Our Carnac powers must have been set on high (no pun intended) when we wrote about the increase in marijuana grow houses in California two weeks ago.
Last Saturday's Claremont Courier had a blurb in its Police Blotter about a marijuana grow house on Cleary Ct. in Northeast Claremont a few blocks from La Puerta Sports Park.
The Courier's Police Blotter had this to say about the June 6th raid on the Cleary Ct. grow house:
Police found over 500 marijuana plants at a home in north Claremont, the first ever ‘grow house’ discovered within the city limits. Police could not determine an estimated street value of the plants.
A search warrant was served at the residence around 3:18 p.m. after extensive police surveillance. Police were initially tipped off about the home, located at 167 Cleary Ct., from suspicious neighbors. The windows of the home were covered in black plastic tarps, the trash was not taken out regularly and nobody seemed to live at the location permanently.
Jeffrey Gway, 52, has rented the 4-bedroom, 2-story home since April. Mr. Gway was arrested at his residence in Rancho Cucamonga. Another suspect connected to the operation, Carl McEntire, 28, of Rancho Cucamonga, was also arrested. Mr. McEntire was often seen driving to and from the home. Police believe the owners of the home did not have knowledge of the operation.
The Blotter also reported that the suspects had stolen about $4,000 worth of electricity by wiring around the electric meter.
Our Insider Security Team may have stumbled onto this grow house phenomena** (see below) in its nightly Claremont surveillance. We'll have to check on that. In the meantime, we've found some ways for estimating the street value of the Cleary Ct. plants. The articles we were able to find on the subject generally agreed that each plant can produce up to one pound of processed marijuana. The articles also varied between street values of $1,500 and $4,000 per pound of marijuana, depending on the market and the quality of the product.
So, using the lower figure, we get an estimated value of $750,000 for the 500 plants (one pound per plant times $1,500).
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[**We checked with our Security Team. As a cost-cutting measure, we have outsourced all of our security work to India, and Anand in Bangalore was a bit slow in reviewing the data. With the large antenna arrays you see on the mountain above town, we capture every phone call, police communication, Code Red signal, video camera image, and most private conversations in town. Hey, we're not the Government, so it might be OK. This Insider Echelon system produces terabytes of data daily, and it takes poor old Anand a little time to get through it. But here we provide the recently-declassified image taken from the Claremont Police Helicopter (betcha didn't know about that, either) from two weeks ago.]
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