Marijuana plants valued at more than $1.26 billion have been confiscated and 82 people arrested over the past 10 days in Fresno County. The operation started last week and is continuing.
By comparison, Tulare County's leading commodity -- milk -- was valued at about $1.8 billion in 2008.
Officials say the marijuana-eradication operation will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but the exact amount won't be known until agencies can add up staffing, vehicle and other costs.
In Operation SOS, more than 314,000 plants were uprooted in 70 gardens -- numbers expected to rise as the enforcement action continues. Agents also seized $41,000 in cash, 26 firearms and three vehicles.
...One hundred growers may still be on the loose, said Fresno County sheriff's Lt. Rick Ko. Many may have gotten rides out of the area, but some could still be in the Sierra, Ko said.
Last year, Fresno County deputies seized 188,000 marijuana plants.
and there is crime:
A two-year corruption and international money-laundering investigation stretching from the Jersey Shore to Brooklyn to Israel and Switzerland culminated in charges against 44 people on Thursday, including three New Jersey mayors, two state assemblymen and five rabbis, the authorities said.
The case began with bank fraud charges against a member of an insular Syrian Jewish enclave centered in a seaside town...It was replete with tales of the illegal sales of body parts; of furtive negotiations in diners, parking lots and boiler rooms; of nervous jokes about “patting down” a man who turned out to indeed be an informant; and, again and again, of the passing of cash — once in a box of Apple Jacks cereal stuffed with $97,000.
...All told, some $3 million was laundered for Mr. Dwek since June 2007, prosecutors said...Maher Khalil is accused of accepting $30,000 in bribes from Mr. Dwek...The bulk of the corruption charges arose in Hudson County. The president of the City Council in Jersey City, Mariano Vega Jr., and the city’s deputy mayor, Leona Beldini, were also arrested. Mr. Vega took three $10,000 payments before and after the municipal elections in May, prosecutors said. Anthony R. Suarez, the mayor of Ridgefield, in Bergen County, was charged with accepting $10,000 in bribes. The court papers suggest the ease, and the relatively modest payments, with which local officials seemed willing to be part of the scheme...
...Weysan Dun, the special agent in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Newark office, emphasized that the case was motivated by neither religion nor politics...“Any corruption is unacceptable — anywhere, anytime, by anybody,” the governor said in a statement. “The scale of corruption we’re seeing as this unfolds is simply outrageous and cannot be tolerated.”
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