BIG-TIME POT GROWERS USE SEATTLE-AREA HOMES

From the sidewalk, the house on a sleepy cul-de-sac in Renton looked
like a sweet slice of suburbia: four bedrooms, vaulted entryway,
roses blooming out front.

But inside, the home was a marijuana factory. Furniture had been
shoved aside to make room for banks of halogen bulbs with foil
lampshades. Tubes of flexible ducting connected to an
industrial-grade air scrubber. Power was diverted around the electric
meter by splices direct from the main line.

In place of a family, the home's primary "occupants" were 658
marijuana plants. In a good year, the harvest would be substantial
enough to pay off the mortgage on the $500,000 house and buy another home.

Growing pot indoors has old and deep roots in the green-thumbed Puget
Sound area. But homes such as the one discovered in late 2005 in the
hills above downtown Renton represent a new level of sophistication
and scale in the lucrative cultivation of premium-grade marijuana
that was once the franchise of British Columbia.

"B.C. Bud" May Have a New Cousin: "King County Bud."

Since 2005, federal and state agents have raided more than 100
large-scale grow houses in the Seattle area, yielding a bumper crop
of more than 41,000 plants, according to the White House drug czar's
office. Police last month found the biggest yet, a 1,500-plant grow
that consumed most of a 3,800-square-foot house.

And Everett police were investigating a double homicide Monday in
which two bodies were found in a home with more than 400 marijuana plants.

Most of the busts flowed from a sprawling, 18-month investigation
into a garden-supply store in Kent, which led police to clusters of
grow houses managed by a handful of entrepreneurs.

Since being opened by Canadian immigrants in 2003, the store, Kent
Distributor, has become a one-stop shop for pot growers, according to
federal court documents -- offering everything from seedlings to grow
lights on credit to an introduction to a real-estate agent who could
help growers buy homes with no down payment.

Growers As Businessmen

Drug investigators, as well as economists and defense lawyers, trace
the boom in indoor-grow operations to tighter border security.
Despite an array of new, post-Sept. 11 detection equipment, the
amount of pot seized by border agents in the western U.S. dropped
from 16,607 pounds to 5,300 pounds in four years, leading to the
belief that smugglers are simply now growing in the U.S.

"This is not the marijuana subculture that has always had marijuana
grows," said Lt. Rich Wiley of the Washington State Patrol's
narcotics task force. "This is a new group, a recent occurrence.
These people are not even using [marijuana] themselves. They're businessmen."

Drug investigators across the country -- but particularly on the West
Coast -- are making similar finds. Last year, agents in the
Sacramento, Calif., area busted 40 homes that together had more than
18,000 plants, while investigators in Oregon have busted at least
three large-scale growing operations. As in other states, local
investigators found the growers usually were Vietnamese, often with
ties to Vancouver, B.C. And Seattle-area growers seemed to
universally favor Kent Distributor.

The store owners, a Vietnamese family, and their employees were
federally indicted in April for alleged marijuana trafficking and
money laundering. All could face 10-year mandatory minimum sentences
if convicted. Dozens of their former customers also were swept up,
and more federal charges are expected.

Attorney David Gehrke, who represents the family matriarch, Le My
Nguyen, conceded that part of the federal case was true.

"People who grew marijuana bought equipment there. But they also
bought dirt at Home Depot and Lowe's," he said. "The fact that a lot
of the growers were going there, I'm still not convinced it means my
client knew what they were doing it for."

One House After Another

The trouble for Kent Distributor started with a house fire in Kent in
March 2005. Kent police found a 500-plant marijuana grow in the
rubble and linked the occupants to several other grow houses, a
common setup in Canadian grow operations. The occupants, after being
charged in federal court, told police they had gotten equipment and
advice from Kent Distributor.

Surveillance, which is detailed in federal affidavits in several
cases, describes officers finding garbage bags full of pot clippings
and root balls in the store's trash bin and listening to negotiations
for the sale of "babies" -- believed to be marijuana sprouts -- for $25 apiece.

Investigators also followed customers back to homes throughout King
and Pierce counties and say they usually found a Kent Distributor
business card amid huge grow operations. Investigators say low-paid
"tenders" usually handled the gardening, employed by higher-level
managers who often operated four or five houses.

The houses were often unlivable, except for small corners inhabited
by the tenders. Flexible ducting snaked through halls and bedrooms,
sucking heat and humidity out through chimneys fitted with air
scrubbers to remove the telltale odor of marijuana. The potted plants
were often watered by drip systems and fed from jugs of fertilizer
such as "Super Bud Blaster."

The homes fit a pattern: modern split-levels with multi-chambered
chimneys for venting, daylight basements and big yards to keep the
neighbors at a distance. Some had plants on a crop rotation: baby
plants upstairs, juveniles downstairs, and adults -- with
baseball-sized buds -- in the basement.

"It's pretty much all I've been doing for the past year and a half --
[busting] one house after another," said Kent police Sgt. Jim Miller,
head of a narcotics task force in the Kent Valley.

Jeffrey Steinborn, an attorney who represents an indicted store
employee, said the largely Vietnamese customers didn't know a
cardinal rule of marijuana cultivation. "All the American growers
know that if you go to a grow shop, you're going to get followed home
[by police] and busted," he said. "The Vietnamese didn't know that
the feds were hanging out at the watering hole."

As the investigation gained traction, a police source described how
Kent Distributor would provide on credit the $20,000 to $30,000 worth
of equipment needed to set up a grow, to be repaid after the first
harvest. Another source, who cooperated with police after being
charged with running a grow operation, reported that Kent Distributor
had hired 20 drivers to ship marijuana to Oklahoma and Texas, and
plants to Iowa, according to a affidavit filed by a federal investigator.

"We've heard about 'Northwest pot' showing up all over the country,"
said DEA agent Art Staples.

Following the Money

As an industry, marijuana in Washington state is roughly estimated at
$1 billion in wholesale value, more than wheat and potatoes combined.
In British Columbia, economists put pot at $6.5 billion (U.S.) a
year, second only to oil.

The DEA estimates that a well-tended marijuana plant can yield up to
$1,000 per harvest and three harvests a year, but some
marijuana-legalization advocates consider that estimate extreme.

But the DEA did document that at least $5.1 million flowed through
the bank accounts of Kent Distributor and its owners since 2003, most
of it cash. In February, federal agents using a listening device
planted in the office heard the sound of cash being counted by hand,
then bundled with the snap of rubber bands.

Canadian drug investigators have followed the money into the mortgage
industry, where unscrupulous brokers falsified loans for pot growers.

Local law enforcement says a small number of real-estate agents and
brokers were involved with many of the King County grow houses busted.

According to a federal affidavit, one Realtor, Thu Ahn "Diana" Tran,
daughter of one of Kent Distributor's owners, was offered by the
store as a resource for people looking to set up grow houses and
bought a series of homes with her husband where grow operations were found.

Tran, who has been indicted for alleged money laundering, denied
doing anything wrong when reached at Skyline Properties in Kent. "All
I know is I'm selling house. I'm not helping out anyone," she said
recently. "I'm just a normal regular Realtor."

Skyline later said Tran no longer works for the firm.

Dave Rodriguez, Northwest director of the White House Drug Policy
Office, compared the approach of going after the suppliers and
real-estate industry supporting pot growers to one taken by
methamphetamine investigators trying to shut off the supply of
"precursor" chemicals used to make the drug.

"In B.C., they've got 10 years of experience doing this," he said.
"We're the ones that are learning the business."