It was dubbed the BHP of cannabis cultivation.

An interstate grow house syndicate hidden in plain sight, run via a seemingly legitimate garden supplies warehouse in Canning Vale and producing dozens of kilos of dope a week.

At its core was Sydney businessman Van Thao Nguyen, 34, who on paper was the director of a minibus company running sightseeing tours to the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Blue Mountains, tulip fields and cherry farms.

In Perth, however, he had his sights set on an entirely different crop.

Using fake IDs in the names of Le and Tran, he leased one house after another in Perth’s southern suburbs, and ordered his minions to establish identical hydroponic set-ups.

Ospringe Street, Bedford Street, Meteor Street, Eileen Street, Camberwell Street, Terence Street. All had $30,000 or more spent on them to install power transformers, carbon fans, lighting and plumbing in multiple rooms.

Mr Nguyen based himself at Seddon Way in Canning Vale — it became the head office of the extraordinary enterprise — and then watched it grow.

“This was the BHP of grow houses,” District Court judge Laurie Levy said.

Camera Icon The damage to a rental property in Beckenham that was used as a grow house. Credit: Supplied

“The number of factories operating in the sense of the grow houses being factories, each one identically converted, each one producing from four or five grow rooms a large number of plants — it’s the top end of the business enterprise of cultivation. I don’t know that I've ever seen anything of this nature.”

Given Judge Levy used to be the silk of choice among WA’s “fraternity of motorcycle enthusiasts”, that is quite the statement.

During a trial, and later sentencing hearing last week, the sprawling sophistication of Perth’s cannabis grow house industry was again laid bare.

With Van Thao Nguyen doing the leasing, his housemate Van Thanh Hoang, 49, was a partner in crime. Hoang’s actual partner, a woman called Thi Hue Nguyen, ran the business behind the business.

From mid-2016 TTN Garden Supplies was an ASIC-registered firm based out of an industrial unit in Tacoma Circuit, Canning Vale.

Camera Icon Beckenham grow house damage and crop - Meteor Street Credit: supplied

“TTN Garden Supplies was not only a garden supply warehouse but it was a warehouse set up for providing the hardware, the power boards, all of the other growing equipment, the ducts for the air and so forth — which was just phenomenal, quite frankly,” Judge Levy said.

Supply receipts worth more than $100,000 were found during police investigations. It was only when unknowing landlords began inspecting their properties in late 2016 that the massive enterprise began to crumble.

When Lyn Merrington inspected her Ospringe Street house, she found thousands of frogs in her pool and a locked room that had been used for growing.

Weeks later, on Christmas Eve 2016, Fei Feng Lin inspected his place in Sandon Road, Thornlie. “There was a cannabis plantation everywhere. The whole place was ... just reefer,” he told the court. Ninety-nine cannabis plants was the total.

The net was closing in.

On January 16, a police raid on the Bedford Street address turned up more than 12kg of cannabis, worth more than $100,000.

When that news filtered through to the gang, panic set in.

A huge crop in Haven Place was hastily stripped and stuffed in a van, intended for the Red Hill tip. But it never got there. It was still sitting outside the Seddon Way address, stuffed into bin bags inside a van, when police came knocking the next day.

Along with the 50kg of cannabis were documentary links to other properties, along with thousands in cash and a $17,000 Rolex watch. At Meteor Street for example, the house had been gutted to accommodate 127 cannabis plants.

Camera Icon Beckenham landlord Kai Kong, who had his house trashed by Nguyen’s criminal syndicate. Credit: The West Australian, Mogens Johansen.

“There was so much damage, the power had been bypassed, there was water on the floors, they had got rid of the carpets,” landlord Kai Kong later told The West Australian.

“Whoever was behind the overall organisation was running an extremely sophisticated and expensive criminal organisation,” Judge Levy said, as he jailed Van Thao Nguyen for five years for being a “central and instrumental figure”.

Since then the specialist WA Police squad — Taskforce Silverdrift — set up to tackle grow houses have charged more than 130 people, found more than 30,000 cannabis plants, 708kg of cannabis head and seized $1.7 million in cash.