In many ways, what happened in Adelanto, California, is an epitomic American tale: a failing prison town wanted to turn itself into a place of prosperity so it turned to another of the country’s greatest commodities, marijuana. In other ways, however, the story of Adelanto is unique, full of twists you would never see coming, and people who defy their own self-curated stereotypes.

In the new podcast series Dreamtown: Adelanto by Crooked Media, reporter David Weinberg delves into what happened when a newcomer on the local council helped the city legalize weed production, and documents the fallout that happened next.  

In the middle of the Mojave Desert, on land indigenous to the Vanyume tribe, sits the small city of Adelanto. Home to around 32,000 people, its name comes from the Spanish for ‘advanced’. For many years, this was fitting—the town was founded in 1915 by Earl Homes Richardson, the inventor of the Hotpoint Electric Iron. Covered in glorious orchards nourished by the nearby Mojave River, Adelanto was designed to be a retreat for the recuperation of war veterans, a place of growth and abundance.

But it turned out vets didn’t want to live so far out in the desert, and the river began to dry up, leaving Adelanto less fertile and desirable than ever. When the Great Depression came, decimating the city further, it attempted its first significant change, one that in many ways foreshadows the story at the heart of Dreamtown. It became home to an army base and then, in the eighties, California took advantage of the War on Drugs by building numerous prisons across the state. By 2008, Adelanto had three such institutions, one later becoming the largest immigration detention center in the state.

For a while, this kept the city afloat, but it did little more than that and people were becoming increasingly fed up. So, in 2014 someone decided to try and do something about it. A quirky character by the name of John “Bug” Woodward, a long-haired, handlebar-mustached man who dons a MAGA hat in his Twitter profile picture, ran for city council on the promise of legalizing marijuana in the city. He won, and Adelanto indeed became the first city in Southern California to legalize weed. 

David Weinberg was interested in this new development and went to Adelanto to do some short feature stories. “I interviewed all these city council members … and then within a year, some of the people I’d interviewed were arrested,” he says. 

At first, things seemed to be going well—as soon as the legislation had passed, tinted Bentleys were seen driving around town, scoping out potential assets, and celebrity investors including Bob Marley’s son Ky-Mani Marley, B-Real and Tommy Chong amongst others were showing interest. Land was cheap, profit margins were enormous, and the city’s prosperity looked set to reach unprecedented highs.

All this glamor was offset, however, by the rudimentary and often childish nature of Adelanto city council meetings. In one podcast episode, we hear elected officials arguing with a man dressed in full clown getup. This isn’t a one-off; he attends every council meeting in the same outfit. The council start berating him, saying they can’t take him seriously. It feels like a fair criticism, but then, with sincerity, one member also says: “If a man comes in here dressed in a cowboy outfit, I can buy that. But not a clown.” There’s audible agreement on this, then discussion unravels into whether it would be fair to pass a dress code that discriminated against a professional clown who came to a meeting following a day’s honest work.

It’s these comedic moments that break up an otherwise serious story of errant authority and power gone awry. Sprinkled into his storytelling, these moments guide our understanding of small-town politics and the eyebrow-raising nature of local government. In doing this, Weinberg creates the perfect backdrop to the astonishing tale of corruption that follows.

Following the initial burst of investment prospects in Adelanto, everything came crashing down. Suspicions of corruption were raised almost right away. They related to council members seemingly taking bribes to pass marijuana legalization zoning bills to benefit certain individuals and businesses. After a sting operation, the FBI arrested council member and pastor Jermaine Wright in November 2017 on charges of bribery and attempted arson. He was found guilty after a trial in June 2022 and sentenced to five years in federal prison. 

Of all the individuals involved, his case is the most extraordinary: he ended up essentially snitching on himself to an FBI informant after he’d been caught out trying to commit insurance fraud and, most oddly, requesting to have himself beaten up to the point of amnesia so he wouldn’t have to appear in court. However, at the start of the series, we hear Wright in recordings made before his arrest, speaking of his moral struggle over voting in favor of weed legalization due to his family background and role as a pastor. He sounds sincere, calm, measured. That he then morphs into the central character in what Weinberg describes as “a plot pulled from the pages of a Cohen brothers movie” is a stroke of ironic genius.

Wright wasn’t the only official arrested. In 2021, the FBI arrested the former mayor of Adelanto, Richard Allen Kerr, on charges of bribery and wire fraud. Featured in the podcast is renowned weed reporter Amanda Chicago Lewis. An expert in weed cultivation, when asked whether what happened in Adelanto was unique her reply was simple: no, this kind of corruption happens everywhere, all the time. The difference, she concluded, was that they got caught. “In Adelanto, it was egregiously dumb people doing the corruption.”

The reason the corruption happens at all is in part due to the federal illegality of weed cultivation. Weinberg explains that if you went to the city council to ask for a permit to open a business and were offered to bribe the councilperson, you could reasonably report this to the FBI. But when it comes to weed, no one wants to get the FBI involved. “It’s ripe for this kind of corruption,” he says, “and city leaders know this.” 

His assumption about what happened in Adelanto is that the city manager most likely had a conscience, saw what was happening around him and tipped off the Feds. “You kind of need these whistleblowers in local government, because that city manager could have taken a cut, but he stood up for what was right and then ultimately got fired,” Weinberg says.

Although Dreamtown is about political corruption, this podcast also tells the story of someone else, someone we’re introduced to early on without realizing until a few episodes in that she’s the real star of the show. After Wright was arrested and automatically lost his place on the council, long-time Adelanto resident Stevevonna Evans decided to run for his seat.

She was already suspicious of power, having had her children wrongfully taken away from her twice by Child and Family Services. It was a traumatizing moment in her life, but it was also galvanizing. “She stopped trusting these institutions around her,” Weinberg says, and that distrust emboldened rather than disempowered her. After sensing something shady was going on in the council, her determination to weed out corruption and provide better representation for Adelanto residents was firm. In 2018, she won the seat, and in many ways, this podcast is her story of trying to fix a broken system.

At the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, where Dreamtown premiered in the audio section, Evans spoke candidly about her take on the city she calls home and the people who ran it, as she does on the podcast. She’s funny, sharp, outspoken and makes you instantly want to be her best friend. In a world where politicians rarely represent the best interests of their constituents, and particularly against the corruption that took place in Adelanto, Evans stands out as an honest and intentional powerhouse dedicated to improving the lives of her community. This is a podcast about what happened when a city council took on the legal marijuana industry and got burnt, but it’s also a story about hope for a better future, and how we can all be part of making that happen.

Dreamtown: Adelanto is available to listen on all podcast platforms.

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Authorities and advocates say that helping these victims isn’t always a simple task, as many don’t admit to being trafficked or may be unwilling to work with law enforcement to bring down the smugglers and dealers who put them in their positions.

Back in May, nine suspected victims were arrested in an early morning raid in California’s Mojave Desert. All of the workers on the secluded farm were Chinese nationals who traveled from New York, attempting to flee as law enforcement executed a search warrant.

NBC News reviewed the job listings, some of which didn’t mention specific salaries or noting that salary could be negotiated in person. One woman told the outlet via translator that she found the job on a Chinese website. Another worker named Jin said, “I have no money. What hope do I have?”

All of the workers also said they previously worked in the restaurant industry before heading West, and several mentioned their hopes to return to relatives on the East Coast. None of the workers had been paid for their labor and lived in cramped, uncomfortable trailers near the illegal grow operation.

One worker named Fang said she left her 8-year-old son behind in New York and described her living conditions, a trailer where she slept, as “very dirty, it’s very messy.” She also said that her employers had been dishonest about what the work would actually entail.

The workers were ultimately charged with misdemeanors and later released. They had tended to 25 greenhouses, where about 1,000 pound of processed cannabis was recovered, according to law enforcement. Officials also said that the facility likely generated $8 million in quarterly revenue. While none of the workers claimed they had been trafficked, law enforcement officials suspected otherwise.

Sergeant James Roy of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department said it’s common for people who have been trafficked to tell officials they feel safe and avoid giving information on their traffickers due to fear of their own safety.

Attorney Xiaosheng Huang represents the trafficking victims and said his clients were exploited during the pandemic after losing their jobs in the hospitality industry, ultimately seeking employment anywhere they could find it.

Law enforcement officials in San Bernardino County have shut down nearly 1,100 illegal grow locations and more than 8,600 greenhouses in the last year, according to the sheriff’s department. Other investigations in Los Angeles and Riverside Counties pushed illegal cannabis seizures in the last year to more than $1 billion, according to a statement from the California Department of Cannabis Control.

In the statement, Director of the Department of Cannabis Control Nicole Elliot said, “This important milestone was reached through close collaboration with local, state, and federal partners and furthers California’s efforts to go after activities that harm communities and the environment, including water theft, threats of violence, elder abuse, and human trafficking to name a few.”

One of the reasons for California’s recreational cannabis program was to curb the black market sales and weaken the grip of drug cartels on the plant. Over the years, high taxes and costs of entry have created instability within the legal market, leaving room for illicit growers and dealers to swoop in with cheaper prices.

Earlier this year, Governor Gavin Newsom eliminated the cultivation tax on growers, though counties can still impose their own cultivation taxes. However, many cannabis professionals believe the move isn’t a long-term solution, doesn’t go far enough to elevate social equity measures, or plainly that the move came too late.

With market saturation and higher supply than demand, the profits cultivators can expect from a pound of wholesale flower have dropped from about $1,000 one year ago to $300 or lower today.

California has consistently been ahead of the action with its finger on the pulse of the cannabis market, as the first U.S. state to legalize medical cannabis with a number of regions heavily tied to cannabis culture. What exactly it will take to eliminate some of these continuous issues within the legal and black market industries remains to be seen.

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