Posted on 09/08/2017 8:49:57 AM PDT by kitchen
Well before dawn Thursday, about a dozen local and federal law enforcement agents drove to an abandoned well pad near De Beque, shouldered some 60 pounds of gear each and began a three-mile trek through the chilly dark of the Colorado River banks by way of Union Pacific railroad tracks.
Agents with night optics peered down from cliffs on either side of Interstate 70, and three Mesa County Sheriff’s Office boats took to the river as the team made its way to one of two river islands they believed were home to a massive illegal marijuana grow guarded by three armed men.
A Drug Enforcement Agency plane and helicopter provided support from above and Colorado State Patrol troopers posted on a closed lane of I-70 to cut off escape. Another team headed to the second island, where they believed they would find more plants but no campsite.
Navigating a dense tangle of tamarisk and cottonwood trees and hampered by the canyon’s infamously poor cellphone and radio reception, the first team surprised the three men in a makeshift camp, who instantly fled.
Two of the three were quickly caught, at about 7 a.m. — both young men whose names were not released by the DEA Thursday.
More than 9,200 marijuana plants were collected between the two islands, which one federal employee described as not more than a “good football’s throw” from I-70.
“They’re pretty brazen,” said Steven Knight, group supervisor for the DEA’s Grand Junction office. “If you were driving down I-70 and pulled over, you could see the marijuana.”
Agents and officers Thursday evening were still looking for the third suspect, described as a Hispanic man wearing a black T-shirt. Knight said during the day he believed the third man was hiding out on the small but thickly vegetated island where the men’s campsite was found.
“You get in there, it’s easy to hide,” he said.
The De Beque Canyon Grow case began in May, Knight said, although it was really triggered by an odd 2016 event. A man was caught trying to sneak into the river islands area with some 8,000 marijuana seeds in his pockets.
In May this year, a Bureau of Land Management employee and a sheriff’s deputy decided to go up a nearby cliff and try to see if anybody ever returned to the spot, Knight said.
“They went up top and looked down,” he said. “They saw what looked like a gas can and some equipment. … We just started watching them from the cliffs up high.”
Knight said surveillance showed what appeared to be three men living on the smaller island and patrolling two grows with rifles.
For the next several months, Knight said, they watched the trio to learn more, waiting until the plants they were tending were closer to harvest.
“There was no hurry on our part,” he said. “They were isolated.”
Thursday morning turned into a waiting game for agents and officers staged at Island Acres State Park while the team on the river island played hide-and-seek with the third suspect.
Around 9 a.m. the first of the two suspects — shirtless with a bandaged cut on one of his bare feet — was brought to the staging area, where he was ushered to a shaded picnic table area and advised of his rights.
Half an hour later, when the second suspect arrived at the park with a Colorado State Patrol trooper, the first suspect grinned and called out to him.
Knight, walking between the two, spun around.
“Hey,” Knight shouted. “Cállate” — “Shut up,” in Spanish.
The suspects told agents they were cousins from Sinaloa state in Mexico, Knight told his team. The first suspect claimed about 6,000 plants were on the two islands.
“They’ve been sent here to set up this grow,” Knight said.
It was after 11 a.m. when the DEA helicopter started lifting slings full of hundreds of uprooted marijuana plants from the river islands and dropping them off at Island Acres State Park, where curious campers stood watching from a short distance and buzzed by in golf carts.
By mid-afternoon, the team had found much more than 6,000 marijuana plants; according to DEA spokesman Jim Gothe the final tally topped more than 9,200 plants.
The two suspects were due to be arraigned this afternoon in federal court in Grand Junction.
Knight said that while outdoor grows of comparable sizes have been raided in the region in the past, the De Beque Canyon grow is the largest operation he’s dealt with since transferring to Grand Junction a year ago.
“But the boldness of doing it right next to the highway?” Knight said. “And these guys are not from Colorado.”
Some 50 to 60 law enforcement officers from multiple agencies were involved in the operation, Knight said, including representatives of the sheriff’s office, the Grand Junction Police Department, the Western Colorado Drug Task Force, Colorado State Patrol, the FBI, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Marshals Service, the National Guard, and DEA operatives from the West Slope as well as Salt Lake City and Colorado Springs.
Knight praised the sheer physical effort of the team that responded to the islands and “pushed through the brush they could hardly get through.”
“A pretty heroic effort,” he said. “I’m proud of them."
They have to be cured and trimmed and 9000 well tended unseeded female plants likely would at full maturity yield 2-4 pounds each with a good strain in that latitude if taken care of
I’m Trinity or Humboldt oIr Williams Oregon it might yield 4-7 pounds on a fat plant
That Hobbit shire climate there really does weed well
Like a cool Vietnam highland
And it’s too early in season to be mature yet
Western slope weed can stay in ground till Halloween in the right micro climate with proper mangement
For your interest.
Immature pot plants do not have any THC content. They had to wait until they were mature enough for harvest otherwise they would not have had a case.
Good post
A legit large grown in colorado is a huge amount of paperwork
Most small grows of under 99 plants are freelance
In the rural areas I’m well acquainted with local cops don’t care if it’s locals with a moderate paperless grow
Often cops are doing it too
That’s definitely true near Crested Butte
And in Trinity county California
But the Feds and Mexican illegals especially from Sinaloa
It’s like the perfect brew
That should read “large-scale illegal cannabis grow busted” if they wished to be accurate.
Thanks for the ping.
I hope they arrest & shut down all the illegal grows. Every single one of them.
I took a class from a guy who was on a National Park Service SWAT type unit — had some hair raising stories about firefights with pot growers, most of whom are gang-affiliated illegals apparently. So tracking down illegals and swooping on on pot fields are frequently intertwined.
Should have shot the third one instead of allowing escape.
Illegal-aliens-growing-Marijuana PING
Making it legal just ups the competition from the illegal sources, who will undercut the legal product prices, and will resort to violence to curtail legal producers and buyers.
Need to poison it, eradicate it. Waste of money they waited months to arrest them. Need better management to act instead of being lazy. Then again, maybe grown plans are more useful to the police?
Yep. You get it.
To bad the liberal-tarians don’t.
you think the war on drugs is over?....its just beginning because now the STATE is openly in on the fix..
It's kind of hard to undercut the price of a plant that you can grow in your own back yard.
That is true, right up until some MS13 gangbanger cartel types find out you’re growing on “their turf”, then it’s either buy from them, grow for them, sell for them, or you and your family are dead.
That is not hyperbole or exaggeration. That is how these people operate, and they are very good at it.
I won’t mess with anyone’s weed, if they don’t mess with my barley and hops.
There’s a net export of high quality weed back down south. Probably a couple billion dollars a year by now.
The state? Oregon runs all their medical through the states hands. Recreational has a tiered permit system. The highest is 10k+ and I couldn’t imagine anyone ever getting that and was subsequently told there was a greenhouse operation nearby that had 4 houses growing 20,000 plants each.
“... had some hair raising stories about firefights with pot growers, most of whom are gang-affiliated illegals apparently”
I got roasted a few months back (on this very website) for even suggesting that legal pot growing in California was going to become overtaken by organized crime and gangs. According to the roaster everything was copacetic and I didn’t know what I was talking about.
Having been technically contracted with law enforcement agencies for decades, what blatantly happens time and again is (simply put) - Human nature. Which is very predictable. Where a vacuum exists, or where there is a weakness that can be exploited with profit to be made in Vice or in intoxicants - organized crime will be there and they will enact hostile takeovers whenever possible or plausible.
Just as... freeloaders will suddenly appear in areas where marijuana (for example) is legalized because they can get a high without the hassles of breaking the law. There are many instances right now in Colorado (for example) of towns that are being overtaken by vagrants, and bums who are there for solely the high. That is human nature which is as I stated, very predictable.
If you want a quick read on human nature and law, I highly recommend the first few chapters in Bastiat’ “The Law” it’s a perfect example of why there is a need for law. It comes down to making it more painful to commit a crime and be caught then if you didn’t have a law which would punish. Why? Human Nature. Human nature is lazy... it is easier to steal or deal, than it is to physically labor. So humans will often take the path of least resistance. Hence the need for law.
By-passing law(s) by previous administrations was also the path of least resistance hence the propensity to even go there.
It is an interesting topic.
Search for Bastait, The Law. It is online, and it is free.
The most effective means to ruin illegal grows would be to aerially pollinate it with hemp fiber marijuana pollen. If hemp ever takes off as a serious cultivation agriculturally it’ll be pretty much impossible to grow quality smoking/pharma weed outside.
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