Sacramento Feds Bust Up Massive Indoor Pot Farm Operation; Group Allegedly Used Mortgage Fraud To Finance 51 Grow Houses; Fifty Went Into Foreclosure

In Northern California, The Sacramento Bee reports:

• Federal prosecutors announced 18 indictments Thursday in a pot cultivation and mortgage fraud scheme that purchased homes in Elk Grove and Sacramento and converted them into bustling "grow houses" for tens of thousands of marijuana plants. Nine people are in custody. Authorities are searching for other indicted suspects who may have fled from the Bay Area to China. The individuals were charged with orchestrating bogus real estate transactions to buy 51 houses in the Central Valley, then establish indoor pot-growing operations using sophisticated lighting and irrigation and stealing thousands of dollars' worth of electricity.

• "They came into our cookie-cutter residential neighborhoods and created cookie-cutter marijuana factories," said Gordon Taylor, assistant special agent for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in Sacramento. [...] Ultimately, the growers abandoned the houses. Fifty of the 51 went into foreclosure. "This organization just walked away … leaving the loan companies and the communities holding the bag," Taylor said.(1)

For more, see 18 indicted in Central Valley marijuana, mortgage scheme.

From the Office of the U.S. Attorney:

• Indictment - U.S. v. Hung, et al.,
• Press release: Eighteen Bay Area Residents Charged In Indoor Marijuana Manufacturing Operation And Mortgage Fraud Scheme In The Central Valley,
• List of defendants and criminal charges.

(1) Since 2006, authorities in the Sacramento region have arrested dozens of suspects in indoor marijuana growing operations. Along the way, they discovered homes totally retrofitted for marijuana production, according to the story. In the latest case, Taylor said, suspects cut into main electrical lines in Sacramento and Elk Grove, "bypassed the electric meter and created their own circuit boxes" to steal some $4,000 in electricity a month, the story states.