Steve Robinson

It is a coordinated and sophisticated effort.

There's a playbook that they have that they developed in California, Washington State, and in Oklahoma.

And when Maine legalized marijuana in 2020 and formalized our adult use recreational and medicinal programs, they brought that playbook to Maine.

They're not allowed to leave the house.

Who's the Chinese?

The workers, yeah.

For the most part, they're what amounts to indentured servants.

The people who are seen at these properties are victims of trafficking.

And there was actually, this is getting a little bit ahead, but there was an indictment handed down

in the District of Massachusetts in July, in which, well, first and most importantly, it showed that these guys were reading my reporting on their activities in the state, but also they were smuggling people from China into Mexico across the border, flying them to New England, stealing their passports, putting them in safes, and bringing them to marijuana grows in Maine.

And it was, you're working at the cannabis house to work off your snakehead debt.

You're going to work here until you've paid back the money you owe us for smuggling you here.

So in August of 2022, Jenny Tehr, who at the time, she's a New York Post reporter now, but at the time she was at the Daily Caller News Foundation, she published a story based on elite customs and border protection memo that just said that there were

um thousands of illicit chinese marijuana grows in the united states that were operating in concert with the chinese communist party that were used they were using the proceeds of these organizations to fund human trafficking narcotics trafficking all kinds of other illicit activities and the memo said that 270 or more of these locations were in maine

And a number of them were also in Oklahoma.

Oklahoma has a serious problem, probably worse than Maine with this issue.

But as a journalist who was based in Maine, I said, geez, if there's 270 of these drug houses in Maine, I've got to be able to find them.

And one of the first things I did was call a friend of mine who I grew up with.

He played center on my high school football team and he's a master electrician.

And I knew that cultivating large amounts of cannabis involves huge amounts of electricity.