LOS ANGELES — In the first raid, Orange County sheriff’s detectives hit a Dana Point marijuana storefront, the San Clemente home of its director and a “stash house” he allegedly maintained nearby.

In the two homes, they found cash stuffed everywhere: in buckets in the garage and attic, in an Igloo cooler in a bedroom, under a mattress, on an ironing board, in a dresser. According to a search warrant affidavit filed in November, they recovered more than $700,000.

At the shop, investigators found spreadsheets showing sales over 10 months totaled $3.17 million, according to the affidavit, with $2.47 million “cash on hand.”

Paperwork indicated that a silent partner, a convicted drug dealer named John M. Walker, controlled the shop and six others in Orange and Los Angeles counties.

In November, detectives raided the other storefronts and 16 connected properties.

Inside a Long Beach duplex owned by Walker, detectives found 14 flat-screen televisions, according to a report from the search. Inside the garage of another Long Beach house, they found a Beretta handgun, a 12-gauge shotgun, a Chinese AK-47 with a bayonet, boxes of ammunition, Walker’s wedding album and grocery bags filled with four dozen rubber-banded bundles of cash; one of the bags contained a note with calculations totaling $99,324.

The discoveries and many others like them across California are starkly at odds with the image presented by medical marijuana providers, who portray themselves as “compassionate caregivers,” taking great risk for patients who are asked only for “donations” for medicine they would otherwise have a tough time acquiring.

A review of court and law enforcement records, along with interviews of industry insiders, police and federal agents, shows that many marijuana dispensaries have been making big money, sometimes extraordinary money, even as they claim to be nonprofit.

Vast disparities

The Los Angeles Times found a cash-infused retail world bearing little resemblance to the one pitched to voters before they passed the Compassionate Use Act for “seriously ill Californians” in 1996.

To be sure, the huge stashes of cash do not represent the entire industry. Many dispensary operators work on slim margins, give away cannabis to the poor and try to comply with the law. Nor do the court cases capture the relief truly ill patients ascribe to high-quality marijuana they might have difficulty getting if these shops did not exist.

One reason for the vast disparities within the medical marijuana trade is that the regulations governing it are hazy. The 1996 initiative and a law the state Legislature approved in 2003 never made clear how patients were supposed to get marijuana, much less whether sales were legal. Attorney general guidelines issued in 2008 allow only for fees “that are reasonably calculated to cover overhead costs and operating expenses.” Dispensaries decide to abide by that or not.

Records from a Granada Hills dispensary showed sales revenue topping $10,000 on many days.

Spreadsheets from a Long Beach operation indicated the owners bought $247,040 worth of marijuana and sold it in the next five months for $776,589. A state board of equalization investigator testified that the pair sold a total of $1,672,206 that year and reported only $206,980 to the tax agency.

A Venice-area dispensary’s bookkeeping revealed it did about $5.1 million in sales in just over a year. One month’s total was $468,331 — with $154,493 in “total profit.” Another’s was $116,625, after a $25,382 payment to the owner.

In North Hollywood, the two partners behind NoHo Caregivers emailed encrypted messages estimating they would each make $194,000 a month in profit, according to a federal indictment.

The state Bureau of Equalization gives a very rough estimate that it collects up to $105 million a year in sales tax from stores that are doing up $1.3 billion a year in sales.

There is no way to know what the average dispensary earns because they are totally unregulated, aside from those in a few cities, including Oakland, Berkeley and West Hollywood. That void has allowed operators to sell huge amounts of pot at giant mark-ups, seeding public mistrust of the industry and giving law enforcement ample incentive to crack down.

“Some people are abusing the system and raking in profits,” said Don Duncan, operator of a West Hollywood dispensary and director of the California chapter of Americans for Safe Access. “That draws the credibility of the field of medical cannabis into doubt.”

He and fellow leaders of the movement are pushing for a bill to better regulate the business. But the legal challenges to growers and dispensaries are mounting.

The federal government, which considers all marijuana use illegal and has signaled it will target any commercial operations, has launched a multipronged campaign to put this all back in the bottle. And local authorities throughout California, led by the Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley, are going after them too, based on the notion that nothing in the medical marijuana law permits sales or profits.

The Organica Raid

On July 31, 2008, the DEA and Culver City police raided a dispensary called Organica, on the border of Venice and Culver City. After seizing about half a million dollars’ worth of weed and $16,379 in cash, the agents expected the shop to stay closed.

They were wrong. Organica’s owner Jeffrey K. Joseph said he had an obligation to his “collective of patients.”

“Those patients still need their medicine,” he said in web interview recorded after the raid, even though two other dispensaries were still operating within 1,000 feet of his.

Left unsaid: The shop was making a fortune.

On April 17, 2009, the California Highway Patrol stopped Joseph on his way to the Coachella music festival and found $92,352 in his car. Federal and local agents executed a second search warrant on the shop four months later and seized about a million dollars’ worth of weed and accounting records for seven months.

Those spreadsheets revealed how quickly business sprang back after the first raid. In December 2008, the dispensary made $468,331 in revenue and $154,493 in “total profit,” they said. The next month’s profit was $129,620. Over the six months documented, the dispensary made $610,301 in profit — in addition to $82,066 in payments directly to Joseph.