Cannabis

How Legal Weed Became Riddled with Corruption

In the San Gabriel Valley, a city councilman demanded bribes from businesses seeking cannabis licenses, according to a source cooperating with the FBI.

In another small L.A. County city, a cannabis industry group offered $15,000 to council candidates who would pledge to support changes to city regulations that weed businesses wanted — an exchange one legal expert said “flirted at the edges” of the law.

And in rural Northern California, an elected official pushed to expand the amount of weed that farms could legally grow, a proposal sought by a cannabis business that was paying her and her husband hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy their ranch.

California’s decision to legalize recreational cannabis in 2016 ushered in a multibillion-dollar commercial pot market that officials in many small, struggling communities hoped would bring new jobs and an infusion of tax revenue to spend on police, parks and roads. But for some cities, the riches never materialized.

Instead, the advent of commercial cannabis unleashed a wave of corruption, prosecutions and accusations that has rocked local governments across the state and left them with few effective tools to combat the problem.

From the rugged mountains near Oregon to the desert along the Mexican border, a Times investigation found corruption or other questionable conduct covering a vast area of activities: public officials demanding cash from cannabis business owners to approve licenses; government officials threatened with physical violence over pot regulations; and elected officials accepting money from cannabis businesses even as they regulated them. In addition, the industry has donated a torrent of campaign cash to local government officials as cannabis became a new and powerful special interest.

Lobbyists, pot entrepreneurs and public officials say bribery and shakedowns have become so commonplace in cannabis licensing that it feels like a normal part of doing business.

Ruben Guerra, board chairman of the Montebello-based Latin Business Assn ., said he has worked with 10 applicants trying to obtain cannabis licenses from Southern California cities. He witnessed cash shakedowns of half those applicants and notified a retired FBI agent he knows.

“I was right in the middle of the negotiations, and [public officials] were telling me they need this much,” Guerra said, adding that the bribe request usually ranges from $150,000 to $250,000.

The corrupting flow of money has its roots in how California crafted its cannabis legalization law to regulate an industry that until recently operated underground. Proposition 64 , the statewide measure that paved the way for commercial cannabis to launch in 2018, put the ultimate decision on where pot businesses could operate in the hands of cities and counties.

More than 12,000 licenses are active, a Times analysis of state data shows, but those are concentrated in a minority of California’s cities and counties, including many small, struggling communities that viewed cannabis and its potential tax revenue as a financial lifeline.

More than half of cities and counties refuse to allow any type of operation, including recreational sales or farming. Those that do authorize pot businesses generally restrict the number of licenses, creating fierce competition among entrepreneurs looking to cash in.

Giving thousands of often part-time, low-paid officials across the state the power to choose winners and losers in the new “green rush” created fertile ground for corruption.

“You pay your way into one of the few spots,” said Dominic Corva, a sociology professor and co-director of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Marijuana Research at Cal Poly Humboldt. “Once the game was limited licensing … it was like, who gets to have it?”

The link between bribery and cannabis grew so quickly that FBI agents issued a public warning in 2019, saying the corruption threat was especially acute in Western states like California that had implemented this “decentralized” system.

In May, a cannabis business operator, Helios Dayspring, was sentenced to 22 months in federal prison for paying more than $30,000 in bribes to a San Luis Obispo County supervisor. In June, Jermaine Wright, the former mayor pro tem of Adelanto, was convicted of taking a $10,000 bribe from an FBI agent posing as a pot businessman in the high desert city in San Bernardino County. The city’s former mayor, Richard Kerr, is awaiting trial on charges of accepting more than $57,000 in bribes and kickbacks in exchange for helping cannabis businesses. Two more former government officials in Imperial County are serving federal prison sentences for taking pot-related bribes.

Accusations of wrongdoing also abound in civil court.

A legal malpractice case over a pot business in the small L.A. County city of Maywood boiled over in July when a lawyer introduced candid emails from several years earlier in which he accused a client of paying off the city’s mayor at the time, Ramon Medina, to secure a cannabis license, according to trial exhibits filed in the case. In an interview with The Times, Medina denied accepting money from the client, or even knowing him. Medina, who is no longer in office, has also pleaded not guilty to unrelated bribery charges filed last year.

A former staffer to then-L.A. City Councilman Jose Huizar alleged in a lawsuit that he was fired as retaliation for informing the FBI, among others, that he believed Huizar was engaged in a scheme to obtain “cash payments” from cannabis applicants in exchange for permits. Huizar, who has pleaded not guilty to unrelated charges of taking bribes from downtown real estate developers, denied the allegation. The lawsuit was settled.

The situation has become so dire that some in the cannabis industry are calling for a radical solution. Adam Spiker, executive director of Southern California Coalition , a cannabis trade association, said corruption is so endemic in local cannabis licensing that cities and counties should consider banning people who want licenses from direct contact with the government officials who will make the decisions. Spiker said it’s the only way to ensure that licenses are awarded without any possible interference or influence by applicants.

“Is that a silver bullet? No,” he said. “But do things like that need to happen? Yeah, until [the corruption] goes away.”

Baldwin Park leaders saw cannabis as a financial boon for their struggling community in the heart of the San Gabriel Valley.

But from the start, pot licensing stirred allegations of corruption.

One of the licenses approved by Baldwin Park gave the exclusive right to distribute cannabis in the city to a local business, Rukli Inc. The city required other licensed weed businesses to use Rukli as their sole distributor. The arrangement prompted another cannabis business to file a lawsuit accusing Rukli of engaging in a conspiracy to secure an illegal monopoly and racketeering, including bribery and kickbacks. Rukli denied wrongdoing. The lawsuit was eventually dropped after Rukli pulled out of its exclusive deal.

Before the end of Rukli’s exclusive arrangement, a Baldwin Park police lieutenant visited the firm’s distribution center to make sure it was complying with the city’s requirements for securing the property. Lt. Chris Kuberry told The Times one of the firm’s partners mentioned paying $250,000 in cash to city officials.

Kuberry said that the comment was “certainly suspicious” and that he had heard the FBI was investigating possible corruption in the city. But he didn’t inquire further, file a report or contact the FBI. He said his department of about 50 officers was rife with complaints of retaliation and he feared for his job if he raised any questions.

“To be honest, [it was] out of self-preservation,” said Kuberry, who retired shortly after.

In a lawsuit the city brought against its former police chief, Kuberry said in a sworn declaration that pot operators complained to him about “questionable business practices which included paying as much as $250,000 cash in a brown paper bag to city officials.” His declaration did not name the firms or their owners, but Kuberry told The Times he was referring to Rukli.

Scott Russo, an attorney for one of Rukli’s partners at the time, said the company never paid a bribe. He declined to comment on whether any city officials solicited bribes, citing an ongoing federal investigation.

“There’s a process [the FBI] would appreciate I respect,” he said.

A source who is cooperating with the FBI told The Times he was present when Ricardo Pacheco, then a member of the Baldwin Park City Council, asked that Rukli pay him $250,000 in cash to ensure the city would approve a license for the firm.

The money was never paid, and at least one of the firm’s partners instead spoke to the FBI, said the source, who requested anonymity because of the ongoing federal investigation.

Pacheco and an FBI spokeswoman declined to comment.

Pacheco is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to a federal charge of bribery related to a contract with the city’s police union. FBI agents also raided the city attorney’s office and the homes of officials in other cities as part of an investigation targeting cannabis licensing in Baldwin Park and nearby cities.

Cruz Baca, who served on the council from 2013 to 2018, said in interviews with The Times that three men representing two other cannabis firms told her in 2018 that city officials shook them down for campaign contributions. All three, Baca said, alleged Pacheco solicited thousands of dollars in campaign money in exchange for approving a license.

They did not say whether they paid the money. Campaign records show a $6,500 payment by the owner of one of the firms to Pacheco’s political action committee and no contributions from the other business. Both firms got licenses.

Baca said she reported the allegations to Baldwin Park police officials.

Jason Adams, then a Baldwin Park police officer, confirmed that Baca informed him of complaints from pot businesses about cash “shakedowns” by Pacheco. He said he told the FBI weeks later about the bribery allegations against Pacheco.

Baca said that she was contacted by the FBI four years ago and that she reported the businessmen’s allegations about Pacheco and others soliciting bribes. Agents, she said, also asked about other elected officials and pot consultants, and were looking at their links to cannabis interests in nearby cities, including Montebello.

“They were connecting dots,” she said.

Vanessa Delgado was the mayor of Montebello when two local property owners asked her to meet in 2018 to discuss where the city would allow cannabis businesses to operate.

At the meeting, she said, the men demanded Delgado vote to limit the city’s cannabis zone in a way that would benefit their properties.

“I was told if I didn’t go along with limiting the zones that my friends or those close to me would be hurt,” said Delgado, who soon afterward was elected to the state Senate. “It’s just my daughter and I who live alone. I was afraid.”

She declined to name the men out of fear of retaliation but said she informed a Montebello police officer.

The officer, former Lt. Julio Calleros, confirmed that Delgado contacted him about the alleged threat. He said she declined to file a police report, fearing that it could lead to physical harm.

“I could tell she was concerned about it,” Calleros said.

Still, Delgado said she refused to vote in favor of limiting the cannabis zone: “I wasn’t going to let that threat stop me from doing what was right.”

Delgado was part of a majority on the council that embraced weed. City officials publicly predicted that money from pot licenses could be used for road improvements and other community needs. The appeal was obvious for a suburban enclave of roughly 60,000 residents whose city government had spent years in the red.

But residents warned at council meetings about increased crime, especially around schools. Two of the five members on the council voted against the city’s cannabis regulations.

Council members on both sides were threatened with recalls.

In her bid for reelection to the council in 2018, Vivian Romero alleged on a campaign flier that “marijuana special interests tried buying my vote for $50,000.” Romero, who had voted against the city’s cannabis regulations, told The Times that the offer came from a cannabis businessman seeking a license in Montebello.

“The state has created a breeding ground for bribery and favoritism,” Romero said. “This is not hyperbole. These are facts.”

She said a pot consultant threatened to have her ousted unless she changed her position on the issue.

Cannabis companies and lobbyists poured about $40,000 into the city’s election, finance records show, helping defeat Romero and the other council member who had voted against Montebello’s pot regulations.

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Few cities in California were as bullish on pot as Lynwood, one of a cluster of small towns in southeast L.A. County that have long struggled with financial woes and municipal corruption.

City leaders said cannabis would bring good-paying jobs and millions of dollars in revenue, and the town quickly gained a reputation as the next “mecca” of weed.

By 2018, cannabis interests had become a major power broker in the city’s political machine. But some pot business owners were unhappy and wanted changes. The local cannabis business association was pushing the city to extend the terms of licenses to the applicant’s lifetime and to provide a path for them to sell their licenses.

In that year’s election, the Lynwood Cannabis Assn. asked council candidates to sign a pledge card . The card promised that the signer would “fully support” the association and back “the industry and the efforts underway to modify the current city ordinance and development agreement for the members of the organization.”

“Let me know when each candidate signs it so I can give direction to the treasurer to issue the check,” one Lynwood Cannabis Assn. board member wrote to other leaders of the group in an email reviewed by The Times.

In other emails, the association’s president, Tony Torres, asked one of the candidates, Candice Nunez, to sign the card and said she would receive “a check for $15,000 when you return the pledge card.” Torres promised in another email that the pledge cards would be kept confidential until after the election “to avoid anyone potentially using this information in a negative way toward your campaign.”

Nunez recalled thinking when she saw the card, “I’m selling my soul.” Still, she signed and returned the pledge. She received the $15,000 check a few days later and showed it to a Times reporter.

She said she feared she might be engaging in illegal bribery and never deposited the check.

Nunez lost the election. Three candidates who won received a combined $40,000 from the cannabis association, according to campaign finance records.

Councilwoman Marisela Santana, who received $15,000, acknowledged signing the pledge. She said she already favored the association’s proposals because they were good for the city. “The best way to ensure that the cannabis industry grows in such a way that it doesn’t harm the community is to engage the industry and make policy decisions that benefit the Lynwood community first,” Santana said.

Torres, the association president, said in a brief interview that the pledge card didn’t result in any major legislative gains for the association. “Nothing came of it. We never brought it up again,” he said. He declined to comment further.

City records show the council approved some of the association’s requests, including allowing businesses to sell their licenses.

Interest groups are allowed to ask election candidates to promise support for legislative causes and to offer campaign contributions as long as there isn’t an explicit cash-for-votes deal, legal experts said.

Prosecutors face a high bar trying to establish that a campaign contribution amounts to a bribe. They have to show an explicit quid pro quo agreement between the public official and the donor, and that there was corrupt intent.

Bob Fellmeth, a University of San Diego law professor and former white-collar crime prosecutor, questioned whether the Lynwood pledge’s language was specific enough to qualify as a bribe, but he said it “could be an interesting test case to bring.”

“They’re flirting at the edges of felony bribery,” he said. “They’re getting pretty close.”

No charges have been filed in connection with the pledge.

Nunez, the unsuccessful candidate who didn’t cash the association’s check, said she was introduced to the association during a meeting at Tequila Jack’s restaurant in Long Beach that was brokered by Aide Castro, a longtime Lynwood councilwoman.

In 2017, Castro was on the payroll of the giant dispensary tracking app Weedmaps, earning $10,000 a month as a consultant — income she didn’t report on her financial statements as required by state law until she was questioned by The Times .

She did, however, disclose ownership stakes in two cannabis companies, which she estimated at the time to be each worth more than $1 million.

She paid nothing for her shares in the companies, and told The Times that she received her ownership stakes in return for providing the businesses with her government expertise. Castro served on the council until the end of 2020, when she was termed out.

The California Fair Political Practices Commission , which enforces state law on disclosing such financial ties, opened an investigation into Castro’s links to cannabis. The inquiry, launched after The Times’ report more than three years ago, is ongoing.

Lynwood does not have its own ethics agency to conduct such inquiries. Few cities and counties do, which means there is little independent oversight of the financial relationships between local officials and the cannabis industry.

The Times identified more than a dozen government officials statewide who received income — ranging from thousands of dollars to hundreds of thousands — from cannabis companies or had interests in weed businesses while still in office. The payments are legal as long as officials disclose them and don’t cast votes that would financially benefit the firms paying them.

Even when legal, such arrangements raise doubts about whether government officials voting on cannabis issues are looking out primarily for the interests of the public or the interests of the pot industry, good government experts said.

“Maybe they’re completely ignoring their financial interests. .... Maybe they’re making decisions that are not in the best interests of their constituents because they’re trying to put some money in their pocket,” said Tracy Westen, a government ethics expert and founder of the now-shuttered Center for Governmental Studies. “At the very least, it becomes a public confidence issue.”

As Santa Ana’s mayor, Miguel Pulido helped reshape the city for more than a quarter-century. The Orange County city became a pioneer in the region for allowing medical marijuana dispensaries before the legalization of recreational pot.

Pulido has come under fire for his support of the cannabis industry. A former police chief said in a lawsuit that he passed along a report to the district attorney’s office alleging that Pulido had accepted $25,000 in exchange for guaranteeing a cannabis license, and sources told The Times four years ago that county and federal authorities launched criminal investigations of Pulido. He was never charged and denied wrongdoing.

In late 2020, Pulido testified in a sworn deposition that while mayor he received a $10,000 consulting payment from Touchstone, a licensed cannabis company operating in the city. Pulido didn’t report income from Touchstone on his statement of economic interests.

Responding to questions from The Times, an attorney for Touchstone denied the company paid Pulido but didn’t respond to questions about the deposition.

Pulido’s testimony detailed the work he did for the company, the amount he was paid and his close relationship with the company’s owner. He said he was paid to help the cannabis business get off the ground by putting the company in touch with others who sold the necessary equipment.

Santa Ana spokesman Paul Eakins confirmed that in April 2019 Pulido spoke to a staffer in the city’s planning division, which regulates cannabis, about whether Touchstone was required to build a wall to hide a carbon monoxide tank from the street. He said Pulido never asked for special treatment for Touchstone. Pulido, whose mayoral term ended in 2020, did not return phone calls from The Times.

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In the far reaches of California’s northern region lies sparsely populated Trinity County, part of the famed Emerald Triangle, a wide expanse of lush forest and mountains renowned for its high-quality weed. Whether to allow cannabis farms to operate became a lightning-rod issue in the county’s rural communities, with some blaming pot for destroying an idyllic way of life.

In 2018, county Supervisor Barbara “Bobbi” Chadwick and her husband sold their 80-acre ranch to a pot farming company, Family Trees LLC, for $1.5 million, court records show. Family Trees agreed to pay for the property in installments.

As the monthly payments arrived, Chadwick urged her colleagues on the board to allow pot farmers to grow far more cannabis. Family Trees’ head grower sent an email to Chadwick and other supervisors in support, asserting that removing limits on pot growing would allow the farm to “once again send profits back into the [local] economy,” according to county records.

But a majority of the board voted to sharply curtail how much cannabis a licensed farm was allowed to grow.

At a candidate’s forum in 2020 , Chadwick said she had no relationship with a cannabis business and only used the drug as medicine for ailing relatives. She did include the sale of the ranch on a financial disclosure statement filed for 2018 but did not disclose on subsequent statements the ongoing payments from Family Trees.

Chadwick, who served on the board from 2017 until 2021, told the California Fair Political Practices Commission that Family Trees also paid her husband’s contracting firm more than $96,000 for work the company did on the ranch from 2018 through 2020, according to county emails obtained by The Times under a public records request. She did not detail those payments on her financial disclosure statements.

Chadwick declined to answer questions from The Times, saying in a brief phone interview last year only that she has no financial interests in cannabis in Trinity County.

In a lawsuit filed a day before the interview, she and her husband claimed Family Trees owed them hundreds of thousands of dollars in outstanding payments for the ranch.

Chadwick and her husband had been receiving annual payments of $180,000 and monthly payments of $1,900 from Family Trees since June 2018, but the firm was no longer paying in 2021, according to court records. The couple’s lawyer said the dispute was resolved; the suit was dismissed in January.

Attorney Charles M. Farano, who represented Chadwick and her husband in the lawsuit, said that she had no interest in the firm’s pot business and that the purchase agreement was solely for the land and “had nothing to do with cannabis.” He said her “voting record on the cannabis business in general stands and is based upon her position regarding cannabis.”

“She has never had a conflict of interest regarding cannabis and currently has no conflict in these regards,” Farano said, adding that Chadwick “has complied with all disclosure laws.”

Brad Gilbert, a longtime friend of the Chadwicks who incorporated Family Trees and oversaw its county license application, said the firm followed all state and county procedures and has created jobs for local residents.

Trinity County Administrative Officer Richard Kuhns told The Times shortly before his retirement in May that he was concerned at how quickly planning department staff processed Family Trees’ license and questioned whether it was properly handled.

“It just stinks all around,” Kuhns said.

For the city of Calexico, the promise of cannabis was too good to pass up.

The small border community in Imperial County was desperate. City officials were considering layoffs of essential workers, and 20% of the 40,000 or so residents were living in poverty.

By permitting cannabis businesses, council members argued, money would pour into local coffers and bring better times.

“I truly believe that God has it here for a reason,” the city’s mayor, Armando Real, said at a June 2017 council meeting where he and his colleagues voted to allow pot businesses.

But instead of blessings, cannabis brought disgrace.

In late 2019, a businessman known simply as Manny met with two local government officials — Councilman David Romero and a city commissioner, Bruno Suarez. Manny drove a white BMW and wore guayabera shirts and a leather jacket. A clean-cut 30-something, he was an avid NFL fan and sprinkled his conversations with Mexican slang.

Inside a downtown cafe decorated with colorful posters and images of artist Frida Kahlo, Manny said he and his partners in L.A. wanted to open a dispensary. Suarez offered to help for a price — $35,000.

Suarez said the money “guarantees you a … top spot in the queue” for city permits. Romero noted that he had the authority to revoke other applicants’ permits and could push Manny’s to the front.

In early January 2020, the three men met again at an Italian restaurant in neighboring El Centro. After bonding over beers and wood-fired pizza, the men headed to the parking lot where Manny handed Suarez two envelopes containing a total of $17,500 in cash.

“We’re good?” Manny asked.

“Trust me,” Romero responded. “In my line of business, I can’t f— up.”

In late January, the three men met again at the Italian restaurant and Manny handed Suarez envelopes stuffed with $17,500 in cash.

Moments later, federal authorities swooped down and arrested the two officials. Manny, it turned out, was an undercover FBI agent. His conversations with the two officials had been recorded and were documented in court filings by federal prosecutors.

Romero and Suarez pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery and were sentenced in May 2021 to two years in prison.

Beyond public embarrassment, Calexico has little to show for its embrace of weed. Major cannabis projects never materialized. Nor did the anticipated jobs or $700,000 in annual tax revenue that had been projected. The city has taken in only about $220,000 since first issuing licenses in 2018.

In interviews with The Times before they reported to federal authorities in June 2021, Romero and Suarez said the undercover agent led their conversations, but both expressed remorse and said they made mistakes.

A key error that officials made, Romero said, was to limit the number of dispensary licenses in the city. That created tense competition for just 12 permits and an incentive for people to try to game the system.

“If you put a number on it, you’ll turn it into a political mess,” Romero said of the process, hours before he was remanded to the custody of U.S. marshals.

“It was just a ticking time bomb.”

Times researcher Scott Wilson and Times staff writer Aida Ylanan contributed to this report.

Prop 64: Promises up in smoke

SIX YEARS after legalization with the idea of crippling the outlaw pot trade, illicit farms abound in Mount Shasta Vista, Calif.

California has done little to address its explosion of illegal cannabis farms

Story by Paige St. John | Photographs by Brian van der Brug

At sunset from atop Haystack Butte, the desert floor below shimmers with a thousand lights.

Illegal cannabis farms.

At this hour and distance, serene hues cloak the rugged enclave of Mount Shasta Vista, a tense collective of seasonal camps guarded by guns and dogs where the daily runs of water trucks are interrupted by police raids, armed robberies and, sometimes, death. So many hoop houses pack this valley near the Oregon border that last year it had the capacity to supply half of California’s entire legal cannabis market.

Proposition 64, California’s 2016 landmark cannabis initiative, sold voters on the promise a legal market would cripple the drug’s outlaw trade, with its associated violence and environmental wreckage.

Instead, a Los Angeles Times investigation finds, the law triggered a surge in illegal cannabis on a scale California has never before witnessed.

Rogue cultivation centers like Mount Shasta Vista now engulf rural communities scattered across the state, as far afield as the Mojave Desert, the steep mountains on the North Coast, and the high desert and timberlands of the Sierra Nevada.

Residents in these places describe living in fear next to heavily armed camps. Criminal enterprises operate with near impunity, leasing private land and rapidly building out complexes of as many as 100 greenhouses. Police are overwhelmed, able to raid only a fraction of the farms, and even those are often back in business in days.

The raids rip out plants and snare low-wage laborers while those responsible, some operating with money from overseas, remain untouched by the law, hidden behind straw buyers and fake names on leases.

Labor exploitation is common, and conditions are sometimes lethal. The Times documented more than a dozen deaths of growers and workers poisoned by carbon monoxide.

The scale of the crisis is immense. A Times analysis of satellite imagery covering thousands of square miles of the state showed dramatic expansion in cannabis cultivation where land is cheap and law enforcement spread thin, regardless of whether those communities permitted commercial cultivation.

The boom accompanied a switch in cultivation technique, from annual harvests of outdoor plots to large, canopy-covered hoop houses that permit three to five harvests a year.

The explosive growth has had grave, far-reaching consequences, according to a Times review of state, county and court records as well as interviews with scores of local residents, legal and illegal cannabis growers, laborers, law enforcement, market analysts, community activists and public officials:

Outlaw grows have exacerbated cannabis-related violence, bringing shootouts, robberies, kidnappings and, occasionally, killings. Some surrounded residents say they are afraid to venture onto their own properties.

Laborers often toil in squalid, dangerous conditions and frequently are cheated of wages. In four counties alone since legalization, carbon monoxide from generators and charcoal braziers has killed seven workers as they labored or tried to stay warm in sealed greenhouses on illegal farms, and eight more inside uninhabitable buildings, coroner records show.

Intense cultivation is causing unmeasured environmental damage. Millions of gallons of water are being diverted at a time of severe drought, pulled out of aquifers even as the wells of local homeowners go dry. Unchecked chemical fertilizers have been deployed, along with banned, lethal pesticides.

The immense scale of illegal cultivation fed a glut that crashed wholesale prices last year, jeopardizing even those in the licensed market. Small-scale legal farmers unable to sell their crop have been pushed toward financial ruin.

The pitch for Proposition 64 focused on grand benefits: an end to drug possession laws that penalized the poor and people of color, and the creation of a commercial market that in 2021 generated $5.3 billion in taxed sales.

But California failed to address the reality that decriminalizing a vast and highly profitable illegal industry would open the door to a global pool of organized criminals and opportunists.

For those sidestepping taxes and regulation, the reduced criminal penalties included in Proposition 64 lowered the cost and risk of doing business.

Although no hard data exist on the size of the illegal market, it is indisputably many times larger than the licensed community. The Times’ analysis of satellite images shows that unlicensed operations in many of California’s biggest cultivation areas, such as parts of Trinity and Mendocino counties, outnumbered licensed farms by as much as 10 to 1.

Butte County, at the northern end of the state’s Central Valley, tried to ban commercial cultivation, but the area covered by cannabis greenhouses in Berry Creek soared 700% in five years. Ravaged by wildfire, it is not rebuilt homes but the shiny plastic of greenhouses that gleams between the charred black skeletons of the forest.

Neither a ban nor lack of water dissuaded outlaw growers from erecting hoop houses on the desert sands of Lucerne Valley, where the state mapped 13 cannabis plots before legalization and The Times last year found 935 greenhouses. A still-running campaign by the San Bernardino County sheriff in 12 months razed more than 8,200 greenhouses without running out of targets.

California has done little to address the crisis.

Enforcement efforts against the illicit market are spread across a variety of state agencies with insufficient resources and very different priorities. Seven years after water regulators set out to map and measure the impact of cannabis cultivation in California, the work remains unfinished.

Under Gov. Gavin Newsom, a champion of legalization, California has subscribed to an industry-backed theory that market forces will eventually squeeze out illegal growers. When licensed growers this year complained they could not compete, Newsom agreed to tax breaks and his administration created incentives to expand the market by giving grants to communities that allow commercial cannabis.

At the same time, he increased the penalties against those that don’t. Communities that prohibit commercial cannabis are already barred from key state enforcement grants. A measure written into Newsom’s budget bill also blocks them from the closed-door meetings of a task force set up to advise the governor’s administration on cannabis policy, including what to do about the illegal market.

Illegal cannabis’ thorniest challenges fall on overwhelmed local law enforcement agencies and code enforcement departments, ill-equipped to contend with criminal networks behind the growth.

The rugged forests and valleys of Mendocino County, deep in the heart of California’s famed Emerald Triangle, renowned for the quality and quantity of its weed production, have an estimated 5,000 illegal cannabis farms. The grows range from homestead farms to dangerous drug-trade operations, such as one where deputies this spring found an AK-47 modified for full-automatic fire.

The sheriff’s cannabis enforcement team consists of a single sergeant and a part-time deputy. They try to identify the worst offenders, borrow officers from neighboring counties for raids and ignore the rest.

“It’s like taking on a gargantuan army with a pocket knife,” said Sheriff Matt Kendall.

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Noel Manners’ licensed farm had a problem — too much cannabis.

Regulators in 2020 sent satellite images that showed large hoop houses on his Mendocino County property that were not permitted under his state cultivation license.

But Manners knew the offending weed wasn’t his.

A large illegal grow had crept onto his 800-acre timber tract. Manners waited for winter, when he knew the operation would be dormant, and hiked up the hillside. He found trees felled for a half-acre clearing, three giant plastic-covered hoop houses, and — especially repugnant because the longtime grower was a leader in organic cannabis farming — chemical fertilizers spilled on the ground.

Manners shoved the outlaw operation back across his fence line with his mini-dozer. It returned the next spring — with unwelcome signs of activity.

Soap suds frothed in his mountain pond. Gunfire echoed at night. Walking his land one rainy day, Manners smelled something foul.

“I saw these little white, almost like, flowers on the ground,” he said.

He was standing in a field of toilet paper.

Manners, 63, was a pioneer in cannabis, a former bicycle shop owner with a laid-back smile and the habit of hanging his eyeglasses on the collars of his Grateful Dead T-shirts. He left the Sacramento Valley three decades ago to move his family to this remote mountain overlooking Round Valley.

He joined the generations of growers who dodged the law while building an economic and social fabric that filled the void left by the collapse of the timbering industry.

When California led the nation by legalizing medical marijuana in 1996, he and other farmers became part of a gray market — one that fostered sham medical recommendations and farms of 99 plants, one less than the federal threshold for a mandatory five-year prison term. Absent state regulation, permitting took the form of zip ties sold by the sheriff to identify legal plants and protect them from raids.

Manners successfully navigated every shift in California’s unstable cannabis landscape. He developed strains that would help form the foundation for today’s industrial growers. High Times, the counterculture magazine dedicated to weed, heralded his off-the-grid operation, Camp Cool, as one of the nation’s premier sun-grown cannabis farms.

The interlopers on his mountain made Manners uncomfortable. He would not go near the grow if it was occupied. But he could not avoid them.

Manners met growers cutting through the woods, one carrying an assault rifle. Another had a bandanna over half his face.

“I pointed at them and said, ‘This is my land. I’m the one who put up the “No Trespassing” signs and whatnot last year.’ And then I asked them, ‘So how long, when are you guys going to be finished and be off of my land?’

“And they said, ‘Oh, 10 weeks ...’

“And I said, ‘Good enough.’ That was my cue to leave.”

In July 2021, Mendocino County sheriff’s deputies finally raided the operation.

Manners returned to the site this winter, and discovered the operation still standing. Three enormous hoop houses stood ready, each the length of two houses. Three giant Doughboy swimming pools were set up for mixing chemical-laden water for “fertigation.”

“They’re getting ready for another expansion,” Manners said as he documented the grow with his phone, his gray ponytail reflected in the glass of the abandoned truck. He pointed out an overturned truck camper top, and enclosures made from black plastic hung from the trees — makeshift toilets.

Manners died unexpectedly in early April, falling and cracking his head after the main artery from his heart suddenly tore. His brain swelled and he did not regain consciousness after emergency surgery. Afterward, his son noticed something uncharacteristic on his father’s nightstand: a .44 magnum pistol.

A coiled belt of ammunition sat on the shelf below.

::

In the run-up to California’s 2016 watershed cannabis vote, Mouying Lee positioned himself at the forefront of a wave.

He moved from Fresno to Siskiyou County’s high desert to snap up scores of cheap lots in a failed vacation resort called Mount Shasta Vista, little more than a spiderweb of cinder paths bulldozed between lava rock and juniper scrub.

Then Lee sold most of the dusty, empty plots to Hmong like himself. Hundreds moved from across the United States to the area populated mostly by white hay farmers and cattle ranchers.

The would-be entrepreneur described his vision of a cultural center for his people, Laotian refugees persecuted for siding with the U.S. during the Vietnam War.

But in the dry volcanic valley, punished by sun and desiccating wind, the newcomers built virtually no homes. They slept in sheds, or beneath tarps, and tended 99-plant gardens of cannabis, one leafy stalk short of the federal cutoff for prison. When the snow arrived, they and the harvest disappeared.

Similar cannabis-centric enclaves emerged across Northern California, often named after Laotian mountains or battlefields. They were controversial in the Hmong community, but even critics said the farms provided a steady flow of cash to a struggling population of immigrants.

Lee said most of the cannabis in Mount Shasta Vista was grown for personal use and “the old way of medicine,” such as brewing cannabis tea and putting it in the shower for steam baths. He voiced dismay that Siskiyou County’s more established residents accused the Hmong arrivals of organized crime.

Law enforcement frequently intercepted shipments of hundred-pound parcels of cannabis sent from the Mount Shasta Vista farms. The sheriff’s posse mounted dawn raids and the county Board of Supervisors passed ordinances that not only banned commercial cannabis but the water deliveries that kept the grows green.

Lee said it was a cultural misunderstanding, if not overt racism.

Court filings show Lee was central to a highly organized cannabis operation. Investigators raiding his houses found water delivery schedules and receipts for dues for a 534-member association. The files tracked members’ medical marijuana cards and voting records as well as search warrants executed by the sheriff. An investigator alleged the organization even insured members against losses from raids. In texts admitted into the court record, Lee brokered cannabis sales by the hundreds of pounds to buyers flying in from afar.

With the opening of the recreational cannabis market, Lee expanded beyond his Hmong clientele. He bought large parcels outside Mount Shasta Vista, bulldozing one 620-acre tract so barren the scar is visible from space. Dubbed the “Cinder Pit” by police, it contained 82 plots, each with two greenhouses and a shed. Tenants arrested during drug raids told police they had leased their plots for $10,000 a season.

It was not the sheriff but a tax agent who stopped Lee’s expansion.

In 2020, with help from the California Franchise Tax Board, county authorities charged Lee with money laundering and tax fraud, accusing him of hiding some $1.5 million in unreported earnings. Lee pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors asked a judge to set his bail at $3 million, but Lee was released on his own recognizance.

Even with Lee sidelined, the expansion of cannabis farms in Mount Shasta Vista continued, attracting other groups who spilled out across the valley of Juniper Flat.

Single-family plots gave way to multi-season greenhouses. Some built industrial-scale complexes that made the small Hmong camps look timid.

“I never thought it was going to be like that,” Lee said this spring as he paced the upper balcony at the courthouse, waiting for his Beverly Hills lawyer to fly in for settlement talks with the county prosecutor.

At night the cannabis camps glow like a small city. The Times mapped more than 1,300 farms in Juniper Flat last year. Their greenhouses covered more than 10 million square feet, a 4,200% increase since 2018.

It is the densest known concentration of illegal cannabis cultivation in California.

Once the dominion of ranchers and retirees, the valley has taken on outlaw qualities. Lookouts are posted at entrances off the highway. Armed robberies are frequent. In 2018, deputies seized seven guns during raids on illegal farms. Last year, they found 66. This spring, police were summoned to one farm to fetch two intruders left tied to a fence post.

Last month, four men who appeared to be in their 30s surrounded a Times photographer parked along the public highway outside Mount Shasta Vista, where he had stopped to document water trucks in the distance filling up at a hay farmer’s well. One of the men took out a tire iron and began hitting the photographer’s car, denting the body and smashing the rear windshield and a sideview mirror.

Another told him: “The only reason you don’t have a bullet in your head right now is because you are talking to me.”

Two years ago, masked assailants attacked a Mount Shasta Vista grower and his companions, tied them up and killed the grower. Police suspect it was an execution. It remains unsolved.

Also that summer, three men from Southern California carrying AR-15-style assault rifles tried to rob growers. In the ensuing shootout, one of the men was killed and his wounded accomplices fled on foot through the rocky cannabis farms, calling 911 to beckon police to their rescue. That killing also remains unsolved.

So do the killings of two Hmong women from Milwaukee in 2019. They were shot on a cannabis farm near the Oregon state line, where another enclave has settled, rarely visited by police.

Since 2016, at least eight cannabis growers in Siskiyou County have died of carbon monoxide poisoning as they tried to keep warm with charcoal braziers and unventilated generators, according to coroner records obtained by The Times. The body of a ninth carbon monoxide victim was found last year dumped on the side of Interstate 5, wrapped in his sleeping bag. Police have no clue where he died, but they presume it was a cannabis operation. Six of the dead were Hmong.

Det. Sgt. Cory Persing commands the county drug enforcement unit, wrestling not just with cannabis but fentanyl, meth and everything else. The five-person unit is down to two, Persing and another sergeant, so they must call for volunteers from the jail to staff raids.

Because of the Proposition 64 prohibition barring counties that do not permit commercial growing from state enforcement grants, they rely on funding from the federal Drug Enforcement Agency.

The ballot measure also dramatically lowered the cost of business for illegal operators, reducing the criminal penalty for unlicensed cultivation from a felony punishable with time behind bars to a $500 misdemeanor no matter how large the crop. To bring a felony case that might shut down an operation, state prosecutors must find other charges. That requires investigators.

Persing has none.

He is caught in an endless cycle of writing search warrants and ripping out plants. Nine out of 10 grows go untouched. He has returned to raided farms three days later to find them back in operation.

On a sunny day in October, Persing’s team hit four small growing camps. Alerted by the lookouts, the growers had fled by the time the convoy arrived. Only a penned dog was left, snarling and snapping, a pile of dry food on the ground kicked through the bars as though even its owners were afraid to get close.

Officers used a mini-dozer to raze cannabis beneath a hoop house built out of PVC pipe, while Persing peered inside one of the plywood sheds used for habitation. He laid the search warrant and a receipt for 157 pounds of seized cannabis on a mattress set on two-by-fours, beside an empty rifle case.

An outdated watering schedule hung on the unfinished wall. The shed held personal financial papers for at least four people, and an offer to buy 70 acres in eastern Oklahoma where there is a cannabis land rush. A garbage pail and a plastic bucket in a makeshift stall suggested a shower. A single-burner camp stove suggested cooking, but there was no food.

Persing stood on the ridge road, sunglasses perched atop his close-cropped head, and pointed out Mount Shasta Vista.

Then he used his arm to trace the expansion since 2019. In the valley below, the white forms of hoop houses stretched for miles.

“This is all of the new stuff,” Persing said, sweeping his arm east across the valley. “I mean, like, prior to this, there was one house up in here. It has just grown, swoosh, all the way around.”

Some cannabis camps empty their pit toilets onto the ground and trash into other holes. When the wind blows, empty fertilizer bags wrap themselves around fences like tumbleweeds. Growers have bulldozed parcels flat, scraping away vegetation, and the land is cut by deep erosion scars littered with empty water totes and growing piles of detritus. With the market collapse, some of the hoop houses are abandoned, and dogs that once guarded the farms now run in packs that sometimes attack cattle, and are frequently found dead or starving.

“All of that’s illegal. Nobody seems to care,” said Persing, exasperation wearing on his voice.

Beyond Highway Patrol and wildlife officers who sometimes lend a hand with physical labor, Persing said, “we don’t get much help from any state agency.”

::

Struggling licensed cannabis growers like Mary Gaterud also feel abandoned.

She is part of the cultural movement that was at the core of California’s early cannabis industry.

Gaterud earned a master’s degree in existential phenomenal psychology, took a look at her job prospects in the late 1990s, and thought, “Yeah, I think I’m just going to drop out and grow weed.” She set up a small outdoor cannabis farm in Humboldt County on the banks of the Eel River.

Her plants are organically nurtured in microbe-rich soil and mulched with a winter cover of fava beans. She spent years developing sweet-scented stocks, grown herself from seed, so that when she pops opens a harvest tub in her state-inspected processing facility, a converted root cellar, the smell is heavy with pineapple and coconut.

Her harvest fell victim to a glut in cannabis that drove down wholesale prices. A pound of dried flower, which just a few years earlier would sell in California for more than $2,000, was now worth less than $300. If it sold at all.

Late last year, as Gaterud cut the summer’s harvest, her distributor in Los Angeles shipped back her 2020 crop, unsold and so damaged by poor storage Gaterud wasn’t even sure it was hers.

There was nothing else to do with the premium plants but ship them to an extractor to be mulched and reduced to generic oil.

Gaterud and many other small farmers now face financial disaster.

“I’m barely hanging on,” she said.

The glut was driven by two factors: the surge in illegal growing and the state’s issuance of licenses to grow more cannabis than Californians consume.

Nicole Elliott, the governor’s cannabis advisor and the head of the Department of Cannabis Control, said she believed California’s licensed cannabis crop was about 3.6 million pounds, in a state that consumed less than 2 million pounds.

The Times’ analysis of state licensing records and production estimates put the state’s 2021 legal crop at well more than 7 million pounds, even accounting for crop failures and growers who did not plant.

Asked about The Times’ findings of increased illegal cultivation, Elliott said: “Do I think it’s worse? I honestly couldn’t say one way or another.”

Elliott said ensuring the integrity of the legal market is her first focus “before we expand those efforts out to the illegal market.” Other state agencies, she said, are better equipped to contend with illicit grows.

Still, she said, “it’s not like we’re sitting on our hands doing nothing.”

In July, the department issued a news release heralding the removal of illicit cannabis from the market, but detailed warrant logs obtained by The Times under California’s public records law show most of those seizures were led by other police agencies. In the year since July 2021, the department’s 59 sworn officers have initiated only 26 of their own warrants against illicit growers.

The department’s enforcement chief told The Times he was unable to provide a list of criminal cases that resulted from those efforts.

The logs show most of the division’s focus is on urban areas and Southern California. In that same time frame, the Department of Cannabis Control enforcement actions in Mendocino County — beset with violent, large-scale criminal operations — were limited to a single day of raids on four small farms along a creek, at the behest of wildlife officers. There were no arrests.

The remainder of state enforcement is fractured and limited in focus. National Guard teams still conduct summer raids that slash plants, but they remove less than a quarter of the crop of eradication campaigns a decade earlier. The state water resources boards were front-runners in approaching illicit cannabis as an environmental threat, but when fees from cannabis permits fell short of budgeted projections, the boards in 2020 cut their cannabis enforcement departments by half.

The biggest state player in combating illicit cannabis is the Department of Fish and Wildlife, which focuses on the impact growers have on streams and fauna.

Cannabis growing that endangers either remains a felony. But the 68 Fish and Wildlife cannabis field officers who have the expertise to document those crimes are spread thin. Nine agents cover the seven-county area responsible for an estimated 40% of illegal cultivation.

State regulators have had authority since 2019 to fine unlicensed growers up to $30,000 a day, and to seek civil penalties that can exceed $300,000 a day.

Although the state has sanctioned licensed growers for violating regulations, The Times found the state attorney general has never invoked civil penalties for unlicensed cultivation. The Department of Cannabis Control used the tool once — against a Shasta County school janitor and his wife accused of leasing their land for nine illegal greenhouses.

Elliott could not explain why the case was filed at all. She said it was a departure from what she believed department priorities should be.

Other states experiencing rampant outlaw activity have taken more aggressive measures. In Oregon, the problem prompted a special session of the Legislature to step up police raids and services for exploited workers. Oklahoma’s attorney general is investigating law firms accused of helping growers skirt residency requirements.

Gaterud, on her farm deep in the mountains of Humboldt County, said she feels betrayed by California and angry that she suffers while those flouting the law go unstopped.

Regulators, she said, repeatedly demanded detailed drawings of her farm’s plans and conducted nine separate inspections. She estimates she spent $100,000 on fees and improvements to her property to meet local and state requirements.

As the winter rains set in, she began borrowing money from friends and relatives to live on. She got a part-time online job as coordinator of an astrology school to make ends meet.

Her 2021 crop came back from the distributor, also unsold.

“I’m afraid that I am one bad piece of news away from having to list my property,” she said, “and abandon my dream, life, everything I have fought for.”

::

In the summer of 2020, Julian “Terps” Sanchez left his Orange County apartment for long buying trips in Northern California to scour illegal farms for 100-pound boxes of processed cannabis buds.

At home, his father, a former meth distributor named Miguel Sarabia, used a strip mall cellphone and satellite dish franchise in Lakewood to build a clandestine lab to make distilled oil for edibles and vaping cartridges imported from Hong Kong.

The father and son represented the connection that enables illicit growers like those in Mount Shasta Vista to reach a national market.

Sanchez supplied a Milwaukee operation some 250 pounds of cannabis a month, and his father provided thousands of vape cartridges, according to plea statements and other court filings. In just six months, the California wholesalers were paid an estimated $1.7 million, much of it sent through the mail with bills painstakingly taped between the pages of magazines. It was a low-risk drug that commanded high street prices, especially sold as vape cartridges, Sarabia’s defense lawyer said, making cannabis more attractive and more lucrative than cocaine or heroin.

On the Milwaukee side, affidavits and plea statements filed in federal court detail stash houses, business fronts and large weapons caches that included untraceable “ghost guns.” The arsenal of one woman, who gathered family members in a basement to assemble vape cartridges, included a baby blue Glock on her dresser and another Glock in a baby bassinet. The ring’s local leader was a Mexican Posse gang member who, an informant told investigators, twice boasted of shooting a “snitch.”

Sarabia had his eyes on the expanding world of legal cannabis. Should Wisconsin approve recreational cannabis, he claimed on a 2020 wiretapped call, influential political connections guaranteed Sarabia a wholesale license. He had already bought the building.

“I’ll be the first one,” he boasted.

Federal and state investigators in Wisconsin shut down the trade in late 2020, charging 26 defendants. Sanchez pleaded guilty to drug and gun charges for a 10-year sentence. Sarabia admitted to a single drug conspiracy charge and was given five years in prison. None of the farms supplying the drug ring were identified.

Few ever are.

Police and prosecutors told The Times that cannabis-related crimes are a low priority, even in the federal court system, where cannabis is classified the same as heroin and LSD. They described unwritten hurdles their investigations must clear — such as proof of laundering millions of dollars — before superiors will approve money and time to prosecute. In the rare instances when charges are filed, they generally don’t target the people who head or fund the operations.

Federal justice officials in 2018 heralded investigators who used utility bills and tracking devices to identify some 130 indoor grow houses in Sacramento run by a network of buyers who wired money from China. Nearly half of the 21 people charged were Chinese citizens.

Five years after the first arrests, most of those charged have yet to go to trial. The operation’s leaders weren’t identified. A federal official connected with the case, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said Chinese authorities won’t cooperate on such investigations and U.S. Justice Department supervisors in Washington, D.C., did not give the green light to continue digging.

The best hope, he said, was to seize local assets and “disrupt the finances ... and put pressure on whoever is organizing this stuff.”

Nearly half of the money for the grow houses came from local private investors who made high-interest loans to buyers with few obvious financial resources. Court records show the lenders included a Sacramento physician who told the court he hated cannabis, but was unwittingly steered into underwriting illegal grow houses by a real estate agent now charged in the conspiracy. And, he said, it was very profitable.

Federal prosecutors allowed him, as they do with other such lenders, to recoup his money when the property sold, even though a forfeiture motion remained pending.

In one of the few federal cases that resulted in a conviction for illegal cultivation, probation officials recommended four years in prison for Aaron Li.

Li, who has a PhD in vision science from UC Berkeley, used money from unindicted conspirators in China to turn nine suburban homes in San Bernardino County into clandestine grow houses. Court records laid out the mechanics of a sophisticated scheme that ran until 2019, involving stolen electricity, straw buyers, fake leases, purloined passport information and money moved from China to shell companies in the U.S. One of the participants was a confessed money-laundering courier for a Mexican narcotics ring.

Li’s defense lawyer told a judge that his client was acting under orders from unnamed bosses he feared, a claim she repeated to The Times.

U.S. District Judge George Wu initially announced an eight-month sentence. After Li said that he had young children, the judge reduced it to six months.

“Marijuana is being cultivated legally — it’s just a question of getting the licenses,” Wu said during sentencing. “There’s so much of it. So why would I impose a lengthy sentence?”

A federal prosecutor in the case said there was no interest in investigating beyond Li, saying the case had met its primary goal, shutting down a community nuisance.

State Assemblyman Thurston “Smitty” Smith (R-Apple Valley) this winter proposed restoring felony charges for large-scale growers, but with no co-signers he yanked the doomed bill before its first hearing. His substitute measure to increase civil fines passed the Assembly but failed to progress in the Senate.

A growers’ group, the California Cannabis Equity Alliance, called the proposed increase in fines “a symbolic deterrent that will be good for a press release and little else.”

“The potential profits to be made are too great.”

In the bowl of a beautiful and tragic valley bordered by the Eel River in Mendocino County sits tiny Covelo.

It was the site of California’s largest state-financed massacre — a campaign that in 1856-59 slaughtered more than 1,000 Yuki tribal members — and the destination for the U.S. military’s forced march of five more tribes. Remote and at times unreachable, the community has struggled since the downturn of the timber industry and closure of the local flour mill.

But Covelo had cannabis.

Small outdoor cash crops were common on Round Valley’s patchwork of private, federal and reservation lands. Mendocino County and the tribes were tolerant, even if the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs did not approve.

After legalization, outsiders rolled into the town in expensive, lifted trucks with Central Valley license plates, moving as a group. They began leasing land from tribal members.

By the summer of 2021, the town was overtaken. A Times analysis of satellite images showed the valley floor that summer had 1,033 homes and 2,423 cannabis hoop houses, almost one for every resident.

More than half are unlicensed. Hoop houses not only fill farm lots, but backyards and front yards. They stand by the schools, behind the auto parts store, beside the Catholic chapel.

“We have been totally overrun,” Round Valley Indian Tribes director James Russ said at a county advisory committee meeting last year. “Not just this reservation, but also this whole valley.”

With the surge in illegal cultivation came heavy-duty weapons, violence and lethal chemicals. On one 2021 raid, deputies found bottles of Metrifos, with “peligroso” — dangerous — and a skull and crossbones on the label. The nerve poison, taken off the U.S. market in 2009, is still sold in Mexico to protect crops from rodents. The sheriff said one deputy became ill after the raid and was hospitalized with poisoning symptoms.

Working conditions on the farms are harsh. Laborers described 14-hour days, living in tents without sanitation and having to provide their own food with the promise of pay after the harvest, if it came at all. Wage theft is so common laborers circulate lists of “no pay” farms.

In 2019, 40-year-old Jose Ramon Mejia Rios, a local man, died inside the cannabis greenhouse he was tending. The county coroner determined carbon monoxide killed him. A young woman living on the property told The Times that Rios was part of a crew of growers who leased space for their illegal greenhouses from her aunt. They pulled out after the death, she said, and others took over.

The next year, two more workers died less than a mile apart, under similar conditions, coroner records show.

Osnin Noe Quintanilla-Melendez, 32, from Honduras died sleeping in a cannabis hoop house with a running generator.

Across from the local landfill, on a site with 52 illegal greenhouses, Wilson Andres Rodriguez Villalobos, a 32-year-old worker from Colombia, was found face-down inside an illegal greenhouse warmed by propane torches.

Months later, on the same farm, another worker disappeared. Victor Medina’s family in San Jose received a ransom call from kidnappers unable to prove the missing man was still alive.

“Cuidado con Covelo,” one person wrote on a WhatsApp forum for cannabis workers, “que esta muy turbio.”

Watch out for Covelo. It’s very shady.

“Aparecen muertos a cada rato.”

Dead people appear all the time.

In the late fall, a game warden investigating the smell from an abandoned car outside Covelo opened the trunk to find the decomposed corpse of Marco Antonio Barrera Beltran, 51, a Mexican citizen who’d been living in the Central Valley. The sheriff said he had been working on an illegal cannabis farm in Covelo. Beltran had been shot to death.

The murder investigation included a search of a bank of cannabis farms where another worker died of carbon monoxide poisoning the year before. But the case remains unsolved.

Covelo residents who spoke to The Times asked that their names not be used because they were fearful of the growers around them.

One woman’s water well now runs dry each May, the shallow aquifer tapped by massive greenhouses that surround her house on three sides. She has gone to extremes: let the garden die, collect drips from the faucets, clean dishes with a spray bottle, and rely on a garden hose from the neighbors and a storage tank to get through the summer. The growers next door haul in water by the truckload. Their generators run constantly, workers defecate in her yard, and she must block her windows at night with cardboard to cut the glare from greenhouses.

Other residents described finding a cannabis worker, unpaid and stranded in the hills, weeping and afraid his employer would return to kill him. During a recent raid of an illegal farm, sheriff’s deputies encountered two workers from Mexico who said they had been held there against their will.

“Right now, from the decimation I see in my valley, it ... breaks my heart,” said Kat Willits, a local school administrator and former council member of the Round Valley Indian Tribes.

Willits spent her childhood in Covelo visiting family, roaming the valley, swimming in the creek beside spawning salmon. She was appalled to return as an adult and find so many community members dependent on leasing to illegal growers.

“Some people say that’s the only way they can make money now,” said Willits. “[But] they’re not making money... they’re also decimating their own land with the byproducts of cannabis grows.”

She said cannabis cash has hastened Covelo’s social decay, not uplifted it. There are more junked cars, more decaying homes, and more violence.

“Great tradeoff,” she said, with apparent sarcasm, “for some California college kids to be able to puff on a pen filled with a cannabis product in public.

“What people think of as a harmless drug or medicinal product have not seen what lies in the belly of the beast.”