Early on Saturday 10 January 2004, more than 100 officers from the Ontario Provincial Police and the Barrie Police Service raided a former Molson brewery on the east side of Highway 400 in Barrie, acting on a tip that someone had built a giant indoor marijuana farm inside the closed plant.[1][2] SWAT teams, canine units and bomb-disposal experts secured the building first, work that took most of Saturday, because large grow operations are often booby-trapped and wired with pirate high-voltage connections.[2] Nine workers tending the plants were arrested in the raid.[1][3]
A big-box grow
Police described the 6,000-square-metre farm as the largest and most sophisticated indoor operation ever found in Canada, holding more than 30,000 high-grade plants under over 1,000 industrial lights on computerized timers, fed through kilometres of irrigation tubing and chemical tanks.[1][3][2] The site ran around the clock with dormitory quarters for up to 50 workers, a makeshift cafeteria, drying racks and vacuum-packing for shipment, some plants growing inside cavernous former beer vats.[1][3] Barrie police chief Wayne Frechette called it a big-box enterprise rather than a mom-and-pop operation.[1][3]
An organised-crime syndicate
Deputy Commissioner Vaughn Collins said the farm appeared to be run by an organised crime syndicate that had rented space in the brewery, which Molson closed in 2000 and sold to an investment firm leasing to businesses including a coffee roaster and a trucking company.[1][3] Police believed the farm had operated for at least a year, hidden by the constant coming and going of trucks, and said Canadian-grown marijuana was routinely shipped to the United States and traded for cocaine smuggled back into Canada.[1][3]
Sentences
On 3 December 2004, seven men who had pleaded guilty to production and possession of marijuana for the purpose of trafficking were sentenced, with terms ranging from two years of house arrest to five years in prison.[4] Justice James Crawford described them as minor players, “not the controlling minds” behind the operation, and said the sentences sent the appropriate message to deter others from large-scale production.[4] Michael DiCicco, 61, of Toronto, who had lived on the site and set up a dummy company as a front for the grow operation, received two years of house arrest because severe health problems meant a jail term could prove fatal.[4] The other terms were two years less a day for Scott Dillon, 24, of Toronto; three and a half years for Craig Walker, 24, of Niagara Falls; four years each for Thomas Gates, 33, of Corunna and Rayne Sauve, 36, of St. Catharines; and five years each for Robert Bleich, 29, of Stayner and Scott Walker, 34, of St. Catharines.[4]
Police said they knew who the individuals behind the factory’s estimated $120 million two-year production run were but lacked the evidence to charge them, and the seven sentenced men would likely be the only ones to serve time.[4]
