Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 12, 1995 TAG: 9511130121
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAN VERTEFEUILLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
After three buys last fall, an undercover investigator came away with baggies of what police realized was not the typical homegrown they were used to seeing.
This was "Phototron" pot, some of the highest-quality marijuana available on the streets of Roanoke and beyond. Police had been hearing rumors about it for years. It was said to be locally grown.
"We knew this was very, very different pot," Botetourt County Sheriff Reed Kelly recalls. "We had never seen anything like it."
Anonymous sources had told police it was grown by someone known as the "Phototron Man," nicknamed after equipment used to grow plants indoors.
The buds, the best part of the plant for smoking, grew sometimes more than a foot long instead of the typical two or three inches. The plants were a deeper color than usual.
"You don't grow that unless you know what you're doing. And it was fresh enough that we knew it was locally grown," Kelly says.
Police followed the distinctive-looking marijuana from small-time buyers to mid-level dealers - and, finally, to the people they believe grew it and distributed it on a large scale.
Police claim it was the largest indoor-growing operation ever in the Roanoke area. Ten people have been charged federally with conspiracy to grow and distribute the marijuana, along with other charges. All have pleaded not guilty.
The exceptional quality of the pot may have proved to be the operation's downfall. It seemed to give police an incentive, a challenge almost, to track it down.
Police eager to find the source of the Phototron pot assembled a regional group of officers to work the case. Their tactics, however, have been criticized twice by local judges and have resulted in evidence being suppressed.
The first time was after a small-time Botetourt grower's chimney caught fire last winter while he wasn't home. When firefighters arrived, they found 25 marijuana plants in an upstairs bedroom at Scott Sample's house.
But it was the marijuana deputies found in his pocket when he returned home that really interested them. It was Phototron pot.
Sample admitted that the plants in the house were his, but refused to identify the friend who had given him the Phototron pot earlier that evening. He says Botetourt County Investigator K.K. Parker, who was part of the regional team working on the Phototron case, then began threatening him.
"He had a mild explosion," Sample, 29, testified at a hearing last spring. "He told me I would tell him - that if I did not tell him, he was going to call Social Services to have [Sample's son] removed and that he would charge my wife."
Sample reluctantly identified the friend, who would later be called to testify before a federal grand jury but was never charged. Sheriff Kelly says Parker did not threaten Sample and that calling Social Services is not uncommon when parents of minors are arrested.
But a Botetourt County judge was troubled enough by the deputy's tactics that he ruled Parker had "stepped over the bounds" during the interrogation. He said the friend's name could not be used at Sample's trial.
On Thursday, a federal judge said he was shocked by the way another defendant was arrested, in front of his 12-year-old, and ruled that a statement he made to police could not be introduced at trial.
Before it was over, the Phototron investigation had pulled in police from Roanoke; Botetourt, Roanoke and Bedford counties; the Virginia State Police; and the federal Drug Enforcement Administration Regional Task Force.
For months, police worked on their own time, gathering in each others' houses on weekends to share information and plan strategy.
As police worked their way up the chain, each person they arrested agreed to give up the person above him.
"This was the beauty of the whole organization," Kelly says. "They insulated themselves from everyone but the layer next to them. It's unusual to start at the bottom and work up and keep an active case on them."
Hank Sink, the Botetourt County dealer fingered by the drunken driver, soon rolled over on the man he said was his supplier, Freddie Wright of Bedford. Wright was arrested after police found 10 pounds of marijuana in his house and faces state charges, according to court records. Wright then gave police the name of the man he said was his supplier, Robert Selman, and agreed to work with police to arrest Selman.
According to a search warrant affidavit, a storage bin at Starkey Road Self Storage in Roanoke County served as a drop-off point. Wright would go there to pick up marijuana - 10 to 20 pounds at a time - and later leave tens of thousands of dollars in payment, according to police. This way, the dealer and supplier never crossed paths.
Selman - who was aware that Wright had been arrested - reportedly still met with Wright and picked up $8,000 Wright owed him. He was stopped and interrogated by police who were secretly monitoring the meeting. U.S. District Judge James Turk ruled Thursday that because police violated Selman's rights during the arrest, his alleged confession would be suppressed.
Police say Selman told them that Victor Layman, a Roanoke County real estate broker, had been his source for three years, supplying him with no less than 10 pounds of pot a month.
In a hearing in federal court Thursday, Selman testified that police "kept asking me about Vic Layman. He's a friend of mine; I do a lot of painting work for him. They kept telling me all kinds of things they knew, or said they knew, I didn't know anything about."
The 10 defendants have retained some of Roanoke's best defense attorneys, and both sides are gearing up for a December trial that is expected to last at least two weeks.
At 1:45 on a cold winter morning last December, police burst into a vacant home on Bent Mountain.
Sheriff Kelly was the first in, leading a regional group of police officers who had been running on adrenaline and little sleep for a few days. After Selman's arrest the day before, police worried that he might have tipped off others and that they would find nothing. Instead, they were stunned by what they saw.
High-pressure sodium lights were blazing in the basement at 8181 Poor Mountain Road; the pungent, sweet marijuana could be smelled even before they opened the door.
"God bless, the smell and the heat," Kelly recalls. "We knew we had found what we were looking for."
A sophisticated system of high-intensity lights, irrigation, fans and ventilation was set up in the basement, nurturing 750 plants. Upstairs, marijuana buds were drying on screens in the bedrooms.
Police believe it was one of nine "grow houses" where Phototron marijuana was grown, dried and packaged for sale. But it was the only one where they would find live plants.
Later that morning, police awakened Victor and Dayna Layman and searched their Roanoke County house. Police found documents they say connect the couple to other grow houses.
Police arrested Victor Layman and Majid Khoshghad, who owned the house on Poor Mountain Road where the plants were found. Later, eight other people were pulled into the investigation; the case was taken over by federal prosecutors because of the amount of pot involved.
Defense attorneys profess bewilderment about police and prosecutors' interest in this case and the government's unwillingness to negotiate what they call fair plea bargains.
"Maybe there was something mysterious about this operation, the identity of this [Phototron] man, the extent of the plants," says Robert Rider, who represents Robert Christenson, accused of being a grower. Or they were looking for "something they can use as an example and may feel this is the one. For whatever reason, [they believe] a marijuana grow case deserves this sort of attention and aggressive prosecution."
The number of grow houses in Roanoke County alone, which had gone undetected possibly for years, embarrassed the police. One of the fascinating things about the case, Kelly says, is "the fact that it was grown under our damn noses for so long."
The government says Victor Layman and Joseph "Jay" B. Smith III acted as the supervisors and distributors of marijuana grown in basements throughout the area for years. Up to 4,000 plants were grown since 1988, prosecutor Joe Mott says.
Layman operated his own real estate and appraisal school and was president of the local Iris Society, which represented his other vocation - raising flowers. When arrested, he and his wife were working to open a flower business, Perennial Passions, to market their day lilies and irises.
Smith, who would tell police only that he was a "commodities broker," lives in Roanoke County in a house listed under a pseudonym.
Police say Khoshghad confessed the morning they found the grow house, and told them he tended the plants while Layman took care of the bills at the house. His attorney, Jeff Rudd, calls that "bull," and is trying to get the statement suppressed because Khoshghad may not have waived his right to an attorney.
Khoshghad now insists he had no active part in the grow operation taking place in the basement of his house and didn't know anything about the sale of marijuana. He lives in Rocky Mount and says he rented the Poor Mountain Road house to Victor Layman in 1992. Layman employed Khoshghad as the property manager for his real estate holdings at the time and told him he needed the space to keep his irises, Khoshghad says.
He says he stumbled upon marijuana at the house during an ice storm in early 1994. Power was lost to the house and he went to check on it. He followed a sweet smell down to the basement.
"I knew it smell different. It don't smell like iris," says the Iranian, who has lived in Virginia as a resident alien for 20 years. He says he saw 60 to 65 plants. "My heart just come through my throat. I just got shook all over."
Khoshghad insists he made it clear the plants must go, and that Layman said he'd have them out by the end of the year. Police arrived two weeks before that deadline, in mid-December, and found not 60 plants, but 750.
Khoshghad lost visitation rights with his 12-year-old daughter for six months after his arrest. He is now allowed to see her every other Saturday, but it is less time than he used to have. "That was the biggest heartache of all," he says.
Smith was arrested after showing up at a suspected Back Creek grow house police were staking out, a week after the arrest of Khoshghad and Layman. About 600 marijuana stalks sat in pots in the basement; the plants had been cut off and removed.
Smith bolted from the house on seeing a search warrant left there. He drove off one way; two friends who had come with him in a moving van went another. When police pulled his friends over, "a very strong odor of raw marijuana" was apparent on the men and at the rear of the moving van, one of the investigators testified Thursday.
On opening the van, all police found was some potting soil and a single marijuana leaf.
The passenger in the moving van was Russell Coles, a Danville teacher who is Smith's stepbrother. His presence in the moving van is the only evidence against him, the lead investigator testified Thursday. Coles has been charged with conspiracy to grow and distribute marijuana and faces 10 years or more in prison.
Out of 100,000 people housed in federal prisons in the United States, about 15,000 are there on marijuana charges, according to the Marijuana Policy Project, a Washington lobbying group.
"It's a backlash on the '60s countercultural revolutionary troublemakers," says Robert Kampia, of the project. And people who think the laws should be reformed "are just not organized around this issue."
When they were charged, sentencing guidelines said the 10 Phototron defendants could get up to life in prison. But changes to the guidelines effective Nov. 1 now forbid life sentences for first-time marijuana offenders.
"There's no indication [the Phototron operation] led to the breakup of any marriages, any homes. There's no indication they were selling to schoolchildren," says attorney Rudd, who used to serve as regional drug prosecutor. "I think certain aspects about this particular prosecution lead a reasonable person to wonder, `Is this a federal crime?'''
Jonathan Rogers, who represents Smith, says prosecutor Mott doesn't want to negotiate reasonable plea bargains in the case, a charge other defense attorneys echo.
"He knows these are nice, family people. There's no danger to the community," Rogers says. "There is a fair disposition that can be worked out. But I think he'd rather put scalps on the wall."
Mott declined to comment and has also forbidden investigators - even those not in the federal system - from talking about the case.
Indoor grow operations have become increasingly popular in recent years because they're harder to detect than outdoor crops and the quality of the crop is more easily controlled.
It takes a large investment to start up a grow operation, requiring high-pressure sodium lights, fans, irrigation and humidity controls, and a large supply of electricity. Plants in the blooming stage need 12 hours of light a day.
In the houses connected to the Phototron investigation, police used Appalachian Power Co. records to date the grow operations. The houses all reportedly used excessive amounts of electricity.
The Phototron pot was not grown from seeds, defendant George Fender says, but instead was propagated by making cuttings from full-grown "mother plants" and rooting them. That way, each plant was genetically identical and there were no male plants. The chemical that gives marijuana its potency, THC, is found in higher quantities in the buds of females than in males.
Fender, who is charged with growing some of the pot, says its quality came not from special growing techniques, but from a blue-ribbon strain of marijuana obtained out of the country.
"It wasn't because they're genius gardeners," he says. "It's because the stuff was genetically superior. It was just an Arnold Schwarzenegger-type plant."
Even though they have pleaded not guilty, George and Cheryl Halls Fender admitted their involvement before the grand jury. In an interview at their home in Maine, they said they left the operation three years ago and moved up north, where they have settled in to a new life and now study the Bible as Jehovah's Witnesses.
Police showed up at their door in January, a month after Layman was arrested on state charges. Despite no longer being part of the operation, the Fenders said they believed they needed to come clean about their past involvement, even though they would be implicating themselves.
"We had already made the decision spiritually what we were going to do," Cheryl Fender said. "We haven't made any deal at all with investigators. We're doing it because it's the right thing to do."
THE PLAYERS
ACCUSED ORGANIZERS:
Victor Layman Jr., 40
Roanoke County real estate broker and owner of a real estate school. Accused of leading the largest indoor marijuana-growing operation in Roanoke history, producing the best quality pot available, dubbed Phototron pot. Police claim he recruited people to grow the pot and he distributed it. Pleading not guilty.
Joseph "Jay" B. Smith III, 39
Roanoke County commodities broker. Also accused of leading the Phototron operation, Smith and Layman face the most serious charges. He's got a midnight to 6 a.m. curfew after prosecutors claimed he studied how to create aliases and that he was a flight risk. Pleading not guilty.
--------------------------------
ACCUSED GROWERS:
Dayna Layman, 28
Roanoke County entrepreneur, starting a flower business when arrested. Accused of helping grow marijuana and recruiting others. Pleading not guilty.
Robert Christenson, 44
Roanoke County car care business owner. Accused of growing marijuana in Boones Mill and Williamson Road houses. Pleading not guilty.
Majid Khoshghad, 39
Rocky Mount contractor. Accused of growing marijuana in a Back Creek house. Pleading not guilty.
Darrell Coles, 35
Danville teacher. Smith's stepbrother, charged after police saw him pulling into the driveway of an alleged Bent Mountain "grow house" and driving away without getting out of the car. Pleading not guilty.
Darrell Gordon, 30
Rocky Mount electrician suffering from a terminal brain tumor. Also pulled over by police along with Coles leaving a Bent Mountain house. Accused of operating two grow houses on Starkey Road based on what police say are abnormally high electric bills there. Pleading not guilty although his trial may be delayed because of his condition.
Cheryl Julia Halls Fender, 41
Kennebunk, Maine. Accused of operating a grow house three years ago in Roanoke County. She has since become a Bible student and admitted her involvement when police questioned her. Pleading not guilty.
George Fender, 35
Kennebunk, Maine, musician. Accused of helping operate two grow houses before moving to Maine. Also admitted his involvement to police. Pleading not guilty.
ACCUSED DISTRIBUTOR:
Robert Selman, 35 Hardy house painter. Accused of distributing at least 10 pounds of marijuana a month. Police say he confessed, but a federal judge ruled the confession inadmissible because police violated his rights during the arrest and interrogation. Pleading not guilty.
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB