Growing things gets Bill Nock excited. His current passion is ferns, the ones he's growing at a 15-acre nursery on the Indian River. Nock has big plans for his fern farm, including a sophisticated micropropagation lab where he can clone plants in test tubes by the thousands. At 85 cents for a dozen sprays, ferns aren't nearly as lucrative as his former crop, but it's a living. More important for Nock, ferns are legal.
For four years, Nock, 47, ran a successful marijuana business in St. Augustine that at its peak employed as many as a dozen people and grossed $365,000 a year. A former criminal defense lawyer, Nock and a client decided in 1991 to start growing a few plants to make some extra money. To his surprise, he discovered he had a bright green thumb. Soon Nock was renting homes all over St. Johns County and turning them into indoor marijuana farms. When arrested in 1995, his main grow house contained close to 1,000 pot plants. Another contained 172. He had plans to expand to Gainesville.
Nock says now that his downfall was letting the business grow too fast. "Hogs that get fat get slaughtered, that's what we said," Nock recalls. "We didn't listen to our own advice."
Nock got 47 months in jail, but countless other pot growers in Florida are doing just fine, thank you. Florida growers produced $701 million worth of marijuana in 1997, according to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). Those numbers, if true, would make pot Florida's second-biggest cash crop, behind only citrus. NORML's 1998 crop report also ranks Florida fifth in the U.S. in marijuana production, behind California, Tennessee, Kentucky and Hawaii.
As opposed to the traffic in cocaine, which is relatively concentrated in the hands of the Colombian cartels, the marijuana industry remains fragmented. For years, most marijuana was imported from places like Mexico and Colombia, with Florida the setting for a lively marijuana smuggling business. Pilots flew the stuff over on small airplanes and then kicked it out of the planes, to be picked up by dealers in waiting cars -- usually. Once, a bale crashed through the roof of a trailer in Fort Lauderdale, narrowly missing the trailer's owner. Gary Moore, a major with the Broward Sheriff's office, remembers calls from farmers in west Broward asking police to come out and clear their pastures of stray bales of pot because "the cattle were eating it, and it was making them goofy."
But in the mid 1970s, the U.S. and Mexican governments began spraying marijuana fields in Mexico with an herbicide that put a major scare into U.S. consumers. Then a few years later, law enforcement, most notably the U.S. Coast Guard and the Drug Enforcement Agency, began coming down hard on marijuana smuggling. Additional seizures created a shortage of marijuana and encouraged smugglers to shift to cocaine, which is much more easily concealed and offers larger profits.
Pot smuggling is still big business, but the momentum of the marijuana industry in Florida has shifted to growers, ranging from mom-and-pop entrepreneur-types to well-capitalized, high-tech pot planters. The bedrock of the state's domestic pot business can be found in the thick forests of north Florida and the Panhandle, including the Apalachicola National Forest. Joey Dobson, who was born in Baker County and is now the sheriff, believes that a tradition of outlaw culture that evolved during Prohibition contributed to the rise of the area as a marijuana center. "Baker was famous for bootlegging," Dobson says. "They did it to raise their families. Now it's gotten to the point where it's just a thing to do. Instead of growing corn they grow marijuana."
Baker's pot industry made headlines in 1995 when then-Sheriff Joe Newmans was arrested and charged with accepting $70,000 in payoffs from marijuana smugglers and growers for protection against raids. Newmans pleaded guilty to one count of obstruction of justice and went to jail. Dobson says marijuana growing isn't as big in Baker County as stories like that would suggest, but he admits, "something like that is hard to live down."
However rustic they may be, Panhandle pot farmers are creative. Responding to aerial surveillance from law enforcement, they've abandoned row-crop farming for smaller plots and developed other stealthy growing techniques, such as mixing pot with legitimate crops. J.N. Canaday of Sanderson spread 2,300 plants among 11 dense, swampy spots in north Baker County and the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia. The plants were so well-hidden that it took 30 police officers two full days to find and destroy them all. Some were in hanging baskets wired to trees, some planted close to the St. Mary's River in pots and potting soil. In some places, Canaday and his crew drilled shallow wells to ensure the plants got enough water and tended the plots on a fixed schedule.
"It's a job for them," Dobson says. "They're not making a lot of money, they're making enough money to live on and not have to work a regular job, or to supplement their regular job." Dobson and agents from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement arrested Canaday and six of his workers last year.
Holmes, Santa Rosa, Liberty, Taylor and Lafayette counties all remain hot spots for cultivating marijuana, but the reality is that the business is slowly moving indoors, where a whole new breed of entrepreneurs is taking advantage of hydroponic techniques that allow efficient, year-around production in locations much less easily discovered by the police.
At one end of the spectrum are the small indoor cultivators who grow five or 10 pot plants in a spare closet or bedroom, mainly for personal use. A few rungs up the ladder are those like Nock, a businessman who kept careful records and assigned tasks to associates. His partner handled sales. A pair of aspiring young entrepreneurs helped take care of the plants in exchange for a 30% cut. Several friends were paid $100 a day to help with the harvest. At the top of the growers' heap are those like long-time smuggler Randy Fink, who ran one of the biggest greenhouses in the country in North Miami Beach before the law moved in three years ago. Fink's 7,000-sq.-ft. home was jammed with 11,800 plants, making Fink's a $21 million-a-year business. Fink is now in jail.
Barriers to entry are low: Marijuana is easy to grow and start-up costs are minimal. A Miami-Dade grower who set out to create a 49-plant operation spent around $3,000 for equipment. Nock says he spent about $10,000 to get going. Using high-powered lights and carefully controlling the environment, indoor pot farmers can harvest several times a year. Indoor pot tends to be higher in potency, so it fetches better prices, say, $3,000 a pound or better compared to $1,000 a pound for outdoor product. Cops call it "lawyer dope," meaning that only lawyers can afford it.
Running what amounts to a small nursery indoors is quite a horticultural production. Plants are grown in rock wool or lava rock under intense high pressure sodium and metal halide lights. Nock rigged lights on pulleys so that they could be lowered or raised as needed, and set up a computerized timer to control feeding and lighting. The plants need to be well-ventilated and watered; Nock says he became something of an expert on plumbing and air conditioning. Different size plants require different lighting and feeding combinations, so Nock and his partners segregated the mother plants, "babies" and mature plants in different rooms. Another room was used for drying the plants and preparing the final product for sale. Nock learned as he went along, and often made mistakes. One house he rented turned out to be connected to well water. Nock tried catching rain water and purifying the well water through an aquarium system, but not before a whole crop was ruined.
Like other marijuana growers, Nock also had to take measures to prevent the local utility company from detecting the high levels of electricity needed to light his indoor grow rooms. Utilities routinely assist law enforcement in spotting indoor growers by watching for abnormal usage patterns. Small growers don't have to worry much -- the aforementioned Miami-Dade grower says his two sets of lights cost only around $60 a month extra, not unusual enough to attract attention. Growers like Nock, though, need a lot more juice, and usually rig their electrical meters so they don't reflect the true power consumption. Nock used an electrician named Dirk O'Connor, who traveled north from Fort Lauderdale as needed to rewire power from Nock's houses so that it bypassed meters. This isn't exactly safe work; Nock remembers standing beside O'Connor with a 2x4 ready to bang him loose from the live wires if something went wrong. In exchange for his handiwork, O'Connor, who was arrested with Nock in 1995, received a little money and a little pot.
Despite being able to produce pot that fetched about $4,000 a pound -- "We felt like we were putting out the best," he says -- Nock's operation suffered from a problem familiar to many small businessmen: Too much overhead. He had to hire so many people to help him that labor costs kept his operation from turning a profit until just shortly before he was arrested. His distribution strategy of sending his product down to south Florida to sell in order to avoid detection worked well, but the business couldn't remain invisible forever. "We didn't want to get a local reputation," Nock says. "We got one anyhow."
Because his crop was so big, law enforcement came down hard. Nock spent eight months in county jail and 32 months in federal prison. He says he doesn't regret his venture, which has led him to his current fern project on the Indian River. "I enjoy growing, it doesn't have to be marijuana," Nock says. "There's good money in ferns, too."
For four years, Nock, 47, ran a successful marijuana business in St. Augustine that at its peak employed as many as a dozen people and grossed $365,000 a year. A former criminal defense lawyer, Nock and a client decided in 1991 to start growing a few plants to make some extra money. To his surprise, he discovered he had a bright green thumb. Soon Nock was renting homes all over St. Johns County and turning them into indoor marijuana farms. When arrested in 1995, his main grow house contained close to 1,000 pot plants. Another contained 172. He had plans to expand to Gainesville.
Nock says now that his downfall was letting the business grow too fast. "Hogs that get fat get slaughtered, that's what we said," Nock recalls. "We didn't listen to our own advice."
Nock got 47 months in jail, but countless other pot growers in Florida are doing just fine, thank you. Florida growers produced $701 million worth of marijuana in 1997, according to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). Those numbers, if true, would make pot Florida's second-biggest cash crop, behind only citrus. NORML's 1998 crop report also ranks Florida fifth in the U.S. in marijuana production, behind California, Tennessee, Kentucky and Hawaii.
As opposed to the traffic in cocaine, which is relatively concentrated in the hands of the Colombian cartels, the marijuana industry remains fragmented. For years, most marijuana was imported from places like Mexico and Colombia, with Florida the setting for a lively marijuana smuggling business. Pilots flew the stuff over on small airplanes and then kicked it out of the planes, to be picked up by dealers in waiting cars -- usually. Once, a bale crashed through the roof of a trailer in Fort Lauderdale, narrowly missing the trailer's owner. Gary Moore, a major with the Broward Sheriff's office, remembers calls from farmers in west Broward asking police to come out and clear their pastures of stray bales of pot because "the cattle were eating it, and it was making them goofy."
But in the mid 1970s, the U.S. and Mexican governments began spraying marijuana fields in Mexico with an herbicide that put a major scare into U.S. consumers. Then a few years later, law enforcement, most notably the U.S. Coast Guard and the Drug Enforcement Agency, began coming down hard on marijuana smuggling. Additional seizures created a shortage of marijuana and encouraged smugglers to shift to cocaine, which is much more easily concealed and offers larger profits.
Pot smuggling is still big business, but the momentum of the marijuana industry in Florida has shifted to growers, ranging from mom-and-pop entrepreneur-types to well-capitalized, high-tech pot planters. The bedrock of the state's domestic pot business can be found in the thick forests of north Florida and the Panhandle, including the Apalachicola National Forest. Joey Dobson, who was born in Baker County and is now the sheriff, believes that a tradition of outlaw culture that evolved during Prohibition contributed to the rise of the area as a marijuana center. "Baker was famous for bootlegging," Dobson says. "They did it to raise their families. Now it's gotten to the point where it's just a thing to do. Instead of growing corn they grow marijuana."
Baker's pot industry made headlines in 1995 when then-Sheriff Joe Newmans was arrested and charged with accepting $70,000 in payoffs from marijuana smugglers and growers for protection against raids. Newmans pleaded guilty to one count of obstruction of justice and went to jail. Dobson says marijuana growing isn't as big in Baker County as stories like that would suggest, but he admits, "something like that is hard to live down."
However rustic they may be, Panhandle pot farmers are creative. Responding to aerial surveillance from law enforcement, they've abandoned row-crop farming for smaller plots and developed other stealthy growing techniques, such as mixing pot with legitimate crops. J.N. Canaday of Sanderson spread 2,300 plants among 11 dense, swampy spots in north Baker County and the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia. The plants were so well-hidden that it took 30 police officers two full days to find and destroy them all. Some were in hanging baskets wired to trees, some planted close to the St. Mary's River in pots and potting soil. In some places, Canaday and his crew drilled shallow wells to ensure the plants got enough water and tended the plots on a fixed schedule.
"It's a job for them," Dobson says. "They're not making a lot of money, they're making enough money to live on and not have to work a regular job, or to supplement their regular job." Dobson and agents from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement arrested Canaday and six of his workers last year.
Holmes, Santa Rosa, Liberty, Taylor and Lafayette counties all remain hot spots for cultivating marijuana, but the reality is that the business is slowly moving indoors, where a whole new breed of entrepreneurs is taking advantage of hydroponic techniques that allow efficient, year-around production in locations much less easily discovered by the police.
At one end of the spectrum are the small indoor cultivators who grow five or 10 pot plants in a spare closet or bedroom, mainly for personal use. A few rungs up the ladder are those like Nock, a businessman who kept careful records and assigned tasks to associates. His partner handled sales. A pair of aspiring young entrepreneurs helped take care of the plants in exchange for a 30% cut. Several friends were paid $100 a day to help with the harvest. At the top of the growers' heap are those like long-time smuggler Randy Fink, who ran one of the biggest greenhouses in the country in North Miami Beach before the law moved in three years ago. Fink's 7,000-sq.-ft. home was jammed with 11,800 plants, making Fink's a $21 million-a-year business. Fink is now in jail.
Barriers to entry are low: Marijuana is easy to grow and start-up costs are minimal. A Miami-Dade grower who set out to create a 49-plant operation spent around $3,000 for equipment. Nock says he spent about $10,000 to get going. Using high-powered lights and carefully controlling the environment, indoor pot farmers can harvest several times a year. Indoor pot tends to be higher in potency, so it fetches better prices, say, $3,000 a pound or better compared to $1,000 a pound for outdoor product. Cops call it "lawyer dope," meaning that only lawyers can afford it.
Running what amounts to a small nursery indoors is quite a horticultural production. Plants are grown in rock wool or lava rock under intense high pressure sodium and metal halide lights. Nock rigged lights on pulleys so that they could be lowered or raised as needed, and set up a computerized timer to control feeding and lighting. The plants need to be well-ventilated and watered; Nock says he became something of an expert on plumbing and air conditioning. Different size plants require different lighting and feeding combinations, so Nock and his partners segregated the mother plants, "babies" and mature plants in different rooms. Another room was used for drying the plants and preparing the final product for sale. Nock learned as he went along, and often made mistakes. One house he rented turned out to be connected to well water. Nock tried catching rain water and purifying the well water through an aquarium system, but not before a whole crop was ruined.
Like other marijuana growers, Nock also had to take measures to prevent the local utility company from detecting the high levels of electricity needed to light his indoor grow rooms. Utilities routinely assist law enforcement in spotting indoor growers by watching for abnormal usage patterns. Small growers don't have to worry much -- the aforementioned Miami-Dade grower says his two sets of lights cost only around $60 a month extra, not unusual enough to attract attention. Growers like Nock, though, need a lot more juice, and usually rig their electrical meters so they don't reflect the true power consumption. Nock used an electrician named Dirk O'Connor, who traveled north from Fort Lauderdale as needed to rewire power from Nock's houses so that it bypassed meters. This isn't exactly safe work; Nock remembers standing beside O'Connor with a 2x4 ready to bang him loose from the live wires if something went wrong. In exchange for his handiwork, O'Connor, who was arrested with Nock in 1995, received a little money and a little pot.
Despite being able to produce pot that fetched about $4,000 a pound -- "We felt like we were putting out the best," he says -- Nock's operation suffered from a problem familiar to many small businessmen: Too much overhead. He had to hire so many people to help him that labor costs kept his operation from turning a profit until just shortly before he was arrested. His distribution strategy of sending his product down to south Florida to sell in order to avoid detection worked well, but the business couldn't remain invisible forever. "We didn't want to get a local reputation," Nock says. "We got one anyhow."
Because his crop was so big, law enforcement came down hard. Nock spent eight months in county jail and 32 months in federal prison. He says he doesn't regret his venture, which has led him to his current fern project on the Indian River. "I enjoy growing, it doesn't have to be marijuana," Nock says. "There's good money in ferns, too."