An investigation into a possible burglary led to a Queens warehouse containing a whopping $5 million worth of marijuana products, a lieutenant with the city’s sheriff’s department told the Daily News.
“This is one of the largest seizures we’ve had,” Lt. Francesca Rosa of the NYC Sherrif’s Department told the News. “There’s over $5 million in product.”
Officers with the 114th Precinct were responding to a 911 call of a burglary when they stopped two men outside a Second St. warehouse near 27th Ave. in Astoria around 3 a.m. Thursday, Rosa said.
After officers found the suspects had 100 pounds of marijuana flower, they traced their movements back to the Second St. warehouse — where they were stunned to find pallets full of cannabis products along with forklifts to move them, according to Rosa.
The NYPD contacted the Sherrif’s Department and authorities organized a dumpster to be brought to the location, where law enforcement could be seen filling the industrial-sized bin with the warehouse’s illicit stock.
Amid the pallets of weed products, officers found a machine capable of producing cannabis vape cartridges on a vast scale, according to Rosa.
“They have a machine to make their own vape cartridges,” Rosa said. It’s definitely industrial scale.”
Louie Patsis, 58, who lives in a building next door to the marijuana stash, said the only activity he saw there was at night — and that the warehouse’s big gate was never left open.
“They only come here in the middle of the night and only for a couple of hours,” said Patsis. “You never saw the big gate open.”
“I wasn’t expecting such a thing in my neighborhood,” Patsis added. “There’s been a lot of development here. I thought the neighborhood was getting better.”
The sherrif’s department has headed a city-wide crackdown of illicit weedshops that’s proven so successful, the agency complained in June it was running out of space to stash all of its seized pot.
The crackdown on unlicensed pot shops across New York follows the decriminalization of recreational marijuana for adults in 2021, which turned the Five Boroughs into a boom town for outlaw weed dispensaries.
Though former Gov. Andrew Cuomo created an Office of Cannabis Management to license cultivators, sellers and dispensaries, the state’s slow rollout of licensed dispensaries incentivized unlicensed pot sellers.
There are only 57 licensed marijuana dispensaries in the five boroughs, according to the Office of Cannabis Management website. In comparison, there are roughly 2,900 illegal pot shops.