AntidoteMan
Member
I haven’t posted any of my own posts and I don’t think I ever have, even long ago when I was on here… but I wanted to share this genuine story, it’s packed with some real advice about getting busted and what/what not to do. I hope it goes to help anyone who reads it..
First off..
Fuck the fucking police and fuck the fucking Diaz brothers.
I have a story to tell about being busted and some thoughts on it, mainly my advice. First off, these are my thoughts and experiences and I want to make that very clear. Other people may have completely different experiences and I hope not to offend, push aside, or step on anyone else’s views. I am merely one person with a story to tell.
Also, I’m suspecting a good number of people here grow large crops, or substantial amounts of marijuana. I know for certain there are people here with extensive knowledge and many years of growing experience. I can’t comment on all of that, I can only imagine the wonders some of you have experienced growing, doing business, selling seeds, traveling to paradise to collect seeds, all of the great people you meet, etc.
As for me, my interactions with the growing community for the most part were very small time, but when I got into the business things went wrong pretty quickly and I’ll share what happened to me. I think there’s obvious reasons and I’ll explain.
My main advice for anyone new to this is stick to the regulations and laws. Otherwise it’s a game of Russian roulette. You could get away with it forever. But the loophole for them to get you is always open. Some of you are older and are set in life and won’t ever stop so I should think this bears you little burden. I apologize if this leads anyone away from a private vendor’s investments and strategies. I think most seed merchants and big time dealers know their clients are taking one in the ass much more often than they are, and in some sense, even if they don’t feel responsible for it, eventually I think most of them will be made to do so. We’ve seen larger marijuana businesses brought down and it’s sad. It’s sad how a lot of things work in this world. Capitalism vs respecting and enjoying a very special plant. I think its just like Training Day the movie, they let you get big …..and then bam! Little fish first, then the bigger ones. In some weird way, if you’re breaking the law, at the end of it.. you’re working for the law.
Fuck the fucking police and fuck the fucking Diaz brothers.
And I take you back to 2013.
I wasn’t from the area. People, organizations are territorial. I should have known better. A friend of mine who had long been out of touch got in contact, I knew he was a grower, I also knew he was unreliable, well, he pitched the idea of moving out to Cally to grow. I lived in New York. His dad lived out there, everything was cool, we were all set. Well I got things together over the course of that month and when it came to go he was gone. Shit. I had my wrangler packed and a trailer hitched and my CB750 strapped to the trailer. I went for it. My family helped bail me out of a few rough spots along the way. I ended up settling in northern San Diego County. I ran a junk hauling business just to make ends meet and this is where I started to collect clones. As for the garbage hauling, I helped San Deigo get rid of tons of garbage …and what did I get? I’ll get there.
So I got my medical marijuana card, it including an add-on that supposedly allowed me to grow 99+ plants for the extra money I paid, which I paid for 3 years. Yay. It was a scam and I’ll get into it. What it also got was me in the door of every dispensary in San Diego, Orange, Riverside and LA County and I can attest I went to almost all of them. I amassed about 150 strains over the course of that year and many of the clones came from people posting on Craigslist. We met at various locations, swapped, traded, sold, I only went along with what all sorts of others were doing. People were also selling their homegrown on there. I made all sorts of friends. My friend Michael had a wife and three small kids and a clone op in his garage and a warehouse with his partner for supplying dispensaries. I met a girl named Lindsey, she invited me to her house. She was a beautiful young hippy chick with a newborn, no baby daddy, a mostly empty house and a clone op in her garage. There was trust. I met people of all ethnicities and walks of life and there were few problems aside from spidermites and powdery mildew. But that was what was on the surface.
Weed makes people paranoid. Money makes people paranoid. On my end I was in heaven, working doing something I loved. Mind you, I don’t really smoke. It heightens my anxiety and some strains downright make me paranoid, and maybe for the better, but I just don’t do it. CBD is different but that makes me sleep too much. The smell of living, flowering plants, I’m addicted to. That’s what drives me… but back to my tale.
Fuck the fucking police and fuck the fucking Diaz brothers.
You were greedy! Some might say. You were stupid and too trusting! I was posting on one of the most popular websites and listing my phone number. Damn right I was stupid and too trusting. I didn’t know the law, I knew there were gray areas but I also didn’t know all of the other politics floating around. And lets be real.. who knows who was watching me online. I didn’t have a vpn or any security setup.
Low and behold I meet Tyler. Tyler lived in El Cajon and was real into getting a cut of my Afghani Bull Rider. We met several times and I sold him a handful of genetics and eventually he invited me out to his place. I get there and it’s a small ranch house. He lives there with his girlfriend and there’s jars of weed on all of these shelves, big jars. Filled with curing nuggs. Then he shows me his grow op, a two car garage filled with flowering beauties. Mainly Headband and Green Crack. He supplied dispensaries and he even had plants growing in pots outside by his pool. The ducting, lighting, the reflective walls, he did it all himself and had backing from his brother and some guy named JJ from Norcal. He was always on the phone with that JJ guy and I always wondered just how connected they were and how high it went.
Tyler did some stupid stuff IMO. He sprayed pyrethryin? on his plants without wearing a mask and gloves. Little things. His neighbor across the street took care of his plants when he went away. To me he seemed more trusting than I was. I think it was a phase during that era in Cally, but I could only guess that. By late 2014 I was in LA County and by 2016 I was back in NY. Crooked as all hell IMO, but I’m not from Cally and so who am I to know it all. I loved the place but perhaps it didn’t love me.
Fuck the fucking police and fuck the fucking Diaz brothers.
So Tyler and I eventually teamed up and formed a business. I started bringing over all of the clones I collected and he started flowering them to check them out. The Alaskan Thunderfuck was unreal. The Hawgsbreath. The Kryptonite OG. The list went on. I had too many cuts to even begin flowering at his place. We were going to need a much bigger spot.
This is where I got legal eagle. I began to do more research, particularly on setting up sole proprietorships and LLCS, etc, as most anyone who owns a business knows, there are certain do’s and don’ts. My junk hauling business was a cash thing so I never went that route. To work with tax law, state and federal brought clear contradictions. You can’t run a state business and follow tax laws without filing federal tax forms which were in direct conflict with federal marijuana laws. Most of you probably know it. But still. IMO the most incredible thing was that Tyler had no medical license whatsoever.
I began to get cold feet. At this point Tyler had over thirty plants outside in his fenced in his backward all in plain view. His best friend Tory and Tory’s girlfriend were moving in to help run the grow op, and stay permanently once we all moved up to LA. That was our plan. Tyler and his girlfriend and I were going to move up to LA together and rent a warehouse as we set up a collective called ‘Cat’s Pajamas’, with our clone business, ‘California Clone Kingdom’ and I was eventually looking to start a seed company, ‘Antidote Seeds’. We were going to be the next collective on the block helping pave the way for legal marijuana consumption. Tyler was waiting on money from his brother and the JJ guy from Norcal. His math was spot on many levels. On others it was spot off.
My feet got colder. I let Tyler and company know I was moving to LA County early and that if we went further into it we needed more legal protection, knowledge and experience. I was the smart one. They were still going to move once Torry took over at the ranch. I figured if it worked out we would still go forward with the business but I would keep my clone business running just in case.
Tyler and his girlfriend met me in LA after I spent a good day loading all of my furniture and possessions, and 300+ plants into a uhaul, then driving to my new place. We got my stuff into a loft I rented and I was set. But I had to go back the following day to clean my old apartment and get my security.
That night I drove to El Cajon to stay on Tyler’s couch. Everyone was there, Torry, his girlfriend, Tyler and his girlfriend, they were drinking, mostly trimming buds. Mind you – nobody in the house had a gun. There were no firearms on the property and also no hard drugs. Just happy stoners engaging in peaceful fun and helping grow a medically important plant. I fell asleep on the couch to dreams of flowering buds.
Fuck the fucking police and fuck the fucking Diaz brothers. And fuck lawyers also.
I woke up to sudden commotion. Loud bangs, from the living room couch and through the open kitchen I saw the door smashing down. Men with guns were storming the building. I was down on my face in moments with my hands pinned and then plastic restraints. The gun pointed at my nose was an AK-47, a gun used for blasting Afghan goat herders into US dust. More commotion, everyone else was going through the same things. They were raiding the jars, the plants, Tyler had shatter in his fridge and freezer, they took it all. Suddenly I'm Antonio Montana the gangster and not somebody following protocals to help sick people get their medicine. We were sectioned off from one another and questioned. The arresting officers were some of the most piggish, evil and nasty people I’ve ever met. I would swear one of them had a hard on while he was talking to me.
I refused to talk without a lawyer. I knew to say that and follow it. They were pissed. They threatened to be harder on me, they said they wouldn’t take off the handcuffs if I didn’t cooperate and tell them what was going on. When I was brought back to the others they all had their hands in front of them folded on their laps. I was treated differently. I know from the supporting deposition which I had access to much later, Tory and hig girlfriend talked the most. Tyler’s girlfriend was next. Then Tyler. Then me. I said nothing.
The police told me that my phone had incriminating evidence, enough to book me. Tyler, his girlfriend and I were put in jail. Tyler didn’t seem to want us separated even though it was obviously his grow they were mainly after. I called my parents and made bail. Tyler refused to have his family help him, which I respect but also think was needeless. It took a while to sort out what happened.
I didn’t have a lockscreen on my phone and they had texts, and also a clone list on paper in my backpack. My lawyer said it was the stuff on my phone that did me in. My lawyer(s) were also people I came not to trust, and I’ll tell this to anyone, if you’re paying a lawyer, you’re helping a lawyer live. He wants you in that position like a leech will suck the blood out of your balls if he can reach them. He’s part of a team of people looking to break your world and take whatever he can.
Ultimately the lawyer’s advice was off. The med card and 99+ plant documents I paid for weren’t worth a shit. In fact, the law stated it clearly, you’re paying for a medical DEFENSE, that’s it. An argument. Like it was written to get you to court. Imagine that. The doctor’s a corrupt scumbag also. She was a Russian certified doctor who went into this bussiness likely to screw people. My ex wife is Russian. I went to her to try and get records for the marijuana medical card to use in my defense and she kept saying "Bwhat Bweccads? Bwhat Bweccads?" My lawyer said it wouldn't have mattered. He could have just said, "Hey, the police, doctors, the citizens of the state of California, me, ..we just want whatever you have and will do whatever we can do to get it." The entire thing… one big hustle. Down to the fucking seed. Yup.
Fuck the fucking police and fuck the fucking Diaz brothers. And fuck lawyers also.
Of course I went home and got rid of it all. I cleaned out the loft of every plant and seed I had. Black garbage bags stuffed into the back dumpster. Some more stupidity, I landed in LA in a fairly rough borough of the city with a sizeable marijuana business. Who even knows who my competition was. Scary. And of course I worked out the deal to plead rather than go to trial. But they kept trying to put us together. I started out with a lawyer my family got me, but Tyler’s lawyers swore they could get us off completely. One of them was an ex DA who switched his views and now fights for the legalization. But only maybe could they get us off. Hah. So I switched to the other teams of guys. They were young and fresh, bad-am.
Their promises were paper thin. The judge for our first panel was a real mean bitch and refused to go lean on me. Later we heard she was an alcoholic who had a handful of DWIs. Crazy. Corrupt, like, just nuts. Politics they call it. I finally found my strategy. They wanted to get us all. This meant, same lawyer, same deal, same signatures, same punishments. As much the same as possible, as little paperwork and headaches for them. I decided to give them the biggest headache I could.
And it paid off. Had I agreed to what they were proposing I would have had formal probation and like months of community service. A constant date with some dick having me pee in a cup. Come the day we were to sign and take our punishment I refused to sign, meaning they would have to go back and work out another deal. Tyler had the brunt of the burden, then his girlfriend. Then me. My lawyer was furious with me. ‘Fuck you’ I felt like saying to him. He conferred again with the DA and they got me what I wanted. Informal probation and one week of community service. That’s another thing I learned - be as difficult as possible with them, your own lawyers even, they’re doing the same thing to you.
Fuck the fucking police and fuck the fucking Diaz brothers.
So I was lucky and free of it all in a flash. No way would they get me on anything else, I isolated myself away from the world and began to get back to writing. Eventually I got the felony charge wiped off my record with some, you guessed it, money. And staying positive, my calling was always to get to Hollywood and be a screenwriter, where I lived for another year, and now I’m an author of 13 fiction novels and several non fiction books, still working on my dream. Perhaps one day I’ll be back in the land of sunshine.
After all was said and done, it wasn’t Tyler who set this up to fail. Torry, to me, has always been suspect. I’m very curious about the JJ guy and if the cops went after him also or what that was about. I’m not really sure how high this goes. They definitely knew about the grow in the garage several months earlier and it seemed it wasn’t linked to me. But they were certainly aware of my involvement, why else would they have chosen that night to raid? I’m fairly certain I wasn’t the main guy who they were following/were after although they obviously knew I was growing also. It was Tyler they wanted to get. And perhaps because of all of this, we fell out of contact. I have no idea what happened to him and he is missed. We had good times.
The weird part about it is what about all of the dispensaries that never got busted? Like Clone Queen, he had five locations. A brief search on him now pulls up nothing, and this has been so long I don’t know what’s going on out there or who’s who. I wonder if anyone does or ever did. I also don’t see sellers doing business on Craigslist anymore, and I know now in California its statewide legal, of course with restrictions.
A lot of it is a head game. They want you to be paranoid. I sometimes think the cops care more about that than busting anyone. Life itself may be whispering things in your ear that you should be listening to. The sacred plant doesn’t bring all good to everyone, we all have different paths, I believe, and purposes and things to discover. It isn’t my place to decide anything for anyone or help anyone figure it out. I can only lend advice and share my experiences.
The one thing I do know is that I’ll never go back to large scale growing unless it becomes legal to do so. I never ratted and for that I’m most proud. There’s different people out there in the dark. Some of us are cool. There are certainly those that are not.
Tyler in his garage op... Dedicating this post to you my bother... wherever you are..
First off..
Fuck the fucking police and fuck the fucking Diaz brothers.
I have a story to tell about being busted and some thoughts on it, mainly my advice. First off, these are my thoughts and experiences and I want to make that very clear. Other people may have completely different experiences and I hope not to offend, push aside, or step on anyone else’s views. I am merely one person with a story to tell.
Also, I’m suspecting a good number of people here grow large crops, or substantial amounts of marijuana. I know for certain there are people here with extensive knowledge and many years of growing experience. I can’t comment on all of that, I can only imagine the wonders some of you have experienced growing, doing business, selling seeds, traveling to paradise to collect seeds, all of the great people you meet, etc.
As for me, my interactions with the growing community for the most part were very small time, but when I got into the business things went wrong pretty quickly and I’ll share what happened to me. I think there’s obvious reasons and I’ll explain.
My main advice for anyone new to this is stick to the regulations and laws. Otherwise it’s a game of Russian roulette. You could get away with it forever. But the loophole for them to get you is always open. Some of you are older and are set in life and won’t ever stop so I should think this bears you little burden. I apologize if this leads anyone away from a private vendor’s investments and strategies. I think most seed merchants and big time dealers know their clients are taking one in the ass much more often than they are, and in some sense, even if they don’t feel responsible for it, eventually I think most of them will be made to do so. We’ve seen larger marijuana businesses brought down and it’s sad. It’s sad how a lot of things work in this world. Capitalism vs respecting and enjoying a very special plant. I think its just like Training Day the movie, they let you get big …..and then bam! Little fish first, then the bigger ones. In some weird way, if you’re breaking the law, at the end of it.. you’re working for the law.
Fuck the fucking police and fuck the fucking Diaz brothers.
And I take you back to 2013.
I wasn’t from the area. People, organizations are territorial. I should have known better. A friend of mine who had long been out of touch got in contact, I knew he was a grower, I also knew he was unreliable, well, he pitched the idea of moving out to Cally to grow. I lived in New York. His dad lived out there, everything was cool, we were all set. Well I got things together over the course of that month and when it came to go he was gone. Shit. I had my wrangler packed and a trailer hitched and my CB750 strapped to the trailer. I went for it. My family helped bail me out of a few rough spots along the way. I ended up settling in northern San Diego County. I ran a junk hauling business just to make ends meet and this is where I started to collect clones. As for the garbage hauling, I helped San Deigo get rid of tons of garbage …and what did I get? I’ll get there.
So I got my medical marijuana card, it including an add-on that supposedly allowed me to grow 99+ plants for the extra money I paid, which I paid for 3 years. Yay. It was a scam and I’ll get into it. What it also got was me in the door of every dispensary in San Diego, Orange, Riverside and LA County and I can attest I went to almost all of them. I amassed about 150 strains over the course of that year and many of the clones came from people posting on Craigslist. We met at various locations, swapped, traded, sold, I only went along with what all sorts of others were doing. People were also selling their homegrown on there. I made all sorts of friends. My friend Michael had a wife and three small kids and a clone op in his garage and a warehouse with his partner for supplying dispensaries. I met a girl named Lindsey, she invited me to her house. She was a beautiful young hippy chick with a newborn, no baby daddy, a mostly empty house and a clone op in her garage. There was trust. I met people of all ethnicities and walks of life and there were few problems aside from spidermites and powdery mildew. But that was what was on the surface.
Weed makes people paranoid. Money makes people paranoid. On my end I was in heaven, working doing something I loved. Mind you, I don’t really smoke. It heightens my anxiety and some strains downright make me paranoid, and maybe for the better, but I just don’t do it. CBD is different but that makes me sleep too much. The smell of living, flowering plants, I’m addicted to. That’s what drives me… but back to my tale.
Fuck the fucking police and fuck the fucking Diaz brothers.
You were greedy! Some might say. You were stupid and too trusting! I was posting on one of the most popular websites and listing my phone number. Damn right I was stupid and too trusting. I didn’t know the law, I knew there were gray areas but I also didn’t know all of the other politics floating around. And lets be real.. who knows who was watching me online. I didn’t have a vpn or any security setup.
Low and behold I meet Tyler. Tyler lived in El Cajon and was real into getting a cut of my Afghani Bull Rider. We met several times and I sold him a handful of genetics and eventually he invited me out to his place. I get there and it’s a small ranch house. He lives there with his girlfriend and there’s jars of weed on all of these shelves, big jars. Filled with curing nuggs. Then he shows me his grow op, a two car garage filled with flowering beauties. Mainly Headband and Green Crack. He supplied dispensaries and he even had plants growing in pots outside by his pool. The ducting, lighting, the reflective walls, he did it all himself and had backing from his brother and some guy named JJ from Norcal. He was always on the phone with that JJ guy and I always wondered just how connected they were and how high it went.
Tyler did some stupid stuff IMO. He sprayed pyrethryin? on his plants without wearing a mask and gloves. Little things. His neighbor across the street took care of his plants when he went away. To me he seemed more trusting than I was. I think it was a phase during that era in Cally, but I could only guess that. By late 2014 I was in LA County and by 2016 I was back in NY. Crooked as all hell IMO, but I’m not from Cally and so who am I to know it all. I loved the place but perhaps it didn’t love me.
Fuck the fucking police and fuck the fucking Diaz brothers.
So Tyler and I eventually teamed up and formed a business. I started bringing over all of the clones I collected and he started flowering them to check them out. The Alaskan Thunderfuck was unreal. The Hawgsbreath. The Kryptonite OG. The list went on. I had too many cuts to even begin flowering at his place. We were going to need a much bigger spot.
This is where I got legal eagle. I began to do more research, particularly on setting up sole proprietorships and LLCS, etc, as most anyone who owns a business knows, there are certain do’s and don’ts. My junk hauling business was a cash thing so I never went that route. To work with tax law, state and federal brought clear contradictions. You can’t run a state business and follow tax laws without filing federal tax forms which were in direct conflict with federal marijuana laws. Most of you probably know it. But still. IMO the most incredible thing was that Tyler had no medical license whatsoever.
I began to get cold feet. At this point Tyler had over thirty plants outside in his fenced in his backward all in plain view. His best friend Tory and Tory’s girlfriend were moving in to help run the grow op, and stay permanently once we all moved up to LA. That was our plan. Tyler and his girlfriend and I were going to move up to LA together and rent a warehouse as we set up a collective called ‘Cat’s Pajamas’, with our clone business, ‘California Clone Kingdom’ and I was eventually looking to start a seed company, ‘Antidote Seeds’. We were going to be the next collective on the block helping pave the way for legal marijuana consumption. Tyler was waiting on money from his brother and the JJ guy from Norcal. His math was spot on many levels. On others it was spot off.
My feet got colder. I let Tyler and company know I was moving to LA County early and that if we went further into it we needed more legal protection, knowledge and experience. I was the smart one. They were still going to move once Torry took over at the ranch. I figured if it worked out we would still go forward with the business but I would keep my clone business running just in case.
Tyler and his girlfriend met me in LA after I spent a good day loading all of my furniture and possessions, and 300+ plants into a uhaul, then driving to my new place. We got my stuff into a loft I rented and I was set. But I had to go back the following day to clean my old apartment and get my security.
That night I drove to El Cajon to stay on Tyler’s couch. Everyone was there, Torry, his girlfriend, Tyler and his girlfriend, they were drinking, mostly trimming buds. Mind you – nobody in the house had a gun. There were no firearms on the property and also no hard drugs. Just happy stoners engaging in peaceful fun and helping grow a medically important plant. I fell asleep on the couch to dreams of flowering buds.
Fuck the fucking police and fuck the fucking Diaz brothers. And fuck lawyers also.
I woke up to sudden commotion. Loud bangs, from the living room couch and through the open kitchen I saw the door smashing down. Men with guns were storming the building. I was down on my face in moments with my hands pinned and then plastic restraints. The gun pointed at my nose was an AK-47, a gun used for blasting Afghan goat herders into US dust. More commotion, everyone else was going through the same things. They were raiding the jars, the plants, Tyler had shatter in his fridge and freezer, they took it all. Suddenly I'm Antonio Montana the gangster and not somebody following protocals to help sick people get their medicine. We were sectioned off from one another and questioned. The arresting officers were some of the most piggish, evil and nasty people I’ve ever met. I would swear one of them had a hard on while he was talking to me.
I refused to talk without a lawyer. I knew to say that and follow it. They were pissed. They threatened to be harder on me, they said they wouldn’t take off the handcuffs if I didn’t cooperate and tell them what was going on. When I was brought back to the others they all had their hands in front of them folded on their laps. I was treated differently. I know from the supporting deposition which I had access to much later, Tory and hig girlfriend talked the most. Tyler’s girlfriend was next. Then Tyler. Then me. I said nothing.
The police told me that my phone had incriminating evidence, enough to book me. Tyler, his girlfriend and I were put in jail. Tyler didn’t seem to want us separated even though it was obviously his grow they were mainly after. I called my parents and made bail. Tyler refused to have his family help him, which I respect but also think was needeless. It took a while to sort out what happened.
I didn’t have a lockscreen on my phone and they had texts, and also a clone list on paper in my backpack. My lawyer said it was the stuff on my phone that did me in. My lawyer(s) were also people I came not to trust, and I’ll tell this to anyone, if you’re paying a lawyer, you’re helping a lawyer live. He wants you in that position like a leech will suck the blood out of your balls if he can reach them. He’s part of a team of people looking to break your world and take whatever he can.
Ultimately the lawyer’s advice was off. The med card and 99+ plant documents I paid for weren’t worth a shit. In fact, the law stated it clearly, you’re paying for a medical DEFENSE, that’s it. An argument. Like it was written to get you to court. Imagine that. The doctor’s a corrupt scumbag also. She was a Russian certified doctor who went into this bussiness likely to screw people. My ex wife is Russian. I went to her to try and get records for the marijuana medical card to use in my defense and she kept saying "Bwhat Bweccads? Bwhat Bweccads?" My lawyer said it wouldn't have mattered. He could have just said, "Hey, the police, doctors, the citizens of the state of California, me, ..we just want whatever you have and will do whatever we can do to get it." The entire thing… one big hustle. Down to the fucking seed. Yup.
Fuck the fucking police and fuck the fucking Diaz brothers. And fuck lawyers also.
Of course I went home and got rid of it all. I cleaned out the loft of every plant and seed I had. Black garbage bags stuffed into the back dumpster. Some more stupidity, I landed in LA in a fairly rough borough of the city with a sizeable marijuana business. Who even knows who my competition was. Scary. And of course I worked out the deal to plead rather than go to trial. But they kept trying to put us together. I started out with a lawyer my family got me, but Tyler’s lawyers swore they could get us off completely. One of them was an ex DA who switched his views and now fights for the legalization. But only maybe could they get us off. Hah. So I switched to the other teams of guys. They were young and fresh, bad-am.
Their promises were paper thin. The judge for our first panel was a real mean bitch and refused to go lean on me. Later we heard she was an alcoholic who had a handful of DWIs. Crazy. Corrupt, like, just nuts. Politics they call it. I finally found my strategy. They wanted to get us all. This meant, same lawyer, same deal, same signatures, same punishments. As much the same as possible, as little paperwork and headaches for them. I decided to give them the biggest headache I could.
And it paid off. Had I agreed to what they were proposing I would have had formal probation and like months of community service. A constant date with some dick having me pee in a cup. Come the day we were to sign and take our punishment I refused to sign, meaning they would have to go back and work out another deal. Tyler had the brunt of the burden, then his girlfriend. Then me. My lawyer was furious with me. ‘Fuck you’ I felt like saying to him. He conferred again with the DA and they got me what I wanted. Informal probation and one week of community service. That’s another thing I learned - be as difficult as possible with them, your own lawyers even, they’re doing the same thing to you.
Fuck the fucking police and fuck the fucking Diaz brothers.
So I was lucky and free of it all in a flash. No way would they get me on anything else, I isolated myself away from the world and began to get back to writing. Eventually I got the felony charge wiped off my record with some, you guessed it, money. And staying positive, my calling was always to get to Hollywood and be a screenwriter, where I lived for another year, and now I’m an author of 13 fiction novels and several non fiction books, still working on my dream. Perhaps one day I’ll be back in the land of sunshine.
After all was said and done, it wasn’t Tyler who set this up to fail. Torry, to me, has always been suspect. I’m very curious about the JJ guy and if the cops went after him also or what that was about. I’m not really sure how high this goes. They definitely knew about the grow in the garage several months earlier and it seemed it wasn’t linked to me. But they were certainly aware of my involvement, why else would they have chosen that night to raid? I’m fairly certain I wasn’t the main guy who they were following/were after although they obviously knew I was growing also. It was Tyler they wanted to get. And perhaps because of all of this, we fell out of contact. I have no idea what happened to him and he is missed. We had good times.
The weird part about it is what about all of the dispensaries that never got busted? Like Clone Queen, he had five locations. A brief search on him now pulls up nothing, and this has been so long I don’t know what’s going on out there or who’s who. I wonder if anyone does or ever did. I also don’t see sellers doing business on Craigslist anymore, and I know now in California its statewide legal, of course with restrictions.
A lot of it is a head game. They want you to be paranoid. I sometimes think the cops care more about that than busting anyone. Life itself may be whispering things in your ear that you should be listening to. The sacred plant doesn’t bring all good to everyone, we all have different paths, I believe, and purposes and things to discover. It isn’t my place to decide anything for anyone or help anyone figure it out. I can only lend advice and share my experiences.
The one thing I do know is that I’ll never go back to large scale growing unless it becomes legal to do so. I never ratted and for that I’m most proud. There’s different people out there in the dark. Some of us are cool. There are certainly those that are not.
Tyler in his garage op... Dedicating this post to you my bother... wherever you are..
Last edited:
