Marijuana Fortune Found In Silver Lake Backyard By Mack Reed
What would you do if you found a duffle bag filled with prime, dispensary-style weed in your backyard?
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A) Kiss your peace fingers, kneel down and point at the sky (in gratitude to your god of choice). B) Curse the world because you ran out of rolling papers and can't find your lighter. C) Immediately jump on Facebook to invite 500 friends to massive toke-in.
If you're Silver Lake resident and game developer Mack Reed, none of the above:
You call the police.
Reed, a former Los Angeles Times reporter, blogged about the episode (link via LA Observed), saying he didn't want the drugs around his family.
Mainly though, he was afraid of the kind of people who might have come to retrieve the stuff:
Katheirne Hitt / Flickr
... Some evil bastard has stuffed a bag of dope into a hole behind my house and turned my life into the backdrop of a James Ellroy noir. Any minute now, some neckless mook with steroidal shoulders and a bullet-shattered voicebox will stalk up behind and beat me bloody with his pearl-handled Desert Eagle .45.
He discovered the treasure -- 61 items, including labeled jars of buds and vacuum-sealed bags of hash -- recently after taking a solar technician to his backyard as part of an accounting of his property's electricity use.
Reed was getting solar panels installed. Green power would find him, indeed. As he lifted the hatches on an empty, unused, in-ground hot tub to show the solar guy it's electrical feed, he found a green duffle bag. Inside of it:
Thousands of dense little marijuana buds stare back at me, through industrial vacuum-sealed plastic, through thick Ziploc bags, through the crystal-argyle pattern of glass jelly-jars - all labeled in looping Sharpie letters with names like "Lemon Haze" and "Bubble Mix."
It's so well packaged, organized and labeled, with specific strain names like Lemon Haze and Bubble Mix, we think it's almost assuredly dispensary pot. Some strains out there are shop-specific, so the labels might point to where this stuff comes from, was stolen from or was headed.
Anyway, after more than an hour and a half an LAPD supervisor showed up. She made an accounting of the pot -- an estimated $175,000 worth -- and put it the trunk of a black-and-white.
Wisely, she suggested posting the LAPD confiscated-property receipt next to the hot tub. It reads:
We stumbled across it and called LAPD. They confiscated it and are now watching the place. Sorry.
[@dennisjromero / djromero@laweekly.com / @LAWeeklyNews]
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