Veterans Back on Patrol, This Time to Protect Marijuana

[HCM]

Veterans Back on Patrol, This Time to Protect Marijuana

DENVER — It’s nighttime at the Herbal Cure, a south Denver marijuana shop and grow house tucked into a parking lot beside the highway. Inside is a marijuana bounty: thousands of dollars’ worth of cannabis plants, boxes of marijuana-infused chocolate, jars of $360-an-ounce weed with names like Frankenberry, Lemon Skunk and Purple Cheddar.

Chris Bowyer, a lanky combat veteran turned cannabis security guard, is outside. He has a .40-caliber pistol on his hip and a few extra magazines stored away, and he is talking about his work on the battlefield. Not the one in Iraq — the one in Colorado, where criminals seeking to breach marijuana businesses face veterans trying to stop them.

In Colorado, a curious marriage has formed between the booming retail cannabis industry — legal in the state since 2014, but not in the eyes of the federal government — and young war veterans, more than 200 of whom have taken jobs protecting marijuana businesses across the state. They spend their days and nights in urban marijuana shops and suburban warehouses and on rural farms, warding off the burglars who have become hallmarks of this cash-heavy, high-value business.

For some, a cannabis security job is a way station toward the police department or law school. For others, though, it is a vocation with purpose, a union of two outsider groups leaning on each other in a nation uncertain about how to accept them.

“It’s almost a kindred spirit kind of thing,” said Mr. Bowyer, 30, sitting in an office with a computer, a bulletproof vest and a booklet detailing marijuana products marketed under the name Jimi Hendrix. Marijuana growers and sellers “recognize that there is another group of guys who have their own talents,” he said, “and that we are here for them.”

No industry is immune to thievery. But the owners of Colorado’s 978 marijuana shop licenses and 1,393 marijuana grow licenses are particularly vulnerable. Because the federal government considers marijuana illegal, many banks won’t work with cannabis businesses, forcing them to deal in mountains of cash.

Criminals have netted anything from a few marijuana-laced sodas to a quarter-million dollars in plants. In June, much worse occurred: Two armed men entered a pot shop in Aurora, called Green Heart, and killed a guard, Travis Mason. The police called it a botched robbery.

Mr. Mason, 24, a former Marine and father of three, was believed to be the first cannabis employee to die on the job in Colorado, and the episode alarmed the industry. Some security businesses reported a rush of requests for armed guards.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/us...pgtype=article

[Dagga Boy]

I have been approached on this. If I was still in California, it is likely that is what I may be doing for work. The amount of theft, and pure heavyweight organized crime intimidation with force and taxing of MJ businesses is extensive. "Legal" weed still has a ton of crime around it.

[LSP972]

Damn.

Times DO change... don't they?

.

[Jackdog]

A year or so ago Vice ran an article
on the weed trade in Co. And how the banks would not deposit the cash. Blue Line security, a company started by retired cops, was providing the security for the transportation me stash house for all the cash the weed stores were making.


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[Paul Sharp]

There was a special on this on the Vice channel. A friend was part of the original shoot but most of his involvement was edited out in favor of hippies beating on drums in the woods...

My friend has been invested in the medicinal marijuana business for a very long time, and their operation is ginormous. They employee a number of combat vets for security, particularly during the money pickups. I'm confident a hit on his operation is going to be a bad day for the brainiacs that thought it was a good idea. It's interesting to watch this from an outsiders perspective. You have a business that's been well established as a blackmarket trade in the US, and North America, for decades. Now all of these same networks are attempting to go legit, and there is this weird dichotomy between the guys that want to, (and are), going for it and making some serious bank with giant grow operations similar to vineyards or any other mega-agriculture operation. I mean, come on man, this is what these guys have always dreamed of being able to do, and now they can finally do it without worrying about attracting attention from LE... Yet there is still this counter-culture push back that says, this is our thing, we want to keep doing it our way, without the G regulating or telling us what to do.

It's really interesting to sit and listen to these guys go back and forth about this topic. I'm curious to see where it will be in 10 years. My friend predicts it will be on the par of mega corporate farms, with labs developing strains and everything we see with corn, wheat or any other aspect of the farming industry. All of that is already there, just not on that level... yet.

[gkieser92]

Seems like armored truck companies would be jumping all over this business. Maybe they stay away because banks are their biggest clients and they don't want guilt by association.

[Totem Polar]

The figures from the store in my WA state town with the highest gross sales are, er, sobering. From their opening in mid-August 2014 through the end of 2015 (a little over 5 quarters) they did 6mil. They did 570k+ in December 2015 alone—not bad for two retired couples: 4 people. More to the point, they don't take credit cards or checks.

Yeah, I'd say that's a high (heh) risk business when it comes to robbery and theft.

(As an aside, they paid 2.1 mil in taxes to the state of WA for the pleasure over the same period)

[Dagga Boy]

Seems like armored truck companies would be jumping all over this business. Maybe they stay away because banks are their biggest clients and they don't want guilt by association.

I would think when you are not using banks for money storage you would want to be very discrete on where you are stashing it. Armored trucks pulling up daily would basically burn the drop houses, and those trucks are pure targets. In the past when tasked with moving large sums of cash, I always used cold cars and super low profile means to do it. Even went so far on one as to drop at a grocery store branch. Who would ever think that is where you would be dropping off money........plus,convenient shopping carts

[Jackdog]

I would think when you are not using banks for money storage you would want to be very discrete on where you are stashing it. Armored trucks pulling up daily would basically burn the drop houses, and those trucks are pure targets. In the past when tasked with moving large sums of cash, I always used cold cars and super low profile means to do it. Even went so far on one as to drop at a grocery store branch. Who would ever think that is where you would be dropping off money........plus,convenient shopping carts

Nyeti, maybe we should start planing a company for Texas when weed is legalized here.


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[HCM]

Seems like armored truck companies would be jumping all over this business. Maybe they stay away because banks are their biggest clients and they don't want guilt by association.

Not only are the banks the biggest clients but often that relationship includes making the armored car company essentially a limited, non-public branch of the bank so that customers cash deposits are credited as of the time they are picked up. RSA- OTC could probably explain it better. There are smaller companies that will pick up money from your business and drop it in the night deposit for you but for the larger companies the clients are usually clients of the banks they are associated with.