The cartels had established extensive marijuana farms within the rugged hills and backcountry of the Sequoia National Park. While there were many hiking trails, large swaths of land were still off-limits to hikers and campers. Foot patrollers were few and far between, meaning the cartels had at their disposal enormous areas of remote, well-camouflaged land protected from aerial surveillance. They were growing their product on this side of the border with impunity and quickly distributing it to their customers, even as the money got shipped back home to Mexico. Ansara had more than once shaken his head in disbelief over those very facts, but the cartels had been doing this for years.
Audacious? Hell, yes. And more so when you’d spent as much time around the area as Ansara had. He’d already noted the extensive security measures put in place, layers of defense beginning with those areas running parallel to the main trails. Any adventurers who strayed far enough off the path might encounter foothold traps of various sizes all the way up to bear, along with trapping pits dug six feet deep and covered with twigs, leaves, and pine needles. At the bottom of these traps lay two-by-fours impaled with nails. The idea was to injure the curious so they’d turn around and seek medical help. Farther in, Ansara found trip wires that again had unsuspecting hikers falling forward onto hidden beds of nails. While admittedly crude, these means of “discouragement” were just part of a more sophisticated network of defense closer in.
Getting to his current vantage point had required a healthy dose of climbing skill. He’d hiked in with a light pack, scaling hills with grades of more than eighteen percent to navigate his way along several rocky cliffs, slipping at least a half-dozen times in order to beat a path wide enough and remain undetected. Loose rocks, low-hanging limbs, and the sheer grade left him gasping.
About an hour north of the big tent he was now observing, and a two-hour hike away from the nearest road, lay what Ansara had nicknamed “the garden.” Shaded by the towering sugar pines were more than fifty thousand marijuana plants, some fanning up to more than five feet tall and planted in neat rows six feet apart. These rows swept up the steep terrain and were planted in the rich soil. Many of the plants lay amid thick brush and near streams that the cartels used for irrigation. Pipes had been buried along the hillside, the streams dammed up, and an elaborate drip-line system complete with gravity-fed hoses was in place so that the plants were not overwatered. This was a professional operation, with no expense spared.
Along the growing area’s perimeter lay knots of small tents where farmers and security personnel lived, most of their food stored in large sacks and suspended from tree limbs to protect it from black bears roaming the area. The fields themselves were watched twenty-four-seven by as many as thirty armed men at any one time. Supplies were brought in by those who were presumably not told about the operation, only that food, water, clothing, fertilizer, and other essential items were needed. Harvested plants were smuggled out at night by teams of farmers protected by guards. Teams that worked by day actually rode expensive mountain bikes and moved swiftly and silently through the unforgiving valleys. Ansara guessed that many of the workers were relatives and friends of the cartels, people they could trust. Every main entrance and exit of the park was protected by rangers, and Ansara’s surveillance had revealed that at least one night guard had been bribed to allow the entrance or exit of a vehicle between midnight and five a.m., about every ten days or so.
Ansara was no stranger to marijuana farming. He had grown up in East L.A., in one side of a Boyle Heights duplex. His mother’s older brother, Alejandro De La Cruz, lived on the other side. During the week, his uncle was a “gardener to the stars” in the affluent community of Bel Air. Nights and weekends De La Cruz grew and sold pot to those very same rich clients. Ansara was his trusted assistant.
By ten, Ansara could spell, as well as pronounce, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active chemical ingredient in pot that enabled the user to get high. He’d spend hours scrounging up and prepping foam cups. He’d start by punching drain holes in the bottom, add potting soil, and last inserted, pointy end up, a dark brown seed with mottled-looking marbling. He’d line thirty or forty cups in a flat, which was a tray similar to his mother’s cookie pan, and then he’d turn on the heating coils lining the underside of the long benches for bottom heat.
He learned how to transplant the germinated seedling, leaving plenty of soil on its root ball, and about the importance of an oscillating fan running twenty-four hours a day. He skimmed newspapers, especially the inserts and flyers, looking for sales on 600-watt, high-pressure sodium grow lamps.
A marijuana plant’s nighttime, or dark period, was equally critical to its growth. Twenty-four-hour timers were a challenge. The grow lamps easily burned out regular timers, so his uncle had taught him that expensive high-power switches known as contactors, or relay switches, were necessary.
The demand for specific amounts of daylight and darkness created two security issues. Covering over windows to facilitate total darkness aroused suspicion from the street. Drug and law enforcement officials looked for it. Chronic above-average residential power consumption could trigger a Southern California Edison heads-up report to those same drug and law enforcement officials. Also, a grow space could become quite humid. Open windows at odd hours, regardless of precipitation or outside temperatures, was risky business.
By twelve, Ansara could recite the top dozen most potent marijuana strains in descending order of their THC content, from White Widow seeds to Lowryder seeds. And during all that time Ansara never once smoked pot — and neither did his uncle, who said they were businessmen supplying an important product. If you sell cookies, he’d told Ansara, you don’t sit around eating all the cookies.
It all came to a screeching halt when his mother discovered why he spent so much time with Uncle Alejandro. She didn’t speak to her brother for months.
That Ansara had gone on to join the FBI and had already busted individuals who grew pot was one of life’s true ironies, and yet another irony was, at the moment, fully alive before his eyes. There were only a handful of drug enforcement agents assigned to police California’s twenty million acres of federal forests, and unfortunately Ansara was not one of them. He was up there because he’d been hunting a particular smuggler, one Pablo Gutiérrez, who’d murdered a fellow FBI agent in Calexico and who he believed had direct ties to the Juárez Cartel. During his pursuit of this man, Ansara had found the Oz of pot farms in California — yet he and his colleagues were hesitant to bring down this operation because they hoped to use it to gather more intel on the cartels. It was clear to all that they needed to remove the lieutenants and bosses. If they struck too soon, the cartels would just plant another field a couple miles away.
As security tightened along the U.S.-Mexican border, the cartels expanded their growing operations in the United States. Ansara had spoken to a special agent for the federal Bureau of Land Management, who’d told him that just eight months prior, park rangers had confiscated eleven tons of marijuana in a single week. The agent went on to speculate on how much pot they did not confiscate, how much actually made it out of the fields and was sold …Mexican drug lords were operating on American soil, and there weren’t enough law enforcement officers to stop them. Like soldiers used to say in Vietnam, There it is …
Ansara lowered his binoculars and tucked himself deeper into the shrubs. He thought he’d seen one of the loaders do a double take in his direction. His pulse began to race. He waited a moment more, then lifted the binoculars. The men were back at it and had set aside some boxes whose lids were removed. Ansara zoomed in to find packages of toothbrushes and toothpaste, soap, disposable razor blades, and bottles of aspirin, Pepto-Bismol, and cough suppressant. Larger boxes contained small tanks of propane and packages of tortillas, as well as canned goods, including tomatoes and tripe.