If ever there was ever an explanation needed as to why closing bingo halls was bad for the local community – this is it.
Unbeknownst to Yorkshire based bingo fans, the abandoned Empire Bingo building in Doncaster held a jackpot worth over £2.1 million, but it wasn’t the sort of prize you would want to win.
Two incredibly audacious criminals had been using the disused bingo hall to grow copious amounts of cannabis, a class B illegal drug, using sophisticated equipment to keep the plants watered and correctly heated.
When police broke into the building in May this year they found a full house unlike any that had been there before – it is unknown whether or not PC 49 was present.
2,000 Plants
Are you ready for a game of how many bingo calls can I get into one blog post? Good – here goes.
The drug dealers were pretty quick off the mark since the bingo club only closed in March of 2020 due to the COVID pandemic, and it can be assumed that no one popped in to ‘clean the floor’ in that time.
The police used a huge saw to get through the metal shutters put in place to protect the building – presumably they didn’t think it was a good idea to ‘knock at the door’.
Inside, they found over 2,000 cannabis plants being grown, which is way more than anyone could claim for medicinal purposes. No one needs 2,000 plants due to ‘doctor’s orders’.
And it was ‘unlucky for some’ as the two criminals who had been ‘up to tricks’ were arrested – probably having been told to ‘hit the floor’ first.
How many terrible bingo call jokes did I manage to crowbar in there – about ‘half a dozen’?
Power Cuts
The police were alerted to the farm by random power outages that had been affecting local residents.
It was worked out that these were down to a number of cannabis farms in the area, and the bingo hall was the biggest of the lot with a capacity of over 1,000 players in the glory days.
The organised criminals who had taken residence in the old Empire Bingo building were using high powered lamps to create the perfect conditions for the plants to grow, but had bypassed the electricity system in order to do it.
If they had just found a way to pay the electricity bill like the rest of us they might have gotten away with it.
Of course this isn’t really funny, and it’s not even the first time a bingo hall has been used in this way, but what a surprise old regulars of the Empire must have got when they heard about it!