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There are new details tonight about Utah's largest marijuana growing operation. Police throughout southern and central Utah shut down massive marijuana gardens last week.
The Drug Enforcement Agency said Ignacio Rodriguez will be indicted this week. DEA agents say he smuggled illegal immigrants from Mexico to run a highly organized drug operation.
Drug agents throughout Southern Utah spent a year investigating marijuana-growing operations, but in reality, the pot had been growing at least two years, maybe longer.
The grows in Washington, Garfield, and Iron counties are all connected, according to the DEA, yielding an estimated 26,000 plants. It's still unclear if a Sevier County grow is connected to the others. The DEA believes Ignacio Rodriguez from Mexico managed the Utah operation, possibly using the people closest to him to work the grows.
Michael Root, a special agent with the DEA, said, "They usually will use cousins, brothers, some family members or someone trying to have the better life and come to the United States to try to get in the system and get smuggled across. They were getting paid approximately $1,500 for being out there 24 hours a day, months at a time, and that would help them pay their smuggling fee across the border."
Harvests would take place twice a year, which would require an extra 20 workers per site. "They were bringing these people in mostly from the California area. I think they're just getting so much pressure out there that they looked at Utah as a new base. And even though it's tougher country, it's so remote they probably thought they could get away with it," Root said.
In fact, the DEA's top man in Salt Lake City expects this to be a trend: more pot growing operations in Utah because the state has so much open land.
E-mail: gkennedy@ksl.com
