POLICE SAY STORES PROVIDED MORE THAN GARDENING TIPS

Businesses Helped Marijuana Growers, Operation Borax Investigators Contend

A dozen garden-supply stores at the centre of a major investigation into
marijuana trafficking offered their patrons more than one-stop shopping,
police alleged yesterday.

Several of the 200 people targeted in Operation Borax - a joint police
investigation headed by the Surete du Quebec and the RCMP - owned,
operated or gravitated to a series of stores in Montreal and Laval. The
stores supplied seeds, equipment and much more to grow pot, SQ Capt.
Martin Cote said.

"They also offered illicit and illegal services like electric diverters,
which we call bypasses. They also offered horticultural advice on growing
marijuana and sold products for it," he said.

As well, Cote alleged the owners of the garden stores acted as middlemen,
connecting people who grow marijuana in houses to drug dealers who would
regularly ship up to 50 kilograms of pot across Canada and into the U.S.

The people acting as middlemen were interested only in the buds from
marijuana plants and not the leaves, which are considered less potent by
comparison. The store owners even offered a service to growers, in which
stores would discard garbage bags of marijuana leaves for them.

While police were searching stores Tuesday, people hired by the drug
dealers to remove the garbage bags showed up for what they assumed would
be a routine pickup.

Operation Borax began after an analysis of police intelligence on
Montreal-area marijuana grow operations was completed in 2005, Cote said.
The study turned up a common denominator in operations involving houses
bought solely for the purpose of growing pot, and that used electricity
stolen from Hydro-Quebec.

The analysis indicated the majority of people involved were of Vietnamese
origin, he said, had moved east to Montreal from elsewhere in Canada and
had been arrested for running grow-ops in Toronto and other cities.

Investigators noticed the suspects gravitated to garden supply stores
operated by people of Vietnamese origin.

Police learned the garden-supply stores specialized in furnishing
equipment to grow marijuana indoors organically, as opposed to the
hydroponic methods more commonly seen by investigators.

"With time - it took four years - we realized these people went from one
business to another," RCMP Inspector Sylvain Joyal said. "We followed them
to different (grow ops) as well. So we came to realize that some of them,
not all of them, were linked."

Eighty-six of the 200 people targeted in arrest warrants Tuesday in
Operation Borax are alleged to be linked to the stores or to have acted as
middlemen who supplied pot to large-scale drug traffickers. Cote said 75
per cent of those people, considered the principal suspects, were arrested
Tuesday. More than 90 people suspected of having lesser roles remain at
large, however.

Only 16 of the 123 people arrested so far have been held in custody for a
bail hearing, scheduled for Monday.

The four-year investigation uncovered 151 grow operations, and police
seized more than 100,000 plants in that time. Another 12 grow ops were
shut down Tuesday.

More than $400,000 in cash and 18,000 plants and 395 kilograms of
marijuana were seized in Tuesday's raids.