Scarsdale Mom Busted For $3 Million Weed Ring
Before you go thinking that Showtime’s “Weeds” can only happen on television, take a look at wealthy Scarsdale’s, N.Y.’s Andrea Sanderlin. The divorced 45-year-old mother of two girls and accomplished equestrian was recently found to have almost 3,000 pot plants stowed away in a warehouse in Queens, being nourished by expensive equipment.
So stealthy that Sanderlin’s maid didn’t even know what she did for a living, the woman known as “Andi” to her business associates racked up massive Con Edison bills from various locations, paying up to $9,000 a month at the warehouse that was finally raided May 20 in Queens, resulting in Sanderlin’s arrest. The DEA found such steep bills matched up with hydroponic marijuana growing operations.
According to the Smoking Gun, if found guilty of narcotics trafficking, Sanderlin will face a minimum of 10 years in prison—not what you’d expect from a “soccer mom” type who kept to herself, lived in the suburbs and was described as a “full-time mom” by her lawyer, Joel Winograd (which perhaps sounds more like a cover-up).
Federal agents found $6,000 in cash in Sanderlin’s Westchester County home, as well as plenty of DIY books on money laundering and pot growing, according to this US District Court Filing. Agents seized even more cash from Sanderlin’s nanny, who had been planning to deliver $7,900 to Sanderlin’s boyfriend, the father of her youngest daughter.
Sanderlin’s business, which she called “Fantastic Enterprises, Inc.,” got her locked up for now at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. The investigation leading to Sanderlin’s arrest started when the feds caught up with her friend, Stephen Haberstroh, also of Scarsdale and the head of a different hydroponic growing operation with warehouses operating out of NYC.
The moral of the story is if you want hydroponic marijuana grown using state-of-the-art equipment, hit up the ritzy town of Scarsdale and find the least suspecting soccer mom to buy it from.
