Campobello Holdings, Inc. arrived in Downeast Maine with promises to convert an antique sardine cannery in Eastport into a seafood exporter that would connect local fishermen with markets in New York City and Asia.
But according to documents, photographs, videos, audio-recorded phone calls, and witness interviews obtained by the Maine Wire, the venture devolved into a rat-infested unlicensed cannabis grow, and a video-surveilled flophouse for an unknown number of workers.
At the helm of the operation was New York seafood dealer Wai Tat “Jimmy” Wong, who in 2014 convinced the LePage Administration and the Washington County Council of Governments to bless his plan to revitalize the old Wass Factory on Madison Street.
That blessing came with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency grants worth nearly $50,000 for environmental assessments. According to records for that grant and a press release from the LePage Administration, the plan was to convert the building into a seafood processing and lobster freezing operation.
“Governor Paul R. LePage today offered his congratulations to Campobello Holdings, which is about to begin a seafood-processing operation in Eastport,” the administration said in a Dec. 2013 press release.
“The company is looking to process, blast freeze, package, store and export lobster and other seafood products to customers around the world,” it said.
The first sign that something was amiss came almost immediately after Wong began business in Eastport.
Campobello Holdings, when it was first incorporated, listed as president George Klapishack, an associate of Wong’s with deep experience in international shipping.
For reasons that weren’t clear at the time, Klapishack unceremoniously exited Campobello Holdings after less than a year.
“I got out of their quick,” Klapishack told the Maine Wire, in a brief phone message.
Over the next seven years, Wong would become somewhat notorious around Eastport. Equal parts schemer and village idiot, locals would often see Wong walking late at night after flying from his native Hong Kong to Bangor and catching a bus that dropped him miles away from Eastport.
It’s unclear whether the plan to flash-freeze lobsters ever came to fruition.
If it did, it never lasted long. Because Wong would quickly turn to the burgeoning elver markets, sometimes soliciting help or investments from residents of the nearby Passamaquoddy tribal lands. When regulation began to limit the elver gold rush, he would turn to urchins or sea cucumbers or back to lobsters, or so he claimed. According to locals, Wong always had an explanation as to how he was managing to keep the lights on by selling locally undesirable sea creatures in exotic places.
Few Eastport residents who knew Wong could have guessed that the 25,000 square foot facility would eventually become a place where an unknown number of workers would attempt to farm black market cannabis.
In a phone interview for this story, Wong denied any knowledge of or involvement in any drug trafficking operation in Eastport.
Photos and videos from inside the Wass Factory shortly before Wong abandoned it tell a much different story.
[RELATED: Triad Weed: How Chinese Marijuana Grows Took Over Rural Maine…]
Revitalizing Eastport
Richard Sheroff, an investor from Georgia, originally purchased the sardine cannery at 11 Madison because he thought Eastport might one day revitalize and make the property far more valuable. Over the years, he rented it to various businesses, but he connected with Wong in late 2013.
Wong was often late in making payments, which always came via a check from someone Wong said was his cousin.
Sheroff first caught glimmers that something was seriously amiss in 2018, shortly after he’d decided to mortgage the property to Wong under the banner of a new venture, JJJ Seafoods and Traders, Inc.
Wong quickly fell behind on payments and sent a paranoid letter on Campobello letterhead and multiple emails about “wise guys” trying to go behind his back.
After that time, he would repeatedly fall behind on payments, often for months at a time, and fail to communicate with Sheroff. When he did reply, there were always excuses. He’d broken a leg, lost his cell phone, been quarantined for COVID-19, or was stranded in Canada by a storm.
“He was the original ‘the dog ate my homework’ guy,” Sheroff would later tell a former Maine State Trooper, who had gone to work for the East Port Police Department, according to an audio recording reviewed by the Maine Wire.
“If he gave me a nickel for every excuse, I’d probably owe him money,” he said.
But it was not until Dec. of 2021 that Sheroff discovered Wong was not only far behind on his mortgage payments, but that he’d also failed to pay property taxes for three years, and the Wass Factory was on the verge of foreclosure.
Sheroff paid off the $14,000 property tax bill to keep the building out of foreclosure, according to text messages and town records reviewed by the Maine Wire.
One month later, after multiple attempts at contacting Wong, Sheroff hadn’t received a reply. By April 2022, he’d hired an attorney to recoup the five-figure debt owed to him or else foreclose on the property. That month, Wong finally replied in a handwritten letter.
Not persuaded by appeals to their friendship, Sheroff nonetheless began the foreclosure process, thus starting him on a more than two year adventure to understand exactly what had become of the building he’d originally purchased in 1990.
The Sardine Flophouse
When Sheroff finally set foot inside the old Wass Factory in July 2022, he was greeted with a putrid smell and a shocking spectacle.
In addition to the sprawling marijuana grow that had been constructed on the first floor of the building, the second floor contained ramshackle living quarters.
The first floor of the coastal building had been walled-off into haphazard marijuana grow rooms, while the lower floor was a rat-infested living space with cooking, bathroom, and sleeping areas. Dozens of stained, thread-bare mattresses were strewn about and stacked in corners. Small shoes were scattered in a closet.
The remnants of thousands of marijuana plants had been hastily harvested, destroyed, or left behind to rot. Flies and obnoxious mystery odors inundated the building. The ceilings and sparse insulation were inked with black mold. Ventilation holes were carved via circular saws into century-old walls. The majestic eastern facing windows that once offered a stunning view of Campobello Island were walled off and papered over with blankets and Oklahoma State-patterned table covers.
Most ominously, the outside of the property was peppered with security cameras, including one facing the water, where a boat might come to dock, but most of the cameras were installed on the interior of the building, where they allowed someone sitting in a central control room to monitor inhabitants as they slept and ate.
“No,” Wong said, when asked if he was involved in marijuana cultivation at the building. “I don’t do bad things.”
Wong insisted that “someone else” was doing the marijuana growing, but he couldn’t provide a name. He said he’d never seen any evidence of cannabis trafficking in the building, despite confirming that he’d only left the property 10 months ago.
Any allegations that there had been marijuana trafficking out of his building, Wong insisted, were “all rumors.”
Asked what prompted Klapishack to exit Campobello Holdings in 2014, Wong said that Sheroff was making “phony documents” and not cashing the checks sent to him for rental payments. (Sheroff denied this claim.)
Wong said that he was the only person working at the Wass Factory, but that when he rented the property out to other people, whose identities he could not or would not provide, there were sometimes three or four workers in the building.
He didn’t know why there were so many mattresses in the building after he abandoned it, even though pictures and text messages obtained by the Maine Wire show him paying a garbage man to take away some additional mattresses that were not left behind.
Wong refused to say why there were security cameras pointed at the living areas for the workers, or to say whether he was the one who had them installed. He also denied bringing any workers into the building.
The Maine Wire was unable to locate or contact any of the workers who lived at the facility, which is mostly uninsulated and not zoned for residential habitation.
An Eastport resident familiar with the property told the Maine Wire that the unknown number of workers at the illicit cannabis grow were almost never seen outside of the property, but could occasionally be glimpsed trying to catch fish, crabs, and even seagulls from the deck.
The Wass Factory
After seeing firsthand what had become of the property, Sheroff initiated the formal foreclosure process and tried – unsuccessfully – to get help from local law enforcement.
Much to his frustration, town officials and the Eastport Police Department seemed uninterested in investigating what had gone on at the Wass Factory.
Wong, for his part, didn’t go down without a fight.
In early 2023, Sheroff was informed that Wong had purchased an insurance policy for the building and he had attempted to file a police report alleging that he was the victim of a burglary that stole more than $50,000 worth of property from him.
At the time, locals believed he was attempting to commit insurance fraud and would potentially set a match to the building to get out from under his debts.
When the Eastport Police Department wouldn’t give him what he wanted, he filed a complaint with the Maine Human Rights Commission alleging that he was being discriminated against because he was Asian.
In Nov. 2023, the MHRC unanimously found no basis for the discrimination complaint, in part because Wong never showed up for any of the proceedings.
When the Maine Wire visited the property last month, it was unrecognizable from the photographs and videos Sheroff provided from his 2022 visit.
It has now been cleaned out twice – once by Wong, then again by Sheroff and a team of locals following intense storm damage in December.
Judging by electrical records reviewed by the Maine Wire, the cannabis grow began ramping up in early 2021, when usage through the 3-phase power entrance shot from 8,159 kilowatt-hours per month in January to 15,166 kWh in August.
Then suddenly, usage through the 3-phase meter dropped to zero – at least, paid usage.
When Sheroff, who is a retired electrical engineer, saw the amateurish electrical work in the building, including bare wires plugged into outlets, he contacted Versant Power to get the electricity disconnected.
That’s when the utility company informed him that someone had “jumped the meter” – an illegal and dangerous way of stealing electricity from the grid.
A Versant linesman Sheroff later encountered in downtown Eastport told him the company had a pretty good suspicion as to who was responsible for jumping the meter.
The linesman, Sheroff said, told him that an elderly electrician and a younger Asian assistant were responsible for the bypassed meter at the Wass Factory and 18 other locations, that the company knew of.
