Mark Coakley lifts the veil on the riveting story of a group of criminals — Ontario police would call them “a gang with no name” — whose most famous exploit was turning an abandoned Molson beer factory north of Toronto into a giant indoor jungle of cannabis. The operation produced tens of millions of dollars in profits and involved gun smuggling, slavery, violence, pornography, and running cocaine and other illegal chemicals.
When the grow-op was raided by police in 2003, the massive scale of the operation drew international media attention. The true masterminds behind the operation were not arrested until 2011, and it was only then that the real story behind North America’s biggest grow-op came to light.
Mark Coakley lifts the veil on the riveting story of a group of criminals — Ontario police would call them “a gang with no name” — whose most famous exploit was turning an abandoned Molson beer factory north of Toronto into a giant indoor jungle of cannabis. The operation produced tens of millions of dollars in profits and involved gun smuggling, slavery, violence, pornography, and running cocaine and other illegal chemicals.
When the grow-op was raided by police in 2003, the massive scale of the operation drew international media attention. The true masterminds behind the operation were not arrested until 2011, and it was only then that the real story behind North America’s biggest grow-op came to light.
Hidden Harvest: The Rise and Fall of North America's Biggest Cannabis Grow Op
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Hidden Harvest: The Rise and Fall of North America's Biggest Cannabis Grow Op
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Overview
Mark Coakley lifts the veil on the riveting story of a group of criminals — Ontario police would call them “a gang with no name” — whose most famous exploit was turning an abandoned Molson beer factory north of Toronto into a giant indoor jungle of cannabis. The operation produced tens of millions of dollars in profits and involved gun smuggling, slavery, violence, pornography, and running cocaine and other illegal chemicals.
When the grow-op was raided by police in 2003, the massive scale of the operation drew international media attention. The true masterminds behind the operation were not arrested until 2011, and it was only then that the real story behind North America’s biggest grow-op came to light.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781770904958 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ECW Press |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 284 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Hidden Harvest
The Rise and Fall of North America's Biggest Cannabis Grow Op
By Mark Coakley
ECW PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Mark CoakleyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77090-495-8
CHAPTER 1
BOOK I
In an abandoned beer factory in the heart of Ontario, just south of Barrie, there once grew a secret garden. Its legendary flowers, when set aflame and inhaled, would give some users joy; others, relief from pain; others, paranoia; others, dependency; and others, amnesia.
Now that garden is gone.
The jungle of almost 30,000 cannabis plants — with long, finger-like leaves swaying in the humid wind from strong electric fans — thrived under lightning-bright lightbulbs all year long in the giant concrete-walled building by Highway 400. Some of the illegal salad grew in horizontal brewing tanks lined with shiny stainless steel. Some grew in huge rooms, with newly built cinderblock walls covered by sheets of white plastic fastened with red duct tape. And some weed grew hydroponically in a janitor's bedroom.
These hidden harvests of sticky, stinky, all-female flowers would bring to men and women in the illegal conspiracy both highs and lows, fun and misery, wealth and years in prison.
This is the biography of North America's biggest grow op.
* * *
On flat land at the corner of Highway 400 and Big Bay Point Road, just south of Lake Simcoe's Kempenfelt Bay and the fast-expanding city of Barrie, stood a huge, modernist, gray concrete building. Ranging from two to four stories in height, it covered hundreds of square feet. Around it, a few clumps of road-salt-damaged trees clung to life. There were no other buildings nearby. As large as it was, the Molson beer factory occupied only part of the northwest corner of the vast piece of land. On the exterior wall of the building's second floor, a red-and-white mural reading MOLSON could be easily seen from cars on Highway 400. Barrie is an hour's drive north of Toronto, and the building was a landmark, both to the 150,000 or so local residents and to people with cottages up north. People giving directions would often say, "When you see the Molson plant, you're almost in Barrie."
The modern history of the property began with tobacco. In 1971, Benson & Hedges — a Canadian corporation owned by U.S. tobacco dealer Philip Morris that made and sold cigarettes in Canada — bought the Barrie-area greenfield for $12 million.
Benson & Hedges put up the building and then took over Ontario's last independent beer brewery, Formosa Springs, which made Club Ale, Diamond Lager, Tonic Stout, Bock Beer, Octoberfest and Birra Italia. The tobacco company moved Formosa Springs to Barrie, expanding production from 80,000 bottles of beer a year to 6 million bottles. Formosa Springs exclusively used Barrie springwater, from a well inside the building — at that time, some of the purest, cleanest water in the world. Only a few years later, in 1974, Benson & Hedges got out of the alcohol market to focus on selling nicotine.
North America's oldest brewing corporation, Molson, bought Formosa Springs and the Barrie property that year, dropping the Formosa Springs label and restructuring the plant to manufacture a number of beers, including Export, Canadian, Canadian Light, Molson Dry, Golden, Molson Light, Excel, Lowenbrau and Durango. About a third of the beer from the Barrie Molson factory was sold across the border to U.S. customers. Most, however, was used in Ontario.
In 1975, 70 acres of unused land south of the brewery was severed and made into an entertainment complex called Molson Park. Its stadium would host big music concerts — Lollapalooza, Another Roadside Attraction, Edgefest, Warped, Live 8 and more.
With various extensions and additions over the years, the Molson building expanded to 440,000 square feet — the size of six soccer fields. By 1996, the plant was producing 567 million bottles of beer (which works out to about 24 million cases, each containing 24 brown bottles and called a "two-four") per year. New labels included Miller Genuine Draft, with its widely advertised "exclusive cold-filtration brewing technology," and Coors Light. A few years later, Molson announced that the factory would close, in order to centralize operations in Carlingview, Ontario. In a protest against the closure, 500 or so Molson workers occupied the factory for a day before departing.
The last bottle of beer rolled off the line in Barrie on August 30, 2000.
The next year, for a price of $8 million, a Toronto-based corporation bought the abandoned beer factory, along with the 36 acres around it, all surrounded by a fence topped with barbed wire.
* * *
From the outside, the abandoned Molson factory was a near-featureless block of gray concrete. Seen from above, it was shaped a bit like the letter L — or a bent human arm. There were loading docks at the "hand" at the southeast part, where the grain, hops and chemicals used for brewing alcohol had once been taken off trucks. Beer had been brewed at the "forearm," bottled at the "elbow" and boxed at the "upper arm." At the building's north end, the "shoulder," there were more loading docks, where finished Molson product had been loaded onto trucks for delivery to retailers, who then peddled it directly to alcohol users.
The flat, multilevel roof was covered with dozens of white venting tubes, like unlit candles on a birthday cake. Standing on the roof, you had a great view to the north of downtown Barrie and the beach and the bright blue waters of Lake Simcoe's Kempenfelt Bay.
On one side of the building were two brown-painted, cigar-shaped chimneys, each a bit taller than the building. There were also three almost-as-big grain silos — one painted yellow, one orange and one red — attached to the main building by a covered conveyor belt.
To the northeast of the main structure stood a much smaller building that had once been Ontario's only drive-through beer store, with retail staff putting two- fours into the trunks of cars. There were also two separate buildings to the southeast: a storage building and, beside a big water reservoir, a wastewater treatment center.
A big sign went up on the side of the building facing the highway, advertising space for lease.
Inside, the main building was a complex, multilevel labyrinth with lots of exposed, orange-painted girders and tangled masses of green piping. There were orange metal stairs connecting different levels, halls lit by cold, fluorescent ceiling bars, high catwalks of steel grille and a complicated system of conveyor belts.
There were warehouse areas, storage areas, loading docks, executive offices, a tourist beer-tasting suite (known as the Canadiana Room), janitorial closets, machine-operator booths, a yeast room, a hops room, a kegging room, fermentation rooms, aging rooms, bottling rooms, garbage rooms and many other kinds of spaces.
Much of Molson's office equipment, furniture and supplies had been left behind. Charts, maps, contracts, bookkeeping records and other documents related to the old brewery could be found all over the place. Paint flaked from the walls. A woman who later worked in the building would tell police, "The Molson plant was a junkyard. There were toilets, pizza ovens, tiles, sinks — you name it — all over the place."
Throughout the building lurked massive, rusting, dust-covered beer-making machines with analog dials, twisty metal tubes and clunky-looking levers. In the south end of the structure, 120 long, shiny, stainless steel tanks lined the walls.
Once used to make alcohol, the claustrophobic interior of these tanks would later be used to create a safer but illegal drug: a cryptic nursery of forbidden flowers. This highly profitable workplace would employ dozens of men and women, and last two years, earning many, many millions of dollars — a secret, beautiful, doomed garden in the heart of Ontario.
Mystique
"You want to get hold of your Canadian people now? ... About this oil? You got somebody you can call now about this oil?" — James Kiernan
Summer 1997. Miami.
Glenn Day was a single, 35-year-old Native Canadian construction worker known to some of his associates as "the Indian." He was of average height, with a fat belly, and he smoked tobacco cigarettes. Clean-shaven, he kept his hair short and parted to one side. Other than hypothyroidism, he was in good health. Day was originally from a poor family on a reserve near Toronto. He did not pay child support for his two teenage kids, and he had a record for assaulting a police officer in 1980, theft in 1981 and mischief in 1982.
A defense lawyer would later describe Day as "intimidating" and "dangerous." Two of his friends would describe him as being funny to talk with, a fun guy, a "good bullshitter," a guy who liked to drink heavily at parties and get "plastered," who gave up alcohol completely for a while and then went back, who never used illegal drugs, a guy who smiled a lot — and who was selfish and untrustworthy, in their later opinion.
Now Day carried a fake Florida driver's license and used a fake name, because there was an arrest warrant out for him in that state. The warrant was based on Day's failure to appear at court on a drug charge.
He was a flashy-looking fugitive, with a diamond ring worth $3,500, a $2,000 TAG watch, a diamond earring, $250 sunglasses, expensive suits, a briefcase made of leather and gold, a then-rare cell phone and two expensive BMW sedans. He carried around thousands of U.S. and Canadian dollars in cash.
Glenn Day was in Florida to buy drugs for Drago Dolic, his boss and friend. They had met while both were working in construction in Canada. Dolic and Day shared a home in Richmond Hill, an upscale suburb north of Toronto. They mainly dealt cannabis, and also some cocaine. And they grew cannabis.
Forty years old, originally from Croatia, Dolic had grown up in Ontario, both in the small town of Elliot Lake and the huge metropolis of Mississauga. He was around five-seven and 275 pounds, with bright teeth, and he spoke without an accent. His parents were Muslim. He was in Alcoholics Anonymous. Dolic had a 16-year-old daughter back in Elliot Lake; he had not seen her since she was three and a half.
In the early part of Dolic's farming career, he had constructed a hidden grow op in downtown Toronto: a huge abandoned Molson beer factory at the southwest corner of Bathurst and King streets, just blocks from Lake Ontario. Dolic later boasted about how he had moved discreetly into the rented space in the historic landmark with grow lights and watering tubes and cannabis plants. When the place was to be demolished, Dolic rented another area of the factory, farther away from the wrecking crews. He moved his grow op within the Toronto Molson factory again and again, until the last possible spot was ripped down. Later Dolic would build a much bigger grow op in a different abandoned Molson factory, near Barrie.
In Florida with Day was another friend of Dolic's — Robin Summerhayes, 36, of Oakville, Ontario. He was six feet tall, with long, thinning blond hair. Summerhayes had two Canadian convictions for illegal drugs; for his last conviction — hash trafficking in Brampton, Ontario, in 1984 — he had been sentenced to 90 days in jail. Summerhayes was now married, with three daughters.
Day, Day's girlfriend and Summerhayes stayed at the Sands Hotel in humid Pompano Beach, north of Miami.
For use in smuggling drugs, Day bought a 39-foot Silverton Cabin Cruiser — a sleek, powerful motorboat called The Casey, priced at $90,000 — and started taking boating lessons at a local school. But Day was not a great sailor. Once, he crashed the boat into a dock, the home of a restaurant patio; the diners stared at Day after the embarrassing accident. On another occasion, Summerhayes later recalled, Summerhayes spent hours doing maintenance on the boat in the hot sun while Day sat inside his air-conditioned BMW, watching the other man work and not offering to help.
Day hired a local trafficker with a long record, Herbert Johnson, 53 — known as "Skip" — to install fake fuel tanks in The Casey for hiding drugs. Johnson had lost his larynx to cancer (caused, he believed, by exposure to Agent Orange as a U.S. soldier in Vietnam) and spoke through a tracheotomy hole in his throat, wearing a voice prosthesis; his speech was sometimes hard to understand. The plan was to get The Casey to Jamaica, where Day and Summerhayes would buy drugs to smuggle into North America and sell through Dolic's network.
In addition to Day and Summerhayes, Johnson worked with other traffickers. A police agent in the Port of Palm Beach said he had seen Johnson making modifications to a sailboat called Mystique. Because of Johnson's reputation, the police put the boat under surveillance.
Mystique was owned by William Kiernan. He and his brother James, both in their late 30s, had smuggled drugs since they were teenagers. Two years earlier, the college-educated pair smuggled a load of cocaine from the Bahamas to Florida, earning $200,000 in profit. William had used his portion to buy Mystique, while James had bought a seaplane (that later sank near Jamaica).
Shortly after the surveillance began, police watched Mystique sail out of the Palm Beach marina. On July 21, it was sighted in the Caribbean Sea, sailing south through the islands of the Bahamas. A month later, it was seen passing south between Haiti and Guantánamo, Cuba, toward Jamaica.
In Kingston, Jamaica, the Kiernan brothers met with a man named Keith (known also as "Kappo"), who sold them the drugs. Part of the load consisted of 400 pounds of dried cannabis flowers (known as "bud," the flowers are by far the most psychoactive part of the plant). There were also 280 pounds of cannabis oil onboard. This was made of the plant matter left over after the flowers were removed — the leaves and the stems. (Only the plant's roots were worthless.) There are psychoactive chemicals in the leaves and stems, though in much smaller proportions than in the flowers. To concentrate the drug, the leaves and stems were soaked in a solvent — usually either ethyl alcohol, methyl alcohol, isopropanol alcohol, acetone, petroleum ether or butane. Acetone was a popular choice in Jamaica at this time. (All of these chemicals were dangerous; many people in Jamaica would die or be injured from fires, poisonings and explosions caused by cannabis-oil manufacture.) The solvents pulled chemicals out of the plant tissues, and the solvent/drug mixture would then be strained to remove all solid matter. Putting the liquid residue into a warm place made the solvent evaporate, leaving behind a dark, gooey sludge. This stuff often looked black, but was actually a very dark green, from chlorophyll.
Cannabis flowers contain, at most, 30 percent psychoactive chemicals, while 40 to 90 percent of this sludge consists of psychoactive chemicals.
It takes over 50 pounds of cannabis leaves and stems to make a pound of cannabis oil. The oil is powerful and often harsh on the throat and lungs when smoked. Sometimes it is smeared on a cigarette or a joint. Or it can be dribbled onto a hot coal, smeared on a piece of heated tinfoil or aluminum foil, or squashed between two hot knives, and the vapors inhaled.
Most cannabis oil is not made properly and, as a result, it contains toxic residue left behind from the solvents. These residues can give users headaches or worse. Smoking cannabis oil is often unhealthy.
Mystique was again detected by U.S. authorities as it sailed back north through the Bahamas. When the vessel was 40 miles east of Florida, it was sighted by a coast-guard helicopter, and then intercepted by a coast-guard boat. A team of officers boarded the boat and arrested the brothers, who immediately revealed the drugs, which were hidden in fake fuel tanks. The busted brothers said Johnson had built the hiding place. They agreed to help the police arrest Johnson and the others. The coast guard escorted Mystique to a marina in Fort Pierce, Florida.
* * *
On the morning of September 24, 1997, William Kiernan paged Johnson. Johnson, who was in Key West, phoned back. Kiernan wanted to meet as soon as possible, at the Budget Inn Motel in Fort Pierce. Johnson agreed, but first he drove to where Day and Summerhayes were staying in Pompano. He had spoken to them about the cannabis oil and knew they were interested in buying some, if the price was right. Johnson borrowed one of their cars, a BMW leased to Day's company, and drove to the Budget Inn. He got there around 5:10 p.m.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hidden Harvest by Mark Coakley. Copyright © 2014 Mark Coakley. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 Mystique
Chapter 2 The Secret Garden
Chapter 3 The Funny Farm
Chapter 4 Yellow Submarines
Chapter 5 The Old Man and the Seed
Chapter 6 Things Fall Apart
Chapter 7 The Raid
Chapter 8 Into the Labyrinth
Chapter 9 Darkness at Noon
Chapter 10 The Morning After a Party
Chapter 11 Dolic’s Doom
Chapter 12 Slaves of Ontario
Chapter 13 Masks and Mirrors
Chapter 14 The Silence of the Beavers
Chapter 15 Narcs Listening to B101 and The Edge
Chapter 16 The Trap Closes
Chapter 17 The Leopard