DEA Raids Massive Indoor Marijuana Operation

Federal and local narcotics agents in Oregon on Thursday raided what they described as one of the largest indoor marijuana growing operations uncovered in this country--about 2,500 high-yielding plants cultivated in greenhouses located in a rural area of west-central Oregon.

“It’s a quiet, unassuming, very picturesque rural area,” Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman Ralph Lochridge said in a telephone interview from Silverton, the nearest town to the marijuana operation, about 17 miles northeast of Salem.

“It’s just the place you’d want to put something like that,” he said.

By afternoon, a passerby could only tell the dimensions of the bust by a camouflaged Army 2 1/2-ton truck that federal agents summoned to haul away the illicit plants, which are earmarked to be burned.

DEA investigators estimated that the massive operation, which was shipping marijuana to markets in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Hawaii, was generating about $40 million in annual sales.

Previous raids in California uncovered similar indoor operations, such as one in Sacramento in 1989 that contained 8,000 plants. But the yield of the plants in Oregon was considered to be much greater. Larry Hahn, a supervisory special DEA agent from Washington, D.C., who helped direct the raid, said he had never seen such high-yielding marijuana plants.

“They were the healthiest, the largest that I’ve ever seen,” he said. “They stood 4 to 6 feet tall and were about 4 1/2 feet around.”

Seven individuals were booked on suspicion of conspiracy to manufacture a controlled substance by the DEA and Oregon State Police. They were: Paul R. Spezza, 40, of Sisters, Ore., alleged to be the ringleader; John G. Russell, 45, of Scotts Mills, Ore.; Kevin P. Day, 37, of Silverton, and Gabriel Ramos, 31, Jose Martinez, 33, Federico Ramos, 24, and Artemio Rodrigues, 26, all of Mt. Angel, Ore.

All of the suspects were scheduled for arraignment by today in Eugene. They face a maximum penalty of life imprisonment and a $4-million fine.

Officials said there were two fugitives: James Barton of Aurora, Ore., and his brother, Robert, of Silverton.

DEA officials declined to talk about how the marijuana ring was laundering its profits. They said Spezza and his associates had formed a privately held corporation in Oregon that used a construction company as a front.

Approximately 50 law enforcement agents conducted the raid at 8 a.m., culminating a yearlong investigation. They entered eight 200-foot-long greenhouses that Lochridge described as “almost like a tropical rain forest” in terms of interior humidity and that he said were “chock full of marijuana plants.”

The greenhouses, he said, were located behind a mobile home on a 6 1/2-acre ranch amid a number of nurseries and orchards in the bucolic Oregon countryside. They were covered with black plastic to prevent outsiders from looking in.

What investigators found inside were premium, high-potency, high-yield sinsemilla plants--the most sought-after marijuana, according to DEA agents--which they estimated would produce about three pounds of marijuana each and were worth about $3,000 to $4,000 a pound in the retail market.

For the past decade, DEA investigators have viewed Oregon as the nation’s cradle of indoor marijuana growing.

The DEA’s administrator in Washington, Robert C. Bonner, said Thursday’s big marijuana bust was “reflective of the fact that as we become more successful in closing down outdoor marijuana growers, we’ve increasingly seen sophisticated indoor marijuana cultivation.”

Staff writer John Balzar in Salem, Ore., contributed to this story.