Three men were busted after attempting to deliver a whopping 300 pounds of cannabis to a building in New York's Greenwich Village, police told CBS New York last month.
NYPD narcotics officers arrested Patrick Johnson, Matthew Parrigo and Christopher Bender after they were spotted carrying a large wooden crate into the building at 144 Bleeker Street. Cops later discovered another 150-pound crate loaded with weed after searching a delivery truck on scene.
Bridget Brennan, the city's special narcotics prosecutor, told WCBS that she believes the pot was shipped by air from California to Newark airport, and then delivered by a courier van to the Greenwhich Village address. Detectives had been tracking the shipment and sent a drug-sniffing dog to confirm the intercept.
"It's a huge amount of marijuana, and it's worth a lot of money," Brennan said, rather obviously. "If it was going to be sold in street level amounts by the ounce, it would probably be worth up to a million dollars."
The mega-bust come almost exactly four years after John Bokun, a supposed chieftain of the "Westies" Irish gang, was busted for apparently flying half a million dollars worth of California hydroponic to Farmingdale airport on Long Island. We have no idea if the two operations are linked, but the lure of big bucks clearly continues to draw high-stakes imports to the New York metro area. And those big bucks are in large part due to the price being inflated by cannabis' illegal status.
