Gang Land: From footsoldiers to kingpins, the search for Mr Big by Thompson Tony

Author:Thompson, Tony [Thompson, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Published: 2010-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

10

Home Grown

With its eight bedrooms, four bathrooms, five reception rooms, extensive grounds, servants quarters and lengthy gravel drive, Field House is without doubt the quintessential English country home in the midst of the quintessential English country village.

The £2.4 million mansion can be found in the most fashionable part of Hoole Village, a tiny parish just outside Chester, with a mostly wealthy, socially elite population of around 220. The village is too small to have a local newspaper of its own, but then nothing much happens here anyway. In August 2009 a faulty junction box led to a minor power cut; the following month the main slip road to the village was partially closed for resurfacing, and in October police raided Field House and found one of the largest cannabis factories ever uncovered in the UK.

Thousands of plants were growing throughout three of the building’s four grandiose storeys. The ground floor had been converted into makeshift living quarters for the team of ‘gardeners’ and the basement was used as a drying room but the rest of the house was devoted to cultivation. All the windows had been sealed and blacked out, holes had been bored through the floor to help with ventilation while a cumbersome system of hosepipes snaked up the stairs around the banister and carried water to all parts of the house from the downstairs kitchen sink. Power for the operation had been diverted directly from the National Grid.

According to Inspector Phil Hodgson who led the raid, the plants his officers found were unlike any he had ever encountered – a ‘mutation of normal cannabis which matures and grows extra rapidly. They were fed by a fast-growing fertiliser and the result was a plant that grows many heads, something none of us have seen in our lives,’ he said. ‘Some of the plants were actually fifteen feet tall.’ The street value of the haul was estimated to be in excess of £500,000 and Hodgson believed the set-up was capable of producing a new crop every three months.

No one was inside the house when it was raided and, judging by the half-eaten rotting food that had been left behind, the occupants had departed in something of a hurry. ‘There’s not been anybody here for a couple of weeks. Because it was linked to other addresses that we searched, they probably knew we were coming,’ added Hodgson. Police had been tipped off about Field House a month earlier after raiding another cannabis factory some thirty-five miles away in Nether Alderley, one of Britain’s wealthiest villages. There, in a home worth more than £1 million, they found plants worth around £150,000. The sole occupant – a fifty-year-old Vietnamese woman – was arrested and taken into custody. She was later charged with producing cannabis and abstracting electricity dishonestly.

In 1997, just 11 per cent of cannabis consumed in the UK was actually grown here, the balance being smuggled in from abroad. By 2007 the proportion of domestically farmed product had climbed to more than 60 per cent and the figure continues to rise to this day.

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