 plants worth about $1.5 million.

Three Vietnamese immigrants - one with a Canadian address - have been charged in the raids. It's unclear whether they were connected to the Medina County ring.

Investigators say the latest probe likely would lead them out of Ohio. Within the last two weeks, agents searched two homes in Mentor, but police are guarded with the details as the investigation unfolds. Also, two weekends ago, two Asian-Canadians were stopped on the Ohio Turnpike by state troopers, who discovered 142 pounds of marijuana in a minivan.

Asian gangs run

intricate operations

As local drug agents came down on the Northeast Ohio pot nurseries last month, police in a small town northeast of Philadelphia raided a suburban home and found 800 plants, according to court records and news reports. The suspect: an Asian man.

Law enforcement officials are careful when speaking about the ethnicity of the suspects, but many acknowledge that the fact that all are Asian is beyond coincidence.

"They've frankly acquired a reputation of growing marijuana in marijuana ops," Nadeau said.

Police in North America are not the only ones taking note; drug agents in New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom have also had to deal with the cultivation trend. The British Broadcasting Corp., citing a study, reported in March that Vietnamese gangs ran 75 percent of the illicit nurseries found in the United Kingdom's booming pot trade.

Who might be pulling the strings remains a major unanswered question. Instead of one "Mr. Big," authorities believe these criminals work in small groups called cells that network to trade large quantities of drugs or launder money.

Drug agents and prosecutors theorize the organizations work much like a compartmentalized corporation, where one employee may not know the fellow on the other side of the cubicle wall. Trying to connect the dots to the bigger players can be a challenge because, as Sommer said, "Many times, [those involved] don't even know each other."

Making the issue more complex is the issue of race. The Asian gangs have probably formed much like other ethnic-based crime groups, taking advantage of customs, language and physical appearance to keep outsiders - and police - on the outside.

Canadian agents have made contact with Vietnamese police to learn more about tracking the money internationally, Nadeau said. They also have had some success at breaking through to the next layers: those who enable the growers to set up.

Canadian authorities recently convicted an Asian mortgage broker in British Columbia who was involved in the illicit purchase of at least 100 homes through fraudulent loans.

The developments have not been lost on Northeast Ohio's Vietnamese immigrant community, where civic leaders have expressed surprise and concern and have described those arrested as dangerous outsiders to Northeast Ohio's 3,500-strong Vietnamese community. Some leaders have expressed dismay that the busts would put the growing local community in a bad light.

The Rev. Augustine Pham Lan is the leader of St. Boniface Catholic Church on Cleveland's West Side, where on Sunday morning 200 Vietnamese parishioners come to celebrate Mass in the tongue of their homeland. He said his worry is that youths will be tempted to a dangerous lifestyle to earn fast money.

"We are very much aware of it in the community," he said. "These people need to be called out."