Pubdate: Sat, 08 Jun 2013
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2013 The New York Times Company
Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/lettertoeditor.html
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Authors: Jenny Anderson and Alan Feuer

SHE RODE HORSES, DROVE AN S.U.V. AND, THE AUTHORITIES SAY, FARMED MARIJUANA

There were many mornings, the authorities say, when a gray Mercedes 
GL4 S.U.V. pulled out from a driveway on a wooded street in 
Scarsdale, N.Y., and cruised through the Bronx before ending up 
inside an ugly, brick-face building in an industrial stretch of Queens.

The driver, they say, was Andrea Sanderlin, a 45-year-old suburban 
single mother. Ms. Sanderlin, living with two young children and 
having a fondness for riding horses, seemed not all uncommon for a 
resident of her fashionable Westchester County community about 20 
miles from Midtown Manhattan. She went to dinner parties and lived in 
a luxurious Spanish mansion. She owned three cars and had recently 
hired a nanny. She worked, or so she told acquaintances, in interior design.

Why, then, had she been seen, according to the authorities, making 
large cash purchases at a garden store in Brooklyn? And why did she 
travel so frequently from her sprawling home to an urban no man's 
land of metal security grates and cracked sidewalks on 57th Drive?

According to a federal complaint, Ms. Sanderlin was a marijuana 
dealer and inside the brick-face building was her growing operation: 
a sophisticated setup with "state-of-the-art lighting, irrigation and 
ventilation systems." When she was arrested on May 20, a team of 
federal agents found nearly 3,000 marijuana plants there. That same 
day, court papers say, her nanny was caught with a leather bag 
stuffed with bundles of rubber-banded cash.

The story - a suburban mom with a double life as a dealer in 
high-grade marijuana - is familiar to any viewer of the Showtime 
program "Weeds." Ms. Sanderlin, however, unlike the fictional 
television character, is now being held in lieu of bail in federal 
detention in Brooklyn. She is charged with narcotics trafficking, 
which carries a minimum sentence of 10 years in prison. She has 
pleaded not guilty.

Her lawyer, Joel Winograd, said that he was trying to arrange bail 
and that she was a "strong lady."

As a child living with her mother and stepfather in Virginia Beach, 
Ms. Sanderlin, who was then Andrea Schmalz, "was a problem kid," said 
a former close friend, who, like many of those who knew her, spoke on 
the condition of anonymity. "She would run away when she was smoking 
pot, when she was 13 or 14," according to the friend. "We smoked a 
lot of pot together."

She went to live with her father in Iowa. In an interview with The 
Journal News, Ms. Sanderlin's father, Wesley Schmalz, said he had not 
seen his daughter in nearly 20 years. "She got herself thrown out of 
high school," Bettendorf High School in Bettendorf, Iowa, Mr. Schmalz 
said. "I told her, 'Well, you got to get a job.' Instead, she left 
and went to live with my ex-wife and that was kind of it."

Around age 16, Ms. Sanderlin got pregnant, said another person who 
knew her. She married the father, William Sanderlin, and gave birth 
to a boy named Jason. But the marriage was unhappy and ended in 
divorce after a several years.

It is unclear when Ms. Sanderlin moved to New York but, according to 
real estate records, she lived in more than a dozen places in New 
York City throughout the 1990s. Her former friend from Virginia Beach 
said that once she left, "no one heard from her."

In 1999, the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance issued 
a tax warrant and lien in the name of Andrea K. Sanderlin, enabling 
officials to seize her bank accounts and garnish her wages to recoup 
more than $21,000 in unpaid taxes, according to state records. But by 
2003, the debt was repaid and the case was closed.

This past April, Ms. Sanderlin came to the attention of the Drug 
Enforcement Administration, which learned about the marijuana 
business after arresting five men on charges of running a similar 
operation in the city. One of the men agreed to cooperate with 
federal officials and told them that a woman named Andi who lived in 
Scarsdale and drove a Mercedes S.U.V. had given him and his fellow 
dealers "marijuana seedling plants and large amounts of cash," 
according to a criminal affidavit. The informer also said he had seen 
Ms. Sanderlin at a garden store in Brooklyn making purchases, in 
cash, of "items that could be used in a marijuana grow house."

Shortly after, federal agents began to stake out Ms. Sanderlin's 
house on Saxon Woods Road in Scarsdale, a $13,000-a-month rental 
adjacent to a golf course. The agents also discovered four 
Consolidated Edison accounts in Ms. Sanderlin's name with varying 
addresses. One was connected to a company called Fantastic 
Enterprises, on 57th Drive in Maspeth, Queens, and included a recent 
bill, that had been paid in cash, for $9,000 a month. "Con Edison 
representatives have confirmed that the amount of electricity is 
unusually high," court papers said.

On May 20, a team of D.E.A. agents followed Ms. Sanderlin from 
Scarsdale across the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge to the warehouse in 
Maspeth. There they found "a sophisticated operation to grow and 
process marijuana," according to the complaint. Ms. Sanderlin was arrested.

A separate team of agents, meanwhile, watched Ms. Sanderlin's nanny 
enter the house in Scarsdale. When the nanny left, the agents 
approached her and found her in possession of $7,900 in cash. Another 
$6,000 and books about laundering money and growing marijuana were 
found inside the house, court papers said.

Last year, a user of the Web site Weedportal who called herself 
Andi68 (Ms. Sanderlin was born in 1968) posted a question: "My plants 
are 6 weeks into vegging and the leaves are curling and going brown, 
they seem to be shrinking. Hve you any suggestions to help and also 
what amount of nutrients should i be using at this stage, i am 
currently using canna a and b."

Despite all this, some who have known Ms. Sanderlin said she fit in 
well in the Westchester suburbs. In January, for example, she bought 
a horse, a Friesian trotter, then several months later sold it when 
she realized it was not good for jumping.

She and her 13-year-old daughter had just begun taking riding 
lessons; the nanny and younger child would go along to watch.

"She blended in perfectly," said Scott Trater, who manages the Twin 
Lakes Farm stables in Bronxville, where Ms. Sanderlin briefly kept 
the Friesian trotter. "She was just like every other mom that was here."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom