|
No jail for grow-op 'gardener'
Jane Seyd
jseyd@nsnews.com
A 52-year old Chinese immigrant who was the caretaker and gardener for one of the largest-ever grow ops on the North Shore found in a British Properties mansion was handed a conditional sentence Thursday.
Ka Wu of Vancouver received six months' house arrest after pleading guilty before provincial court Judge Carol Baird Ellan to possession of more than 2,000 pot plants for the purpose of trafficking.
Wu was inside the house at 743 Eyremount Dr. when West Vancouver police burst in with a search warrant on Jan. 20 last year. Also in the house, in 10 separate grow rooms, were 2,176 marijuana plants in various stages of growth, including 500 one-metre-high mature plants ready for harvest. Police experts calculated the pot plants would have yielded 408 pounds of marijuana bud. A further 320 pounds of marijuana were found on drying racks inside the house.
Police estimated the value of the single harvest at between $1.4 million and $1.8 million.
Federal prosecutor John Whyte asked the judge to send Wu to jail for one year because of the massive size of the grow op, which was powered by a hydro bypass. "I'm advised by the West Vancouver police this is the single largest grow operation they've ever encountered in West Vancouver," he said. Whyte added marijuana grow ops are "notorious" in West Vancouver and have become even more so since another British Properties grow show recently exploded.
But the judge said while "as a member of this community I'm affronted by the sheer size, audacity and opportunism . . . inherent in the large-scale criminal operation conducted in a residential neighbourhood," Wu was not the main player in the grow op. "Mr. Wu was a paid employee, a caretaker," she said. "He tended the crop."
Baird Ellan added the suggestion by Wu's defence lawyer Paul Doroshenko that "Mr. Wu was set up to assume the risk and take the fall is not unreasonable."
Police ended up at the house after searching another grow op on Port View Place the week before and tracing the owner of that house to the Eyremount Drive address.
Whyte described it as an "extremely sophisticated marijuana grow operation" with high-intensity grow ops wired to ballasts and timers in each room. All plants appeared to be "tended to very carefully," said Whyte and there was some evidence of previous harvests, along with bullets for a .22-calibre gun.
He acknowledged, however, that Wu didn't own the house, and Wu's name was also not on the hydro account.
Doroshenko said Wu was recruited into the job of looking after the grow op by a middleman named David who approached Wu one day when he was in a casino. At the time, Wu had huge debts to pay after he lost huge amounts of money in a business deal gone wrong. The middleman promised Wu $4,000 for each crop he looked after, every 35 to 40 days, said Doroshenko. "He knew it was wrong, but he wanted to pay off his debts."
Doroshenko said Wu was paid $8,000 over two months to look after two crops of pot plants. Wu was simply set up "to take the fall" for the operation, said Doroshenko. If pot was legalized and sold in liquor stores controlled by the government, huge grow ops like this wouldn't exist, he said. Doroshenko said it's difficult for a person like Wu to understand what the law is on marijuana when there has been so much discussion about decriminalizing it.
But Whyte said it's not credible for Wu to say he didn't know what he was doing was illegal. "He was being paid $4,000 (a month) to water some plants," he said.
Baird Ellan said while the size of the grow op is concerning, there's no proof that Wu was a main player in the operation.
She added higher courts have already determined that jail time isn't warranted based simply on the size of the grow op.
Baird Ellan handed Wu an 18-month conditional sentence to be served in the community along with 100 hours of community work service.
published on 04/23/2006
|
