Millionaires' Row with an £800,000 cannabis factory

During the recent warm snap, many of us would have given a lot to have access to our own private swimming pool.

But for the occupants of one house on Millionaires' Row, a quick dip was out of the question - instead, they had filled the pool with cannabis plants worth £800,000.

Police who raided the property following a tip-off said they were left "speechless" when they discovered the massive cannabis factory, complete with special lighting, heaters and fans.

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The outisde of the rented house at posh D'urton Place of D'urton Lane in Broughton

They are seeking a group of people who are thought to have been renting the £500,000 property from its owner.

The discovery was made on a lane of substantial, detached houses north of Preston, Lancashire, after a warrant was issued over an unpaid fine and the occupant was spotted running away.

Officers forced their way in and stumbled across the industrial-scale cannabis plantation in the indoor pool at the back of the property.

Chief Inspector James Lee said what they found had left them "speechless".

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Inside the £1m house were cannabis plants with a street value of £800,000

He added: "We have had experienced officers working at the scene and they have never seen a drugs cultivation operation like this in more than 20 years of conducting police searches.

"The most staggering aspect to this is we expect to recover somewhere in the region of 1,000 fully grown plants which is likely to put this seizure, in terms of street value, of between £700,000 and £800,000."

Neighbours had noticed the hum of electrical equipment coming from the 30ft pool but assumed it had been for heating the water.

They said a group of Chinese men had been living there recently but no-one had any inkling of what was going on inside.

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A police chief said he was 'speechless' at the size of the haul

"We have seen two Chinese men who haven't been there long, but everyone in this area keeps themselves to themselves," said one.

Police used a helicopter in an unsuccessful attempt to trace the man seen fleeing the property. A 30-year-old man arrested at another address has been released on police bail.

Chief Inspector Lee said: "We know the property was rented to two men and two women, described as Oriental. We urgently want to trace them and would urge them to come forward and speak with police."

They are also looking for descriptions of vehicles seen at the house and for anyone who knows the identity of the man who fled the house to come forward.

Last year police warned of the growing number of cannabis factories in unassuming suburban locations and issued advice on how to spot them.

A typical domestic factory of the sort raided in London alone at a rate of two a day can produce as much as £30,000 worth of skunk every three months.

Larger-scale farms of the type found in Preston can yield £8million a year, much of it ploughed back into more serious crime.

The gangs behind them - often, according to police, from Vietnam or elsewhere in South-East Asia - frequently tamper with the mains supply to get free electricity to light the plants, making them major fire hazards.

Telltale signs include windows and doors being sealed with blinds or sheets and a pungent smell emanating from the property.

The house where the plants were found, named D'Urton Place, has a chequered recent history. It was bought in 2002 by Malaysian-born hospital psychiatrist Dr Karrupiah Selvam who moved in with his new wife Lynda.

However he later discovered she had still been married to her third husband at the time of their wedding and reported her to police, and she was jailed for bigamy two years later.

Dr Selvam sold the property last year to Indian businessman Mohamed Vali for £475,000 but he has not lived there, instead telling neighbours he plans to knock the sprawling mock Tudor property down and build a modern house on the site.

Since then he has been renting the large, detached house - which has a pool and snooker room in two separate outbuildings - for a reported £2,500-a-month.

A neighbour in a beautifully-kept 1920s home nearby said: "I thought 'That's a bit steep at £30,000-a-year', but I didn't know then what they were using it for.

"With the sort of profits they were making from cannabis, the rent would have been a drop in the ocean.

"They didn't care about the place though - the garden is a tip but no-one ever went out there to do anything. They must have been too busy inside.

"This is not the sort of place you would associate with these type of people. Those who live here tend to be well-to-do or retired.

"You wouldn't expect drug runners on a road like this but I suppose you never see anyone so you wouldn't know. All the houses are surrounded by high fences and mature bushes."

A woman whose detached property backs onto the house added: "You would see this infra-red type light at night coming over the fences or through the bushes.

"It was very eerie but everyone just thought it was some sort of security system. No-one thought it could be a cannabis farm in an area like this.

"You never saw the lights in the main house go on or off and it was rare to see anyone there although occasionally a grey car was parked outside."

The Sleepwalking Millionaire

A million dollars seems like a lot of money because, well, it is a lot of money. Thing is, racking up that sum isn't nearly as difficult as most folks imagine. Indeed, after putting just a few sound financial principles into action, you can basically sleepwalk your way to financial independence. Here's a two-step plan (pun intended) for doing just that.

1. Take maximum advantage of your company-sponsored retirement plan. The 401(k) contribution limit for tax year 2007 weighs in at a hefty $15,500. Even if you can't kick in quite that much, do everything you can to contribute enough to take full advantage of your employer's matching contribution, if one is provided. Hey, that's free money -- and because your contributions will be automatic, once you set the wheels in motion, they'll just keep turning without additional work on your part.

And just how far will those wheels take you? Quite a long way. A 40-year-old who kicks in $10,000 each year between now and age 62 will have more than $760,000 if her investments match the S&P 500's historical rate of return: 10.5% annualized.

Not too shabby, eh?

2. Fully fund a Roth IRA and watch the tax man vanish. Impressive though the figure above is, you still have some work to do if you want to be a millionaire by the time retirement rolls around. Enter the Roth IRA. Set one of these puppies up, kick in the maximum each year ($4,000 for 2007), and voila: At the end of 22 years, you'll have nearly $305,000 at 10.5%. And get this: Uncle Sam won't expect a dime on the withdrawals, either.

That deal is sweet indeed, particularly since, unlike with your company-sponsored retirement plan, you're in the driver's seat. You might choose to invest in individual stocks, bonds, or -- if you're looking for a no-muss, no-fuss vehicle -- mutual funds.

Indeed, world-class actively managed funds make great candidates for IRAs because you won't have to pay taxes on the capital gains and dividends they generate. Still, even if you opt for a "no-brainer" lineup of index picks, you can improve your odds of earning a rate better than 10.5% -- and of becoming a sleepwalking millionaire even sooner. For example, the iShares Russell MidCap Value (IWS) ETF -- which counts Dynegy (NYSE: DYN), Level 3 Communications (Nasdaq: LVLT), and Rite Aid (NYSE: RAD) among its holdings -- tracks a benchmark that cranked out an annualized return of 14.91% for the 15 years that ended with March 2007.

Meanwhile, MidCap Value's bigger brother -- the namesake benchmark of iShares Russell 1000 Value Index (IWD) -- has managed "just" 13.04% annualized over that stretch of time. Investors who track this bogey are hitching their wagons to comparatively buttoned-down big boys such as Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) and Kraft (NYSE: KFT). Valero Energy (NYSE: VLO) and Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC) are in the mix, too.

No matter which way you go, the bottom line with Roth IRAs is this: The market is your oyster. Feel free to pick pearls -- and watch 'em grow tax-free.

The Millionaire in Your Carpool

Is there a millionaire in your carpool? Probably not because odds are millionaires don't carpool.

Still...

A growing number of TSP investors now have accounts that are worth well over one million dollars! But if you don't, don't feel bad about it. You haven't done anything wrong and you didn't miss any good investment bets.

The TSP millionaires are all people who transferred money - from outside IRAs and 401(k) plans - into the federal 401(k) plan. In fact at least one person moved $1 million into his account shortly after joining the government. Reason: The safety of the G-fund and the low administrative fees of the federal TSP.

While nobody has yet earned (as opposed to transferred in) $1 million within the TSP, a growing number of federal investors now have accounts worth more than $500,000.

In fact consider this e-mail I got yesterday morning:

Hey, Mike, Didn't you sometimes mention, in your Washington Post column, the TSP balances of people you knew in the Federal Government? That always encouraged me to max out my own contributions. Now, after 17 years with HUD, my own balance is approaching $400,000 in the L 2040 fund. Not bad for a Government worker! Thanks.

Not bad indeed. In fact great! Imagine if the HUD employee had been investing the max from day one of the startup of TSP. Which he couldn't because he joined the government three years after the TSP was launched. Obviously he maxed out, and invested in stocks as opposed to the safer but more conservative alternatives.

The TSP will celebrate its 20th birthday this month. When it started it had only three funds (C, F, and G) and the rules as set by Congress encouraged most people to put most of their money into the super-safe G-fund. For years it took anywhere from two to six weeks to make fund-to-fund transfer. It made day trading tough.

Now the TSP has been liberalized and expanded. New funds (the S and I) were added, along with the Lifecycle L-funds. For a look at how they work, click here.

If there is someone in your office who isn't investing in the TSP (several hundred thousand people fit in to that category,) you may want to send them this column. If they are FERS employees who are not investing, remind them they are refusing a tax-deferred pay raise (the government contribution) of 4 percent.

Postal Buyouts

Our column on rumors-making-the-rounds prompted two readers to say they have heard through the grapevine that the U.S. Postal Service is set to offer buyouts to employees under the CSRS system. Not true says the USPS and the American Postal Workers Union.

Back in the 1990s when the USPS did offer a buyout it turned out to be a disaster. Many skilled employees left and had to be replaced. In effect USPS lured people into retirement (on lifetime pensions) and then had to back-fill their jobs. Bottom line: It is unlikely the USPS will ever again be allowed to offer buyouts. Early retirements, yes. But buyouts: Not likely!

Hawaii has highest millionaire-to-household ratio in the nation

HAWAII has the highest millionaire-to-household ratio in the United States, according to a division of New York-based Phoenix Marketing International.

The winning number, 6.79 percent, might be so high because so many Hawaii households are house-less, but that's another story.

The Phoenix Affluent Marketing Service ranking of U.S. states and the District of Columbia counts the percentage of millionaires in each state.

Hawaii tops the list this year, as it did last year -- and it was at or near the top in the years prior, said David Thompson, vice president and managing director of Phoenix Affluent Marketing.

Some states' rankings , such as California at No. 8, down from No. 6 last year, and New York at 13 this year, down from No. 11 last year, are surprising.

Poor Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway was practically slumming in 2006 with his corporate HQ in Nebraska, which ranked No. 34. It's up to No. 29 this year with a 4.32 percent millionaire-to-household ratio.

Households with greater than $1 million in investable assets are included in the millionaire category, but home values are not included, Thompson said.

Phoenix Affluent included only "highly liquid assets," Thompson said.

"We have a large-scale tracking study that we've been conducting for many years," he said. Using an algorithm to combine its own research, census data and information from Claritas Inc., a California-based marketing research firm, it comes up with the state rankings.

The information "is really just one component of the service we provide," Thompson said. The company also studies "how affluent households behave," from a financial and lifestyle standpoint -- information that is helpful to financial services wanting to market themselves to that elite sector of the population. "We do some business with other players in the luxury space," but its clients are primarily in the financial services and wealth management industries.

Northeastern elite, in their millionaire fantasyland of Cape Cod

"I have to watch my children gasping for air on a bad air day, because somebody gave money to a politician,” environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. once told a crowd of supporters, repeating an attack on the Bush administration and coal-fired power plants that he had earlier issued in Rolling Stone magazine.

Among the many “crimes against nature,” RFK, Jr. listed not only his children’s asthma but also that they could not “enjoy the seminal American experience of fishing locally with their dad and eating their catch” due to the mercury contamination of many waters. Obviously, Robert Jr. is a man who takes the environment personally – although it seems the environment he cares most about is his personal property. Despite fossil fuel’s heavy toll on his family – oh, and the fact he says it is destroying the Earth in general – Kennedy is a leading opponent of plans to build America’s first offshore wind farm.

This project is supported by every major environmentalist group in the country. An official environmental impact study on it could not find a single significant negative result. It would generate 75 percent of the electricity needs of Cape Cod and Massachusetts’ islands without producing any of Kennedy’s mercury, or greenhouse gas.

Yet Robert (and the other Kennedys) can’t find anything good to say about the project. Coincidentally, the “Cape Wind” farm location would be just offshore of the Kennedy family’s compound in Hyannis. The turbines thus constitute a major threat to one of America’s “most important” seashores, a seashore owned by the Kennedys and other super-rich vacationers.

Sure, the air would be cleaner, the Earth safer, the children healthier, the water less threatened by another oil spill from tankers headed to the current power plant – but what about the rich folks’ views?

Utilitarian infrastructure is fine for the barbarians of Sulphur, Louisiana or Pasadena, Texas, but the liberal northeastern elite, in their millionaire fantasyland of Cape Cod, are too precious to be asked to see even the slightest dots on the horizon – which is all the windmills would be, since they’d be six miles offshore.

Protecting’ Nantucket Sound from clean energy

To add the illusion of popular support to the obstructionist cause of a few wealthy whiners, Robert Kennedy, his neighbors, and his uncle, Sen. Ted Kennedy, have organized the “Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound,” a group that in 2004 drew 62 percent of its $4.67 million budget from just 15 donors. Greenpeace calls the alliance “an Orwellian group” of landowners that are only “‘protecting’ Nantucket Sound from clean energy.”

The alliance has a colorful history. Its co-chairman is Bill Koch, a billionaire oil and coal player, who explained his sudden environmentalism thus: ‘’So what? I’m interested in my view and the value of my property on the Cape.’’ An alliance co-founder, Wayne Kurker, is all for Cape development, as long as it expands his marina and defends against giving Hyannis harbor an “industrial look.” Kurker proposes cigarette boat races in the sound and he wants them protected from windmill noise.

Another co-founder, John Donelan, just resigned from the alliance in disgrace after paying the Cape Wind project defamation damages for issuing forged press releases. The group has also distributed fliers showing Cape Wind windmills close to shore and at triple their actual size, created computer images that misrepresent the project, and submitted a petition to the state containing thousands of fake signatures. Robert Kennedy gave the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound a “Soundkeeper” award for its work.

But the real work to stop Cape Wind is behind the scenes in Congress, where Sen. Kennedy has devised a series of Cape Wind poison pills. The latest is a deal, apparently cut with Alaskan Republican Don Young, to place a measure into an appropriations bill banning windmills within 1.5 miles of a ferry route. Even the New York Times saw through the ruse and issued a February editorial condemning it.

When it comes to the sacrifices that common folk must make to end our “dependence” on fossil fuel, no hardship is too great. Higher energy prices, increased regulation, and direct taxation are just a start. But when it comes to the spoiled Cape windbags, no hardship is too small that they won’t oppose it with all their money and power. The public waters must be protected as their private playground.

Why millionaire wants a £15,000-a-year job

The official watchdog shredded West Dunbartonshire Council for poor management, and Labour Party headquarters purged its members over recent months.

Now, Labour's answer to its troubles in West Dunbartonshire Council is to put up a member of the exclusive club of Leading Women Enterpreneurs of the World for election on May 3, in the hope that her skills can help turn around the political and social problems in one of the most deprived parts of Scotland.

Ann Rushforth grew up in Haldane, near Balloch, where she is standing for a council seat. She intends to remain in control at the headquar- ters of her business on the banks of the Clyde at Old Kilpatrick, despite the challenge of merging her £11m turnover business with another company.

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But there's a catch. Her business is in one of the more controversial areas of private provision for public services, providing up to 1000 agency nurses per week to hospitals, care homes and prisons.

Labour has previously pledged to stop the use of agency nurses, believing the profits being made by the agencies were a drain on NHS finances.

Mrs Rushforth, a nurse who set up ScotNursing 20 years ago, argues the sector has been much misunderstood.

She has sought to work with the NHS through contracts, providing a route into part-time and flexible work for nurses who would not want to go full-time or into a staff job.

But that has not stopped her opponents claiming a conflict of interest. SNP group leader Craig McLaughlin asked why a multi-millionaire would want to be a £15,000 a year councillor. "Labour is trying to pull in some big guns from outside to salvage its poor reputation in the area," he added.

Mrs Rushforth said she had contracts with most councils in Scotland, adding: "If there was any conflict of interest, I would just step back from having anything to do with a decision."

The 48-year-old mother-of-three, who is married to a rail industry executive, has been a Labour Party member in East Dunbartonshire for more than 10 years. "I've always thought I would like to be more involved in politics," she says. "This is earlier than I'd planned, but because we've had issues in West Dunbartonshire, this was the time to step forward."

That does not extend to parliamentary politics yet: "If people feel what I have to contribute is what they want, that may be something for the future, but for now, my commitment is West Dunbartonshire, and the first thing is to get elected."

Mrs Rushworth denies knowing much about the internal party warfare that saw the West Dunbartonshire group split.

"I was not involved in the detail of what happened, but for a party that can run the country effectively, we must be able to run councils effectively and fairly."

UK millionaire funds construction of home in illegal outpost

British Jewish millionaire Cyril Stein last week flew from London to Israel to attend a house warming party in in Givat Harel, an illegal outpost in the West Bank, Ynetnews reported. Stein, 79, was a guest of honor as he funded the house's construction. Stein does not want to give up his lavish lifestyle to live in the outpost, so a family from Givat Harel purchased the house and the money will be redirected to new construction projects for settlers. It is no secret that rich Diaspora Jews doll out tens of thousands of dollars each year either to purchase homes from Palestinians in east Jerusalem and the West Bank or to fund settler construction projects there.Donors include Yosef Yitzhak Gutnik of Australia and Irvin Moscovich of the US, know for being keen on purchasing homes in east Jerusalem and Hebron. The Yesha council recently launched a campaign aimed at encouraging American Jews to buy West Bank homes in government-approved construction projects.Stein's investment however is risky. The government deems unapproved constructions in settler outposts illegal and his house in Givat Harel may be destroyed should the government go ahead with plans to uproot all illegal outposts in the West Bank. As Stein is unwilling to abandon his posh house in London to live in the outpost, a settler family from Givat Harel purchased the house and the money will be invested in new construction projects for settlers.