Illegal Chinese Marijuana in Maine: Cannabis Office Docs, Police Records Highlight Maine’s Failure to Combat Chinese Criminal Gangs (Part I)

Maine’s Office of Cannabis Policy (OCP) has for the first time released documents related to its investigations into marijuana operators who have fallen afoul of the agency and had their licenses revoked. The documents, which the Maine Wire has been pursuing for more than a year, offer a glimpse at how the cannabis regulatory agency has tried — and failed — to grapple with the scope of Asian transnational organized crime in Maine. The records show that the OCP has barely scratched the surface of the massive criminal networks surrounding the 270 illegal Chinese marijuana grows that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) identified in Maine, according to a memo that leaked last year.

[RELATED: Illegal Chinese Neurotoxins Are Coming to Maine’s Blackmarket Cannabis Grows: Maine Threat Brief…]

The Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) memo said that Chinese criminal networks in Maine are illegally earning billions of dollars through the trafficking of black-market cannabis, narcotics, and human beings, and at least some of the proceeds are returning to sources in the People’s Republic of China. Although the criminal organizations are taking advantage of Maine’s cannabis laws, cheap real estate, and lax law enforcement to traffic black-market buds, the leadership—at least within the eastern U.S.—is thought to be located in Massachusetts and New York City, specifically Flushing.

[RELATED: Illicit Marijuana Grow Near U.S. Army Base in Maine Tied to Chinese Communist Party’s NYC Consulate…]

For more than four years, illicit Chinese drug cartels have operated in plain sight. Neighbors have frequently complained to local law enforcement, sheriffs, and even Maine’s congressional delegation. Maine’s top electrical utilities, Central Maine Power (CMP) and Versant Power, both know exactly where the illegal foreign growers are located, though only Versant has proactively attempted to cooperate with law enforcement. The locations are so obvious that, over the past year, the Maine Wire has identified nearly 300 using public records, financial records, real estate records, and on-the-ground investigations. Legal cannabis operators have known about the phenomenon for years, coming to dub the sketchy, pesticide-ridden cannabis grown at those locations “triad weed.”

[RELATED: Asian Biz Owners with Illegal Cannabis Ties Targeted in Complex Home Invasion Spree Across Maine…]

Since the beginning of the Maine Wire’s Triad Weed series, dozens of properties have been raided throughout the state and several individuals, including Chinese foreign nationals, have been arrested. The arrests have also included individuals of Chinese descent with identity documents from New York, California, and Massachusetts, as well as passports from China and Malaysia. However, the immigration statuses of the conspirators are often unclear, in part because liberal U.S. states and others will issue official identity documents to non-citizens. In some cases, illegal Chinese drug traffickers claim asylum in the U.S. after admitting to entering the country illegally and violating Maine’s drug laws.

The broken immigration system and the permissive rules some states have for issuing identity documents are a blessing to transnational criminal groups. This is especially true in cases where the governments in their home countries assist in the production of foreign identity credentials. A New York driver’s license, for example, can become the key to entering Maine’s medicinal marijuana market, regardless of whether the name and address on the license correspond to a real person. That NY driver’s license, regardless of whether the details on it are accurate or reflect reality, can function as a defense against both immigration and non-immigration crimes. To the extent that the Chinese consulate in New York City is helping foreign nationals obtain these kinds of identity documents, they are enabling in a critical way the ongoing exploitation of Maine and any other state where Chinese criminal gangs have flourished.

[RELATED: How the U.S. Treasury Department Helps Chinese Organized Crime Transform American Homes Into Drug Dens…]

Weak controls over who can obtain an American driver’s license, combined with poor enforcement of marijuana laws, a broken immigration and asylum system, and a reluctance to enforce laws against non-English-speaking criminals, have created a breeding ground for organized crime in Maine. Although county sheriffs, particularly Somerset County Sheriff Dale Lancaster and Lincoln County Sheriff Todd Brackett, have had some success in 2023 and 2024 in disrupting and degrading illegal Chinese marijuana grows, the criminal organizations are evolving and adapting.

As keen observers may have noticed, the steady pace of raids on Chinese pot grows ground to a stop this summer. Why? According to recently released OCP records, many of these organizations are now applying for and easily obtaining licenses to become medicinal “caregivers”—licenses that will provide them de facto protection from local police departments and sheriffs. It’s plainly obvious that someone is helping the transnational criminal groups adopt this new strategy, a strategy that will help them continue exploiting American laws and Maine’s cannabis system. Someone—perhaps a cannabis consultant or an unscrupulous law firm—is helping criminal organizations acquire medicinal licenses, and those licenses will protect them from the only law enforcement in the state that was previously disrupting their unlicensed and illicit activities.

[RELATED: Maine Gov. Janet Mills’ Brother Helped Transfer Nine-Acre Black Market Cannabis Grow to Chinese National “Mother” Living in Guangdong Province…]

Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) has yet to even acknowledge the existence of the sprawling transnational criminal network operating within her state. It’s a network that, according to Homeland Security, is engaged in not only black market marijuana sales, but also in narcotics trafficking and human trafficking. Even apart from the illegal drug activity, the operation is ruining Maine homes during a period of generational housing scarcity, poisoning the environment with an unknown menu of toxic chemicals, driving legal cannabis entrepreneurs to the point of bankruptcy, and threatening the health and well-being of everyone who consumes Maine cannabis. Beyond that, it’s a national security threat, as top defense and intelligence officials have made clear to Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, the one member of Maine’s congressional delegate or statewide leadership who appears to give a damn about the problem.

The properties controlled by Asian Transnational Criminal Organizations just happen to fall near sensitive infrastructure, like regional airports, electrical substations, and water treatment facilities, and near military facilities, such as the National Guard training facility in central Penobscot County or the U.S. Army Reserve base in Dexter. The locations would also prove highly conducive to whatever corporate espionage someone might want to engage in at Maine-based companies, including defense contractors like Bath Iron Works. And all of this activity is abetted by the wide open northern border with Canada, where U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents have caught multiple Chinese operatives attempting to enter the U.S. illegally between ports of entry.

Gov. Mills’ silence on the topic is all the more perplexing considering that it’s a problem that developed entirely after she was elected governor. Real estate records show that the properties from Homeland Security’s list of properties affiliated with Chinese organized crime were acquired almost entirely after Mills’ inauguration. An inauguration that was attended, by the way, by none other than Chinese Consul General in New York Ping Huang, the top-ranking Chinese Communist Party official in the eastern United States. According to Xinhua, a CCP-controlled media outlet, Huang also met with former Senate President Troy Jackson (D) and then-Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap as part of a bid to increase “cooperation.”

Even when the Maine Wire provided Mills, elected members of the legislature, and several other Maine media outlets with irrefutable evidence that Mills’ brother, Paul Mills, had conducted business with a Chinese national illegal marijuana grower, Mills remained silent. So has the nominal head of the Maine State Police, Department of Public Safety Commissioner Michael Sauschuck. If Maine State Police leaders have said anything about Maine’s Chinese gang problem, we’re not aware of it. So far, our Freedom of Access Act request looking for records that might shed light on why the Maine State Police have failed to take a proactive posture against Chinese organized crime have gone unanswered.

Has Commissioner Sauschuck, perhaps acting on orders from the governor, given a stand-down order to the intrepid rank-and-file troopers in the Maine State Police? It certainly appears that way. Given the Maine State Police’s lack of involvement in the majority of raids targeting Chinese gang activity, it’s hard to imagine that such an order hasn’t been delivered, an order that would effectively hamstring the police agency in Maine singularly well positioned to combat such a menace.

[RELATED: Maine Man Charged in Marijuana Conspiracy Looks to Supreme Court for Vindication…]

The closest the Mills administration — or really anyone in state government — has come to recognizing the scope, scale, and nature of the problem occurred, ironically, as Democratic lawmakers and the Mills administration were preparing to kill a piece of legislation that might have helped address the organized crime crisis. In testimony to the legislature, a Maine Assistant Attorney General seemed to recognize the problem, telling a legislative committee earlier this year that as much as one-third of the illegally grown cannabis was making its way — somehow — into the legal dispensary markets. Even though the Attorney General’s Office admitted, if in an offhand way, that the illegal Chinese cannabis was treading on territory regulated by the Office of Cannabis Policy, that office has remained utterly impotent.

The OCP’s disciplinary measures against the illegal foreign growers have been practically non-existent in comparison to the scope of the criminal conduct outlined in the Homeland Security memo. Rather than deal with the vast criminal conspiracy that is systematically undermining Maine’s quality of life and the quality of our cannabis markets, OCP would rather quibble over gummy labels and yeast. That’s partly because OCP Director John Hudak, a Mills appointee, says Maine law doesn’t allow his office to investigate any cannabis growers or sellers who aren’t at least pretending to operate legally. At the same time, law enforcement have received the message that marijuana enforcement is no longer a priority for their departments. That’s created a jurisdictional grey area where no one is really sure whose job it is to investigate transnational criminal groups in Maine when their primary money making activity is marijuana.

The latest Maine Wire reporting on Chinese organized crime in Maine centers on revelations made possible by the release of OCP documents, as well as Maine State Police records obtained through a more limited Freedom of Access Act request. In addition, the Maine Wire has for the first time obtained the full Homeland Security list of properties that federal law enforcement has tied to Chinese organized crime — both locations involved in black-market cannabis cultivation and other illicit activities.

The documents revolve around one group of Chinese cannabis traffickers who entered Maine’s nascent marijuana market an attempted, at least on paper, to operate legally. But as the records demonstrate, Yen “Johnny” Hsein Wu, Shunwang Ding, Sheng Cheng Ye, Jung “Jason” Yen Tsai, and quickly learned that compliance with OCP regulations is costly, while ignoring the rules is extremely profitable. Alarmingly, the records also show that even as the Maine State Police and Homeland Security knew that Chinese gangs from New York were operating illegally in Maine, almost nothing was done to combat the organized crime scourge.

Read the second article in the Maine Wire’s ongoing Triad Weed series to examine the activities of Green Future, LLC, its related shell companies, and the individuals affiliated with these organizations via Office of Cannabis Police, Maine State Police records, and records obtained from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security:

Illegal Chinese Marijuana in Maine: The Shadowy Network of Johnny Wu and Green Future LLC (PART II)