The video shows a huge sprawling spliff farm housed in old Mussolini-era tunnels under Italy’s capital. The value of the bust is estimated at $3,7 million. There shouldn’t be too much fist pumping from the Italian police, however, as they found it by chance.

Officers walking down a street smelled the strong, and easily identifiable scent of fully grown marijuana wafting out of an entrance to a company that cultivated mushrooms in the abandoned tunnel. The New York Times reports that when the officers climbed a ladder and “peered over a makeshift wall at the back of the mushroom farm . . . they found a 43 000-square-foot tunnel housing the illegal crop.”

Col. Stefano Corsi of the provincial branch of Guardia di Finanza, which oversaw the raid said:

It was a regular business. It was a very sophisticated operation.

The video shows a section of the tunnel crammed with garbage bags filled with marijuana plants, vacuum-packed packages of marijuana and sophisticated greenhouses with top-quality lighting, ventilation and irrigation systems, where hundreds of cannabis plants were found in various stages of growth.

Despite the scale of this operation, the growers were not particularly careful in choosing a secluded tunnel. Marco Placidi, president of Sotterranei di Rome, a cultural association that carries out guided visits to underground sites said that the tunnel was well known to archaeologists and had been on his list of places to visit. “I never went, and it’s just as well, given what was under there,” he said. What? If you are going to orchestrate the large scale manufacture of marijuana, surely the last place you choose is somewhere that could have a guided tour pop by. Incredible.

[Source: New York Times]