Why Miami’s wild, once-booming grow house industry went up in smoke
Legalization of pot for recreational use in other
states has caused marijuana grow houses to dwindle in South Florida. Meanwhile, the number of packages containing the drug being sent from Colorado and California
has increased.
Not long ago, marijuana grow houses seemed to sprout like weeds in Miami-Dade.
In 2012, for example, county narcotics detectives raided 257 illegal hydroponic labs. Most of them were hidden in unassuming suburban houses in Southwest Miami-Dade, and they weren’t always nice neighbors.
That year alone, shoddy wiring caused one grow house in West Kendall to explode, hurtling the roof in the air. In another case, a marijuana grower shot a Miami-Dade detective in the stomach. The feds busted one notorious ring tied to at least two murders along with the crooked cop protecting their secret labs.
Now, the spreading legalization of marijuana across the
country has largely dried up South Florida’s wild and once-booming black-market pot farming business.
Grow-house busts in Miami-Dade have plummeted, with just 36 last year. As marijuana floods in from outside states, street prices for pot also have dropped. The reason, law enforcement experts say: Many Miami pot farmers have now planted roots in Colorado, where the growhouse business is flourishing as Miami’s slows. But though pot is legal there, some Miami expats are still managing to run afoul of the law.
The result of the marijuana-grower migration is that the South Florida grow house has given way to a new supply chain — one built around package delivery services. Over the past five years, the number of packages of marijuana seized by U.S. postal inspectors has soared, rising by a staggering 510 percent, newly released federal statistics show.
“It’s changing the narcotics game,” said Anthony Salisbury, the special agent in charge for South Florida’s U.S. Homeland Security Investigations, which did more than 200 undercover deliveries of marijuana packages in 2018. “The parcel game is very much a priority for HSI.”
Now, a typical marijuana bust might look like what happened in December, when county detectives — tipped off by HSI agents in Atlanta — intercepted a shipment at a freight-forwarding company near Miami International Airport. Inside the package from weed-friendly California, detectives found 48 pounds of marijuana stashed inside 10 buckets of Tide laundry detergent.
The mail is not a new smuggling tool. And Miami-Dade narcotics detectives now focus growing attention to an influx of cocaine and crystal meth, not to mention the deadly fentanyl and heroin that has ravaged the ranks of drug addicts. Many of those drugs have also arrived through the U.S. mail and private package delivery companies, as chronicled in the Miami Herald’s 2015 Pipeline China series on the rise of synthetic narcotics arriving from China.
Just a decade ago, secret pot labs were popping up across the South Florida landscape. Rapid advances in hydroponics — the science of raising plants in nutrient-enriched water instead of soil — helped fuel their rise.
Growers, set up in rented homes with sealed-off doors and windows, could grow larger crops of stronger dope in a shorter time. The sophisticated labs featured bright lights, timers, humidifiers and air conditioners, mimicking cycles of day and night, keeping plants at an optimum temperature of 68 degrees.
The market was cornered primarily by Miami Cuban Americans, according to law enforcement. By the mid-2000s, they had improved the quality and THC content of the marijuana, perfected the setup of the labs and were recruiting immigrants recently arrived from the island to act as caretakers.
One of the movers of the black market was a man named Luis HernandezGonzalez, a Cuban-born electrical engineer who is now in federal prison after he was found with $22 million in cash stuffed inside orange buckets hidden in his home.
He owned Blossoms Experience, a North MiamiDade store that sold hydroponic equipment to growers across South Florida and the country. He helped master the science of indoor hydroponic gardening and secured the lucrative rights to sell a fertilizer that became a favorite of local marijuana growers.
The store also became a magnet for law enforcement, which routinely followed suspected growers leaving the business.
As the illegal market grew, Miami-Dade narcotics detectives and federal agents responded with frequent and splashy busts — with operation names like “Weed Killer,” “Eagle Claw” and “Growing Pain.” Television newscasts regularly showed detectives hauling away hundreds of pounds of plants from homes in Southwest MiamiDade.
“The property room was filled up with marijuana, which we put in barrels, and also the high-intensity light bulbs, transformers, electrical panels, PVC piping,” said retired MiamiDade Maj. Charles Nanney, who headed the narcotics bureau between 2005 and 2012.
The cases demonstrated the ingenuity of growers but also underlined that, with crops worth tens of thousands of dollars at stake, it was an often dangerous illegal business.
In 2008, agents found a sophisticated lab with 200 plants hidden inside a storage room at the Mall of the Americas in West MiamiDade. That same year, at least four people were murdered in separate robberies at Miami-Dade grow houses.
Four years later, in 2012, cops got into a shootout with caretakers at one grow house — all caught on stunning surveillance video. One Miami-Dade detective, John Saavedra, was wounded while one suspect was killed. That was also the year the feds busted the notorious Santiesteban family, which ran a violent ring of grow-house operators that included a crooked Miami-Dade cop.
Law enforcement agencies expected to see the trade shift tactics with more states legalizing pot. So they’ve changed tactics themselves. Miami-Dade detectives now more often work with U.S. postal inspectors and pose as delivery men to sniff out illegal grow houses.
States began approving medical marijuana laws in the mid-1990s, and today 33 have approved programs. In addition, 10 states have ushered in recreational marijuana, even though federal law still forbids the drug.
In Florida, lawmakers in 2014 approved a program that allowed limited use of certain strains of marijuana to treat debilitating diseases. Voters in 2016 overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment to broaden the use of medical marijuana. But lawmakers limited access to the drug to pills, oils, edibles and vaping — not smoking.
At the urging of Gov. Ron DeSantis, however, lawmakers repealed the ban in March. Prescribed smokable medical marijuana is now legal in Florida.
The beginning of the end of the grow-house boom really came when Colorado and Washington voters legalized recreational pot, the first states to do so. Commercial sales in Colorado began in 2014.
Miami growers began flocking to Colorado, experts say, setting up illegal grows in nondescript suburban homes, pushing the limits of a state law that allowed for up to 99 plants to be grown in homes for medicinal purposes. Since then, Colorado law has been changed to allow only 12 plants for any use per residence, a rule that is routinely flouted by South Florida expats.
“Cubans from South Florida are among the most prolific,” said Deanne Rueter, the Drug Enforcement Administration assistant special agent in charge for the Denver field office. “They’re super good at it. They’re sophisticated at it. They’re probably still the largest in numbers. Cubans were here first. They came in big numbers.”
For the transplants, the reason was simple: The state’s marijuana laws allowed them to operate in plain sight, but outside of the highly regulated legal industry.
Back in 2015, Colorado’s DEA served just 14 search warrants on illegal grow houses, seizing 943 plants. Last year, agents participated in 125 warrants, seizing 36,063 illegally grown marijuana plants.
In Pueblo County, Colorado, the first grow-house operators with ties to South Florida appeared in 2016. Marijuana found in a truck stopped in Texas was traced back to a ring that had just moved to Pueblo from Florida.
“We’d always had a grow here or there, but this time we found five houses where they all knew each other, had all purchased or rented the homes and all turned them into illegal grow houses,” said Pueblo County Undersheriff J.R. Hall.
Since then, scores of South Floridians in at least a dozen separate illegal grow-house busts have been arrested in Pueblo, a county of only about 165,000 people about 120 miles south of Denver.
Just last week, Pueblo deputies arrested Daniel Vilallonga, 32, who officers say had 38 plants inside his home. Vilallonga hailed from Miami. County police here twice arrested him for possessing large amounts of marijuana.
One Miami man, Yordany Basulto Vargas, was implicated in a marijuana grow house in El Paso County, Colorado, in May 2018. One month later, he was arrested back in Miami on the same allegations related to running an illegal grow house. He’s now awaiting trial in both states.
Investigators say the marijuana is usually bound for Florida, or New York.
In South Florida, the availability of hydroponic weed from Colorado and California is affecting the price on the streets. A pound of weed here now may only cost between $1,000 and $2,000, way below the prices about five years ago.
“It’s dropped. It’s something we’re monitoring,” said Justin Miller, intelligence manager for South Florida’s DEA field office. “The market is oversaturated.”
Mail carriers, unwittingly, are helping fuel that trade.
While countless pounds of marijuana are moved secretly across state lines by vehicles, many dopers are taking advantage of robust package delivery systems, which thanks to online retail led to the U.S. Postal Service delivering a staggering 6.2 billion packages nationwide last year.
Consider: In 2014, U.S. postal inspectors across the country found 5,782 packages with marijuana, according to the feds. Last year? Inspectors seized 35,317 packages, amounting to nearly 100,000 pounds of weed.
In Florida, postal inspectors seized 4,490 packages of marijuana and nearly 17,000 pounds of marijuana in 2018, nearly quadruple the amount from five years earlier.
Yamil Cabral-Domenech, 47, a North Miami Beach personal trainer, got caught with 46 pounds.
It started when U.S. postal inspectors and MiamiDade police in March 2018 delivered three boxes of smoke ovens, all mailed from Santa Rosa, California, all addressed to Cabral-Domenech, all filled with weed in vacuumsealed bags. Inside a shed, cops found two identical smoke-oven boxes, but empty.
Cabral-Domenech refused to cooperate with police. He pleaded guilty with no plea deal. MiamiDade Circuit Judge Milton Hirsch sentenced him to three years in prison for armed marijuana trafficking.
Some claim ignorance, like Ryan Oliver Wilson,
30, who lived at the luxury Marina Blue condo complex near downtown Miami. Two months ago, undercover officers delivered two packages from Sylmar, California. Inside were marijuana cigars and small glass cans of retail marijuana with names like “Thin Mint,” “Lemon Jack” and “Banana Split.”
Wilson, according to an arrest report, said the marijuana “he had purchased for personal use, that he had a medicinal marijuana card and he did not think it was a big deal.” He is pending trial in Miami-Dade on two felony counts of marijuana possession.
Antonio Gomez, the Inspector in Charge for Miami’s U.S. Postal Inspection Service, stressed that the public needs to understand that the legality of marijuana stops in states such as Colorado, Washington and California.
Said Gomez: “It is still a federal offense to send it through the U.S. mail.”