Last Thursday night I was at a Town Hall meeting when some friends of mine who live around the corner from my Airbnb came in and immediately came over to me and asked if I knew what was happening at my Airbnb house.
Turns out, this quiet, respectable little neighborhood was harboring TWO drug “chop houses” of a major drug cartel and the DEA and FBI were there busting them. One of the houses was two doors north of our Airbnb house, and the other is two doors south of our Airbnb house.
I had a guest staying at the house. I called her immediately to see if she was OK and to offer to put her up somewhere else. She was fine with staying put.
I had new guests arriving on Friday so I kept watching the news and the paper for info on the bust so I could give the facts of the situation to the arriving guests and give them the option to cancel if they didn’t feel safe. Nothing was said about it on the news Thursday evening or in the paper on Friday so Friday around noon my hubby called the Chief of Police (he had the Chief’s private cell phone number).
Here’s the full scoop. This drug cartel was operating out of Dayton Ohio. They had their own trucking company. They made runs to Arizona to pick up the shipments, then brought the drugs back to Dayton and divided them into smaller shipments. The cartel members in our neighborhood were bringing some of the drugs back to our little town and dividing them up into smaller packages for distribution to the street level dealers.
Nothing has been on the news about it yet because, although the operation in out town has been completely shut down and everyone arrested here, they are still shutting down the operation in other Midwest cities. The houses have been thoroughly checked out and remediated. There is no crime scene tape up or anything to show that anything has happened out of the ordinary.
I told the weekend guests and they decided to cancel and I helped them to get a full refund from Airbnb. I got another booking from a previous guest almost immediately that ended up taking the dates I lost to the canceling guests. I told the previous guest about the drug bust and she was ok staying there. This weekend I have new guests arriving. I told them about the drug bust and they are ok with staying.
The neighborhood is a very quiet one with lots of retirees who have lived there for 40-50 years, and a few families with children…but it is mostly retirees. As I understand it, that’s part of the reason the cartel located there…no one would expect to find drugs being handled in a quiet, respectable neighborhood like that one.
Here’s my dilemma. At what point will it be OK to quit disclosing the drug bust to guests? The Chief of Police assured us everyone in the local area had been captured and arrested. I see no signs of the DEA or FBI surveilling the neighborhood (but I didn’t notice anything untoward before either!).
What do y’all think? Has anyone ever encountered anything remotely like this?