Courtesy, JimG944

The North Coast wine industry is a sprawling, multi-billion dollar enterprise. It encompasses hundreds of thousands of acres of prime agricultural land in Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino, Marin, Lake, and Solano counties, commands millions of acre feet of the area’s ever-more scarce water resources, and frequently operates on a scale so industrial that at least one Sonoma County vineyard developer has shared heavy machinery with trans-Alaska oil pipeline builders (all the better to scalp the trees and vegetation from small mountains). In addition to vineyards, the industry’s main ingredients range from a barrage of tasting rooms — those upscale-rustic environs omnipresent in downtown areas from Sonoma to Napa to Philo — to manufacturing services such as crushing, processing, bottling, labeling, storage, and shipping.

With the opening of Angelina Jolie’s latest film “Salt” — which casts her as a double agent working for the Russians, and following the recent arrests of 12 bona fide Russian spies who had been living undercover in American cities, America appears to be warming up to a New Cold War — all over again. You may not realize that Mendocino County is in the thick of the battle.

Sheriff Tom Allman begins this year’s growing season with the same marijuana objectives as he had in 2009 — Commercial Operations, Trespass Grows, Public Land Grows, Environmental Degradation Grows, Water Theft and Illegal Diversion Grows, Neighborhood Complaints and Compliance Checks.

One additional objective was included: Cartels.

“The Russian Mafia are here,” says the Sheriff.

Though we don’t know where the local cartel is headquartered, Russian River Estates, Russian Gulch State Park and properties along the Russian River must be likely strongholds.

If the new Red Threat wasn’t enough to stress out on, the cannabis community is reacting loudly to a DEA-led raid on the Covelo home of Joy Greenfield, 68 — dispensary owner, medical marijuana patient and recently dubbed “Grandma Grower” of marijuana activists. Some see this raid as a bellwether moment forecasting the failure of the county’s just-adopted, labyrinthine 9.31 marijuana nuisance ordinance — already the subject of two civil lawsuits.

Kolev & Vanoff

The high profile bust featuring the Bulgarians of Covelo has developed an added angle — and more defendants.

Last October, when the first case against the Bulgarians was getting ready to go to trial, Special Agent Peter Hoyle returned to the scene to take some pictures where Hoyle found two more Bulgarians, Hristo Kolev and Vasil Ivanoff, in the act of transporting marijuana from the Bulgarian’s pot farm off Bently Ridge Road north of Covelo.

Hoyle said he had just gotten out of his vehicle with his camera when a vehicle approached from the other direction. He waved them on, he said, but the vehicle stopped as its occupants pointed toward the property Hoyle was interested in, a property bisected by a US Forest Service road. Hoyle then approached the vehicle and smelled marijuana. He asked the driver how much marijuana they had and the driver handed him a 10 pound bag. He asked if they were armed; they said no. He asked the driver to get out of the vehicle and found a revolver tucked between the seats — and more marijuana. With Deputy Timothy Goss bringing up the rear, the two cops busted the two new Bulgarians who, it seems, were simply trying to help out.

— text of Proposition 19

“…marijuana legalization would yield tax revenue [for the entire United States] of $2.4 billion annually if marijuana were taxed like all other goods and $6.2 billion annually if marijuana were taxed at rates comparable to those on alcohol and tobacco.”

— Libertarian Harvard Economic Professor Jeffrey Miron (the most-often cited authority on pot economics):

“Will big business and corporate interests — specifically, Fortune 500 alcohol and tobacco companies — now put small growers out of business?”

— John Sakowicz

“…pot billionaires and hemp empires are expected to be forged after legalization. There will likely emerge a Robert Mondavi of the marijuana business. Agriculture companies will race to build marijuana harvesters, tractors and seeders. New pot-specific fertilizers and pesticides will be sought. Commercial development catering to hemp outfitters and smoke shops, like those in Amsterdam, will break ground and revitalize infrastructure. Counties will immediately see the benefits of increased tourism, which industry experts expect to surge in the region.

— Zoltan Istvan, “Marijuana crop could bring cash to California’s next Napa”

“To put the icing on the cake, just imagine what could happen if the public votes to legalize recreational marijuana—a measure, sponsored by one of Oakland’s own, that will appear on the November ballot. Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron has estimated that cannabis prohibition costs the nation $7 billion in potential tax revenue; Oakland City Council member Rebecca Kaplan has said the revenue already being generated by the current tax will help save libraries, parks, and other public services. If that’s the case, advocates contend, doesn’t a taxation measure make simple economic sense? “People are no longer outraged by the idea of legalization,” former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown told San Francisco Chronicle last year. “And truth be told, there is just too much money to be made both by the people who grow marijuana and the cities and counties that would be able to tax it.” If Oakland has anything to do with it, it’s high time the rest of California sees just that.”

— Newsweek Magazine

“To the extent that a commercial marijuana industry developed in the state, however, we estimate that the state and local governments could eventually collect hundreds of millions of dollars annually in additional revenues.”

— California Legislative Analyst on Proposition 19

* * *

It’s been almost 30 years since Mendocino County’s then-Ag Commissioner Ted Erickson was fired for writing the obvious in the County’s annual crop report — that marijuana was Mendocino County’s number one cash export crop.

Nowadays, Mendo Mellow is growing nearly everywhere in the County from residential neighborhoods to remote mountaintops.

Every so often a local official suggests that the Ag Commissioner try to estimate the value of Mendocino County’s pot crop; the last time was in late 2007. But since Erickson, it has never gone past the suggestion stage so nobody in an official position has tried. Perhaps the memory of what happened to Ted Erickson still lingers.

But how would you estimate the commercial value of Mendo Mellow? What do you count? Plants? Processed bud? It’s a bit like counting grains of sand on the beach.

Back in 2007, before he retired, Dave Bengston, the long-serving Ag Commissioner who took office after Erickson was fired, nevertheless gave some thought to the question on the off chance that the Board of Supervisors would officially direct him to begin assaying weed, so to speak. Besides contacting local, state and federal law enforcement agencies for their input, Bengston said he would talk to what he calls “the marijuana support industry” — the local suppliers of fertilizers, plastic baggies, large generators or diesel pumps. Bengston said he knew a retired forester who was “very good at estimating acreage from the air” who could take the Commissioner aloft for a fly-over or “pot-cruise.”

With conventional ag crops simple grower surveys are used. But an (anonymous) pot survey might not get much response, much less be even remotely accurate. Even a partial response from pot growers would be difficult to base an reasonable estimate on since there’s no way to know how representative it would be. Surveys would also have to be bi-lingual given the many, large illegal grows by, well, illegals.

Over the years attempts have been made to guesstimate Mendo’s pot crop value, but they all rely on speculative assumptions, beginning with the law enforcement’s plant seizure reports. But those numbers are never explained. How many were mature plants? How much had already been harvested when the garden was raided? How much bud did the plants produce? How big were the plants? How much would have been lost due to animals, weather, and so on. The variables are numerous.

Pot value guessers assume a certain amount of processed bud per plant. Multiply that dubious figure by the number of plants seized, jack that up by a factor of 10, or 20 or more (to represent the uncounted and unseized), apply the assumed wholesale price and like magic you’ve got a wholesale pot crop value estimate — usually in the billions.

Yeah, sure, dude.

Since Mendo’s seizure numbers are so large these days, any assumption about processed bud per plant or cost per pound can produce wildly varying results. We’ve seen estimates as low as several hundred million dollars to well into the billions, just for Mendocino County alone.

Mendocino Supervisor John Pinches said a couple of years ago that a “consultant” hired by the County had estimated that the marijuana industry in Mendocino County represented two-thirds of the county’s economy. Since the County’s total conventional ag crop value is typically in the range of $225 million, that would translate to around $450 million worth of pot — large, but much less than the inflated estimates derived from seizures.

Seizures have gone up dramatically in recent years, probably because so much more pot is being grown, and grown in boldly large gardens, some of which number in the thousands of plants. Obviously illegal, therefore not voluntarily surveyable, assessable or taxable.

Depending on what source you use (state numbers or County Eradication Team numbers) seizures have gone up by two or three or four times just in the last few years.

The County’s pot team says they eradicated almost 450,000 plants in 2009. They claimed to have ripped out about 320,000 plants in 2007. In 2004 they said they eradicated 92,000.

Already this year, still early in the season, the pot eradication people say they’ve snagged almost 100,000 plants.

Could the total number of pot plants have gone up as much as these seizure numbers indicate?

The only reasonable way we know of to approach a pot crop estimate would be to try to break it down by category and geography and build from there.

The pot crop breaks down to registered Prop 215 medical personal use growers, unregistered Prop 215 personal use growers, Prop 215 caregivers (registered and unregistered, some of them “dispensaries”), non-medical personal use growers — which, taken together probably don’t represent much by volume or price. Then add large “medical” and non-medical (illegal) commercial growers, plus Mexican or drug trafficking organization cartel growers.

There’s also the additional problem of how much is grown indoors.

You’d have to apply different prices to different categories of pot depending on how processed it is and whether it’s sold retail or wholesale.

Since the cops focus primarily on large commercial trespass grows and illegal public land grows, they probably seize a higher percentage of those crops since they tend to be visible from the air. For the other categories, you might try to get the number of Prop 215 cards and the number of patrol deputy or police seizures by supervisorial district and you’d probably start to get a rough handle on the crop size and perhaps some estimate of value.

Factor in that fact that most large grows and many of the smaller grows in Mendocino County are not sold in the County nor are they sold by County residents and therefore don’t contribute to the local economy at all. Then factor in that in some areas of the County pot is a form of currency used for barter and is not converted to cash. (“Hey dude, I’ll give you this bag of bud for that old motorbike over there.”)

“I’m not going to do a marijuana crop estimate on my own, arbitrarily,” Bengston told me a few months before he retired last year. “It’s a can of worms and it can become very politically charged. Some people might think that estimating it is adding legitimacy to it. Others might say it’s so pervasive that it should be legalized.”

Looking at marijuana growing from a purely agricultural perspective, Bengston also points out a significant likely outcome of legalization that is frequently overlooked: If you legalize it, above-ground companies will start growing it in the central valley or the midwest where they can grow high volumes in row crops causing a dramatic price drop. If that happened — and it might soon, given that there’s a legalization initiative on the November state ballot — a year or two later there could be a dramatic reduction in marijuana growing of any kind in Mendocino County. Some people say the pot industry would adapt by emulating the wine industry and that small, boutique pot farms would spring up, selling specialty marijuana out of tasting rooms — a nightmare scenario on several levels.

In other words, pot could go the way of wine and all that goes with it: Proposition 19 (on the November ballot) says that pot would be taxed and regulated like alcohol (while simultaneously saying that each city or county would develop its own taxes and regulations — an obvious contradiction.)

So if you like the wine industry is taxed and regulated, you’ll love this the November pot initiative.

There’s also some serious speculation in the real estate world about what would happen to local land values if pot is legalized. Put marijuana and/or hemp on the list of possible legal ag crops and what would happen to land values? Would it become like vineyards? Probably not, because while pot requires less development cost per acre, the water demand and availability could put a limit on it.

“There’s no reliable or accurate way to estimate the value of the pot crop,” said Bengston. “What good is a number if it’s just somebody’s wild guess?”

And if there’s no reliable way to estimate the value of marijuana crop when it’s illegal, think how much harder it would be to estimate the value after legalization. Would it include the additional taxes on property of pot-growing raised assessed property values?

A whole new range of guesses would be have to be made.

But that hasn’t stopped some “economists” from trying.

Libertarian (and pro-legalization) Harvard-based Jeffrey Miron is an oft-cited economist because a in 2005 he issued a “report” entitled “Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition in the United States.”

(http://www.prohibitioncosts.org/mironreport.html)

“The first step in determining the tax revenue under legalization is to estimate current expenditure on marijuana,” says Mr. Miron who then goes on to cite the 2000 $10.5 billion estimate by the Office of National Drug Control Policy. “This estimate relies on a range of assumptions about the marijuana market, and modification of these assumptions might produce a higher or lower estimate,” admits Miron. “There is no obvious reason, however, why alternative assumptions would imply a dramatically different estimate of current expenditure on marijuana. This report therefore uses the $10.5 billion figure as the starting point for the revenue estimates.”

There you go. Take a dubious — but official — number and assume it to be true. Then extrapolate and apply academic factors to your heart’s content.

Nobody really knows how a legal marijuana marketplace would operate. What percentage of total marijuana transactions would continue in the black market and involve people who grow, purchase or barter cannabis rather than buying it in stores? What percentage of transactions would involve extra excise taxes like cigarettes or alcohol? How many marijuana transactions would be subject to taxation and regulation at all? What unpredictable fiscal impacts would legalization lead to?

Oh, and did we mention this additional factor: “The Marijuana Policy Project provided funding for the research discussed in [Miron’s] report.”

In other words, give me some funding and I’ll produce a report supporting your position.

Most of the “reports” on the value and possible tax revenue of marijuana are similarly funded with conclusions tending to support the political position of the funder.

We’ve seen estimates of the value of just Mendocino’s pot crop as high as $20 billion. (500,000 plants seized x 1 pound per plant x $2,000 per pound x 20 unseized plants).

Or perhaps $5 billion (500,000 plants seized x 1 pound per plant x $1,000 per pound x 10 unseized plants.)

Mr. Miron nevertheless ends up with a $7 billion pot value estimate for the entire US (presumably the retail value, but even that’s not clear.)

If California represents one third of that then there would be maybe $2.3 billion in California. And if Mendo represents maybe one-fifth of that, then Mendo’s crop could be upwards $500 million, roughly comparable to the questionable Mendo estimate.

Then you can guess how much of that might be taxable in Mendocino County (retail only?), and how much of that taxable amount could actually be collected. We doubt that much of those Mendo Mellow Millions would produce real tax revenue for the County or the state.

These vagaries will never stop people from making self-serving guesses about the value of marijuana and the potential tax windfall that might result.

As a general rule however, and as hinted at here, the lower the guess, the better.

Before anyone votes for a measure that presumes to solve local or state tax budget problems by taxing marijuana, they should at least realize that all the revenue numbers being tossed around are just wild guesses and that local and state budgets ills will not be cured by marijuana taxes any more than marijuana will cure my headache at trying to examine all of this.

Everyone in a position to know says this is another banner year for the marijuana cultivation business, Men­docino County franchise.

Sheriff Allman says simply, “It’s everywhere.”

And it’s drawing people from everywhere.

Last year law enforcement grabbed young people from Italy, Bulgaria, Israel, China, Spain, Russia, and, of course, Mexico who had come to Mendocino County to grow weed. The foreign nationals brought an interna­tional flavor to an industry begun forty-five years ago out of old fashioned American ingenuity, back-to-the-land hippie botanists who went on to produce a product of such quality it has been in great demand ever since.

Though there is no fury like a woman scorned, com­parable emotions are engendered in Pot People when one of their own is taken down.

Spurred on by what appears to have been a flurry of recent DEA-led raids in the County, Mendocino Medical Marijuana Advisory Board founder Pebbles Trippet called a meeting to discuss the nature of the relationships between local, state and federal drug enforcement per­sonnel, upcoming legal challenges and the viability of the county’s recently approved 9.31 nuisance ordinance.

Due to last week’s raid at the Covelo home of Joy Greenfield — the county’s first applicant for the brand-new, 99-plant exemption — the ordinance, in the words of one observer, “appears to be a stillbirth.”

“Hey,” my nephew said, “that place you used to live is in the newspaper.”

And so it was; in a lengthy SF Weekly piece about the mishmash of conflicting regulations and practices regarding marijuana and how they might be affected by this November’s statewide referendum on its legaliza­tion, my lovely old Laytonville loomed large.

True to form, the story offered everything one might have come to expect of Laytonville: tie dyes, aging hip­pies, cranky opinions, hot, dusty roads cordoned off by locked gates and paranoia, the promise of untold riches dangling against a backdrop of hardscrabble poverty, and, of course marijuana. Lots and lots and lots of mari­juana.

Laytonville, never an easy town to love, has a softer image these days, perhaps not only because of the peren­nial cannabis haze in which it basks. It was not always thus: when I arrived at the end of the 1970s, it looked like nothing more than an unkempt aggregation of gas stations, motels, stores, churches and a single bar strung along a low-lying stretch of Highway 101 and baking miserably in the unforgiving sun. Population 991, said the sign at one end of town and 1,018 at the other; nobody knew for sure which it was, and how could they, since nobody had any idea where “Laytonville” actually began and ended?

It wasn’t a real town at all, in that it had no local gov­ernment or elected officials. You might say it was more a state of mind than an actual physical place, yet there was no doubt in people’s minds as to whether they lived “in town” or “up in the hills,” the latter being where the majority of the local population, soon to include me, made its home. In those days, there was much more of a divide between the hill people and the town people, or hippies and rednecks as they were more simplistically categorized; since that time, as the area has grown rich from marijuana and the urban incomers have taken on country ways, most such lines have vanished.

With logging and ranching all but extinct as viable economic activities, and tourism never likely to become the major factor it is in more scenic and temperate coastal Mendocino County, marijuana has become the one and only rising tide to lift all local boats. Shopkeep­ers and businessmen who once turned their noses up at longhairs and hippies could never afford to do so nowa­days. In fact, as the SF Weekly article makes clear, long­hairs and hippies (at least the ones bringing in the big bucks through growing) are becoming the establishment. The idea of two tie-dyed Deadheads hobnobbing with the Sheriff about the size of their annual harvest still seems more than slightly surreal to me, having spent my own Laytonville years at a time when the sight of anything resembling an official vehicle on Spy Rock Road would send waves of panic juddering across the canyons.

Now they’re inviting the Sheriff to come up and inspect their marijuana patches? Well, times do change, but I never could have imagined so quickly and so dra­matically. All this came about thanks to the very clever wheeze known as “medical marijuana,” which overnight magically turned thousands of marijuana growers and dealers into “providers” to the sick and suffering. I don’t wish to be entirely cynical, but just as I have yet to encounter a single “patient” whose primary purpose for obtaining marijuana wasn’t to get stoned out of his or her gourd, it also never occurred to me that the principal driving force of the medical marijuana movement was anything other than getting the camel’s nose of legaliza­tion into the tent of public policy.

Now, apparently, it may be about to happen. My guess is that Proposition 19 on this year’s California ballot will be narrowly voted down, but that it’s only a matter of time before a better-drafted version comes along and wins approval. The Anderson Valley Adver­tiser’s ever-reliable Mark Scaramella compiles a laundry list of what’s wrong with what he only half-jokingly refers to as Prop 420: the gist being that it’s so poorly thought out and written that, rather than finally imposing some sort of order on the increasingly troublesome and violent pot trade, it will only set off a free-for-all that will dwarf the Gold Rush/Wild West situation spawned by the semi-legalization “medical marijuana” scam.

The big selling point touted by legalization advocates is the tax revenue state and local authorities stand to gain coupled with the savings from no longer having to arrest and prosecute growers and dealers, but as Scaramella correctly points out, the new law puts forth few substan­tive proposals for how this tax money would actually be generated, and at any rate, the true fanatics of the mari­juana movement appear to be unalterably opposed to any government regulation or taxation of their sacred herb, er, “medicine.”

Given that the average 20-acre parcel in the hills above Laytonville could easily produce a ton or so of weed annually, and that with prices already plummeting as a result of the current semi-legalization, it’s hard to believe that further liberalization of pot laws will result in anything other than a massive increase in growing along with its attendant problems. Such as? Well, put it this way: in the 20+ years that I had a home in the Men­docino County hills, “home invasions” were something that happened down in the dicier precincts of Los Ange­les or Oakland, not the leafy backroads of Spy Rock and Iron Peak.

To be fair, the handful of people I know who still live up there have had no such experiences, and life for them has continued at more or less the same relaxed pace it always has. But they’re small-scale growers, or don’t grow at all. Even when I left Spy Rock for the last time in 2004, I couldn’t help noticing a distinct change of climate. There was the proliferation of locked gates, for example, not just on people’s driveways, but even across the roads themselves. If you weren’t immediately recog­nizable — and being only an occasional visitor during those last few years, I wasn’t — you’d get the ice-cold stink eye from the big-time growers as they careened past in their high-powered SUVs.

I’m sure there’s still a lot of neighborliness, sure that passing cars still stop at the crossroads or the ridge top for hour-long conversations about the weather, the crops, and who ran off with whose wife, but that a lot has also been lost as marijuana went from being a lucrative side­line to big business to being pretty much the only busi­ness in town. Yes, I still miss those hills tremendously, even miss the long trips to town, the visits to Geiger’s General Store and Bill Bailey’s logging supplies HQ, but I don’t know if I could ever live there again.

Even though by some standards I could be aligned with them (I’d prefer not, but there’s no denying the demographics), I can’t help observing that the hippies who first trickled, then flooded into the Emerald Triangle have transformed the region almost as rapidly and irrevocably as did the white European settlers who displaced the original occupants. Was it all for the bad? No, of course not; 30 years ago your chances of dining on anything more exotic or healthy than a Loggerburger at the Laytonville Inn were slim to none, and the area, despite its undeniable charms, bore the equally undeni­able trappings of a rural slum. Had it not been for the marijuana pioneers, Laytonville and environs, now stripped of their forest resources, would most likely resemble a ruined Appalachian community after the strip miners had come and gone.

Now they’re envisioning the area, post-legalization, anyway, as a marijuana-oriented counterpart to the Wine Country. Supposedly tourists will come to sample the exotic varieties of weed developed by local horticultur­ists, and stay to spend their big city bucks in pot-themed restaurants, shops and B&Bs. Sounds like an absolute nightmare to me, while at the same time my more avari­cious side can’t help calculating how much I might have profited by hanging onto my 40 acres of prime Mari­juana Country property.

But mostly I’m feeling nostalgic and sad about good old Laytonville, a town I once found hard to like but learned to love, a town that soon will bear little resem­blance to the glorified stagecoach stop it managed to remain from the 19th century through most of the 20th. It may never become another Napa or Sonoma — perhaps the Yountville of the North County, or, setting its sights extremely high, the new Boonville — but never again the poky little place that — admittedly after considerable resistance — took me in and welcomed me as one of its own.

A San Francisco Chronicle reporter named Kevin Fagan called on Monday, July 12, to get some quotes. He explained his angle: NIDA and the prohibitionists cite studies showing that marijuana is harmful, while “the pot people” cite studies showing that it’s helpful.

“And you’re going to provide a fair and balanced over­view,” I said. Fagan said yes, that was his goal — and wasn’t it a shame that Fox News had appropriated that slogan. Fagan said he had already talked to someone at NIDA and was due to talk to them again at length the next day. He’d heard I could tell him about the “pro-pot studies.”

In the Summer of 1998 an enterprising fisherman and timber worker named David McCutcheon leased a bare acre of land from Ed Colombi Sr. The acre sat off Odom Lane about a mile north of Fort Bragg. McCutcheon needed a place to store the huge Doug Fir and redwood sinker logs he’d laboriously retrieved from the depths of local rivers. Most of the valuable old-growth logs and partially milled lumber was destined for the construction of McCutcheon’s oceanview dream home at Irish Beach where McCutcheon owned a nice lot.

For years in the 1990s, a few enterprising locals laboriously salvaged the perfectly preserved sinker logs lost years ago when big trees floated downstream with the winter rains, and sank before they got to the mill ponds. The beds of the Mendocino Coast’s cold, fast flowing rivers acted as perfect preservatives. A hundred years later, if you could get them up and out of the water you had yourself virgin redwood seldom available anymore.

Fish and Game put an end to the sinker log business in 1997. Environmentalists had complained that the logs had been in place for so many years that removing them amounted to detrimental alteration of the streambeds. While it lasted, the retrieval of the old logs proved quite lucrative, however. Old growth lumber had grown scarce, and the yield from the big, dense sinker logs was much in demand.

Dave McCutcheon was one of several enterprising locals engaged in the sinker log recovery business, a business that requires multiple skills – diving to locate the logs, securing them in the underwater murk, hauling them up and out with an ingenious array of cranes, rafts and chains, and then onto trucks. It’s not work for the lazy or the careless.

McCutcheon worked long and hard to salvage some 80 large sinker logs from local streams. The logs, along with other partially milled lumber, were like a savings account, a large and valuable sweat equity savings account McCutcheon had deposited for safe keeping on Colombi Sr.’s lot on Odom Lane.

In the years following his storage of his logs at his Odom Lane depository, McCutcheon, with a hired helper, had milled and produced more than 4,000 feet of fine redwood siding, 18 cants (large, slabbed logs ready for milling), 13 clear-heart redwood beams, a number of doug fir beams, paneling and flooring, all of it of a very high quality as only rare old growth lumber can be. McCutcheon also had about 28,000 board feet of unmilled, old growth sinker redwood logs worth more than many of the world’s currencies. McCutcheon conservatively estimated the value of the milled lumber at about $70,000 and the value of the remaining unmilled sinker logs at about $300,000. He’d made this little fortune the old fashioned way – enterprise, ingenuity and many long hours of hard physical labor over several years.

The sinker log entrepreneur had rented the Odom Lane lot from Ed Colombi Sr. of Fort Bragg. The lot was perfect for storing and then milling the logs to lumber. The old man liked McCutcheon and never charged him more than a hundred dollars a month rent. Access to the property was limited, and a reliable neighbor named Tom Anderson kept an eye on the place.

But in late 2004 Ed Colombi Sr. passed away and the property was inherited by Ed Colombi Jr. McCutcheon continued to send rent checks to the address he’d always sent them to, but the checks started to come back marked “deceased, return to sender.”

McCutcheon says that after the first few months his progress on the conversion of his log cache to lumber had slowed way down. He’d married and started to raise a family in Oregon; he didn’t get out to Odom Lane much. He thought that the vigilant presence of his friend Tom Anderson, who lived next door to the Odom Lane lot, would be more than enough security for his logs and lumber. And very few people even knew the logs and lumber were there. What could go wrong?

On May 26, 2006, McCutcheon arranged to move his dormant lumber operation down the coast to Elk, closer to his planned homesite at Irish Beach. He called Ed Colombi Jr. and told him that he was ready to move.

“I told him I knew I was behind in the rent and that I was ready to make it even with him. He asked me how much I was behind and I said it’s got to be a couple thousand dollars. The actual amount was $1,800. And so I said I could pay $500 to $1,000 now and give him the rest by the time I moved the lumber and logs out of there by mid-July.”

McCutcheon says that Colombi told him, “‘Send me $500 and we’ll call it good.’ … And I thought that was a heck of a generous – you know, very generous and very considerate of Mr. Colombi.”

McCutcheon faithfully sent the $500 check, but Colombi Jr. later told him that based on “legal advice” he hadn’t cashed it, because, the mysterious advisor said, that would make him liable if something bad happened to McCutcheon’s wood. McCutcheon says he then told Colombi that he would soon be down from his home in Oregon to relocate his logs and lumber to Elk. McCutcheon would move out by June 15th.

Colombi reportedly replied, “Great!”

When McCutcheon arrived on the 15th he discovered that his rented lot on Odom Lane was nearly empty. His logs and most of the lumber had vanished.

“There had been a burn pile that was still smoldering,” said McCutcheon. “And there was a road cut in from Odom Lane that had never been there before, since I was there, and never been used since I was there in ’98. All my wood was gone.”

Colombi Jr. told the investigating officer, Mendocino County Sheriff’s deputy Ricky Del Fiorentino, that he’d given an associate of his named Robert Russell permission to remove firewood and downed trees and to do general cleanup of the property. The deputy also talked to a neighbor who said that between June 9 and June 11 a steady convoy of small to medium-sized pickups and a flatbed truck came and went late into the night for three consecutive nights, carrying away many loads of logs and lumber – Dave McCutcheon’s logs and lumber. The neighbor said he’d also heard chainsaws running for hours and couldn’t help but see a newly constructed gate at the site.

McCutcheon decided to investigate the disappearance himself. He started calling around. Ed Colombi Jr. told a stunned and disbelieving McCutcheon, “I thought you’d abandoned that stuff.”

When McCutcheon first reported the disappearance of the logs and lumber, Coast Deputy Del Fiorentino’s first reaction was that the disappearance was a civil matter, a dispute over late rent, possibly abandoned goods, and miscommunications.

Others thought so too – at first.

But as McCutcheon piled up more evidence – photos of his wood now resting on other people’s property, statements from witnesses, and so on into irrefutable detail, law enforcement started to take his claims of theft seriously.

After several more months of McCutcheon’s own investigations, then-Assistant DA Keith Faulder looked at McCutcheon’s assembled evidence and instructed law enforcement to treat the case as a possible grand theft. Other attorneys who were approached on the case, including former Fort Bragg prosecutor Mark Kalina and Willits prosecutor Scott McMenomey, said that Mr. Colombi had no right to take any of McCutcheon’s wood or lumber without first going through a formal legal notification process to have it officially declared abandoned.

Nothing like that had been done. Neither Colombi nor anyone else had legal authority to touch McCutcheon’s wood. That’s what made it a possible grand theft.

McCutcheon continued his own inquiries, accumulating pieces of evidence of what happened to his logs and lumber.

Finally, Detective Del Fiorentino agreed to set up a pretext call from McCutcheon to Colombi. Colombi denied that he had anything to do with the disappearance of McCutcheon’s lumber, but he again declared, “I thought you abandoned that stuff.”

Colombi said he had authorized an associate named Robert Russell to go onto the parcel, and “remove wood, firewood, dead trees and clean up the property.” Colombi said he trusted Russell to do that even though, Colombi said, “I was forewarned about Russell through his ex-father-in-law, Herb James, but disregarded his advice.”

Colombi would later say that his primary mistake was that he “trusted [Russell] too much.”

Russell and a crew of what McCutcheon describes as “meth addicts” then proceeded to hustle over to Odom Lane and get all the wood out before McCutcheon arrived to move it away.

Colombi was the only person who knew McCutcheon planned to be down in mid-June to move his wood. As the probation report would subsequently conclude, “It seems too coincidental that the logs and lumber would disappear ‘all of the sudden’ within a month of Mr. McCutcheon’s plan to relocate them to another property.”

And there was Colombi’s incriminating claim that he “thought” McCutcheon had abandoned his wood, and the “too coincidental” timing of the removal.

But to this day, Colombi insists that Robert Russell was the thief, not him.

Then there’s Colombi’s extensive criminal record, most of it for drugs and theft, plus a number of parole and probation violations going back to 1974.

As Colombi said in his statement to the court:

“I am a recovering addict, unless one considers that I have been on methadone maintenance since around November 1998. The reason I say this is there are two schools of thought in recovery AA/NA in that if one is still dependent on medication to ‘stay clean,’ that person is not in recovery. The other thought is, if the medication as prescribed keeps one stable, it’s acceptable and I am in recovery. …

“I was born and raised in Fort Bragg and lived my teens there during what Life Magazine called the ‘town in trouble’ era. Between having weak character and the need to feel accepted I delved into alcohol and drugs at an early age. I graduated from Fort Bragg High School in 1968 and attended Santa Rosa Junior College only to drop out because of drug abuse and legal problems and was drafted into the Army in lieu of incarceration because of my possession conviction. I remained in the states during my Vietnam era service obligation. I again got in trouble because of drugs and barely got out of the service with an honorable discharge. I moved back to Fort Bragg and was soon divorced and back into drugs and legal difficulty. I moved to Oregon but no matter where I went, I was there. I found a job working for the Corps of Engineers and, still drinking, found peace for the first time in my life, I thought. I met a woman and bought some property and started to raise the two children we had. This gal I was with was a wallpaper hanger/artist and I fell into the construction trades. I obtained a contractor license and worked for years for numerous builders. This was from the mid-70s to the first of the 80s. I injured myself and was exposed to prescription medication. To me it was just like heroin. I couldn’t get enough. I started ‘running’ doctors and got on methadone. I met the local drug addicts and fell in with them. After becoming physically/mentally dependent, I was kicked off of the program when I tried to right a wrong with another client on the program. I started to do heroin and stole to support my habit. It was a rapid downward spiral and I was soon incarcerated. It was very ugly. From 1982-1997 I had done over 13 years incarcerated! It was the prime of my life and I deserved to have done every minute. I did the crimes and I did the time! Period. When I was released in 1997 I knew if I repeated my old behaviors I would go back and spend the rest of my life and die in prison.” …

“Russell and I started doing things together probably early in 2003. In fact, when I first started working maintenance at Pine Beach Inn, he and I started doing small repairs around the Fort Bragg area. The place that I was living we built a garage, front deck, etc. Russell and I went to McCutcheon’s wood stack and gathered some rough cut 2x4s (9-12 feet) for roof bracing and a few pieces of scrap 4×4 posts. It was pretty much crappy wood and the vast majority was fir, at least on the south side of the skid road that separated the cut lumber. There were also a stack of logs that were 15-28 feet long by 1-3 feet across stacked maybe two feet high and extended probably 16 or so feet into the adjoining property. These logs were punky, water-soaked, and in my opinion worthless except for maybe 20-30% of it. They were lying on bare ground that was moist at least 50-60% of the time.”

Colombi continues, “Russell knew very well that the lumber/logs were not mine. I explained that I had ‘permission’ from McCutcheon to do this. [The “this” is not explained.] Tom Anderson was also there and his attitude was ‘Fuck McCutcheon, take it all.’ All was above board and no criminal intent was involved.”

(There’s no independent corroboration that Tom Anderson said anything of the sort.)

“Russell owed me several thousands of dollars as I had bailed him out of jail on an old warrant,” continues Colombi, “paid to repair his truck numerous times (tranny/rear end/etc.) and had let him live at my rental at Whipple Street without him paying the rent for six months as he had agreed upon. In reality, every time I would come down from Oregon to get some of my stuff, more and more of my property was missing. Russell kept coming up with lame excuses but he was my friend/partner so I let it go. …

“Then in May of that year, McCutcheon calls me up and says he has found a new woodyard and wants to catch up on the back rent. The first thing that came to my mind, without thinking about the legal ramification was, ‘Hell, I hadn’t heard from you in years and I thought you abandoned the wood’ or something to that effect. The reason I even said that I was in shock that he had called after so many years out of the blue after not even making an effort on catching up on the three years or so of rent. He said he was planning on getting all his wood/lumber and those things were not going too well financially and that he could basically catch up on half the rent he owed. But he also said that he had intended on getting in touch but he was busy making babies and trying to stay afloat. We BS’d for a bit and he was to send me $500 to show his good intentions.

“A bit later, I called Russell and told him luck was with us and he didn’t have to worry about that wood/logs being in the way as the owner was going to come up and remove it by the middle of June. When I asked him how the cleanup was going he said it was more work than he expected, that he needed more help and that the backhoe wouldn’t start. The dry season was coming up and I had planned on going down to Fort Bragg soon to bring back another load of my stuff so I didn’t worry.

“Next thing I know, McCutcheon is calling me telling me his wood is gone! I told him Robert Russell was working on the property to clear up the drainage and get it ready for sale. He is irate. I gave him Russell’s cell number and tell him where I think he lives at. My understanding is McCutcheon is going around stopping anyone carrying lumber on their vehicles and talking to neighbors. I finally get in touch with Russell and he tells me that McCutcheon is wrong and that he just cleaned up the area getting ready to clear out the ditch. He said it looked like someone, probably McCutcheon himself, took all the lumber and that there were still over a dozen or so logs still there.”

So here are two people with criminal records for theft claiming that McCutcheon himself stole his own wood!

Deputy DA Tim Stoen of the DA’s Fort Bragg office soon filed grand theft charges against both Edward Colombi Jr. and Robert Russell.

Russell was subsequently convicted of a minor charge related to the theft, served 30 days in jail and was fined $3200. Prosecutor Stoen said there simply wasn’t enough evidence to pursue him on felony charges. Besides, how would anyone get a large sum of restitution money out of a drug guy?

Colombi hired Richard and Justin Petersen, the go-to guys-if-you’re-guilty-and-can-afford-their-magic criminal defense lawyer team in the County.

Perhaps for his stated fear of prison, perhaps because Stoen’s case was looking better and better, Colombi Jr. pled no contest to the Grand Theft charges.

The next step, and probably the most difficult, was trying to establish the amount of restitution Colombi would have to pay.

Colombi insisted that McCutcheon was exaggerating the value of his wood. McCutcheon insisted that it was worth at least $400,000.

After the interviews and statements were prepared by the Petersens and the prosecution, Stoen updated his charges saying that “Mr. McCutcheon’s claims of loss are corroborated by several witnesses. Although none of the witnesses are able to confirm the total amount or value of the stolen property, taken together they support his claims.”

Mr. Stoen also noted that “the defendant’s witnesses contradicted themselves or offered testimony that had negligible probative value.”

“Defendant Colombi Jr. is expected to testify that he had nothing to do with the theft of Mr. McCutcheon’s logs and lumber,” said Stoen, “and that there was nothing nearly of the value and board footage claimed. However, the defendant did enter a plea, represented by the finest defense lawyers around, and who therefore could not possibly have been convicted if he was not guilty. Mr. Colombi’s testimony, whatever it is, is unbelievable and impeached – based on five convictions for grand theft, four of them felonies and one of them, the petty theft, for which he was on probation in June 2006.”

As the case neared its conclusion, McCutcheon submitted his official “Victim Impact Statement” to the Court.

“The theft of logs and lumber by Ed Colombi Jr. and Robert Russell and a 10 or 12 meth addicted workers, set me back significantly financially. There were 70,000 board feet of lumber at the very minimum and two giant piles of similar logs.

“That was significant to my future because in truth it was a theft of years of effort towards a retirement plan that I started investing in in the middle 90s. Stolen was my ability to manifest a truly spectacular home upon which I based my future. That said, the real damage to my family and myself came from the threats made by Ed Colombi Jr. and the organized crime network that he is a part of.

“The loss of this amount of construction material is like a serious physical injury, something that happens that has to be worked through and dealt with. It has an emotional impact but it is a one-time incident of onset and not a sustained emotional attack of threats against a man’s children, wife and home from Ed Colombi Jr. and his supporting group of criminals from both inside and outside the law enforcement community.

“When not when a father of three young children, two still in diapers, is threatened with Mob-speak – ‘we know where you live’ type of thing and ‘our people will be after you and yours.’ Exactly 90 days after I discovered the theft and was reduced to tears because of the threats against my wife and children, I walked the dirt road at night trying to decide if I should dishonor my own personal integrity and that of my ancestors, Revolutionary War heroes and just honest hard-working people, by just slinking away quietly, my children safely secure. But at what cost? That was the question. At what cost?

“At the cost of my self-respect and values I believe in as a patriot of the ideals of justice this United States of America was founded upon.

“My decision was validated in August 2007 when Fort Bragg Deputy District Attorney Tim Stoen told me in his office that ‘if nobody stands up to the criminals, soon the criminals will take over.’

“Tim Stoen decided to press charges on my word alone with almost no investigative effort, except for the pretext call done by investigator Ricky Del Fiorentino which caused then-Sergeant Bushnell to kick the crime over to civil court forcing me to hire Mark and Barbara Kalina to research the law. Both Ricky Del Fiorentino and Detective Rob Crabb believed the theft was indeed a crime, in fact when pressed further on the sidewalk outside the courthouse in Fort Bragg, Ricky told me, “I would like nothing better than to help you catch these wood thieves but it would seem there is a lack of political will or perhaps it’s a lack of money.”

“At that early August 2007 meeting with Mr. Stoen my faith in the American judicial system and God himself was restored. There is no doubt God himself is on my side. I’ve had too much help from on high.

“For example, hearing the milling of large logs going on across Greenwood Creek on Clift Ridge; meeting the man who volunteered his time and airplane to find Robert Russell’s truck there the next day. Spotting Ed Colombi Jr. and his friend following me in Ukiah before I got out on the County Road on August 8, 2008 and on numerous other occasions.

“After the initial threat from Ed Colombi Jr. with the ‘you are pissing me off and you are pissing a lot of other people off,’ an allusion to the criminal organization known to law enforcement as ‘the good old boy network,’ I was terrified and knew I should be afraid not of Ed Colombi himself but the criminal network that he works with.

“The damage this crime and its larger crime of threats, intimidation and retaliation have caused my family is immeasurable. In fact, there is no amount of money that can compensate me for 3-3/4 years of apprehension, lost work time and emotional stress for my wife, myself and my family as a whole.

“That is why although I can set a value on my logs and lumber, there is no value that can be set on the cumulative stress caused by 2-1/2 months of intense investigation, three separate emotional meltdowns in the fall of 2006-2007 and the summer and fall of 2008, and actually then again in the summer of 2009, although not as emotionally grievous, I was still afraid to establish a pattern of being gone at work all day every day. I could sleep but not dedicate myself to work while we painted the house.

“I would like to see the court recognize the criminal racketeering nature of Ed Colombi Jr. and the organization of people he works with by imposing RICO act statutes in penalties at his sentencing.

“Also as a condition of his very light sentence he should name his mysterious “legal advisor” person he talked about on the pretext call tape made by Ricky Del Fiorentino. I believe that this person was high enough up in Mendocino law enforcement that Colombi Jr. felt he was protected from prosecution and could guarantee the same for his partner Robert Russell and his crew of meth addicts.

“In short, this person, Ed Colombi Jr., has robbed me of ten years of work and savings, my pension, and given the retaliatory nature of the organization he works with, my peace of mind for many years to come.

“The value of the wood is around $700,000, depending on how it is marketed. The value of my past emotional strain and future peace of mind I would put at between $1 and $2 million dollars, closer to $2 million if a value can be set upon such a thing at all.

“For too long criminals have had the upper hand in Fort Bragg. It’s time for this to come to an end. Protected crime – crime for which a criminal is guaranteed protection from prosecution – is illegal. All those who participate in such crime, the act and the protection of the act, should be investigated. Now is the time to send a message to the network that these acts will no longer be tolerated.”

The Probation Department agreed with McCutcheon. Coast Probation Officer Monica Vargas wrote:

“The defendant displayed no remorse as he does not accept responsibility for this offense. The defendant does not appear to be a danger to others.”…

“The defendant’s previous probation performance has been unsatisfactory. …

“Edward Lewis Colombi is a 59-year-old male appearing before the court for sentencing after pleading nolo contendere to felony grand theft/personal property. The defendant is aware he could be sentenced to 16 months, two years or three years in the California Department of Corrections, or up to one year in county jail for this felony conviction. Other sentencing alternatives available to the court have been discussed with the defendant including the terms and conditions of probation. Although there is an indicated plea agreement of probation, if it were denied, this appears to be an aggravated term of three years in state prison. Mr. Colombi has been reminded of his lifetime prohibition from owning or possessing any firearms and ammunition.

“Additionally, the majority of his record is theft related conduct which does not help his credibility regarding this offense.

“Probation understands there are possibly some civil issues here as well due to unpaid rent, but the bottom line is that up until the victim notified Mr. Colombi of his intent to remove the lumber in June of 2006, the wood had been undisturbed. It seems too coincidental that the logs and lumber would disappear ‘all of the sudden’ within a month of Mr. McCutcheon’s plan to relocate them to another property.

“Probation is also bothered by the defendant’s refusal to accept responsibility. To this day, he seems angry and almost blames the victim for his predicament. During the interview, Mr. Colombi appeared appalled at the idea of having to serve any custodial time let alone a lengthy period. This officer was left with the impression that the defendant feels he is a victim of circumstance and he places the entire blame on Robert Russell. Mr. Colombi’s credibility is very questionable. Although there is a lot of gray area in this case, the victim has done a lot of work to prove he’s telling the truth. Probation has spoken with the victim on numerous occasions and it is clear this case has consumed him and affected him not just financially but emotionally as well. He deserves to be restored and although he will likely never be fully compensated financially it is a strong desire that the defendant be held accountable and face punitive consequences.

“Mr. Colombi’s prior record is horrible. He is presumptively ineligible for probation except in unusual circumstances due to suffering two or more prior felony convictions. However, it has been 18 years since his last felony conviction and he has not had any criminal convictions in the past five years until now. Mr. Colombi should be given an opportunity on probation but he needs to accept his part in this offense. To continue to deny any accountability would be counterproductive in his plan of achieving successful rehabilitation.”

At a July 2, 2010 hearing prior to the sentencing, Judge Henderson said he had difficulty determining the value of McCutcheon’s loss, but he put substantial weight on the testimony of realtor-appraiser Stu Beck – described by Henderson as “reliable and dependable as a witness” – who saw the lumber and its condition and quality a few months before the theft and had no interest in the outcome of the case.

Beck confirmed most of what McCutcheon said. He also found that Dave McCutcheon was “generally credible,” whereas Colombi and Russell were “somewhat suspect.” (Stoen later pointed out that having the judge declare someone “generally credible” means that, effectively, everything that that person says is considered true unless proven otherwise by the defendant. On the other hand, Colombi was declared to be not credible by the probation department and the judge.

Petersen, taking over the courtroom with his boisterous style, admitted that he wished he’d accepted an earlier lower estimate of value because the value of McCutcheon’s loss was going up as negotiations proceeded.

Henderson told the parties to attempt to arrive at a compromise one more time, and they agreed. After almost five days of lengthy negotiations, Stoen reported that they had come to an agreement: Colombi would have to pay a total of $200,000 in restitution, $150,000 to be paid within 30 days, and another $50,000 to be paid within 90 days. (Apparently Colombi Jr. intends to mortgage some of his late father’s property to pay the full restitution.) “There would be a stipulation to a 90 day actual Mendocino County Jail term without any half-time credits,” added Stoen.

Justin Petersen told the judge that Colombi’s mother was dying and that Colombi needed time before he could turn himself to do his 90 days of County time.

Henderson said that based on advice from probation he would defer sentencing until Colombi gets back from Oregon because otherwise he wouldn’t be able to leave the state to help his mother.

After agreeing to the deal, Henderson acknowledged that there still seemed to be a significant difference of opinion about the value of the lumber that was stolen and that each side had “strongly held beliefs.”

After agreeing to the sentence and restitution, Colombi first shook prosecutor Tim Stoen’s hand. Then he turned to Mr. McCutcheon and said, “I’m sorry this happened” – still not admitting any personal responsibility – and shook McCutcheon’s hand.

McCutcheon said he was glad it was over. He spent years trying to convince whoever would listen that Colombi was responsible for the theft of what amounted to McCutcheon’s life savings. And although the final judgment was not all that he wanted, Colombi Jr. is going to jail, and McCutcheon will get a good hunk of his life savings back.

The news took less time to filter through the crowd of over 500 than the spark from a spliff filled with Bell Springs Blue Dream picked up by the cool afternoon breezes that meander through the coastal canyons of Mendocino County.

The place: Area 101, about ten miles north of Laytonville on Highway 101. The proprietor, celebrated and notorious marijuana icon Tim Blake rented his multi-acre campground and event center to the Stilldream Collective, a Sierra-foothills based organization putting on a ten-year reunion and music party featuring a stellar lineup of what some would call some call the “sickest” music on the underground electronic music scene. The event drew fans, friends and family from across the country and the Pond — hardcore devotees of a music and culture not usually encountered in provincial Mendo.

It was early in the evening on Friday. Attendees were pulling off Highway 101 into the parking area to register and unload. The event’s chieftain of security, a formidable woman from Oakland who cut her teeth travelling the world in the military, was firmly in command, keeping the continuous stream of incoming revelers moving through the registration process despite the presence of several large trucks pulled hastily alongside the turnout area, creating a slightly confusing point of entry for the arriving guests.

Standing alongside their trucks were a handful of very large, mostly bald, uniformed Department of Justice personnel including Bob Nishiyama of the Mendocino Major Crimes Task Force. They were bedecked in black, sporting combat boots, weapons, bulletproof vests and all the accoutrements of a serious swat-style engagement.

Teddy Muth

Teddy Muth was on hand for the festival and had been sitting around the campfire area with friends. Bong in hand, he was primed for a weekend of music and chillin’. Teddy is known to everyone in the neighborhood. Quiet, hardworking, mesomorphic and with a face that is not easy to forget, he embodies and understands the life of the outsider. When you see Teddy, you know certain doors will be closed for him. But Tim Blake’s door has and will always been open. The son of his best friend, Blake has known Teddy from the day he was born. Of course Teddy smokes cannabis medicinally. Compared to many young men his age, whose idea of a good time is careening down 101 hopped up on Monster drinks, meth, tobacco and Budweiser, Teddy seems distinctly less of a threat to public safety.

“I was sitting by the fire pit, talking and smoking with a couple of friends,” says Muth. “This chick came up to me, bugging me about selling pot. She said she didn’t have any bud for her ride home.”

Muth ignored her the first, second and third time. “I kept saying to her, it’s not my thing. I don’t sell pot.”

If Muth ran the world, he would provide cannabis free to anyone who needed it. To be equated to a “drug dealer” when cannabis is as much part of his psychological and spiritual integrity as Wellbutrin for someone suffering from endogenous depression is beyond repugnant. For this crew, getting stoned isn’t “getting high.” It’s “getting right.”

When the girl harangued him for the fourth time, Teddy relented — half-tossing, half handing her a nug of Mendo’s Finest.

“Finally I handed her a single bud,” says Teddy, methodically. “Less than five minutes later I was in handcuffs.”

“YOU!” thundered one of the very large men in uniform as they pushed aside one of Muth’s friends and descended upon the startled group. “DROP THE BONG!”

The phalanx of men swamped 300-pound Muth and he was forced to the ground and cuffed. “We’re taking you to the front. Walk faster,” they growled. “I’m like, God damn,” sighs Teddy.

They hoisted Teddy atop the roof of the truck. Wearing nothing but his shorts in the 97-degree heat, Teddy was duly apprised of his rights and the requisite series of forms and paperwork began to flow.

“Teddy, do you remember them dragging you?” says Simon — another friend of the family who stopped by the venue just as the arrest was unfolding.

Simon ran to catch up with the officers and Teddy as they walked to their truck. “I asked the uniformed officer behind the men dragging Teddy what happened. He immediately responded by commanding me to get back,” says Simon. “He’s my friend’s son — he’s like a family member. Can you tell me what happened?”

“He’s got drugs,” responds an officer. “He’s being arrested for drugs. We’re taking him to jail.”

An officer responded in a take-all-prisoners tone. “You’re not allowed to sell it or give it away. You know the rules.”

None of this was new for event coordinator Paul Plescov, who has headed up the Stilldream events and many more for over ten years. This event was considerably smaller than many shows Plescov produces, but he has learned how to manage the underground festival scene. Regardless of the show size, he hires high end medical and security teams staffed by professionals, many from urban areas who are comfortable handling serious situations that occasionally require the assistance of law enforcement.

“After the arrests, our staff spoke directly with the police,” says Plescov. “We were told by the officer in charge that the reason they were here was that they had gotten an anonymous tip a month ago that the owner was going to be dosing the staff at the event.” Neither Plescov nor Blake could determine if Nishiyama was referring to the “owner” of Area 101 or someone from the Stilldream crew. “We’re going to be watching to make sure that you are doing what is supposed to be done,” said Nishiyama to Plescov.

Plescov indicated that the DOJ team marched into the event and proceeded to the main stage about 200 yards from the highway without seeking out event staff. “In all my years of doing shows, I’ve never seen police just march through the front gate without checking with staff.”

One lad who drove all night from Ogden, Utah was checking in at the registration desk as the bust went down. “I know you guys had a bad deal with the cops back there, but you gotta realize in my state the cops would be camped right in here with you. No disrespect or anything.”

The image of these beefy men rustlin’ up some tri-tip on the grill surrounded by the likes of Teddy was no more ludicrous than the charges brought against him. “It says on my paper that I’m being charged with felony transportation and sales.” Teddy had a total of $2.00 in his pockets. Minus the gram of marijuana he reluctantly passed to the informant, Muth estimates he had less than an ounce of marijuana.

“I worry about all this traffic,” said Nishiyama to the staff. “The last thing we want is someone high on LSD getting hit by a car.” Shades of black and white films shown in the 70’s with “stoned out” hippies jumping off three-story buildings come to mind. “In the history of this place there has not been one accident or incident at Area 101,” notes Blake. Once Plescov and Nishiyama talked, things seemed to calm down. “The police were really aggressive at first,” said Plescov. Then as we talked he became calmer.” The DOJ chief seemed satisfied for the moment that the organizers were capable of keeping matters under control.

Even faster than the news of Teddy’s arrest went the alarm that four undercover informants were on scene. It took only minutes before the covers at least three of the informants had been compromised.

Stilldream staff received numerous reports of several men walking through the grounds who didn’t seem to fit in. “They were very tunnel vision,” said one attendee. “They went up to this guy’s tent. There was a jar of weed on the table. They asked the guy, is that your weed? We want to search your bag.” Others reported having police grab their personal stash of cannabis, dump it on the ground and grind it into the dirt.

Another man approached a suspected undercover cop wearing earbuds. “Hey, what are you listening to?” he asked the man. “My iPod,” he responded. “I asked this guy directly if he was a cop. My father is a police officer so I know the rules,” explained the man. “He’s supposed to answer. He got really pissed, laughed at me and walked away.”

Another person approached one of the suspected undercover cops. “I said, Dude, you dropped your badge. He literally looked down — all over the ground. Then he saw me watching and split,” he noted.

Simon was at the event to help out his friend Blake. At 53 years old, he considers himself an elder and wanted to be on hand to help out. “A bunch of kids pointed out the informants,” says Simon. “I decided I’d try to go talk to one of the guys.”

Simon described the alleged undercover officers as looking like “Mexican nationals. Older, big and buff. This was mostly a pretty white crowd, so they totally stuck out. I went up to the guys. I asked them directly if they were cops. One guy wheeled around and pushed his shoulder into me. Hard.”

“Are you disrespecting me?” said the man to Simon. “I’ve lived in Garberville for 35 years!” roared the man — his face only inches from Simon’s. “Look at my partner. He’s smoking weed,” said the man.

“I think we all know that police have been known to smoke weed,” said Simon — still waiting for the men to answer his initial question.

“STEP THE FUCK OFF!” roared the alleged informant. He proceeded to grab his crotch. “I just want some X!” he said.

“Can’t help you there,” said Simon.

“What about some pussy? I want some pussy!” said the man. At this point Simon became angry. “Hey dude — there are young girls here. These are people’s kids. We’re trying to provide a safe place for them. Why are you so aggravated?” he asked the men.

“You are fucking disrespecting me!” he responded.

“They never answered my question directly,” said Simon. “It’s a tactic known as verbal judo. Many law enforcement personnel are trained in this kind of thing. I told them that all the kids know who they are. They left the event shortly after.”

Meanwhile, Muth had been transferred to a van parked down the road. “I was in that van for five hours. It was pretty hot in there. They brought in a couple of other people. Then we drove around by Branscomb and the officers chit-chatted behind the auto shop for a while. We picked up a couple of people off Covelo Road and then we headed to Ukiah to the drunk tank for the next 14 hours,” said Muth.

Other media have reported the event to be a “rave.” Perhaps. Were illegal drugs being consumed and sold? No doubt. Another individual who was arrested with Teddy was charged with selling Ecstasy. “Besides that guy, they took this other guy in because he was getting a freakin’ light show,” said Teddy.

For the uninitiated, a “light show” is a nighttime game where the “giver” is outfitted with glowing colored lights on the fingertips. People practice manipulating the streams of colored light, making patterns and shapes in the air for observers. Perhaps the effects are enhanced under the influence of certain controlled substances, but on a cool summer evening, with big, fat beats pulsing through the canyons, dancers spinning blazing chains of fire in remarkable symmetry with the music, sitting at one’s campsite giving a light show seems about as threatening as spinning the glowing red tip from your toasted marshmallow stick at the family campout.

The crowd seemed civil and relaxed despite the heat and close quarters — a unique blend of 100 percent organophiles decked out in dreads and hemp mingling with chain-smoking city dwellers wearing $1000 glasses frames and tragically hip t-shirts featuring logos and insignia only recognizable to the initiated. When not socializing at their campsites, most of the guests wandered between the indoor and outdoor stages, staying for a set by their favorite DJ and retreating back to their campsites until the next act.

No alcohol was sold at the event. Blake was delighted with the net on food sales. By Monday morning the larder was almost bare. The medical staff reported only one incident for the entire weekend — a gentlemen who was overcome by heat on Saturday and required additional medical attention.

Whether a Civil War Re-enactment or Burning Man, any time groups come together for a common purpose, a few get out of control and professionals are called in to help. Organizers were puzzled that the DOJ would deploy this much money and manpower for what resulted in a fairly minor haul. “People live for these events,” notes Muth. “It’s the only bit of fun some people have in their entire lives. The only thing that isn’t controlled 100% by the government or anyone else. Nobody has prejudice towards one another here.”

On Sunday night Mendocino County Sheriff’s Deputy Toovin and another officer came to Area 101 and chatted with the security and medical staff. He was not familiar with Teddy’s bust. “Geez, we find a lot more weed than that on routine traffic stops,” he said. “I stopped these two guys a while back. They had some really bad weed in the car. I said, you didn’t buy that stuff, did you? They said they bought it in Humboldt,” laughed Toovin, and so did everyone else.

Teddy did drop his bong, and Simon prevented the police from confiscating it. “As soon as I got out of jail, I hitchhiked back to Area 101,” Muth explains. “I actually got picked up by someone I knew who drove 100 miles out of his way to take me back.”

Bail for Teddy Muth was set at $15,000.