Steve Robinson

I've got a bag of drug proceeds with $250,000 on it.

I bring it to my lawyer, maybe his name is Mr. Mills, and I ask him to deposit it in his trust account.

And then the following day, I come in and I say, hey, can you draw a bank check out for a quarter of a million dollars and make it out to real estate company X?

Real estate company X can't accept a bag full of cash, but they can sure as hell accept that check.

And the IRS is never going to know about it.

The relationship is protected by attorney-client privilege.

And I've just effectively managed to season my money through the attorney's trust account and then pour it back into real estate.

And that is a pattern that you can see laid out in the indictment that was filed in the District of Massachusetts, where they show each of the steps that would be necessary to season the money and then dump it back into real estate.

And it helps explain how in New England, the real estate empire necessary to facilitate the Chinese drug cartel was able to expand so rapidly.

because they were able to take the huge amounts of cash that they were generating from these activities and just dump it back into real estate.

And they were buying up properties in Maine, 20% over asking price for cash and closing in, you know, 20 days.

It was the dream for some elderly couple in Maine looking to, you know, move to Florida or something in the middle of the pandemic.

So it's part, I think, of the answer to the question, why hasn't anything been done?

But also, how did it happen?

What are they doing with the money?

What are the roles of attorneys in all of this?

And I think that if the kind of work that Leah Foley did, or at least the indictment that she was willing to file in Massachusetts, if we were able to see that happen in Maine, it would go a long ways toward dealing with the problem.

But we don't have a US attorney in Maine.

And that is in part because Trump hasn't appointed one yet, but there's also a tradition called the blue slip tradition where home state senators get what amounts to a veto of Senate confirmable nominees.

So if the president nominates a US attorney from the state of Maine, Senator Angus King, who's a dope and a dummy, and I don't like him at all,