A Franklin County man who was charged in an alleged marijuana conspiracy is taking his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the federal investigation into his licensed cannabis business has raised profound constitutional questions about the limits of governmental power.
A federal grand jury indicted Lucas Sirois, 44, of Farmington, and his now-ex-wife Alisia in 2021. The indictment was based on federal Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agents’ theory that he was the kingpin of a sprawling black-market marijuana conspiracy that had earned millions of dollars through out-of-state sales.
The alleged out-of-state sales form the foundation of the federal government’s case against Sirois. On top of those allegations, the prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Noah Falk, constructed more robust charges that included money laundering, bank fraud, and tax evasion.
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Sirois has vigorously denied the allegations of criminal conduct made against him from the start, insisting that his sizable marijuana growing business at all times attempted to follow the new, highly complex, and shifting rules emerging from Maine’s Office of Cannabis Policy (OCP) following the broad legalization of marijuana use and sales in 2016.
However, the courts have so far sided with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and Sirois has run out of options for fighting the charges against him.
In Oct. 2024, a three-judge panel in the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the District of Maine rejected Sirois’s final attempt to have the prosecution thwarted, affirming a lower court’s ruling and allowing the prosecution to move forward.
“The defendants failed to show that their marijuana operation complied with Maine’s medical marijuana laws,” Falk said in a press release.
“As a result, the prosecution will continue in federal court,” he said.
That has set the table for a Supreme Court showdown that could have implications for licensed cannabis entrepreneurs in every state.
“The government is the law breaker here,” said Eric Postow, Sirois’ lead defense attorney.
“Luke is going to stand up for himself in the biggest way possible,” Postow said.
Postow, a managing partner at Holon Law, a top cannabis law firm, said government investigators have constructed a flawed, illegal, and biased case against Sirois.
For Sirois, the case is about more than cannabis — it’s about government overreach, an overzealous prosecution, and law enforcement failing to respect the limits placed on the power of the state.
“Luke believes that it is far more important that the government, the ones with all the power, be accountable to the laws that restrict it,” said Postow.
Whether the Supreme Court will agree to hear Sirois’s case is anyone’s guess.
Every year, 7,000 to 8,000 petitioners compete for their attention, and about 80 receive a review.
But thanks to the outcome of the election in November, Sirois’s case may never get that far.
That’s because the U.S. Attorney for the District of Maine who has pursued the charges against Sirois, Darcie McElwee, will soon be relieved of her federal employment and replaced by Republican President-elect Donald Trump.
Trump’s new U.S. Attorney in Maine will have the option to evaluate the Sirois case and drop it altogether.
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Should the future head of the Justice Department in Maine find that the case was a misuse of taxpayer resources or that the case is likely to fail on its merits at the Supreme Court, Sirois could find himself liberated from a government investigation.
Although that avenue would be ideal and less costly for Sirois, it would leave unresolved the serious questions the case has raised about government overreach, states’ rights, and whether limited government can be achieved if government employees ignore, disrespect, or misunderstand the limits imposed on them by elected officials.
Government Overreach in Sirois v. United States
At issue in Lucas Sirois’ case is a restriction on the power of the federal government peculiar to state-legalized medical marijuana industries known as the Rohrabacher-Farr Amendment.
That amendment, which has been attached to federal legislation as an appropriations rider since 2014, forbids the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) from spending taxpayer dollars investigating marijuana related crimes if those investigations would interfere with a state-legalized medical cannabis program.
The text of the amendment is as follows:
“None of the funds made available in this Act to the Department of Justice may be used, with respect to the States … to prevent such States from implementing their own State laws that authorize the use, distribution, possession, or cultivation of medical marijuana.”
The logic of the so-called Rohrabacher Rule is simple: States are increasingly legalizing cannabis, so the federal government should respect states’ rights and the will of the people, and not waste taxpayer money targeting supposed marijuana offenses, as that would interfere with the implementation of state cannabis laws.
For the defense, the entire case is flawed because the investigation was carried out in violation of Rohrabacher. They have argued that the DEA agents and other federal employees violated the rule when they started investigating and surveilling Sirois in 2015, tapped his phones 2019, and used the testimony of disgruntled former employees to indict him in 2021. But if the investigation itself was illegal, then it should not matter what might have been uncovered subsequent to illegal investigative actions by the government.
The argument would seem clear: the elected legislative body—Congress—has told the Justice Department several times “thou shall not,” yet DOJ lawyers and federal investigators went ahead and did it anyway to Sirois for nearly five years, costing taxpayers millions of dollars in the process. Continuing a prosecution that started and matured in violation of this rule would only further defy the laws written and approved by Congress.
The federal investigators, for their part, seem not to have contemplated whether the Rohrabacher Rule ought to have constrained their behavior until they were submitting a search warrant application in July 2020 — several years after they started investigating and surveilling Sirois. In a footnote appended to an affidavit, almost as an afterthought, an investigating agent blithely asserted that Rohrabacher doesn’t apply to Sirois’s case.
Rohrabacher isn’t the only weakness in the government’s case against Sirois.
Throughout the appeals process and the evidentiary hearing, it became apparent that federal investigators and the U.S. Attorney’s office had developed an evolving theory of why Sirois ought to go to jail, a theory that rested almost entirely on the testimony of disgruntled former employees with severe credibility issues.
The federal government obtained an indictment of Sirois by telling a grand jury that Sirois was responsible for exporting black market cannabis to New York in exchange for cocaine as part of a conspiracy involving a guy named Ryan Nezol.
However, the prosecutors accusation eventually shifted the entire theory of the case against Sirois, abandoning the Nezol-Sirois conspiracy theory completely. In the most recent version of the case against Sirois, the federal government has insisted instead that Sirois was flagrantly non-compliant with OCP rules (even though OCP never told him this or suspended his license) and engaged in an out-of-state sales conspiracy with someone other than Nezol.
A careful reading of the court filings related to Sirois’s case can’t help but bring up thoughts of the infamous Stalin Era quote attributed to Lavrentiy Beria: “Show me the man, I’ll find you the crime.”
At the center of the Lucas Sirois case is a cannabis business that Sirois, at the time a licensed medical marijuana caregiver, ran out of an old shoe factory in Farmington, as well as several other cannabis-related companies he owned. Sirois had been cultivating cannabis under Maine’s medical marijuana program since 2012, and, with the statewide vote to legalize cannabis in 2016, he saw an opportunity to drastically expand his cannabis business. Sirois also operated other companies that distributed medical cannabis and cannabis products to other licensed caregivers and dispensaries.
The Shoe Shop, as Sirois’s marijuana growing space was called, emerged as a somewhat common business model in Maine following the roll out of legalized marijuana sales. Under the model, licensed caregivers could rent growing space from Sirois to grow cannabis under their own licenses. It’s an arrangement that several marijuana growers—both licensed and unlicensed—used at a Turner marijuana growing facility owned by Green Future LLC. The same arrangement is currently in use at 128 Weld Road in Wilton, another former shoe factory that was converted into a rentable marijuana growing facility. Unlike the 128 Weld operation and Green Future LLC’s Turner operation, Sirois found himself on the wrong end of a federal probe and a grand jury indictment.
Sirois doesn’t deny that he was running perhaps the largest legal cannabis business in Maine, or that it was a complicated endeavor that involved multiple employees and associates. But he argues that he was attempting to build the business in compliance with Maine law and rules emerging from the Office of Cannabis Policy (OCP).
Rather than the kingpin of a illicit conspiracy, Sirois’ attorneys argue that he was a cannabis entrepreneur attempting to build a business in a new and evolving regulatory landscape. Further, they argue that he is in fact the victim of a conspiracy by government investigators and a fundamentally unjust prosecution, beginning with a grudge held by a high-ranking member of the Maine State Police and culminating in the selective enforcement of the law.
“The evidence clearly shows that there was absolutely zero conspiracy between Luke and anyone for black market sales,” Postow, Sirois’s attorney, told the Maine Wire.
“The entirety of the governments case is based on biased and flawed police work and incompetent prosecution,” he said.
The governments’ primary argument against Sirois is that he operated as the head of an illegal “collective,” a case they’ve attempted to make via testimony from former associates and government employees. But even if Sirois admitted to running a collective, that wouldn’t necessarily justify a federal investigation as it would amount to a violation of state-enforced regulations. In addition, the federal government only developed the “collective” accusation after it had already spent several years of investigating and surveilling Sirois for different alleged crimes.
Whether Sirois conspired to arrange back market sales that involved cannabis crossing state lines in violation of federal law is key to the federal government’s investigation and prosecution, because minor violations of Maine’s legal cannabis rules would not justify federal involvement.
Dubious Legal Theory and Government Overreach
From the outset of the case against Sirois, the news headlines in Maine have cast his guilt as a foregone conclusion.
To read the local Franklin County news, one would surmise that Sirois was engaged in a massive cocaine and cannabis selling conspiracy that made weekly deliveries throughout New England.
That’s not the news reporters fault, either. That’s exactly what the federal government claimed when they announced the grand jury indictment.
But the government’s portrait of Sirois seems like a cartoonish caricature of a northern Maine mafioso when compared to the facts that emerged during the evidentiary hearing.
Compared to the vast resources the federal government has marshaled against him, including informants, wiretaps, and in-person surveillance, the evidence against Sirois amounts to little more than the opinions of a few disgruntled employees with monetary or plea deal-related incentives to lie about their ex-boss.
Here are just a few instances where the case against Sirois appears shockingly weak.
Grand Jury Indictment Based on False Information: The DEA agent whose testimony the grand jury used to indict Sirois later admitted that his testimony to the grand jury was inaccurate. The DEA agent told the grand jury that Sirois provided an underling, Ryan Nezol, with marijuana to export out-of-state in return for shipments of cocaine. None of that is true, as even the DEA agent later acknowledged during the evidentiary hearing. Here’s the relevant transcript from the DEA agent’s cross examination with Sirois’ attorneys:
After the DEA agent acknowledged a lack of evidence linking Sirois to cocaine trafficking or out-of-state sales via Nezol, he admitted that his only basis for suspicion was technical noncompliance with Maine’s medical marijuana program. It’s questionable whether that alleged noncompliance could have provided an adequate pretext for a federal investigation under Rohrabacher.
Misleading Affidavit and Wiretaps: After having surveilled Sirois and listened in on his phone calls, the DEA’s case against him nonetheless remained so weak that they resorted to giving a judge misleading selective quotes in order to obtain their search warrant. In the warrant application, the DEA took a conversation that Sirois had with his father about Christmas trees and stock market investing and transmogrified it into an illegal conversation about the marijuana business. The conversation was problematic for Sirois because his father, as a convicted felon, was not allowed to be a part of his cannabis business activities. As the transcripts below show, the DEA edited quotes from the conversation to make them seem cannabis related when they were not.
Including the misleading quotes in a search warrant application that was then submitted to a judge is damning enough. But the fact that the DEA felt it had to spice up the search warrant application with such misleading edits is even more damning for what it implies about the federal wiretapping itself. That is, federal agents secretly spied on Sirois’s phone calls for weeks without ever recording him saying something obviously incriminating. The wiretaps produced no smoking-gun evidence of an out-of-state sales conspiracy directed by Sirois. Quite the accomplishment for what the federal government considered on of Maine’s largest black-market marijuana kingpins.
Flimsy Origins of Surveillance: The investigation into Sirois began with questionable connections. DEA agents initiated surveillance based on links to a New York cocaine trafficker who identified Ryan Nezol as a Maine-based supplier of black market marijuana. The DEA then extended the investigation of Nezol to Sirois, despite acknowledging a lack of direct evidence tying Sirois to cocaine trafficking or black-market sales. The basis for jumping from Nezol to Sirois that the government provided was having surveilled Nezol driving to a location where Sirois’s car was parked after selling marijuana to an informant, as well as data showing the two communicated by phone. Sirois would later go on to briefly employ Nezol, but the relationship had nothing to do with out-of-state sales of cocaine, as even the federal government would late admit. Again, linking Sirois to either out-of-state cannabis sales or cocaine sales would have been key to legally getting past the Rohrabacher Rule, because without those potential federal crimes, investigating Sirois would be an illegal use of tax dollars.
Selective Scrutiny and Unexplored Leads: Throughout the investigation described in the Sirois court documents, federal investigators obtained multiple leads about other individuals in New England who could have drawn the same level of scrutiny as Sirois. Yet none ever did. The DEA investigator who testified for the government at the evidentiary hearing never justified why Sirois and only Sirois became the subject of invasive surveillance when other licensed caregivers were similarly situated. Similarly, the OCP declined to respond to questions from the Maine Wire about whether the office had engaged in similar treatment of other licensed caregivers. The OCP also declined to say whether it has rules for when it will bring in federal law enforcement.
Unreliable Witness Testimony: In parallel to the Nezol-based line of investigation, which led to wiretaps that failed to produce any striking evidence that Sirois was engaged in out-of-state sales, the DEA investigators began to develop cooperating witnesses against Sirois. The government’s two most important witnesses, Tanya Crogan and cooperating defendant Brandon Dagnese, both have objectively spotty tack records when it comes to honesty, as well as questionable motives when it comes to Sirois.
Crogan, a former Sirois employee, was fired for theft—which was caught on video, according to court documents. After she was fired, Crogan approached OCP with a series of accusations that Sirois was engaged in brazenly illegal conduct. Crogan’s complaint to OCP provided the DEA with a pretext to further investigate Sirois after the wiretaps turned up nothing spectacular. Crogan’s complaint and the OCP’s reaction to that complaint would later allow prosecutors to argue that Sirois was not in compliance with state law and therefore Rohrabacher did not apply. Crogan was also strongly incentivized to get Sirois thrown in jail because the DEA agents dangled a cooperating witness agreement in front of her, which would have allowed her to receive a share of Sirois’ seized assets.
In other words, the DEA took a disgruntled former employee with some large outstanding debts and said, “If you give us the goods on Sirois, we might give you a slice of his assets.”
Here’s a transcript of Crogan discussing that agreement during cross examination with Sirois’ attorneys:
The DEA relied heavily on Brandon Dagnese, a cooperating defendant, to connect Sirois to alleged out-of-state sales. However, Dagnese was incentivized to prove a case against Sirois by the terms of a plea deal that would reduce his prison sentence.
During the evidentiary hearing, Dagnese confessed to lying to law enforcement and during court proceedings, further undermining the reliability of his testimony. In addition, Dagnese admitted that, during the execution of the search warrant, he got his phone back from law enforcement to make a call and secretly wiped it of all data. Dagnese, as the defense showed during the hearings, bought cannabis from Sirois; however, he always represented himself to Sirois as buying his product on behalf of another licensed caregiver.
Here are the relevant transcripts from Dagnese getting cross examined:
Importantly, Crogan and Dagnese are the two key witnesses to the entire theory of the prosecution. Crogan’s complaint to OCP is, the government claims, what allowed its investigation into Sirois to continue when the wiretaps proved unfruitful. The OCP asking the DEA to get involved, based solely on Crogan’s complaint, was what the prosecutors would later use to get around Rohrabacher. That is, the fact that OCP asked the DEA to investigate meant that a DEA investigation would not interfere with OCP’s administration of the medical marijuana program and was, therefore, fine under Rohrabacher. Dagnese, after the original theory about Ryan Nezol fell apart, became the only link the government had to show Sirois’s alleged ties to out-of-state sales.
Surveillance Obtained Proof of Attempts at Compliance: Despite years spent investigating Sirois, following him around Farmington, investigating his associates, and even listening to his private phone calls, the DEA case remains so thin that they were forced to rely on unreliable witnesses and misleading claims to judges and grand juries. Despite all the surveillance, the DEA was never able to obtain audio of Sirois clearly directing the very illegal behavior they accuse him of directing. Instead, they found numerous examples of Sirois directing his associates to engage in compliant behavior and avoid non-compliant behavior. Remarkably, the federal government interprets these instances of Sirois seeking to be compliant as evidence that his areas of non-compliance had to be purposeful because he had demonstrated knowledge of the regulations. In other words, Sirois’s compliance was evidence of criminal non-compliance!
Money Laundering, Bank Fraud, and Tax Evasion: The financial activity Sirois has been accused of only becomes criminal if it’s true that he was engaged in cocaine trafficking and out-of-state sales. The federal government has dropped the allegation that he was involved in cocaine trafficking, but it continues to allege, based on Dagnese’s testimony, that Sirois directed out-of-state sales. If Sirois never directed out-of-state sales or profited from black market sales, as he contends, then his use of various bank accounts and LLCs is not criminal. As OCP Deputy Director Vernon Malloch said during the evidentiary hearing, there was nothing inherently criminal about Sirois use of multiple companies and bank accounts. Other licensed cannabis businesses operating in Maine use multiple separate corporate structures to track and store assets, income, and costs. None of that is inherently illegal; it only becomes illegal if it’s used to abet underlying illegal acts, such as cocaine trafficking or out-of-state cannabis sales.
The OCP Treated Sirois Differently Than Any Other Caregiver: In the evidentiary hearings, it emerged that Sirois was treated differently than every other licensed medical marijuana caregiver, though no explanation or justification for this special treatment was ever provided. OCP Deputy Director Malloch acknowledged under oath that Sirois’s operation was inspected prior to the execution of the search warrant and that the inspector found no reason to warn Sirois that he was bordering on non-compliant behavior. Even after the search warrant was executed, the caregivers working at the Shoe Shop never saw their licenses revoked.
Further, while Malloch said it was common for the OCP to give “soft warnings” to caregivers, the OCP in Sirois’s case skipped all intermediary steps and went straight to the DEA when Crogan came forward with her complaint. The OCP did not give Sirois or the Shoe Shop caregivers warnings that the activity could be an illegal collective. Nor did the OCP strip them of their licenses. Instead, the OCP went straight to federal law enforcement and later helped the DEA build a case against Sirois. The OCP has never explained why Sirois received this disproportionate response while every other licensed caregiver in Maine received a lesser response.
Any one of these deficiencies could be enough for the next U.S. attorney to toss the case in the dustbin of history. Taken together, they raise a new question: Is this really what the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the U.S. Attorney of Maine has been doing with her time since 2020? That question is especially vital considering what all Mainers now know about the ongoing and expanding activities of Chinese organized crime in Maine, as well as other criminal groups trafficking in fentanyl.
Here’s the motion that Sirois’s attorneys filed as part of their effort to get the prosecution halted due to the deficiencies in the federal investigation and federal case against their client.
And the Chinese continue to grow their pot here with complete immunity .
How Maine is that !
I suspect the only difference between this guy and the Chinese is the kickback to mills.
Lawfare at it’s worse,….
The State should have never got in MJ gateway business. There has not been a reduction in problems or use as promised by the POLITICANS, only more adiction by our kids.
Well, the indentured chinese marijuana growers will have to continue to pay the price for being here illegally… so …. I guess the top dogs will still get their pay and this poor guy trying to make a living will pay the ultimate price, and so it goes in the state of Maine where certain “ones” are above the law.
And the illegal Chinese grows keep growing with impunity and seems immunity…. who’s paying who???
Perhaps the author of this overly long piece wrote while smoking some of the $hit that Siois grows. This is probably the worst article I have read in the Maine Wire. I am sorry to see that it was written by the guy who runs the site. This undercuts my desire to support the Maine Wire or believe other articles I read here.
For all you AirBnB users and cottage owners it is owned by China!.
Wonder why rentals are off in Maine by 9% while cottage rental rates have gone up.
Maybe the governor tax division should check?
Also check out the the stake china investors have in GMC.
And Nathan’s Hot dogs is a fully owned subsidiary of Smithfield foods a company we all know which is CCP owned.
Why does the Governor not crack down on the MJ grow houses in Maine. What a dog.
Steve , is he too much competition for the illegal China run grow houses in Maine?
In the meantime.. the Chinese weed market is left alone… make it make sense