3 Men Tied To Illegal Marijuana Farm In Hennessey Indicted By Grand Jury

Three men are indicted for their role in an illegal marijuana farm near Hennessey where four workers were massacred last year. The state’s Multi-County Grand Jury announced the indictments on Friday.

Kevin Paul Pham, 47, and Alex Shiang Lin Chang, 48, are accused of paying Richard Gregorio Ignacio, 36, to serve as a straw owner.

Related: Kingfisher County Deputies Release Bodycam Footage From Quadruple Homicide At Marijuana Grow Farm

Pham’s attorney in a civil forfeiture case, Tom Cummings, says the indictment is a one-sided proceeding.

“Kevin Pham, he is not any kind of criminal kingpin,” said Cummings.

Instead, Cummings says his client is merely a bookkeeper.

“There's just no there, there, in any of this,” Cummings said. “He is not the kind of person that needs to be standing trial on criminal charges.”

A multi-county Grand Jury disagrees, indicting the three for allegedly helping out-of-state people get commercial licenses to grow medical marijuana, including the one in Kingfisher County.

“They all had different roles in helping create fraudulent “straw” owner structures in order to provide licenses for individuals to allow a business to operate that should never have gotten a license in the first place,” said Mark Woodward with the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation.

Woodward says OBN jumped on the case following the execution-style murder of four workers at the illegal farm near Hennessey. A former worker, Wu Chen, was arrested in Florida in connection to those murders.

“As we started to look into his activities, we were able to trace an individual that was listed as the owner of farm in Kingfisher where the homicide took place and that person was also on nine farms in total,” Woodward said. 

Woodward says the bureau has shut down hundreds of similar farms where “straw owners” are found to be a legitimate front to illegal grow operations.

“They started putting people down as a 75 percent owner who would pass the background and meet the residency requirement, but they have zero involvement in the farm. So it's 100 percent fraud using a straw owner to prop up as the owner of a farm that they know nothing about in exchange they get a small fee,” Woodward said.

Meanwhile, Cummings maintains his client’s innocence.

“There are plenty of people in Oklahoma I am sure who are richly deserving of being indicted for some kind of drug crimes or drug trafficking,” Cummings said. “Kevin Pham is not one of those people.”