There's no Orange County angle here, but this story is simply too 909, er, funny to not pass along. On Monday, a Riverside County drug task force raided a suspected pot farm in Hemet. No, the fact they actually have time to do go after marijuana cases with all the meth labs out there isn't the weird part.
Nope, the weird part is that the pot farm was being guarded by “Wally,” a 4-foot-long, 55-pound alligator.
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A 29-year-old suspect was arrested at the house for felony possession of
concentrated cannabis and cultivation of marijuana for sale, and Wally
was sent off to an exotic-animal shelter in the nearby town of Phelan,
reported Village Voice Media's national medical-marijuana blog. You can
read that story here.
Okay, so a 4-foot alligator doesn't exactly sound that menacing, although technically, they can move pretty fast, at least for short distances. But even though the publicity-hungry narcs are calling their catch a “Watchgator,” they actually found the beast in a “black cement-mixing tub” inside the house where the farm was located, raising the question of whether Wally was really just an innocent bystander, or what most people would refer to as a “pet alligator” rather than some pimped-out wannabe drug kingpin's idea of pot protection.
Award-winning investigative journalist Nick Schou is Editor of OC Weekly. He is the author of Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb (Nation Books 2006), which provided the basis for the 2014 Focus Features release starring Jeremy Renner and the L.A. Times-bestseller Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love’s Quest to bring Peace, Love and Acid to the World, (Thomas Dunne 2009). He is also the author of The Weed Runners (2013) and Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood (2016).