Word: pots
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...encounter as they head for their summer vacations in America's national parks and forests. But drug smugglers, methamphetamine cooks and cannabis cultivators are invading federal lands as never before. A U.S. Park Service ranger in Arizona's Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument was gunned down by a Mexican pot smuggler last August. In Missouri's Mark Twain National Forest, 192 meth labs have been dismantled over the past three years. And marijuana farms are infesting Kentucky's Daniel Boone National Forest and Alabama's Talladega National Forest...
...traffickers have turned to creating vast marijuana plantations Stateside, that much closer to their main customers. Thanks to a mild climate, rich soil and a lengthy, March-to-October growing season, California cultivators routinely produce 10-ft.-high specimens worth up to $4,000 each. Some of these California pot farms stretch over several hundred acres and have as many as 50,000 plants. Last year 420,000 pot plants with a street value of $1.5 billion were eradicated from the state's 18 federal forests, a tenfold increase from 1994. In Sequoia National Park, renowned for its majestic trees...
Villa Garcia is unarmed when he is caught in the Tahoe forest--probably, rangers say, because it is early in the season. If they had already matured, the 3,500 plants he was tending would have yielded some $8 million worth of pot--an investment worth protecting. In the fall, when scores of Mexican workers arrive to harvest and process the pot, shoot-outs occur between law-enforcement agents and camouflage-clad growers toting AK-47s. Sometimes the pot pirates mistake innocent tourists for thieves or cops. Last year kayakers on the Salmon River in the Klamath National Forest were...
...clan pleaded guilty in federal court to narcotics charges and were given prison sentences ranging from four to 12 years. The Maganas have been tied to 20 large gardens with more than 100,000 plants in the Sequoia, Sierra, Stanislaus and Mendocino national forests. They also supplied workers for pot farms on federal land in Arkansas, Idaho, Oregon, Utah and Washington. According to investigators, the Maganas and other groups have used profits from methamphetamine operations to expand into marijuana. They own gas stations, haciendas and million-dollar resorts in Puerto Vallarta, Guadalajara, Michoacan and other parts of Mexico. "They have...
...trials; in Cowbeech, England. Shawcross also prosecuted William Joyce, a Nazi propagandist better known as Lord Haw-Haw, and Klaus Fuchs and Alan Nunn May, physicists convicted of giving atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. He later lamented that the Nuremberg trials didn't deter Idi Amin and Pol Pot from their own "odious crimes...