Thursday, August 6, 2009

Little Green Houses 4



"Ain't that America, for you and me?"
"Ain't that America, something to see, baby!"
"Ain't that America, the home of the Free!"
"Little (Green) Houses, for you and me!"
-from Little Pink Houses, by John Cougar Mellencamp
Proposal continues for
Little Green Houses: Florida Grow Houses and the Rise of Home-Grown Organized Crime.
Copyright David A. Kearns
4 Central Florida: The new epicenter As a result of recent busts in Dade - and organized crime anticipated it - the emphasis of the effort shifted elsewhere; namely upstate where jobs have been lost in the defense industry, and homes which had already been more reasonably priced than those in south Florida, became even more readily available on the cheap.
There is a fully operational marijuana grow house not five miles from where these words are being written in the city of Palm Bay, Brevard County, Florida. It is “undetected” by the police. It represents only one of several within the community of Palm Bay and surrounding areas of South Brevard.
If you were offered the chance to essentially live in a house rent free for a salary of $23,000 per month, you might consider such an opportunity to be heaven-sent. You might even bribe local officials to look the other way if you took it.
The quiet no-snitch complicity model of course is in affect for the neighborhood because, you’d at least keep your mouth shut if you knew all about it. The reason here being, with all this money flying around which officer or public official does one trust with the information? Regarding Palm Bay, police have told the city council they need to purchase a powered hang glider for surveillance to establish probable cause in many of these cases before they can gain a warrant. They had wished to purchase a remotely operated drone for this purpose but both of these requests have been denied by the citizen board.
Complicating this issue are new laws which render the heat envelope, as measured by infrared cameras, useless as trial evidence. Strangely these restrictions came in the same package of laws which reduced the felony hurdle of cultivation for personal use, from 300 plants to just 25. As always it is a felony to cultivate with intent to distribute, or raise a kid in the presence of such criminal activity, or arm yourself in the commission of any of the previous offenses.Lawyers are gearing up to assert that the airspace over a person’s house, then, is not subject to random, aerial intrusion, either. In other words, just as a cop cannot go peeking into windows without cause, so too, one can argue, they cannot fly over people’s houses looking into their backyards for random evidence of crimes. And real estate law in Florida tends to bear this out. The property rights of the landowner have traditionally extended above the property lines and out into space. With that, of course comes the right to privacy, and the protection from unreasonable search and seizure.
The hurricane shutters on the suspicious home in this author’s neighborhood have been pulled down tight over this dwelling since well before the 2004 hurricane season and have remained locked down tight ever since. There are numerous “beware of dog” signs around it. The same vehicle, a van with tinted windows, is backed up to the driveway every day; better to both conceal the license plate, and perhaps allow for the van to accept cargo from within the garage in a rapid-deploy fashion. No one ever seems to be home. In twelve years living near this home, passing by it, my wife and I have never seen a face. There are always excess bags of fertilizer laying around outside, yet there are no potted plants outside it that would seem to require it.
Every so often, an extremely expensive sports car with dark tinted windows and south Florida license plates is seen parked outside the home.This scenario, which will be described in detail within the pages of Little Green Houses, is common in the city of Palm Bay, just as it has become more common in Deltona, Orlando, Apopka, Titusville, Grant-Valkaria, Vero Beach, Melbourne, West Melbourne and many other cities in central Florida.In Hendry County, the operators have taken to building underground grow-bunkers on fallow, absentee landowner, parcels, and within parklands; a new trend in the business.Tougher drug enforcement in South Florida, complete with the newer laws, has pushed the operators northward into Brevard, Osceola, Polk, Orange, and Volusia Counties, and westward into Hendry, Pinellas, and Sarasota.

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