Police swooped on a bungalow in a rural North Yorkshire village and found a Chinese man tending a quarter-of-a-million-pound cannabis factory.
Amid surreal scenes, police looked through the living-room window to see 54-year-old Long Chen watching a screen relaying CCTV from cameras around the property.
“The defendant was watching the officer watching him,” prosecutor Jennifer Gatland told York Crown Court.
A sergeant spoke to Chen using Google Translate. Then, “police pulled the defendant through the window and arrested him,” said Ms Gatland.
Exploring the bungalow, on Doncaster Road, Whitley, near Selby, officers found about 250 mature cannabis plants hidden in the roof.
A further 300 young cannabis plants were being cultivated behind a false wall in the garage.
Ms Gatland said the electricity supply to the property had been illegally bypassed and officials from the energy company had to attend to ensure the bungalow was safe.
The back doors were propped shut by piles of furniture inside the house.
Police seized a total 542 cannabis plants with a potential yield of between 15kg and 45 kilos of marijuana. The value of such a yield was potentially as much as £227,000.
Not the mastermind
Chen, who doesn’t speak any English, was brought in for questioning but made no comment to police questions about the cannabis farm. He did respond when asked about his immigration status, telling officers he had an asylum claim awaiting a decision.
“There are no immediate plans to deport him but he’s on immigration bail pending the outcome of this case,” added Ms Gatland.
She said that Chen had acted in a “gardening role” as part of a cannabis-cultivation plot “capable of producing significant quantities for commercial use”.
Chen, of no fixed address, was charged with cannabis production, or being concerned in the production of the Class B drug, but didn’t plead guilty until after the authorities had checked that he hadn’t been exploited under the Modern Slavery Act.
They found that, although Chen wasn’t the mastermind behind, nor potential beneficiary of, the huge cannabis crops, there had been no undue pressure placed on him to act as caretaker of the marijuana farm.
He appeared for sentence via prison video link today (Tuesday, 17 February) after being remanded in custody.
Graham Parkin, for Chen, said his client had arrived in the UK in 2019 after travelling from his native China in April of that year.
In October 2019, Chen was served with a notice of removal from the UK by the immigration authorities but, according to him, he “could not return to China because he owes money to a number of people who he can’t name”.
Mr Parkin said that Chen, a married father, owed £16,000 to these people when he arrived on these shores, which made him “extremely vulnerable, and he then enters the black economy by having to work for cash”.
He said the authority which carried out checks on possible exploitation had concluded that although Chen was “recruited” by others to act as “cannabis gardener”, there was “no evidence of him being subject to threat or force”.
“The threats came from China where people were threatening his family,” said Mr Parkin.
He added: “The area he comes from is a very poor part of China…where the only industry is fishing at a subsistence level. He simply would not have had the ability to set up and run this sort of operation.”
He said that police were still looking for “two named individuals” in connection with the massive cannabis plot.
Mr Parking said that Chen “worked at the address as directed, monitoring CCTV cameras and trying to prevent others, criminal gangs, gaining access to the product, hence the barricading of the glass doors with any furniture that came to hand.”
Judge Sean Morris, the Recorder of York, said that Chen had played a “crucial” role in the production of “significant quantities of cannabis”.
He added, however: “I’m satisfied there was a degree of exploitation from those above you in the chain… and that you weren’t going to make anything out of it other than your board and lodgings, and your role was gardener which is always the man that takes the risks.”
Chen received a 10-month jail sentence but was told he would serve less than half of that behind bars before being released on prison licence.
In passing sentence, the judge warned him: “I suspect, depending on your (asylum) application), you will be sent back to China.”
