Sean Patrick O'Donnell, 49, was jailed for 2½ years last July after police were tipped off by a person who visited the Wainuiomata house near Wellington and smelled cannabis. Police raided the house and found a highly sophisticated cannabis growing operation.
The house has since been seized under the Proceeds of Crimes Act and will be sold after an electrician has rewired it to remove the complicated system O'Donnell installed to bypass the main power supply and feed a complex system of the lights, fans and filters.
O'Donnell admitted drugs charges, but details of the drug growing business he had hidden in several rooms of his Wainuiomata house have just been revealed through the police magazine, Ten One.
Sergeant Mike Sarten of Lower Hutt police said the police team had never seen anything like the operation.
O'Donnell installed about 40 light ballasts to run lights at 400 volts and provide the cannabis plants with light to grow, he told NZPA.
Police estimated he had stolen electricity worth $40,000 in two years and his business may have earned him an estimated $2 million in that time.
The cannabis plants were also of such a high grade, O'Donnell was throwing away the leaves and selling the cannabis heads on the plants.
The cannabis head was the most potent and valuable part of the plant with a high level of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive substance in cannabis plants, Mr Sarten said.
The 70 plants found at the house had been cloned and mutated to create multiple budding heads.
"He had got to point where his plants were probably the top quality plants you could get and he was getting these massive buds.
"All he was doing was sitting down and nipping off the buds and throwing the leaves away. He didn't need to use the leaves because he had the very best quality cannabis. He was selling it by the rubbish bag full and we estimate he was getting $19,000 for each rubbish bag."
When police raided the house they found 70 mature plants, and five plastic bags, each containing up to two kilograms of cannabis head and worth close to $100,000.
They also found $25,000 in cash hidden under his mattress and estimated the value of the drugs in the house was $500,000.
The garage was divided into two growing rooms and another room was used virtually as a sub-station, or power room, where O'Donnell had taking a direct feed from the power coming into the house, by-passing the power meter so the electricity supplier did not know he was stealing the power.
A third room was used for germinating new plants and a fourth room was devoted to producing cloned plants which had big and valuable heads.
Another room was a processing room where he cut off the heads and packaged them, and got rid of the leaves.
He also had a complex and expensive carbon filtering system to deal with the fumes from the operation.
Mr Sarten said O'Donnell was "a crafty wee fella" and had several cars registered under different names and had probably hidden a lot of the proceeds of his drug dealing.
"I have been in the police a long time, 23 years, and I have done lots of bits and pieces relating to cannabis and stuff but this is the best I have seen," Mr Sarten said.
Police said the Government would reap about $200,000 from the sale of the seized house and cash found in the raid.
