But if you rent the house and the landlord can reasonably claim he didn’t know you were using it to cultivate a felony, he gets to keep his property and you go to jail free of that karma, anyway.

So Ben and Chon went looking to rent a house that

Had a basement

Wasn’t too close to neighbors

Wasn’t anywhere near a school or a playground (maximum sentencing under the guidelines)

Or a police station

Could be rewired

And where the landlord wouldn’t be coming around every twenty-eight minutes

Or ever.

This narrowed down the possibilities.

You can’t just put an ad in the paper stating your requirements, because the police will be happy to rent to you-they have some of these houses in stock You ain’t gonna find it on Craigslist

(Well, not that Craigslist-see below.)

You need

A Realtor.

23

Fortunately, this was Orange County.

(Before the real estate market flopped like a European soccer player.)

Back in those halcyon “finance and flip” days, you could walk into any upscale OC hotel (the Ritz, St. Regis, or Montage) and drop something-anything-in the lobby Chances are, whoever picked it up would have been a real estate agent.

Or you could drive up (or down, didn’t matter) the PCH and rear-end your ride into any BMW, Mercedes, Lexus, Audi, Porsche, Land Rover, Land Cruiser-actually any vehicle not a Mexican gardening truck. Just prison-shower that ride and the odds were that the person who got out of the other vehicle would have handed you a business card before the insurance information.