Steve Robinson

So the marijuana grows all have very advanced electricity and lots of heat pumps.

They're kind of easy to spot once you know what you're looking for.

Um, but the, once I was talking with my friend, who's the electrician, he was telling me about these jobs where people who could barely speak English, um, groups of young military age, Chinese men trying to get him to install,

enough electricity for properties to operate six electric stoves simultaneously.

It was just stuff that didn't make sense to him.

It wasn't residential electrical needs.

It was just his spidey sense went off and he just said, no, I'm not doing those jobs.

But he knew enough about the different areas where someone said yes to those jobs.

And he knew who said yes to those jobs.

And his input was enough for me to be like, okay, we're onto something here.

There's something going on.

And I got in touch with Jenny and eventually was able to get her to come up to Maine.

And she didn't publish but had been given a partial list of addresses because in addition to the Homeland Security memo that identified just the raw number, 270 sites, there was a list of addresses of these sites that had been flagged.

I don't know how that list was created.

I suspect it was just tips that had come in over time and someone had filed them away.

But we were able to take the 12 or 15 addresses and do a dive into the property records to see who'd purchased them, when, and some of the other details about the tax records and that kind of thing.

And we were able to visit the properties and try to get

interviews, see what's going on, talk with neighbors.

And we found that every single one of them, they were very obviously marijuana grows.

You had the advanced electricity, you had the heat pumps, you had individuals there who, when we encountered people who were actually there, they 99% of the time, they can't talk to us.