If you don’t remember.
http://www.onmarijuana.com/2007/04/03/the-great-tennessee-marijuana-cave/
Sold for *cheap
http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071209/NEWS01/712090417
Roth Käse USA Ltd., a Wisconsin-based maker of European-style cheeses, offered the highest bid Saturday at a court-ordered auction. The company bid $285,000 for seven hilly acres and the improved cave below, which for several years was home to a clandestine marijuana farm.
The company’s representative at the auction, Chuck Olson, offered little comment on the purchase after the auctioneer named him the winner.
“They’ll make an announcement shortly,” said Olson, who smiled widely after a half-hour bidding volley between him and another would-be buyer. Asked what the company intends to do with the property, he replied coyly, “Make money.”
Unlike the previous owner’s business, Olson said, the cave’s new enterprise will be entirely legal “in a tasty way.”
The auction was held in what had been one of the underground growing rooms in a previous marijuana operation. About 170 people, the majority of them spectators, came to watch the court-ordered sale unfold about 90 feet below ground.
“It’s very unusual to be selling a cave like this. This thing is built just like it’s supposed to be. This man was a perfectionist, everything had to be right,” said auctioneer Pete Scruggs of J.T. Shrum Auction and Realty. He was referring to Fred Strunk, the now-jailed entrepreneur who, according to authorities, was the mastermind of transforming the cave into a subterranean pot farm.
“They say he spent $750,000. Everything was just perfect. Look at the craftsmanship. A man this smart, who could do all this, he could have made an honest living, but I guess it must have been the thrill, I don’t know,” Scruggs philosophized to the audience before launching into his auctioneer’s banter. Strunk’s pot-growing operation was estimated to have brought in millions of dollars.
Opening bid confuses
Scruggs asked for a half-million-dollar bid to start, but instead, a bidder near the back offered “four fifty.” That raised a number of eyebrows, including Olson sitting near the front.
After unsuccessfully trying to cajole a counteroffer from the crowd, Scruggs was in his “going once, going twice” mode when another member of the auction team told him the bidder thought he was asking for $450.
“We got us a whole lot different ball game,” Scruggs replied.
When bidding restarted, three groups started out at $100,000. After the price moved over the $200,000 mark, one group dropped out, leaving only Olson and a trio of men in the back of the cave. After a lengthy discussion the trio bowed out at $285,000.
Proceeds from the sale of the cave will go to the 15th Judicial District Drug Task Force, which confiscated the property after Strunk’s illegal enterprise was shut down.
“We’ll use the money to fund our undercover work,” said Mike “Sarge” Thompson of the drug- fighting unit.
Thompson said the auction sales price was not disappointing.
“It’s right in the middle of what we thought it might sell for. I think we did pretty good.”