Steve Robinson

So we write a story about this.

I thought it was noteworthy in part because we were less than a mile away from a U.S.

Army Reserve garrison.

Maine does not have a lot of military facilities, but we do have one in Dexter.

And I'm familiar with this one because it was the garrison that my brother served out of.

And there's probably seven other transnational criminal organization affiliated properties

encircling this particular U.S.

military facility.

So I thought that that was newsworthy, published a story about it.

Another journalist, Philip Lenzicki from the Daily Caller News Foundation, who I would say is the best China journalist in America, bar none,

was able to, because he speaks Mandarin Cantonese and is familiar with Chinese culture and language, was able to expand on my reporting from the ground and dig into the Siju Association.

And what he found is that the executive director of the Siju Association is a guy named Huang Weizhan.

who was among the first to be arrested in 2022 in Carmel, Maine, about an hour from where I found those T-shirts, at a very large chicken barn that had been converted into a marijuana grow.

There was 4,000 plants confiscated, three other individuals arrested, but he was photographed along with his cousin or some kind of relative, and he was the executive director of the Siju Association.

There are other examples like that where we know that individuals who are coordinating with the Chinese consulate in New York are directly tied to marijuana grows throughout Maine.

And it's one of these things where it's sort of a puzzle that has to be fit together through financial records, real estate records, electrical records, physical inspections of the properties, eyewitness accounts, interviews with neighbors.

But you can start to take this property in Dexter where those shirts were, then the barn in Carmel.

and you can find out that this same guy hooked up the 400 amp electricity for this property and this property and this property, and the owner of this property also owns all of these properties.

And if you look at it hard enough and long enough, you can start to see how all of them interrelate.

It's not a case of a cultural phenomenon where Chinese migrants to the United States all glommed on to this idea that they could come up to America and make a bunch of money growing pot.