Steve Robinson

And that's either a decision that they're making strategically in order to avoid having to communicate, or they actually don't speak English.

Usually what we would encounter is somebody would come out, take out their phone, dial a New York number, and then hand the phone.

And a woman on the other end of the line who could kind of speak English would correspond with us.

And we had a couple of different situations.

cover stories, you know, husband and wife shopping for a home, you know, different things like that.

And eventually we'd ask about the marijuana and they would dummy up.

But we were never able to really successfully communicate with any of these individuals or talk to them.

But our conversations with the neighbors to these properties were much more fruitful.

And we found that the properties are purchased.

A clean-cut Chinese couple who speaks English shows up shortly after.

They come to the neighbors.

They give a gift of a bottle of wine or a bottle of cognac or, in one case, a Peking duck fresh from New York.

And they introduce themselves, and they say that they're fleeing COVID.

They are trying to get out of the city.

So they've purchased this place for their family in Maine, and their family's going to be staying there.

And then that couple's never seen again.

And what follows is a steady flow of military-aged Chinese men, in some cases older Chinese individuals, the very obvious odor of marijuana, both the active, pungent, skunky flower that people are familiar with, but also the

kind of decaying detritus of marijuana once it's harvested and just thrown out back into a pile.

It has its own kind of decaying plant matter smell.

And U-Haul vehicles or sprinter vans arriving every 35 to 40 days.