Drug dealers are buying up vineyards to grow marijuana

WAPATO, Wash. – Across central Washington’s fruit bowl, farmers are buying vineyards, hoping to establish roots in the area and capitalize on the booming wine industry.

Many of the buyers, however, are believed to be living in Mexico, and those roots go to tens of thousands of illegal marijuana plants – a crop that could easily surpass grapes in value this year.

Law enforcement officials in the Yakima Valley have converged on seven vineyards that had been converted to marijuana operations this summer. At least five had been recently purchased – the drug-dealer buyers are still being tracked – and one had been leased to pot growers by an unknowing owner.

Dealers aren’t just hiding their crops in national forests and random cornfields anymore, said State Patrol Sgt. Richard A. Beghtol, task force supervisor. Rather, they’re making a sizable investment with the possibility of huge returns if they avoid detection.

“They are able to amass a huge amount of money and using that money to go out and buy land to do their marijuana cultivation. It’s their big moneymaker.”

Pipeline for drugs

The valley, home to acres of orchards and hop fields, has long been recognized as an important pipeline in the drug trade with easy interstate access to Seattle, Portland and points east, and the area’s largely Hispanic farmworker population has close ties to Mexico.

Loads of cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin from Mexico arrive in the valley en route to East Coast cities, Beghtol said. At the same time, crackdowns on the Canadian and Mexican borders have made it more difficult to ship marijuana into the United States, prompting dealers to establish U.S. growing operations.

A bust of more than 60,000 plants on the Yakama Indian Reservation in 2004, one of the biggest nationwide at the time, was traced to organized crime in Mexico and valued at more than $35 million.

By 2006 authorities were seizing more than 144,000 marijuana plants across Washington. That number more than doubled the following year, to 296,611 plants, reflecting a rise in both drug activity and enforcement efforts, said Rene Rivera, the Drug Enforcement Agency’s agent in charge in Yakima. “This year we’re probably going to surpass 2007 easily, just given the way we’re starting,” Rivera said.

Water use is often an important clue. Beghtol has noted that grapevines require much less water than marijuana, which needs daily irrigation.

Drug enforcement teams have confiscated about 110,000 marijuana plants valued at more than $100 million this spring and summer in the Yakima Valley alone, and they haven’t even begun their annual aerial surveillance.

In 2006, grapes ranked No. 11 among Washington state crops with a value of $144.2 million. About 31,000 acres are in vineyards for the $3 billion wine business.

Buying up farms

Finding farmers willing to sell their property isn’t difficult. Fewer have children who want to take over the family business, and rising operating costs have driven many farmers off the land despite increasing prices for their crops.

But dealers aren’t just limiting their property purchases to older sellers, Beghtol said.

In one case, unknown drug operatives approached a farmer who didn’t have his farm listed. He resisted until, asked to name a price, he threw out a figure: $263,000 for 27 acres and no building. The buyer showed up a few days later and paid cash for the property, Beghtol said.

The seller said he had no idea the farm would become a marijuana operation.

“The Yakima Valley is a huge player. These are big operations that are difficult to track down,” Beghtol said. “They use fictitious names, they put property in daughters’, wives’ names to conceal identity and try to thwart law enforcement from going forward with civil forfeiture.”

Still, there have been 22 arrests this year with the possibility of federal charges. Authorities expect that number to rise as aerial surveillance begins later this summer.