By Patric Hedlund

Ventura County investigators got a search warrant to dig around a Lockwood Valley property last month, looking for a few million dollars in buried cash. Profits from marijuana sales were their target. They didn’t find any, said Investigator Robert Camarillo on July 13.

Steven Richard Kall, 55 may be remembered by some in the Frazier Mountain area for his Lockwood Valley parties with guitarist Garrett Farn (who died in February 2008), but on June 9, 2009 Kall was arrested for a marijuana-growing operation discovered on his property in the 16000 block of Lockwood Valley Road. He is still awaiting jury trial on felony charges for cultivating marijuana and possession of marijuana for sale. He pled ‘not guilty’ to both, although he pled guilty to similar charges in Los Angeles County and is awaiting sentencing on that.

Kall was arrested again July 3, 2010 in Las Vegas. On July 8 the judge set Kall’s bail at $750,000 because he allegedly attempted to flee the jurisdiction just before being indicted by a Ventura County Grand Jury on over 100 counts of money-laundering. He is accused of hiding about $2.19 million in undisclosed profits from a medical marijuana dispensary in L.A. County.

Investigators found “very suspicious circumstances that led us to seek a very high bail, including taking a rental car to Las Vegas in the name of someone else, leaving their cell phones in L.A., parking the car at another hotel, having $160,000 in bundled bills in the trunk of that car and a huge amount of money bundled inside a vacuum cleaner back at their L.A. apartment,” Ventura County Prosecutor Marc Leventhal said. The Grand Jury indictment came down on June 9, the arrests of Kall and Anne Adams was July 3 and the bail hearing was held on July 8. A third man, Jimmy Silva, was arrested in June in the case.

Shell corporations implicated in Kall’s illegal sheltering of profits include Screen Creative Concepts, Inc., Conover Estates, Inc., JAS Group Incorporated (co-owned by Jimmy Silva and Anne Adams with Steven Kall) and AKA Script Services Inc.

Last year, on June 4, 2009, the Ventura County Combined Agency Team (VCCAT) narcotics detectives discovered a hydroponics marijuana cultivation operation in Kall’s Lockwood Valley house, garage and an outbuilding. Resident Deputy William Hollowell had discovered bootleg electrical lines supplying large quantities of electricity to Kall’s house.

“Each room was equipped with large plastic growing containers, special grow lights and an array of electrical connections and extension cords to power water pumps and fans,” the report said. Over 1,000 plants were found in the buildings, “though total capacity was estimated to be several thousand more,” investigators said. No one was living at the residence at that time. Farn was said to have lived in the front building until a few weeks before his death, the year before.

Kall told authorities the marijuana was being grown for the Golden State Collective medical marijuana dispensary in Granada Hills. Statute 11362.765 of the Health and Safety Code says that the medical marijuana statute does not “authorize any individual or group to cultivate or distribute marijuana for profit.”

This is part of the July 16, 2010 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

Have an opinion on this matter? We'd like to hear from you.