TWO friends, one of whom is from Flintshire, who ran a sophisticated cannabis factory in a cellar have been handed jail sentences totalling eight and a half years.
Liverpool Crown Court heard police raided Lee Rawlinson’s Birkenhead home after an anonymous tip-off.
When they arrived at the Old Chester Road property they found Rawlinson and landscape gardener Neil Stuart delivering compost and noticed a strong smell of cannabis.
They went into the semi-detached house on April 11 and found a hidden trap-door leading to the cellar where they discovered the secret drugs factory, said Ken Grant, prosecuting.
The cellar had been specially converted with different areas for the plants at each stage of life.
Fans, air extraction units and lights had all been fitted and the walls lined with silver foil, and the electricity supply had also been tampered with.
Mr Grant told the court an expert estimated that if all 126 plants had been harvested they would have produced about five kilos of strong skunk cannabis, which would have been worth up to £50,000 on the streets.
Stuart, 33, of Park Farm Caravan Park, Mold, later admitted cultivating cannabis. Rawlinson, 34, of Mulberry Road, Rock Ferry, denied the offence but was convicted after a trial.
He had claimed he had no knowledge of the drugs farm but his fingerprints were found on equipment in the cellar.
Jailing them, Judge Nigel Gilmour, QC, said he believed Rawlinson had set up the factory, before recruiting Stuart to look after the farm while he was away in Spain. He added that Rawlinson had used Stuart’s gardening skills.
This was an operation that took planning, it was deliberate and each were after profit.
He jailed Rawlinson for five-and-a-half years and Stuart was imprisoned for three years.
Defence barristers told the court the men were hard-working family men who had good qualities.