Just after dawn on a recent spring morning, police dressed in tactical gear and armed with a search warrant pounded on the front door of an upscale home in a quiet suburban neighborhood an hour outside San Francisco., which polices the legal sale of marijuana in the state, took a battering ram to the steel-reinforced door. When the door didn’t budge, they used a power saw to cut their way through a fortified back entrance and into the spacious five-bedroom property.
But that’s not all. Investigators say the illegal pot production in Antioch provides a glimpse of a hidden world – one that mirrors a trendA CNN investigation has found that, in this unassuming city of 115,000, the minimal consequences and hefty rewards for producing illicit marijuana in huge volumes have led to a whack-a-mole pattern of enforcement and a brazenness on the part of participants – all while neighbors look on in dismay.
Law enforcement officials – including former DEA leaders and FBI director Christopher Wray – attribute much of the activity nationwide to Chinese organized crime. The home that Cannabis Control agents had to power-saw their way into belongs to Samson Liu, a police officer in nearby Oakland, California, CNN found. Cannabis Control declined to say whether Liu lived in the home or had tenants, citing an ongoing investigation.
As for the house owned by Liu, Cannabis Control agents have referred the matter to the internal affairs division of the Oakland Police Department, but have made no arrests in connection with the contraband. CNN identified one real estate agent who has had a hand in selling four residential homes raided by authorities in Antioch. A review of online property records shows that she herself owns one of those homes, from which $937,000 worth of illicit cannabis was seized during a raid in December.
“It is not fair to tie a few houses to her or to tie her to the illegal cannabis operation,” the lawyer said. “She’s a victim of circumstance.”Illegal operators ignore the rules and fees of California’s highly regulated system under which marijuana can be legally produced and sold.
The agent faced life in prison, but after pleading guilty in 2020 to conspiracy to possess, manufacture and distribute at least 1,000 marijuana plants, he ultimately was sentenced to six months. One of the men, who asked that he not be named due to his immigration status and fear for his safety, said he crossed the Mexican border about a year ago and found work in the underground cannabis market through a Los Angeles-area employment agency geared toward recent Chinese immigrants.
He said the drug sells for $1,000 a pound and is picked up by Chinese buyers who show up at the door. He doesn’t know where it goes from there. City records obtained by CNN show that an inspector deemed the house uninhabitable on the day of the raid in March, citing a fire hazard and “a lot of chemicals” that he believed were ending up in the house’s drainage system. The inspector came back less than a month later and removed the designation.
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