Months after illegal pot-farm bust in China firm’s Barstow warehouse, questions remain
An impromptu July 2022 raid at a Barstow warehouse owned by a Chinese countertop-making company — purportedly vacant at the time — uncovered an illegal weed-cultivation complex spanning more than 80,000 square feet and storing millions of dollars worth of product.
But seven months later, while a criminal investigation of the illegal pot grow is still underway, the City of Barstow maintains permits for other marijuana-focused entrepreneurs who lack state licenses on the 75-acre Mojave Desert property owned by China-based American Quartz Group Inc.
Even after the multi-million dollar bust, the Barstow City Council greenlit an application from Quality Life Inc. — a Carlsbad-based firm incorporated in November 2021 by attorney Alvin Gomez and run by sole director Michael Wilhoit — to cultivate, manufacture and distribute weed in the American Quartz warehouse that police had swarmed five weeks prior.
Quality Life had already gotten Barstow’s first cannabis-biz approval in February 2022 for a dispensary in a building that now jointly operates as a pot shop and IHOP restaurant at 2841 Lenwood Road, less than a mile southeast of American Quartz.
In March 2022, Quality Life leased a 5,000-square-foot unit of the warehouse from American Quartz and applied to grow pot there. The pitch got unanimous post-raid approval from Barstow’s elected council after city staff argued a then-ongoing investigation had cleared Quality Life of involvement in the illegal grows at the same building, which they said were instead run by separate entities using the rest of the warehouse that totals 86,000 square feet.
Six months after that local approval, though, Quality Life still hasn’t secured the state-level permits it needs to produce or transport weed. A California Department of Cannabis Control database listed only five state-issued licenses in Barstow as of Feb. 7, all of which permit only retail-bud sales.
“The City of Barstow has had no official communication with Quality Life since its development agreement was approved by council on (Aug.) 15, 2022,” Barstow City Manager Willie Hopkins Jr. said in a statement via public-relations firm The Ferraro Group, responding to a Daily Press email inquiry.
City officials didn’t address separate inquiries in the email as to whether Barstow has reprimanded or enhanced oversight of American Quartz for its housing of the illegal grow, and whether the investigation cited by city staff in August has since concluded or progressed in any way.
In response to a Daily Press inquiry about the American Quartz raid, Jacquelyn Rodriguez, a spokeswoman for San Bernardino County District Attorney Jason Anderson, said the office is awaiting a final report from Barstow Police Department “for issuing and review."
“In following up with Barstow PD, they let us know that they are concluding their investigations and submitting the case to us likely within the coming week," Rodriguez wrote in an emailed statement.
Representatives of Quality Life and American Quartz didn’t respond to requests for comment.
How the raid went down
The American Quartz bust only occurred because a building inspector stumbled upon the illegal pot-farming warehouse by coincidence.
American Quartz has owned a block of land parcels totaling 74.7 acres since 2019 along Lenwood Road, in the north corner of Barstow’s Interstate 15 hub midway between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, according to county property records.
This land includes three industrial-size structures: one that houses American Quartz’s countertop-making operations, the largest building; a second that operates as a semi-truck terminal; and a third classified in county records as a commercial storage warehouse, closest to the property’s Lenwood Road entry.
A City of Barstow inspector went to the American Quartz property on July 7 to inspect a different building than the storage warehouse closest to the entry, according to a July 12 Facebook post by BPD and as later explained by Chris Heldreth, Barstow’s Building and Safety Department director and fire marshal.
“The inspector was doing an inspection on another building,” Heldreth said at the City Council’s Aug. 15 meeting, when he “noticed that somebody was inside the (warehouse) and decided to go over there.”
Then, the “inspector requested assistance from the Barstow Police Department regarding a possible marijuana cultivation operation,” according to BPD’s post.
Detectives Andrew Hollister and Jose Sanchez dispatched with BPD officers around 3:10 p.m. to the American Quartz warehouse, which has a specific address of 2989 Lenwood Road.
There, “Hollister and the officers on the scene could smell a strong odor of marijuana emitting from the building from as much as 100 feet away,” BPD stated, “indicating a strong, reasonable suspicion that a large quantity of marijuana or marijuana plants were at the location.”
“People could be heard inside the building as the officers knocked and announced their presence multiple times with no one from inside the building responding.”
Hollister wrote a search warrant and got it approved as officers continued announcing their presence via a PA system to no response from the warehouse occupants, according to BPD’s post.
When the detectives and officers entered the warehouse with an approved warrant, they found “(10) individual cultivation rooms with marijuana plants in various stages of developmental growth.”
“Based on the extent of the grow,” BPD stated, “the operation had been in existence for months.”
The department counted a facility-wide total of 15,047 cannabis plants and arrested 14 people inside the warehouse for illegal-marijuana cultivation, all of whom it says “were working inside the building.”
City officers photographed the warehouse, loaded every cannabis plant onto city-owned trucks, and hauled it all “to the Barstow landfill,” where they dumped “a total weight of 8,980 pounds of Marijuana,” as described by BPD.
The Barstow Sanitary Landfill is a solid-waste dump run by San Bernardino County a few miles south of Barstow’s city limits. If the 8,980 pounds cited by BPD was ready-to-smoke marijuana, it could’ve netted roughly $8.8 million on the legal-wholesale market as of Jan. 27, according to the U.S. Cannabis Spot Index — and potentially double that if it were high-quality.
A murky aftermath
BPD detectives identified the business behind the operation as Woolsey Farms LLC, according to the department’s post.
The firm “had applied for a cultivation permit with the City of Barstow, but the application had failed to meet all the requirements of the city ordinance and was ultimately rejected,” BPD stated.
Woolsey Farms was registered as a business based in the gated city of Canyon Lake in September 2020. It recently filed its required statement of information on Jan. 19, according to California Secretary of State records.
The recent filing lists the LLC’s managers as Jacob W. Woolsey and Jordan M. Woolsey, the same first and last name as two of the people BPD named in its July arrest logs among the 14 illegal-cultivation arrestees at the American Quartz warehouse.
The 14 people cited for illegal-marijuana cultivation in the American Quartz warehouse as a result of the July 7 raid, according to the arrest logs, included:
Cui Zhang
Hong Wei
Yong Huang
Lin Juan
Carmelino Lopez
Woshun Yang
David Fabian-Orantes
Ming Wu
Jordan Woolsey
Jacob Woolsey
Han Chen
Natasha Stratton
Zachary Woolsey
En Lee
Despite each of these individuals being arrested and booked that day, according to BPD, all were cited and released without criminal charges.
That’s because California made illegal-grow citations a misdemeanor comparable to speeding tickets in 2018, no matter how big a pot farm is. The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s and DA’s offices have criticized this area of the state’s legal-weed policy, arguing it has fueled a surge of cartel-tied grows in rural High Desert pockets.
Quality Life
Barstow’s City Council gave Quality Life — the dispensary operator connected to an IHOP — its final approval at an Aug. 15 meeting to become the first business with local permits to cultivate, manufacture, and transport weed in one unit on the north end of the warehouse that BPD had busted five weeks prior.
City staff exonerated Quality Life that night as a potential subject of investigation, though. Councilwoman Barbara Rose focused a line of pre-vote questioning on the idea that a legitimate cannabis business shouldn't be hindered by a probe of the illegal-pot growers who’d been busted in its building.
Quality Life entered a lease as “tenant” with American Quartz as “landlord” on March 21 to enable its planned grow operation, according to its cannabis-biz application. It had gotten unanimous approvals in a Barstow Planning Commission review and an initial City Council vote before the raid happened.
Heldreth said at the Aug. 15 meeting that the roughly 86,000-square-foot American Quartz warehouse contains 16 units.
Separate from Quality Life’s 5,000-square-foot unit, he said, two other businesses had applied for permits to grow cannabis across the rest of the warehouse. Aside from Woolsey Farms being named in BPD’s statement five days after the raid, city officials haven’t identified a second business responsible for illegal growing at the site.
“When the police department did their search warrant,” Heldreth said, “the entire two suites, or the two — the majority of the building, approximately 80,000 square feet, was used for the illegal operation.”
In Quality Life’s unit, “we actually went in and took pictures and did all that just to have for ourselves and the investigation the police department was doing,” the building official continued. “There was nothing inside that unit.”
The illegal growers had “applied for their permit. They were going through the entire process. They just decided to start,” Heldreth said. He added that they built a wall dividing Quality Life’s unit from the rest of the American Quartz warehouse that they were using to grow.
“So they not only did, obviously, illegal cultivation,” he said, “but they did illegal construction inside the facility as well.”
No building inspectors had entered or checked in on the American Quartz warehouse since at least February 2022 “because there was no reason to” as “nobody had a permit to do anything” there, Heldreth said.
Rose asked, referencing Quality Life, “is it going to be OK for them to be in there and not be affected by this investigation in any way, shape, or form?”
“Yes,” BPD Chief Andrew Espinoza responded.
“That’s what we anticipate at this time,” City Attorney Matthew Summers added.
“We cleared (Quality Life) that day,” the chief continued. “We talked with the owner, and we — just like Chris said, there’s a wall right there. There’s no way you can access their area.”
“And I should note,” Summers said, “the investigation regarding the other side of that wall does continue. That matter is not resolved yet, that investigation.”
“That’s correct,” Espinoza confirmed.
Charlie McGee covers California’s High Desert for the Daily Press, focusing on the city of Barstow and its surrounding communities. He is also a Report for America corps member with The GroundTruth Project, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization dedicated to supporting the next generation of journalists in the U.S. and worldwide. McGee may be reached at 760-955-5341 or cmcgee@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @bycharliemcgee.
This article originally appeared on Victorville Daily Press: Pot-farm bust in China firm’s Barstow base still murky months later
