HAMILTON POLICE FIND BOOBY-TRAPPED GROW OPERATION

Traps Designed To Electrocute, Poison The Unwary

HAMILTON - The illicit drug trade in Hamilton has taken a sinister
turn with the discovery of multiple, potentially lethal booby traps
guarding a marijuana crop inside a vacant factory. Drug squad officers
who tripped a chemical booby trap were doused with a noxious mist when
they raided a concealed growing operation on Birmingham Street
Thursday to seize 210 plants worth about $95,000.

The unknown mixture attacked their ability to breathe and drove them
outside until they could get proper equipment to re-enter the room.

Two of the officers were at St. Joseph's hospital for tests yesterday
while the substance sprayed on them was being analyzed by Team One
Environmental.

Veteran drug officers say this is the first time they have encountered
mechanical and chemical traps inside a marijuana growing operation in
Hamilton.

"We're going to have to change the way we do business," said one.
"We'll have to approach this increased risk appropriately."

Police found a steel door leading into the room rigged to electrocute
anyone who pushed it open from the outside.

They found jars of highly corrosive nitric acid placed in a door frame
to spill and burn anyone who bumped them.

Hamilton drug officers have seen booby traps before - tree branches
rigged to swat an intruder, sharp objects and animal traps - in
outdoor marijuana stands.

They've even come face to face with a giant 1.2-metre, 18 kilogram
monitor lizard - they bite - and an overgrown poisonous scorpion
guarding a crop in a house about a year ago.

But detectives Mark Petkoff and Jay Turner have never seen anything
like what they found inside what is said to be an old soap factory at
the corner of Birmingham Street and Whitfield Avenue.

City records show the factory is owned by a company registered as
1125906 Ontario Inc. The old Quaker City factory sits across the
street from modest homes on Whitfield Avenue.

It is not the biggest grow operation police have encountered - one on
Tiffany Street yielded 3,400 plants this year - but it is the first
booby trapped one and indicates the level of security criminals are
ready to use to protect a product that can make them a lot of money.
Detective Sergeant Rick Wills, head of the drug squad, said officers
donned protective gear to catalogue and move the crop after they have
searched the building to locate the drugs or occupants.

"Whoever did this really wanted to protect their crop from ripoffs and
the police.

"They have no regard for anything or anybody's life at
all."

Wills said the three officers doused with the chemical "are OK. They
had a very brief exposure to that substance."

Police cut through a wire fence to get at the building, crashed
through a door and searched the grungy main floor and darker basement
of the building just after 4 p.m. Thursday.

They found nothing. No marijuana on the first floor, none they could
see in the basement and no one in the building.

But officers could see a room full of growing equipment down from a
loft over the door they'd come in so they went back to the basement
and checked out what looked like a solid wall.

"There was one spot with a piece of steel over what looked like an old
doorway and lots of cement around the edges," Petkoff said as he
stood outside the factory's yard yesterday.

"We tapped on the steel and it was hollow.

"So we just hacked and whacked our way through the wall into this room
full of marijuana plants."

As the officers moved into the room, a motion sensor wired to an
electric paint sprayer mounted above them and filled with some kind of
solvent and oil mixture began pumping a noxious mist into the room.

"As soon as you inhaled, you couldn't breathe," said
Turner.

"We were short of breath and coughing and we had to run out of there
as fast as we could."

Police called the Hamilton fire department to bring breathing masks
and equipment to ventilate the room. Team One Environmental service
was called to find out what at least three officers had been sprayed
with.

When they could go back inside the room, police found a steel door at
the other end of the room had been rigged to electrocute an intruder.

"It was really pretty crude but it could have been very effective,"
Petkoff said.

"They'd taken household wiring, attached it to pipes above the inside
of the door and run bare wires down to the floor about an inch from
the door.

"This was plugged into a wall outlet."

They also found jugs of nitric acid had been placed in front of the
old door they'd smashed through.

"Somehow, nobody stepped on them," said Turner.

Petkoff and Turner say an officer could have been hurt, or killed, if
squad members had entered the room the way the marijuana growers
thought they would.

"We kind of came in the back way," said Petkoff, adding the growers
used a hidden trap door police found later on the first floor under a
heavy piece of equipment to tend their crop.

Wills would not say whether or not the factory farm was being operated
by an organized group or gang. He did say he was confident police will
soon find those responsible for the booby traps.

"These guys are going to be facing some serious criminal charges," he
said.