On December 5, 2009, Cook County sheriff’s police sergeant Patrick Donovan spotted two men in a white, windowless cargo van on the loading dock of a shop called the Brew and Grow, tucked between Elston and the Kennedy expressway. Donovan watched from his car 40 yards away as the men—one of them medium height and stocky, the other tall and gangly—loaded large tables, fans, and four-foot filters into the van.
From a safe distance, Donovan watched the van pull into a garage, and he was able to catch sight of the two men unloading the cargo. He then continued to follow the van as it left the house and drove another 11 miles to a condominium complex in Bridgeport.
Over the past year, the Reader has chronicled a number of problems with how marijuana laws are enforced in Chicago: they’re applied differently among different racial groups, clog the courts, and consume millions of dollars and thousands of hours that could be used on other critical needs.
A grow-house operation “is in fact a criminal network,” says Frank Bilecki, a spokesman for Cook County sheriff Tom Dart. “What is the impact on the neighborhood when this type of operation is targeted by the competition? These houses are frequently located in residential neighborhoods.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But while some of the busts have nabbed dealers with lengthy criminal records and caches of guns, others have netted nothing but cannabis plants—a product that millions of Americans believe is OK to buy and consume, though they have nowhere to go for it but black markets.
After discovering the grow operation, the sheriff’s police team immediately drove to the Bridgeport condominium.
Ortiz, an English-as-a-second-language instructor at UIC, couldn’t have been more cooperative, Donovan later recalled. The professor even directed the officers to a small bag of marijuana and a pipe before being led out of the apartment by two officers. Left in the apartment with two other officers was Ortiz’s girlfriend, Heidi Keller, a public school librarian. Even though Keller’s name was on the mortgage for the house on South Exchange and she lived with Ortiz in the Bridgeport condo, she had not been a suspect in the investigation.
