Landlord who tried to blame tenant jailed for cannabis production

A landlord has been jailed for four years for cultivating cannabis.

Sixty-year-old James Sullivan was thought to have been overseeing the cultivation of a huge crop of the Class B drug, worth an estimated £70,000, in one of his properties in the south west.

The crop was discovered by passing police officers, who managed to sniff out the drugs from the street outside.

One force expert said that odour from the plants was almost ‘eye-watering’, the Plymouth Herald reports.

The defendant denied all knowledge of the drug crop, claiming he couldn’t smell a thing and that he couldn’t even grow a tomato.

During the trial, the landlord attempted to blame one of his tenants, Joe Brown, whom he said rented the basement and a ground floor bedroom.

The court heard that Brown never paid rent and vanished.

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