Three men have been jailed for running a vast underground cannabis farm in a former nuclear bunker in Wiltshire, staffed by young Vietnamese workers held in slave-like conditions. Martin Fillery, 45, Ross Winter, 30, and Plamen Nguyen, 27, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to produce class B drugs and abstracting electricity. Fillery was sentenced to eight years, while Winter and Nguyen each received five years.
The farm was capable of producing £2m of cannabis every year, with £650,000 of electricity siphoned off illegally from a nearby pylon. Police found 4,400 plants, of which 643kg had to be incinerated. The bunker, built in the 1980s to protect government officials during a nuclear attack, had been decommissioned and sold in the 1990s. Fillery leased it in 2013, initially storing TV memorabilia including Daleks before converting it into a cannabis farm.
Detective Inspector Paul Franklin said the Vietnamese men working there were enslaved and extremely scared. 'It was slavery. There’s no doubt. They weren’t there by choice. They were trafficked from Vietnam, they were placed there and told to work,' he said. However, slavery charges were dropped after the men refused to cooperate, and three were deported for immigration offences while one claimed asylum.
The court heard that workers were locked behind a five-inch door strong enough to withstand a nuclear explosion. They slept on mattresses in the bunker's sickbay and had limited fresh air. Food and water supplies to last weeks were stored in the kitchen. The diverted electricity created a significant fire risk, particularly dangerous given the men were locked in.
Police were tipped off by dog walkers who noticed a strange smell. They arrested the trio when they arrived by van in the middle of the night. Anti-trafficking organisations expressed disappointment that slavery charges were dropped despite investigators' certainty of enslavement.
