100 Chinese-run ‘pot-growing’ houses seized in one of the largest residential drug busts in US history
Raids were part of an investigation that began in 2014, when police began to notice down payments on houses financed by wire transfers mainly from Fujian Province, on China’s southeast coast
Federal agents seized more than 100 homes in one of the largest residential drug busts in US history in a bid to combat Chinese-run marijuana operations.
The raids culminated a months-long investigation focusing on dozens of Chinese nationals who bought homes in seven California counties.
Most of the buyers were in the country legally and were not arrested as authorities investigate if they were indebted to Chinese gangs and forced into the work, US Attorney McGregor Scott said.
Much of the pot was shipped to Georgia, Illinois, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania through Atlanta, Chicago and New York City, he said.
The drug is legal in California but requires permits to grow and can’t be sent across state lines. It is still banned by the US government.
Black-market pot-growing houses have proliferated in the inland California region where authorities carried out the raids, and many of them were traced to Chinese criminal organisations from the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid-2000s, Scott said.