Among New York cannabis growers, Eleni Polinski is known as “the Godmother.” Born and raised in Brooklyn, the 26-year old grows sticky and pungent cannabis strains as distinct as coral reefs. Soon after she launched Godmother’s Garden five years ago with her then boyfriend, the brand seemed poised to shine in New York’s legal market.
It won awards at a local growers’ competition two years in a row. In a podcast last year, a state official described smoking its weed as “an out-of-body experience.” Carmelo Anthony, the former Knicks star who owns a cannabis line, told THE CITY that the Godmother is “one of the best out there.”
Eleni always planned to launch in legal dispensaries. But first, she needed a license.
While waiting for the state to review their applications, she and co-founder Steven Bubis released limited drops of their strains, grown in Eleni’s home in Manhattan Beach. Positioned as a luxury brand, an eighth of an ounce typically sold for $75 — the very top of the market. Eleni knew that her plant count was above what the state permitted but wanted to launch in licensed dispensaries as soon as she got the green light.
“Our goal was always to grow the best possible product,” she said in an interview with THE CITY. “I wanted to make it successful and perfect and blow it up as much as I could.”
For a moment, she felt invincible. “Everything was aligning,” Eleni said.
That all disintegrated last October, as she gripped her phone screen, watching as at least 15 police and firefighters broke into her home. Eleni was visiting her mom in Florida, but Ring security cameras in Brooklyn captured the rapidly escalating scene as she shook with rage and disbelief at what unfolded before her.
The raid began with an anonymous complaint about a loud argument that triggered an hours-long police response and drew at least 10 vehicles to the home at its height. First, cops checked for evidence of a possible fight, then the fire department searched for explosives, and finally emergency support teams were called in after cops reported an alleged firearm.
They never discovered signs of a conflict, a gun or anything hazardous.
They did find a lot of plants. In the home were dozens of unique strains the pair had developed — from seeds or cuttings collected from skilled cannabis breeders around the country. The genetics were invaluable to their brand and impossible to replicate.
A firefighter surveying the home that night quietly told a colleague: “Somebody ratted someone out.”
Soon, everything Godmother’s Garden had built was uprooted and strewn across Eleni’s lawn.
Eleni, Steven and her mom would all be arrested on felony cannabis possession charges. All three had no doubt about who was behind the police response.
Eleni’s uncle, John Peluso, a former senior official in the New York office of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, had long wanted the plants removed from the home. For years, he had scorned Eleni’s ambitions as criminal activity.
“What they are doing is a violation of federal law,” he told his daughter in a phone call back in early 2022. “They are drug traffickers.”
The dispute simmered for years before erupting into a conflagration that would divide Eleni’s family into two warring factions. Eleni and John found themselves on opposing sides of conflicting state and federal laws that swing between treating cannabis as a highly-addictive drug and the widely accepted foundation of a vibrant, tax-producing industry.
The NYPD did not respond to detailed questions about the incident. But hours of surveillance footage of the raid, contemporaneous audio recordings, text messages, police records and extensive interviews provide a detailed picture of what led to the NYPD response and its troubling aftermath.
The raid and subsequent charges highlight how razor thin the margin can be between whether a person in the cannabis industry is celebrated as an entrepreneur or charged as a criminal.
Eleni Meets Weed
The first time Eleni smoked weed she was 14 years old. She still recalls the relief she felt from the initial drag after a friend passed her a joint in the park after school. “The words started flowing,” she said. “The social anxiety just melted away.”
Eleni long had an entrepreneurial streak, selling cheap picture frames that she decorated with shells from the beach to her mom’s friends before she was 10. By sophomore year of high school, gaining new confidence, she discovered the booming resale market for streetwear brands. Learning she could flip a pair of coveted sneakers for sometimes three times the price, she began camping outside the Supreme store in SoHo for its weekly merch drops.
Eleni attributes some of her moxie to her grandfather, a Polish engineer who immigrated to New York with her grandmother, mom and aunt in the late 1970s. Working multiple jobs, he saved to buy an apartment building in south Brooklyn and eventually built a portfolio of properties across New York and Florida.
He helped his daughters open a clock repair shop in the West Village and purchase the spacious brick home with white fluted columns in Manhattan Beach where Eleni grew up. Divided into two units, Eleni’s mom Annie lived on one side, and her aunt Grace lived on the other.
The home was where Grace married her first husband, John Peluso. He was a drug enforcement agent with a taste for fine antiques who had read about the sisters’ shop in the newspaper. On his second visit to the store, he asked Grace for a date. John was charming and “a good talker,” Grace said in an interview with THE CITY.
But Grace’s sister Annie said that John could erupt in rage and that the couple fought frequently. Sometimes Annie became a target of his ire too. “He always had a bad temper,” Annie said in an interview. “John is a guy who feels powerful, and he’d threaten me with that.”
Grace divorced John, then remarried him and then divorced him again.
Things quieted down as Grace and Annie each had two daughters within a few years of each other and raised them together while running the shop. Grace’s were twins, Lori and Gracie. The doors to each other’s homes were always open. In one room hung a regal painting of Eleni’s grandmother with her daughters wearing billowing, jewel-toned dresses.
John became a bigger presence in the family’s life as his daughters got older. The first time Eleni recalled speaking to her uncle was during a family trip to Florida as a young teen. Her phone rang from a blocked number.
“You little slut,” she recalled hearing. Her skin prickled as he told her she was a bad influence on his daughters and warned her to stay away from them. Her phone pinged with a screenshot of her most recent post to Instagram. She was wearing a bikini on the beach.
In an interview, Grace disputed Eleni’s account and said John did not harass her niece.
But Annie said John often used vulgar language when he was angry and complained to Grace when it involved her daughter. She underscored this in a call with her sister last October. “Since age 13, John has been punishing her constantly, threatening her, threatening me, threatening you,” she said.
When reached by phone, John said that he was in a meeting and would return the call. He did not respond to follow-up calls, texts or a certified letter sent to his home with detailed questions.
John’s alleged threats didn’t keep Eleni off Instagram. Her followers ballooned into the tens of thousands as she posted about the latest sneakers she was selling along with snippets from her life. At 15, she used some of the cash to throw a Hudson River boat party with her friends. VIP tickets to “summer’s hottest yacht party” cost $125. Lots of her friends sold or smoked weed, and she started selling too, she said.
Valuing independence, Eleni was always looking for a new venture. “If my grandpa came here with nothing and built what I would say is a substantial amount to show for his life, I could do that too,” she said.
A Lifetime at the DEA
A few years before John walked into the sisters’ clock shop in the West Village, he was assigned to run the DEA’s outpost in Allentown, Pa., thriving in an era where law enforcement was the favored means of addressing drug use and related crime.
President Richard Nixon is credited with starting the war of drugs, but it persisted as other presidents took up the mantle. John was handling cocaine busts in the manufacturing town when President George H.W. Bush called crack “America’s biggest problem” in a 1989 address about drug policy from the White House.
When the town newspaper reported that crack wasn’t common in the area, John began looking for a local supply, he told a journalist. Posing as “Tony,” a Poconos drug dealer, he met 21-year-old Andre Burroughs through a paid informant. He made a couple of small purchases, then arranged for a larger sale that led to a sting operation outside a Chinese restaurant. Burroughs was arrested and faced a 10-year minimum sentence under new federal drug laws that penalized even a small amount of crack.
“The law is very harsh with crack traffickers, because crack traffickers are harsh people,” John told a reporter following Burroughs’ arrest.
Back then, there was a culture of “agents notching victories based on how long a sentence they could get,” Burroughs’ lawyer, David McColgin said in an interview with THE CITY.
Penalties for cannabis were stiffening, too. No place was tougher than New York; the state’s Rockefeller drug laws prescribed sentences of a minimum of 15 years to life — even for small amounts of marijuana.
McColgin argued at trial that federal agents had entrapped his client, but Burroughs went away for a decade. Across the country, prisons were disproportionately filling up with men of color, while law enforcement was frequently lauded. The Allentown chief of police awarded John a commendation for his “untiring dedication to duty.” He was promoted to New York to lead a team of a dozen agents.
There, he kept rising. In 2005, he ran an investigation into a pair of NYPD cops suspected of working as informants and assassins for the Mafia. He was the one to draw his gun on the pair as they dined at a Las Vegas restaurant. “You’re under arrest,” John announced as a dozen officers closed in, according to a Vanity Fair article.
The duo were sentenced to life. John won praise from New York City cops shaken by the brazen breach in their ranks. Eventually, he rose to the DEA’s upper ranks in New York.
A Godmother Is Born
Eleni was finishing a business degree at Brooklyn College when the pandemic hit. She had been helping manage her family’s apartments but began talking about launching a cannabis brand with her then-boyfriend, Steven, who was also from south Brooklyn and had worked in the cannabis industry out in California.
Bored of watching dumb movies one afternoon during quarantine, Steven flipped to a documentary about Griselda Blanco — the Colombian drug lord who earned the moniker the Godmother of Cocaine. Eleni got the idea of becoming the Godmother of Weed in New York. Not a lethal one, of course, she said, but as she put it, “a bad bitch.”
She and Steven enrolled in an online certificate program on growing medical-grade cannabis at Utah State University. They visited cannabis breeders who specialize in genetics, collecting rare seeds and cuttings to grow from. They invested in equipment to closely control the growing environment, even building their own humidity and temperature sensors. They were constantly testing and tweaking, looking for ways to improve their strains.
Around them, more states were legalizing cannabis, and recreational use in New York seemed imminent.
Steven liked the technical part of cultivation, installing software to automate some of the growing process and monitoring each variable closely. Eleni cared for the plants. Trimming the flower became her speciality. Instead of automated tools or scissors, Eleni used a pair of cuticle trimmers for more precision. She spent hours cutting away the excess leaves to reveal the unique plant structure of each bud while preserving the trichomes, the fine, crystal outgrowths that can increase the potency of a strain. Instead of a typical buzzcut look, Godmother Garden’s cannabis shimmered.
Eleni and Steven debated whether to launch a brand before legalization, but New York already had a thriving craft cannabis scene and they wanted in. “Everyone wants to see brands,” Eleni said. “That’s what gets the most hype.”
From watching hours of “Shark Tank” and the rise of brands like Yeezy, Eleni understood that consumers often connect to a brand through a persona. She developed the logo of a woman with a swoop of dark hair holding a finger to her lips and wearing a teal crown, drawing inspiration from the Statue of Liberty and an old Soviet propaganda poster warning women not to gossip. An Instagram account showing off the details of their strains started to get attention.
“Jesus she looks beautiful,” one commenter wrote under a post of their strain White Tahoe Zkittlez. “I want to eat it,” wrote another. Others left strings of fire emojis.
When adult-use cannabis was legalized in March 2021, the New York state legislature, recognizing how deeply the drug war had disproportionately ravaged communities of color, detailed how the people most harmed should be the first to benefit. The state expunged low-level cannabis convictions and revised the statutes so that five pounds of cannabis became the threshold for a felony possession charge.
Eleni and Steven pored over the law’s details and noted that the state planned to allow individuals to grow six plants each at home without a license. If they stuck to this limit, they thought, they could adhere to the law while developing a portfolio of strains that typically takes years of research and development. When the state issued licenses, they’d be ready.
They began selling jars of flower at invite-only industry events and entered a few strains into the inaugural Grower’s Cup competition for local cultivators held in 2022. Judges evaluate entrants based on each strain’s structure, how it hits the nose, the taste, what it feels like to inhale and exhale it, as well as the experience of the high. “What matters is the entourage effect,” one judge told THE CITY.
On the night of the awards, some attendees still had jitters about whether cops would show up as the white-walled Tribeca gallery space filled with clouds of smoke. A few wore ski masks to protect their identities.
Godmother’s Garden took first place in the “Gas” category, named for a category of strains with a diesel-like smell. When a state regulator handed Eleni the award to whoops and cheers, it was a signal of a new era where unlicensed growers could draw recognition rather than a police response.
In the room of men wearing hoodies and flat-brimmed caps, Eleni’s river of dark hair and eyelash extensions stood out. Some privately questioned whether she was really a grower or just the face of the brand. But that night, Eleni only grinned.
“This is so surreal because I worked my ass off,” she told the crowd. “Shoutout to all my women in this industry and everyone who’s doing it out here, I couldn’t be more proud of you.”
John Finds Out
Before Eleni began growing at home, she asked her aunt Grace for her permission in the fall of 2020. Grace agreed. But as cannabis and drug reform laws were spreading across the country, her ex-husband, John, held to a framework that criminalized drug use.
Eleni isn’t quite sure how John found out about the plants but had an instinct to start recording her family conversations, recalling her memories of how John treated her as a teenager. In case things escalated, she’d have a record.
In an early conflict over the plants in February 2022, Eleni recorded her cousin Gracie as she spoke to her dad on speaker phone. Growing up, Eleni and her cousins had celebrated birthdays and spent summers together. They stayed close. And with the twins now in college, sometimes Eleni invited them to smoke with her. On the phone, Gracie tried to assure her dad that growing some plants at home was legal under state law.
John became impatient. “I don’t care what New York state law says. I’m telling you what I know as the former number two guy of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration in New York,” he told her. “Please don’t send me nonsense and challenge my veracity, I don’t appreciate it.”
Gracie protested, but John warned that she, too, could be implicated if she even spent time with them. “Okay dad, I will stay away from them,” she said, trying to end the call.
John told her he wasn’t finished. “When those DEA agents come in, you’ll see where your little sweet ass will be. Daddy won’t be able to help you,” he said.
Weeks later, Eleni told her cousins that John had called her directly. “His exact words were if you don’t uproot those plants, I’m gonna get a squad of the DEA or the FBI to come and arrest you and Steven.” Eleni said, near frantic.
But the twins didn’t know what else they could do to curb their dad’s behavior. “I called him four times already,” Gracie said.
Eleni was hurt. “Steven, they don’t give a fuck,” she complained. The twins declined an interview request through their mother.
Steven dialed the twins’ mom looking for reinforcement. “Okay Grace, the niceties are over,” he said. “I have nightmares every night, and I’m not even doing anything wrong.”
But Grace didn’t believe she could help, either: “He doesn’t listen to me. That’s why I divorced him 20 years ago.”
Yet, she relented and called her ex-husband. He would back off, she told Steven later. John was concerned about the safety of his daughters and fearful that the cannabis activity could lead to home invasions, Grace explained.
“What home invasions?” Steven asked, disbelievingly. The majority of their operation was just live plants that were of little value on their own. “We’ll get a deadbolt then,” he told her.
Finally, they came to a truce. Each side of the family would stick to their separate entrances and respect the others’ side of the house.
It was a short-term fix.
From Legacy to Legal
In early 2022, Chris Alexander, head of the state’s newly formed Office of Cannabis Management, asked Jason Salmon to join the agency. Both had advocated for New York’s cannabis law and wanted it to benefit legacy operators — the people who had been growing and selling long before the legislation was signed.
Salmon, the agency’s external affairs director, traveled the state educating people about the opportunities of legalization. Included among the legacy growers he reached out to was Eleni.
She was only 23, but people were already calling her “the Godmother,” and her brand was exactly what the state wanted for its legal market. She was knowledgeable, young and one of the few female cultivators around. Beyond that, Salmon said of Godmother’s Garden, “They were growing some of the best weed in the state.”
Both Salmon and Damian Fagon, the agency’s first chief equity officer, courted them and other legacy growers, meeting at Roberta’s Pizza in Bushwick or at the agency’s office in lower Manhattan to walk through the state’s licensing plans. Eleni and Steven were both accepted in the agency’s mentorship program to learn the ropes of compliance.
Over slices in May 2023, Fagon told the growers he wanted to see their products on the shelves of dispensaries — they deserved it more than anyone. He acknowledged not everyone would get a license and suggested they partner with one another if they were unsuccessful initially. Still, he was confident that “a lot of legacy will get licenses.”
Fagon, now the director of the Bronx Cannabis Hub, a nonprofit that assists social equity applicants with licensing, said these community-building efforts were critical to the success of New York’s legal market.
“The skills they had developed under prohibition were incredibly valuable to what we were trying to build,” Fagon said of longtime growers. They are “incredibly talented horticulturalists who understand the cannabis plant from top to bottom and how to grow what consumers want.”
‘The Cavalry Is Coming’
Eleni and Steven felt some protection because of the state’s encouragement. While they had initially planned to stick to the number of plants permitted by state home grow regulations, Eleni’s vision for the brand drove her to keep expanding. By then, they had developed more than 60 different proprietary strains and were testing ten at a time in their grow room.
“It was like a laboratory,” said Ben Gilbert, a co-founder of the Grower’s Cup who later befriended the duo. “There was almost a maniacal level of details in everything they were doing.”
In October 2023, both applied for microbusiness licenses, which would allow them to grow and sell small quantities of their products. State officials, privately, were supportive. “The lottery gods blessed you,” Fagon wrote in a message congratulating Eleni after her application was assigned a desirable slot for review.
Then, last summer, tensions within the state agency began to trickle down to applicants like Eleni and Steven. Court challenges and administrative decisions slowed down licensing. An explosion of unlicensed weed shops shifted the state’s priority to expanding enforcement measures. Alexander, the head of the agency, was out, Salmon had already quit and Fagon was on administrative leave.
The state began prioritizing applicants who had already secured a retail location, leaving Eleni and Steven essentially frozen in a separate licensing queue.
As progress stalled, Eleni’s expanded operation strained the family. Grace confirmed she had agreed that Eleni could grow in the house — but only a few plants. “It was too much. They were taking over the house,” said Grace.
John pressed Grace too, demanding anew that Eleni and Steven remove the plants. He warned her that she was violating federal law by having knowledge of their crime and not reporting it, she told her sister in a call.
One day last September, Grace found Eleni in the kitchen and reported John’s latest warning: “He’s gonna call the police on you. They’re gonna come and raid the house,” she said, tense and stumbling over her words. “There’s nothing I can do to stop him.”
John specified that it was happening Friday, she said, and that he told her to remove any cash and jewelry from the home before cops had a chance to seize it. She told Eleni that she had been up all night, unable to sleep until 5 a.m.
“It’s all arranged,” Grace’s new husband affirmed. “He’s not bluffing no more. The cavalry is coming.”
This time Eleni was the calm one, reminding her aunt that nothing had happened despite John’s warnings. Growing at home was legal. Police needed a warrant to enter a private residence. John didn’t live here, how would he even know if they moved the plants or not? She tried to reassure her aunt, “I promise you, no one will arrest us.”
A week and a half later, on Sept. 27, Eleni was visiting her mom in Florida when the Ring cameras posted around the house recorded something that reignited the feud.
Lori and John entered Eleni’s side of the house and walked into a room with two grow tents. When Lori unzipped one of them, light from LED bulbs spilled out. John took some photos, then reached in to grab one and pulled it to his side.
Facing his daughter, John puffed his chest out and tugged at his collar, posing with the plant as Lori snapped more photos.
Up in Smoke
On Oct. 4, 2024, an anonymous caller dialed 311, the city’s non-emergency helpline, at 8:45 p.m., to report a domestic dispute at the Manhattan Beach house. Eleni was at a Mexican restaurant with her mom in Florida, debating how to deal with John’s latest escalation. Grace was on vacation in Europe. Steven was at a meeting in New Jersey. Only the twins were home.
Screams were coming from the back of the house in Brooklyn, the caller said. An operator transferred the call to 911, and two patrol cars were dispatched.
Around 9 p.m., the commanding officer of the 61st precinct, Captain Joseph Antonio, rang the doorbell at the side entrance of the home, flanked by a lieutenant.
Lori was in the basement doing laundry and answered the door.
“We got a call for screaming, fighting. Can we check it out? ” Antonio asked.
“Of course. You’re the police, ” she said lightly, letting them in.
The two officers followed Lori down a short staircase. Antonio surveyed the quiet room. He asked Lori if he could look inside a six-foot-tall tent in a back corner of the area. There weren’t any live plants, but Eleni had stashed some packaged Godmother’s Garden products and discarded plant trimmings, she later said.
As more police officers entered, Gracie joined her sister’s side.
“This is illegal what you have here,” Antonio told the twins, nodding to the tent.
“It has nothing to do with us. We live in an apartment upstairs,” Gracie responded.
“So none of this stuff is yours?” Antonio asked.
“No,” the twins said in unison.
The call about screams now seemed forgotten. Some of the cops spotted frozen cannabis inside the fridge near the television. “There’s weed in there,” one cop nudged another. Another snapped a photo of the contents.
With no sign of fighting and only some cannabis, there was little for police to go to to secure a warrant in order to further search the home. “No judge in Brooklyn would sign that warrant,” said Steve Zissou, a criminal defense attorney who has handled cannabis cases.
At 9:17, the captain called the Fire Department to check for any hazardous materials. A string of firefighters wearing oxygen tanks and holding axes filed into the basement a few minutes later. One asked which door they wanted open and Antonio pointed them to the door into Eleni’s side of the home.
Soon, more than a dozen firefighters and police appeared on camera in Eleni’s hallway.
The officers quickly found the room with tents full of chest-high plants where Lori had snapped John’s photo a week before. Now, Antonio walked inside and appraised them glowing under the bright lights. Down the hallway, firemen fiddled with the handle of the locked grow room, pointing to the irrigation line running along the ceiling, but Antonio waved them off.
Eliza Orlins, a career public defender in Manhattan, said that the police calling the FDNY to gain entry was “a clear abuse of power,” since there was no emergency that required access.
At 9:29 p.m, the captain called Steven after getting his number from the twins and told him to return home. Steven alerted Eleni and then fruitlessly tried Antonio at least seven times while driving back, records show. At one point, he addressed the officers through the Ring app.
“Hello, officers? Can you hear me?” Steven’s voice rang through the hallway. “Do you have a warrant?”
Some turned their heads toward the voice. “Hey boss, I think he’s trying to talk to you,” one said to the police captain.
“Don’t worry about it,” Antonio said.
‘You Pulled a Gun‘
Around 11 p.m, Steven parked his car down the street and entered through a back entrance, wary of any remaining police.
By that time, most of the initial responding officers had left. The fire department had cleared Eleni’s home after failing to turn up anything hazardous. A pair of cops still stood guard at the side entrance where Lori had first let the cops into the basement.
Steven shut the hallway door where the firefighters had broken through and checked each room, looking for any signs of disturbance after the intrusion.
But when he entered the kitchen, he saw a pair of cops on the back patio, watching him through sliding glass doors. Arms folded and leaning against a patio chair, one asked Steven to come outside and talk. He refused.
“What am I going to do to you?” the officer asked.
“There’s two of you, you got guns. How about this, I’ll stand in my underwear,” Steven offered, trying to prove he wasn’t a threat.
He turned his attention to Eleni who was on FaceTime with her mom from Florida, the phone a little shaky in his hand. Steven held the phone up to the door as Annie explained to the cops that she was the owner of the home. She texted one of the officers a photo of her Florida driver’s license to confirm her identity.
“The owner of the home is requesting that you leave the property,” Steven shouted at the cops. They didn’t budge.
The standoff escalated after a ranking officer reported that there was a “barricaded perpetrator with a possible firearm,” at the house. Emergency Service Unit vehicles started speeding toward Manhattan Beach, police records show. A few minutes later, an officer said “a black firearm was seen.”
Steven was pacing the kitchen when he spotted officers in tactical gear through the house’s back entrance. They banged on the door with their shields, shouting for his attention: “Steven! Steven! Come talk to us.”
“Do you have a warrant?” Steven shouted back.
“I don’t need a warrant, you pulled a gun on someone,” an ESU officer responded from outside.
“Are you crazy?” Steven responded. His voice squeaked. He had no idea what they were talking about.
The shouts stopped briefly. He heard the buzz of a drill at one entrance. Then, after a pause, he heard the muted whacks of a hammer, its long yellow handle visible through a door pane. Steven whipped his head toward the noise, his eyes widening. “Eleni, they’re breaking in,” he said on the phone.
An ESU officer interjected, “I’m telling you to come out right now or your door is gonna get ripped off the hinges. I’m not calming down anymore.”
“Okay, okay,” he said. Finally relenting, Steven raised his hands in capitulation. Nearly two hours had elapsed since he returned. He removed a long wood stick jamming the sliding glass doors shut and a cop grabbed his forearm, yanking him outside. Off view of the surveillance cameras, he was arrested.
Minutes later, Antonio entered the home through the same door. Eleni was still watching through the Ring camera when she saw Lori speaking to the captain. John followed closely behind.
“Officers, officers, that man is John Peluso —” Eleni began, her voice shaky as she tried to get someone’s attention. John looked up at the camera as she shouted. Then, he walked away.
Cameras and Handcuffs
Local television news crews pulled up to the home a few days later, and police vehicles lined the street.
Cops returned with a search warrant this time. Working through the house, officers flipped off each Ring camera, cutting the surveillance feed. They carried the large potted plants to the front lawn. Next to the plants, they piled empty jars with the Godmother’s Garden logo.
New York City Sheriff Anthony Miranda spoke to reporters. “They are growing the plants from birth to larger plants. It’s clear that this is a distribution point.”
When Steven was arraigned, the charges against him included four counts of felony cannabis possession. Missing was any sort of weapons violation.
The alleged firearm did not appear in any records of what was recovered from the house.
Reached by phone, Antonio said he recalled the raid and referred the inquiry to the NYPD’s public information department, which did not respond to detailed questions. It issued a brief statement about the cannabis recovered following execution of the search warrant.
Eleni returned from Florida with her mother one week after the raid. On Oct. 14, Eleni left the house to meet a lawyer about Steven’s charges. As she was driving, a cop pulled her over — she was told that there was an alert out that she was wanted in relation to an investigation.
Eleni was cuffed and taken to a nearby precinct. An officer phoned her mom to pick up her daughter.
But when Annie arrived, police cuffed her, too. The cuffs were so tight that it strained her shoulder, she said. Both were transferred to the 61st Precinct on Coney Island Avenue and charged with four counts of felony cannabis possession.
Since legalization in 2021, such charges have dropped off significantly, according to state crime data. In 2024, there were about 300 arrests on similar cannabis possession charges across the five boroughs, but almost none ended in convictions. There were no criminal convictions in either Brooklyn, the Bronx or Staten Island last year, only one conviction in Manhattan and seven in Queens.
Eleni and her mom spent the night in a holding cell before being arraigned and released the next day.
A Relationship Destroyed
Annie and Grace’s relationship lay in the rubble of the police raid. Years of fighting had calcified into an impenetrable wall of hostility.
Annie blamed Grace for not doing more to intervene, while Grace believed she was unfairly tarred for a plan she felt certain was concocted by her ex-husband — one that she had warned Eleni explicitly was about to unfold. After decades as each other’s closest companions, the two sisters wanted only to divide their assets and be done with one another.
“Where is my sister that was kind and not vindictive?” Annie asked in a phone call. “The person that I knew, that I called my best friend, that I called my sister, that I called my family, that I wanted to be there so we could take care of each other —”
“And I did the same thing, so don’t give me that crap!” Grace interrupted.
Annie paused, then spoke, her voice shaky. “I did not…I did not call the police on you.”
“I did not call the police on anybody,” Gracie responded.
“I have it on video, black and white. Lori was involved. And Gracie was involved. Black and white,” said Annie. “Sisters don’t do that — lie to their face.”
“You can say whatever you like, I didn’t know, and I wasn’t a part of it,” Grace replied. “John was, not me. You’re blaming the wrong person.”
Annie could not let her hang up, without one final warning. “Your kids one day will destroy you how they destroyed me, how they destroyed us and they destroyed my daughter,” she said.
“All my dreams got destroyed, too,” said Grace. “None of this would have happened if Eleni and Steven had just moved the plants. Say thank you to your daughter,” she spat back.
Dropped and Sealed
The tally of items confiscated by police included equipment like lighting fixtures, a water storage tank and air filters. Police also recorded 508 pounds of cannabis — including potting soil and stems, records show. But even without counting the dirt and plant matter, it was impossible to determine whether the amount of cannabis in the Manhattan Beach home constituted an alleged felony.
While the new law outlined that possession of more than five pounds of cannabis is a felony, the calculation is only supposed to include the “pure weight” of the plant. Court decisions interpreted that to mean the psychoactive chemical known as THC rather than seeds or stems.
Back in December 2023, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office said it would not prosecute weight-based cannabis possession charges since labs could not measure THC content alone.
In January, all charges against Eleni, Steven and Annie were dropped and their cases sealed. When Eleni read the text with the news from her lawyer, she felt some relief at first, especially that her mother would not have to navigate the criminal justice system. But it was quickly followed by rage that it had happened at all.
The family hasn’t recovered.
Eleni doesn’t speak to her cousins anymore. Annie and Grace fought for months over how to divide their family assets. They considered selling everything and splitting the money. But they had trouble deciding on what was fair and their exchanges grew heated. Annie threatened a lawsuit. Grace threatened more criminal charges through John. Any well of empathy they had for one another had dried up.
Finally, the sisters agreed to split up their homes. Grace took the house in Manhattan Beach while Annie took the one in Florida. Eleni is in the process of moving out of the home.
Eleni and Steven are no longer dating but they continue to run the brand together amicably.
Their microbusiness license applications are among nearly 900 others still stuck in a queue due to a court injunction. So far, the state cannabis agency has licensed less than a quarter of the participants of the state’s mentorship program.
While many legacy growers wait on licensing, the state recently surpassed $2 billion in retail sales — a billion this year alone.
Vanessa Cheeks, a spokesperson for the Office of Cannabis Management said the agency “is working to ensure groups such as legacy operators are fully integrated into the fabric of the industry and not left behind.”
Slowly, Godmother’s Garden has been rebuilding. Eleni and Steven are meeting with breeders to salvage some of their strains. With support from an investor, they’ve partnered with a licensee and hope to soon grow legally in Brooklyn. Despite an absence over the last year, there’s still a clamor for the Godmother’s products.
“She always brings a crowd,” said Gilbert, the co-founder of the Grower’s Cup at a recent cannabis event. “There’s just an extreme opulence to their products that’s unique to New York’s cannabis market.”
Within Eleni’s family, the damage endures. A year later, both Annie and Grace are mourning the loss of their relationship with one another and the nieces they raised together.
Grace still has a few of the picture frames she purchased from Eleni all those years ago. She maintains that she’s been unfairly blamed. “There was no person closer in my life than my sister,” she said. “What the heck did I do? Nothing.”
But Annie doesn’t even want to be buried next to her sister anymore. She’s rehabilitating a shoulder injury that she attributes to the arrest and which recently required surgery. “No, there’s no reconciliation in this family anymore,” she said.
The imposing painting of Eleni’s grandmother and daughters no longer hangs in the Manhattan Beach home.
Annie took it down.
