Nobody had any idea they were cooking up more than pizza at one hole-in-the-wall pizzeria in Los Angeles, California. Along with a large pepperoni to go, they could hook you up with all the cannabis concentrates you can vaporize. A little dab’ll do ya but they were producing it in standard food prep trays by the rack full.
Pizza super lab
If you have the munchies, they could hook you up with a pizza and sell you something to give you more munchies, if you knew what was on the “special” menu. From the outside, it appeared to be a typical pizzeria, quietly nestled in an industrial park. It was really “operating as a drug lab, cooking up illegal THC concentrate.” Never trust a pizzeria located next to an animal hospital.
According to Commanding Officer Lillian Carranza that’s where they found it. The “super lab” was discovered by cops “in a shop in the 7300 block of Radford Avenue in North Hollywood next to an animal hospital.”
Police took a whole bunch of photos, including one of an officer posing “beside giant vats that were used to cook the THC Honey Oil.” They also got photos showing “plastic trays of oil stacked on kitchen racks typically used for food.”
What appeared to be a pizza shop in North Hollywood was really cooking up illegal THC concentrates, authorities said. https://t.co/urnryidmuK
— KRON4 News (@kron4news) June 25, 2023
In other words, your basic “eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was, to be used as evidence” against the pizza shop owners.
Another batch shows officers rummaging through cardboard pizza boxes declaring “hot and ready.” While not as fly-by-night as your typical meth lab, this one was just as explosive. The process of removing the concentrates from the plant material often uses highly flammable petrochemical solvents. Like butane.
“These kinds of labs,” Carranza said, “are the type police have seen explode, cause injuries, property damage and sometimes death.”
Secret ingredients
It was clear to the officers that the “super lab” was simply “disguised as a pizza shop” and the real business was squeezing wax from marijuana plants.
All the THC crystals and flavorful terpenes in their most potent and concentrated form. They took shots depicting racks of the stuff cooling in sheet pans.
“We’ve heard of secret ingredients, but this takes the pie! It seems like criminals are getting more creative by the day,” LAPD noted.
“From faux vending machines to pizza-making trickery, we are well aware of these sneaky things, keeping our city safe one clever bust at a time. This super ‘pizza‘ lab won’t be making any more deliveries!”
Police aren’t talking about any arrests. If they have anyone in custody, they aren’t saying so, which indicates they’re quietly looking for the big bosses. New York Post notes that “The bust comes just days after an LAPD K9 dog sniffed out a massive stash of cash and heroin that were stuffed inside of a vending machine.”
That yielded a much more deadly stash than that found in the Pizza pot concentration lab. “The dog pointed police to the vending machine, where they found a whopping 15 pounds of heroin, a kilogram of fentanyl and an assault rifle.“
