SECRET GARDEN YIELDS $13.6 MILLION IN POT

Officers used machetes, hatchets and off-road vehicles to reach a secret
garden of marijuana that yielded $13.6 million worth of the cash crop
Monday. No arrests have been made and the find is still under investigation
by the Lancaster County Sheriff's Department, Sheriff Johnny Cauthen said
Tuesday. The land belongs to a hunt club but Cauthen said he feels the
owners had nothing to do with the unusual crop found there. The plants were
cut down Monday and the harvest is being kept at an undisclosed location
until it can be burned later this week. The marijuana was discovered by a
National Guard pilot flying over Green Road near S.C. 200 late Thursday
afternoon.

These fly-overs are standard procedure a few times a year to look for
marijuana plots, Cauthen said. On Friday, a helicopter from SLED scoped out
the area and officers from Lancaster County drug and violent crimes task
forces headed into the heavily wooded area on foot. They found three
separate plots, up to several acres in size each, about 50 yards from each
other containing 6,820 budding plants 6 to 8 feet high. The plants were
nearly ready for harvest and the growers probably planned to have the crop
out of there before hunting season began, Cauthen said. Closer inspection
showed how carefully the marijuana farmers tended the plants.

They cleared the three areas of large trees along a creek bed, then cut up
the trees and hauled them away. Large holes were dug near the creek to help
irrigate the plants. "These were large holes, you could lose a pickup truck
in some of them," Cauthen said. "And they were dug by hand. You couldn't
get a backhoe through there." To keep deer or humans away, the plots were
enclosed with chicken wire. The grass was kept trimmed and pesticide cans
found at another surprising discovery, a crude camp near the garden,
indicate chemicals were used to keep the grass and weeds down. Fertilizer
was also used on the plants. "They knew what they were doing - this was no
fly-by-night operation," Cauthen said of the unknown suspects. "The rows
were straight.

From the air, it looked like fields you would see in the Midwest, with
corn for acres and acres.

They had been babying these plants all summer," Cauthen said. At what
officers are calling the operation's base camp, a tent sat three feet off
the ground, covered by a green tarp. It couldn't be seen from the air.
Inside were sleeping bags and a camping stove, among loads of Kool-Aid
cans, flour tortilla wrappers and other trash, evidence that the camp was
used for days at a time while the suspects tended their crop. Hammocks were
strung up in nearby trees. Officers had a difficult time getting to the
crop on foot, Cauthen said, having to hack their way through the brush at
least a mile from the road and walk along creek beds to find it. In
Saturday's oppressive heat, the officers wore body armor and carried
backpacks and rifles into the woods to watch the crop all day, waiting for
suspects to come to the field. "If we hadn't had two or three days of rain,
someone would have probably gone down there to water the plants," Cauthen
said. "But our guys going down in there, or the helicopter, could have
spooked them." A team of drug and violent crimes task force officers, SLED
agents and an agent from the federal Drug Enforcement Agency met at
Lancaster County Airport on Monday morning, where pilots from SLED flew in
with their helicopter. A couple of officers boarded to videotape the fields
from the air. From there, officers left in pickup trucks hauling ATVs for
the woods. They invaded the forest on foot, on four-wheelers and a SLED
off-road vehicle capable of climbing over felled trees. The day's
jungle-like humidity didn't slow the officers as they whacked down the
plants and tied them into 20-plant bundles to be hauled out of the woods.
Cauthen got his first look, an aerial view, at the find Monday. A DC3 plane
carrying bales of marijuana confiscated in 1979 after it landed at the
airport, and small fields of 100 to 200 plants found over the years here
didn't prepare him for what he saw. "I wasn't expecting it to be like it
was," Cauthen said. "I've never seen anything like this in my career.

This is something you see in training tapes.

The best part is that we were able to get this off the street." SLED or DEA
officials were unable to say whether Monday's cache was the largest seized
in the state's history. Last month, 4,000 plants were collected in Horry
County, said DEA Assistant Special Agent John Ozaluk, but the last large
bust in the state was in 1979 when 18,000 plants were seized. So far in
2002, DEA's marijuana eradication program, which provides funding for drug
eradication for state and local agencies, has collected four times more
plants than last year. "This is one situation where the program worked,"
Ozaluk said.