“We thought they were growing capsicums and tomatoes,” said Brian Lewis, dairy farmer, of the extraordinary cannabis crop hidden beneath 600 metres of half-round greenhouses.
He made a mental note not to put maize in the field over the fence shared with the new neighbours. “Tomatoes only need a small amount of chemicals and they fall over.”
Lewis need not have worried. The six Vietnamese nationals who worked from dawn late into the night weren’t growing tomatoes. Or capsicums.
Rather, it is alleged that they had 6500 cannabis plants into which they were pumping fertiliser and other compounds to force-grow seedlings into a cash-crop worth millions of dollars.
Police raided the remote Northland property in late November, arresting those working on the land. It’s the fourth large growing operation in two years in Northland in which those arrested were from Vietnam and is part of what police have alleged is an organised crime syndicate.
Detective Inspector Lloyd Schmid of the upper North Financial Crime Group said it was a “vast” operation and the Taheke haul of cannabis was among the biggest ever found by police in New Zealand.
It far exceeds the 4800 plants discovered in the 1997 police operation in Whanganui National Park, which has been described as the country’s single biggest bust.
The scale of the operation became apparent when the Herald on Sunday visited the property. It hosted 11 half-round greenhouses allegedly built by the six people living on the property who now stand accused of cultivating the crop.
The size of the operation is even more staggering given the speed with which it was developed, based on documents and interviews with locals.
Those documents show an Auckland lawyer lodged the property transfer on August 22, selling the property to a client he told the Herald on Sunday was a “young girl (who was Vietnamese) purchasing property with family money”.
Slightly over three months later, police drove down State Highway 12 west of Kaikohe and turned into the driveway leading to the three-bedroom house with its sheds that were once part of the dairy farm and 11 new greenhouses.
The Vietnamese group who worked the property took it over from notorious conspiracy theorist Karen Brewer. While Brewer announced her presence at the property with a bright yellow Covid-related sign at the gate, the new residents kept a lower profile.
Brewer’s sign came down and went into one of the dairy sheds. Without any fanfare or introductions, the group set about building the greenhouses. One neighbour recalls trying to engage a couple of people in the group in conversation, only to be given a friendly smile and the words: “No English.”
Lewis said: “They just appeared there.” A little later, word went around “Vietnamese market gardeners” had bought the property. Another local said: “The place was sold and a week later they were setting up tunnel houses.”
As Lewis and his partner worked the neighbouring paddocks, they would occasionally catch sight of each other.
“We waved to them and they waved to us,” he said. He watched a couple of tunnel houses go up “and one blow down”. “I thought, ‘the poor little buggers haven’t got off to a good start’.”
And yet they persevered and Lewis wasn’t the only one in the area who admired the degree of industry being put into the property. One after another greenhouse went up, built by the group using brand new power tools that - like anything else of value there - disappeared after police left and light-fingered locals came by for a look.
At one stage, Lewis recalls looking at the scale of it and thinking “it was getting a bit bloody big” before getting on with dairying. As farmers, he and his partner worked hard - and he admired the hard work he was seeing on the neighbouring property.
Another local who spoke to the Herald on Sunday held a shared admiration, saying it appeared that work regularly started not long after dawn and continued after dark.
He also believed the group were growing capsicums and tomatoes although a couple of times the wind shifted and he caught a familiar smell. “You’d get a bit of a whiff and think, ‘nah, that’s my imagination’.”
Then, almost as soon as they arrived they were gone again. On the last day in November, about 7am on a Wednesday morning, police arrived and arrested the lot.
“I thought, ‘what the f***, has someone died’,” said one person who watched a line of police vehicles turn into the property. “Then my neighbour told they’d been busted for weed.”
Word spread quick enough. Lewis’ partner was on the farm that day and she rang to let him know. He popped along to see what was happening. “They were planning on burning the bloody stuff on our paddock.” Police had mistakenly assumed the field over the back of the tunnel houses was on the same property.
“That’s our paddock,” he complained before giving the go-ahead. “You’ve got to let the police do what they’ve got to do.”
The next day, it all went up in smoke. The local who thought he was imagining the odd “whiff” was left in no doubt about what had been growing there. “They basically burned cannabis from eight in the morning until eight o’clock at night.”
With the arrests done, evidence secured and cannabis destroyed, the police locked up what they could and left.
And then the locals arrived - so many that Lewis’ partner dropped what he calls a “pebble” - actually a large boulder - across the driveway to “slow down traffic”.
The treasure hunt that followed has assumed legendary status in Taheke. There’s stories of locals coming across paddocks after dark, or driving boldly down the drive, and removing whatever wasn’t nailed down.
Among those, they claim, was a decent haul of cannabis although police deny drugs were left for scavengers.
But those who visited the site soon after the police left noted when they returned weeks later that much of what had been there was gone. ““All the tools were taken, heaps of timber,” said one person.
Lewis went down for a look. “It was a bit of a bloody eye-opener when I went in there.” The industry and scale was breathtaking. Extensive water systems extended across the tunnel houses and the sheds, easing a nagging thought that had been in his mind.
“I thought the Vietnamese were watering their tomatoes with a watering can but they had pumps and reservoirs.”
The former dairy sheds had been sealed inside with sheets of black plastic where, a local expert advised, grown plants would have periods of intense special light to better develop the sought-after marijuana buds. Piles of electric blankets remain that were used to warm the plants from beneath.
The extensive stockpiles of fertiliser and nutrients were tipped out by police. One person told the Herald they had contacted Northland Regional Council, upset that it had been tipped on the ground.
While the council didn’t have a record of a complaint, regulatory services manager Colin Dall said: “A council officer will be contacting the police to ascertain the range of chemicals found at the site.”
The Taheke property is now a small part of the $16.9m of cash, property and other assets legally restrained from being sold through a court order obtained by police.
Those restraining orders point to the size of the police operation which began as a money-laundering inquiry carried out by the police’s financial crimes group.
Schmid, the detective inspector, said there was an ongoing investigation. “The scale of these alleged cannabis syndicates was vast. We allege millions of dollars have been laundered both within New Zealand and offshore.”
Asked how the Taheke bust stacked up, he said: “The seizure of 6500 cannabis plants would place this near the top in terms of the number of plants located at any given cannabis search in New Zealand.”
He said the entire police inquiry stopped between $20m and $25m worth of cannabis being sold. Of the Taheke cannabis, he said about half was at or close to the harvest stage when police arrived “and were particularly abundant in terms of their ‘head’ material yield”.
Schmid confirmed it was decided to “destroy on site” the products allegedly used to force-grow the plants to prevent them from being used in other cannabis-growing operations. He said the decision was made only after they were checked online and found to be “100 per cent organic”.
And he said there had been no complaints of theft from the property. “Police left the property secured as best possible. However, the outdoor sheds had no doors and could not be secured further.”
The ongoing inquiry has ranged well beyond Northland. The Taheke bust was dubbed Operation Peruvian and came out of an earlier police inquiry called Operation Bush, which police alleged involved growing and selling cannabis across Auckland, in Northland and Waikato.
It has seen search warrants carried out at 52 addresses, on 10 vehicles and two storage lockers. In total, 37 people had been arrested and 96 charges laid.
In mid-July, police made a string of arrests said to include a 40-year-old Waitematā man they allege was the kingpin “believed to be linked to a Vietnamese organised crime group”. Police said it was working with Immigration NZ because of the foreign nationals involved.
As for the claim Taheke locals scavenged cannabis after police had left, Schmid said police did not believe “any usable plant material was left at the scene”.
It’s a point of difference with the stories of some Taheke locals, who reckon it was as good a smoke as anything else grown locally. Not that they’re planning on contacting police to argue the point.