The federal government has started procedings to take control of a Dorchester house it says two brothers built to become the center of an international drug ring that was broken up with a series of arrests in 2007.
The government says it will sell off 59 Bloomfield St., currently assessed at $503,000, to help recoup some of the roughly $3 million in drug and money-laundering profits made by Anna Trinh and Tiem Trinh, both convicted in federal court on Dec. 23, 2009 on a variety of drug charges.
The government has already started procedings to sell off the Trinhs' other belongings, including three Mercedes and a Rolex watch. In an affidavit filed in US District Court last week as part of the federal request to foreclose on and sell of the house, Boston Police Det. Robert Fratalia outlined the history of the two-family, eight-bedroom structure that the Trinh's sons, Quoc and Tai Trinh, built in 2001.
The younger Trinhs spared little expense in building the house, larger than the surrounding homes, spending $200,000 just on fancy wood floors and woodwork, Fratalia wrote. But they did find a way to save some money - they paid one worker, who later turned informant, in both cash and marijuana, Fratalia wrote.
Between 2002 and 2005, according to the informant, the brothers were making as much as $20,000 a week, from the "thousands of pounds of marijuana [that] were delivered to, stored at, and distributed" from both the house and other nearby Dorchester locations. So much money was flowing into the house from pot and Ecstasy sales that Quoc Trinh kept a money-counting machine on the third floor - and had five separate phones to arrange purchases and sale.
In 2004, Fratalia wrote, the Trinhs secured a home-equity loan on the house, which they combined with drug proceeds to buy two properties in Buffalo, NY in which to grow marijuana. But even as they began growing pot in New York, the Trinhs expanded their own pot-growing effords on Bloomfield Street, putting in "large marijuana plants" in their basement and back yard - and growing them with a special fertilizer they created themselves, Fratalia wrote:
[T]the family cultivated a pile of potting soil, enriched with rotting fish parts which caused the pile to have a strong and unpleasant odor, in the back yard of the [house]. [The informant] and members of the Trinh family periodically packed that enriched soil into containers so that the Trinhs could take them to the Buffalo property for use in the marijuana grow.
The pile, which they covered with a blue tarp, was also infested with maggots, Fratalia wrote.
On Sept. 2, 2005, a murder at the house was narrowly averted, Fratalia wrote: The younger Trinhs paid a local $5,000 to kill a man who'd punched Tai Trinh during a dispute over a pot shipment Tai Trinh had allegedly stolen from a Canadian dealer. The police's informant notifed police, who arrrested Warren as he waited nearby with "a long-bladed bow-style knife" for the man.
Quoc Trinh pleaded guilty to marijuana conspiracy charges last fall and will appear in court on April 1 to plead guilty to MDMA charges - he's expected to be sent away for ten years. Tai Trinh, who had earlier heroin-related convictions, agreed to a 20-year sentence last fall. Anna Trinh and Tiem Trinh were both found guilty of a variety of charges on Dec. 31.
