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With a canal running by one side of his house, a large plot of brush and foliage on the other, and a front yard as big as a tree-filled football field, Joe Cook’s Golden Gate Estates home on 22nd Street Northeast offers a quiet respite from the hustle and bustle of modern life.
Out here, chit-chatting with a neighbor on the other side of the fence is nearly impossible, because the nearest neighbor is no closer than yelling distance away.
“One of the nice things about being out here is you don’t have to worry about what the neighbors are doing,” Cook said.
But that same solitude that has attracted thousands to a simpler life east of Interstate 75 also attracts criminals who use houses in Golden Gate Estates and Lehigh Acres to grow marijuana.
It’s a growing problem in Southwest Florida, authorities say, pun intended.
“I don’t see the trend changing any time soon,” said Lt. Nelson Shadrick of the Collier County Sheriff’s Office’s Vice and Narcotics Bureau.
Tuesday evening, investigators discovered 81 marijuana plants valued at about $250,000 inside a suspected growhouse across the street from Cook. A resident of the home, Antonio M. Carralero, 35, was charged with marijuana trafficking and possession of narcotic equipment.
It was one of three suspected growhouses Collier investigators discovered in four days, and one of seven they’ve shut down in the first two months of 2008. In all, the Sheriff’s Office reports seizing about $1.7 million worth of pot and thousands of dollars worth of equipment in the process.
Collier authorities made 31 growhouse-related arrests in 2007, most in the Estates. The Lee County Sheriff’s Office reported busting 66 growhouses in 2007, seizing nearly $8 million in marijuana.
“This is like Groundhog Day. Get up, go to work, go to a growhouse,” Shadrick said, referring to the Bill Murray movie where the main character repeats the same day over and over again.
The prevalence of growhouses in Southwest Florida really started to escalate around 2002, Shadrick said. Before that, authorities mostly uncovered marijuana growing in open fields.
As authorities busted more and more growing fields, criminals adapted by moving indoors.
Through the years, the sophistication of growhouses has greatly improved, Shadrick said. Indoors, criminals have more control over the growing conditions, allowing them to grow a more potent crop and negating the typical growing season.
“It’s grow, grow, grow all year long,” Shadrick said.
The growhouse phenomenon is most prevalent in the Southeastern United States, with Southwest Florida being a real hotbed, Shadrick said. In fact, the first few growhouses Collier County authorities uncovered around 2002 left them a bit baffled.
“When it first started, we couldn’t find anything on it,” Shadrick said. “We were kind of stumbling around in the dark with the first few of them.”
Lee County Sheriff Mike Scott said most growhouses in Southwest Florida tend to be connected to organized crime based on the East Coast. The majority of the people arrested in suspected growhouses are Cuban criminals.
“We’re not arresting Germans in marijuana growhouses ... We’re arresting Cubans,” Scott said. “It’s just how it is.”
Many of the people arrested inside growhouses do not actually own the home, authorities said.
Instead, many are smuggled into the United States for a fee, and to pay that fee they are put up in a growhouse and paid to be a “tender,” Shadrick said. Some tend the growhouses for up to a year or two, and are paid around $1,000 a month.
“Once they’re done with that commitment, they can go out on their own and their debt’s paid,” Shadrick said.
However, in the past six months, Collier authorities have found at least two people who said they lost their jobs and turned to growing marijuana.
“I don’t have any reason to doubt that,” Shadrick said. “When the economy gets weak, crime across the board increases.”
The increase in the number of growhouses is not really a surprise, Scott said.
“It’s economics 101, supply and demand,” he said. “As long as there is demand for any product, someone is going to bring it, legal or illegal.”
The majority of the population doesn’t use illegal drugs, Scott said, but the minority that does is big enough to support the growhouses and the illegal drug trade in general.
Even people who enjoy smoking pot at home are contributing to the problem, he said.
“The people that are creating the demand are the ultimate bad guys,” Scott said.
Growhouses tend to bring many dangers to the neighborhood, authorities said, including poisonous fumes, power outages, environmental damage, increased risk of fires, increased crime and violence.
Two men were killed in a shootout in mid-February when they attempted to rob a suspected growhouse in Lehigh Acres. In 2005, four people were found dead inside a Golden Gate Estates home where investigators discovered an elaborate marijuana-growing operation.
Betty Hernandez, who lives next door to the suspected growhouse on 22nd Street Northeast, said she had no idea there were drugs being grown in a house near where her children played.
She said she rarely saw the people who lived in the house.
“You hear about it, but you don’t picture it happening next to you or on your block,” Hernandez said.
Though he wouldn’t get into specifics, Scott said law enforcement in Southwest Florida is using every tool in its tool belt to crack down on growhouses.
“We’re very aggressive and we’ll continue to be aggressive,” he said.
Shadrick said authorities rely on tips from neighbors and the public to help identify growhouses.
He said there are plenty of easy-to-spot indicators that a marijuana growhouse may be operating in a neighborhood, including: multiple air-conditioning units; little traffic at a residence, except for odd hours and on the weekends; gates and beware of dog signs; windows and blinds that are never open; and frequent loading and unloading of equipment, especially at night.
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