Farmington attorney Paul Mills, the brother of Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D), first popped into The Maine Wire’s multi-year investigation into Chinese drug cartels operating in rural Maine in March 2024, when we uncovered real estate records showing Mills’ involvement in a bizarre real estate deal that transferred an illicit cannabis grow to a Chinese national living in Guangdong Province, China. Since the first story broke, Mills has continued to facilitate real estate deals involving out-of-state cannabis entrepreneurs, including a cluster of Chinese growers who’ve opened up shop within miles of his home in New Sharon. As his sister vies for a position in the U.S. Senate, county property records and state cannabis records show no sign that the eager real estate attorney is moderating his involvement in the seedy world of cannabis to protect his older sibling from accusations that she’s soft on organized crime — and perhaps a little too comfortable with transnational criminal organizations the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department have linked to human trafficking, fentanyl trafficking, and the Chinese Communist Party.
On April 1, 2025, Somerset County sheriff’s deputies executed a warrant at a South Road property in Harmony and arrested Wenfeng Chen, 51, of Malden, Massachusetts. Inside, they found 1,405 marijuana plants, approximately 100 pounds of processed cannabis, a 9mm pistol, ammunition, and $1,600 in drug proceeds. Chen and his co-defendant, Xinwen Zhang, 71, of Boston, now face Class B felony charges — unlawful cultivation and drug trafficking — the kind of charges that can put you in prison for ten years, or get you deported.
It was the second time law enforcement had hit the same Harmony property. Deputies raided it in May 2024 and seized more than 1,200 plants, but no one was home.
Law enforcement would have to wait another eleven months to find Wenfeng Chen on the premises.
But one year before Chen was arrested with illicit drugs, cash, and a firearm, the Maine Wire photographed a 2017 Mercedes-Benz sedan bearing Massachusetts plates registered in Chen’s name at his Charles St. address in Malden, Mass.
The vehicle was parked at the site of a separate illicit cannabis grow, 51 Cider Hill Road in Corinna, where the local code enforcement officer had repeatedly denied requests from the owners to upgrade the electrical capacity because large-scale cannabis cultivation is illegal in that town.
Chen happened to share an address with Xiling Ou, 44, the man who owned the Corinna property until he gave it away, allegedly to his mother, Xiaoyu Lu of Guangdong Province, China.
The attorney who made that gift happen was Paul H. Mills — better known as the brother of Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D), the woman currently vying for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination and a chance to square off against Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins.
The Corinna “Gift to Mother”
Paul Mills is 70-something, a Farmington lawyer with a 48-year career and more than 100 documented Franklin County deed transactions dating back to 1983. His firm, Mills & Mills, has handled the real estate needs of Franklin County for four decades — wills, estates, probate, property transfers. When this reporter called him for help with a fictitious deed in Penobscot County, the location of the illicit cannabis grow he helped transfer to the hands of a Chinese national, he declined the job, adding that he doesn’t work in that part of the state.
Yet Paul Mills’ name and contact information appear on real estate documents connected to at least three properties and multiple individuals in Maine that are part of a cannabis cultivation network the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has estimated spans more than 270 properties statewide and is controlled by Asian Transnational Organized Crime.
On March 6, 2024, Penobscot County recorded a deed transferring the nine-acre Corinna property — a shabby tear-down off a dirt road — from Xiling Ou to Xiaoyu Lu. Paul Mills, the governor’s brother, was listed as the preparer. Lu’s address on the deed — the address he provided to Maine’s legal system — is in Foshan City, Guangdong Province, China.
The deed described the transaction as a “gift to mother,” which must have been a translation error, because Lu is 37 years old. Ou is 44. Lu is male.
Those facts — property transferred to a man living in Guangdong Province under paperwork claiming he’s giving it to his mother, when the alleged mother is seven years younger than he is — appeared in a deed that Paul Mills prepared and submitted. In Mills’ defense, he did tell me in a phone interview that no one in his small Franklin County law office is fluent in Cantonese.
Al Tempesta, the code enforcement officer for the town of Corinna, confirmed to the Maine Wire that the owners of 51 Cider Hill Road had attempted numerous times to obtain approval for the 400-amp commercial grade power required for a major cannabis grow.
“I did not sign off on that because the application with the state said ‘to grow marijuana’, and [the Senior Electrical Inspector] told me that, and I said, ‘I can’t sign off on that, Corinna did not opt in’,” said Tempesta.
Paul Mills’ clients even used J. Martin Vachon as their master electrician, the same 90-year-old eccentric electrician who has helped Chinese cannabis traffickers at more than 35 locations across the state.
“The Chinese want to hide,” Vachon said in a phone interview. “And I’m their frontman.”
Tong Q. Lu, Vachon’s handler, electrical assistant, and a man the electrician described as his adopted son, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2025.
However, he was ultimately released in January because the U.S. government could not prove that Lu, who claimed to have fled China after the Tiananmen Square massacre, was in fact a Chinese national.
RELATED: The Restaurateur: Bangor Business Owner Linked to Illicit Marijuana Grows…
When the Maine Wire asked the governor’s brother about the Corinna transaction in 2024, he said: “I don’t know the purpose of the property… ordinarily you do not do an analysis of that when you’re asked to do a deed.”
Exactly when the governor’s brother decided to cater to a special kind of cannabis clientele is hard to pin down. In the phone interview, he would only say that “someone” asked him to handle the transaction, but he unsubtly dodged specifying who that someone was.
Registry records show he was handling real estate transactions for the network before anyone was paying attention.
In August 2022, nearly two years before the Corinna story ran, Mills was the preparer on a deed transferring 1130 Farmington Falls Road in Farmington to Aizhu Feng, of Brooklyn. The property is in Mills’ own home county. The gifter was Xin Xia Huang — also of Brooklyn — who had purchased the property ten months earlier. The transaction involved no money. Like the Corinna transfer two years later, it was a gift deed — this one described as aunt to niece.
In a remarkable turn of events, a former alpaca farm less than a mile from Feng’s property is now a cannabis grow — complete with commercial grade power thanks to Marty Vachon and Tong Lu. What’s more, Feng’s “aunt” Xin Xia Huang is now a registered medicinal cannabis cultivator at a massive Chinese marijuana grow 60 miles away in Sangerville — a 10,000 square-foot cannabis facility that is owned by another former client of the governor’s brother, the same Chinese national who took receipt of the Corinna property.
When Xiaoyu Lu, of Guangdong Province, China, couldn’t get Al Tempesta to go along with his Corinna plans, he set his sights on 550 North Dexter Road in Sangerville, a compound that has become one of the largest indoor marijuana cultivation sites in New England. State records show Lu is an active Office of Cannabis Policy caregiver, meaning he can legally grow 500 square feet of canopy.
On December 4, 2024, state records show four LLCs registered simultaneously at the 550 North Dexter Road address: Oneleaf Garden LLC, Twoleaf Garden LLC, Threeleaf Garden LLC, and Fourleaf Garden LLC. The registrant of Oneleaf Garden LLC is Xin Xia Huang — the same woman whose 2022 Farmington property transfer Paul Mills handled.
That’s precisely the kind of arrangement — shared electricity, shared water, shared supply chains, and synchronized registration dates — that landed Lucas Sirois in prison for operating a prohibited collective. Yet the Chinese national clients and associates of the governor’s brother have remained totally immune from harassment by state law enforcement.
Here’s the Sangerville farm before and after Paul Mills’ Chinese clients turned it into a cannabis factory and a flop house. The last time The Maine Wire visited, there was a well-drilling company on site poking another well in the ground because the medicinal licenses tied to this location are consuming so much water.
In a phone interview, Mills purported to be totally unaware of the Chinese criminal conspiracy that had, by that time, been featured on CBS, NBC, Fox News, and multiple national news platforms. But even after his real estate dealings with Chinese nationals involved in the illicit drug trade drew the spotlight, he continued to ink deeds and real estate transfers for Chinese cannabis entrepreneurs, including some whose properties appear on the DHS list for locations with suspected ties to the Chinese mafia.
Three months after our phone interview — in June 2024 — Paul Mills prepared the real estate transfer tax filings for a New Sharon property purchased by Simon Leung, a Brooklyn resident who had registered with Maine’s OCP as a cannabis grower just three months before the purchase. That property — 54 York Hill Road — is now so clearly a mass cannabis cultivation site the grow operation can be seen from space, with a nearly identical footprint as the Sangerville operation.
The York Hill Road facility is a short drive from 25 Vienna Rd., in Chesterville, which Simon’s brother Nelson Leung had purchased in Nov. 2020. That property happens to appear on the list of 270 addresses Homeland Security flagged for ties to transnational organized crime, according to a copy of that list obtained by The Maine Wire.
For all of these coincidences, you’d think Paul Mills is the only lawyer in Maine who can help Chinese cartels from New York and Massachusetts buy land and houses in Maine. But given the sheer scope of Chinese cannabis cartel dominance in rural Maine, the governor’s brother is just one of the lawyers and real estate professionals playing a role in the expansion of their lucrative empire.
By 2025, the hitherto illegal Chinese cannabis traffickers had realized — perhaps thanks to an enterprising attorney — that simply obtaining a cannabis registration card from the state made them immune from law enforcement under Maine law. But as Maine’s Office of Cannabis Policy Director John Hudak admitted in Jan. 2025, no one believes the Chinese growers from New York and Massachusetts are getting registration cards because they intend to comply with the laws that honest, heritage Americans are forced to comply with.
“These groups are exploiting Maine’s medical and recreational cannabis systems for illicit gain,” said Hudak.
“I do believe that, in some of these cases, individuals who are getting arrested in connection with these search warrants, or addresses that are connected to these search warrants — they are not applying to our medical program to come out of the shadows and into the light,” said Hudak.
“They’re applying so they can have a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card, or what they perceive as a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card to continue to do the operations that they’re doing. Which, by and large, is directing product out of state as well,” he said.
The Governor’s Silence
The DHS estimated in August 2023 that Asian Transnational Criminal Organizations controlled more than 270 Maine properties — a number that by most accounts has since grown.
OCP Director John Hudak testified before the Legislature’s Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee on January 15, 2025. He acknowledged that his office had been issuing cannabis licenses to individuals linked to transnational organized crime. He said the current statutes left him powerless to stop it — that existing law does not authorize the OCP to deny medical caregiver licenses even when applicants are known to law enforcement.
That’s the closest the Mills Administration has come to acknowledging an organized crime infestation that has been the subject of numerous congressional testimonies and even an entire congressional hearing last year.
Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, has not commented on her brother’s role in facilitating these property transfers. Indeed, she has yet to utter a single word of condemnation for the vast criminal conspiracy that proliferated across the state after she welcomed New Chinese Consul General in New York Ping Huang to her Jan. 2019 inauguration as Maine’s first female governor.
In the only instance where she’s been asked about the organized crime epidemic afflicting rural Maine, she laughed off the question with Democratic U.S. Sen. Angus King and U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree (ME-CD1).
The extent of Maine’s cannabis industry controlled by previously illegal Chinese marijuana traffickers has only grown since the original leak of the DHS memo. But now, thanks in large part to a tacit blessing from Mills and Maine law enforcement, the Chinese cannabis traffickers now have white shoe attorneys and fancy lobbyists.
Beginning in 2024, when the Maine Wire started aggressively exposing the transnational organized crime ring and county sheriffs began aggressively executing search warrants at illicit cannabis grows run by Chinese indentured servants, the cartels adopted a new tactic. Rather than operating completely off the radar, the Chinese growers from New York and Massachusetts began slipping into Maine’s medicinal cannabis program.
With Maine’s cannabis prices plummeting and American cultivators going out of business, it’s tempting to think the market has become over-saturated. But that wasn’t the case for the money behind Eden Plus Botanical, LLC.
Jill G. Cohen, a partner at Verrill Dana who is often spotted mixing it up with local marijuana activists, represented the founders of Eden Plus Botanical, LLC, Majority Member Kenny Ng and his partner Junming Li, a veteran of the Chinese marijuana game in Maine.
According to the deal that Verrill Dana partner Jill G. Cohen negotiated for the Chinese cannabis entrepreneurs, Eden will pay Maine Poly Holdings $18,000 per month to lease a space where they will operate a Tier Four (20,000 square-foot) adult use marijuana grow.
Both Ng and Li listed 38 Union St. in Livermore Falls as their address on the lease, a building that used to be a doctor’s office belonging to Dr. Dorothy Thayer. As Maine suffers from a decline in rural health care options, the exam rooms that once sat patients now have been converted into boarding rooms for workers at the kinds of operations Maine Poly’s space now hosts.
Cohen did not respond for to email asking about her involvement with the Chinese cannabis growers.
Although Kenny Ng appears to be the adult use license holder under which Eden Botanicals will operate, Junming Li is seemingly the more experienced ganja grower.
According to records obtained under a Freedom of Access Act request, Li was previously among the growers active at 333 Brunswick Ave. in Gardiner, along with Bikang Huang and Yen Hsein Wu — two cannabis growers who’ve previously been disciplined by the OCP for brazen violations of Maine’s cannabis rules. Per the records, Li was Huang’s assistant.
What the Pattern Means
Paul Mills has not been charged with any crime. He denies knowing the properties he helped transfer were part of a cannabis cultivation network. Odds are he’s one of the many attorneys and real estate professionals who’ve seized on the cash-flush Chinese cannabis traffickers to make a buck processing paperwork, maybe holding some funds in escrow, and other totally ordinary legal business with plenty of layers of plausible deniability.
What the documents show is this:
In February 2024, he prepared a gift deed for a Corinna property that, in his own words, was located outside the area where he usually works for white English speaking clients — no money changed hands, the recipient was listed as a Chinese national living in Guangdong Province, the paperwork described a biological impossibility, the property was an active unlicensed cannabis grow.
Three months after national coverage of the Corinna transfer, he prepared tax documents for a New Sharon property purchase by Simon Leung, the same Simon Leung who had obtained a cannabis caregiver license for New Sharon two months earlier. The same Simon Leung whose brother, Nelson Leung, owned a nearby Chesterville property the DHS flagged for ties to the Chinese mafia.
In the competition to be the Chinese marijuana capital of Maine, New Sharon is surely at the front of the pack. It also happens to be where Paul Mills keeps his primary residence, according to public records.
RELATED: Feds Charge Seven Chinese Nationals in Bay State Drug, Money Laundering, Smuggling Scheme…
It’s also worth noting: In July 2025, when U.S. Attorney Leah Foley handed down an indictment of seven Chinese nationals for human and drug trafficking charges that related to cannabis grows in Massachusetts and Maine, several of the exhibits included in the indictment related to law firms, banks, and real estate companies. Taken together, those exhibits were a not so subtle hint that prosecutors suspect perhaps the alleged money launderers were engaged in some classic money seasoning, a practice that involves funneling dirty cash into real estate by first passing it through a morally flexible attorney’s trust account.
But what’s in store for the future of Maine’s bustling Chinese cannabis economy?
Since the flurry of search warrants and arrests in early 2024, police activity around the Chinese marijuana grows has ground to a halt — even as the volume of illicit cannabis trafficking has surged.
That’s because the Chinese traffickers — according to Gov. Mills’ handpicked pot czar — are using Office of Cannabis Policy credentials to shield themselves from law enforcement scrutiny.
The data support Hudak’s analysis. In a 2024 release of Maine’s medicinal cannabis program registrants, there were less than a dozen cannabis businesses linked to Chinese individuals from out of state — even as the program had been operating at full capacity for at least four years.
However, in the most recently released OCP records, there are more than 220 Chinese individuals, with 90 of those individuals telling OCP that their full-time residence is outside of Maine, mostly in New York and Massachusetts.
But just because the Mills Administration has afforded the Chinese cartels the protection that comes with OCP credentials doesn’t mean they’ve dropped off of federal law enforcement’s radar.
[RELATED: Maine State Police Spotted at Notorious Chinese Cannabis Hub in Fairfield…]
In January, one of the oldest and most well-known fronts for illicit Chinese cannabis was the site of a massive and mysterious raid by Maine State Police vehicles and almost a dozen unmarked federal vehicles.
Yezi Craft Cannabis in Fairfield, the location of the raid, is intricately connected to a web of other black-market Chinese growers from out of state, according to OCP disciplinary records. (That would include, by the way, Junming Li, the co-lessor of the facility that Jill Cohen of Verrill Dana helped convert into a Tier 4 adult use cannabis grow.)
As the Maine Wire has previously reported, Shunwang Ding and Shengcheng Ye, two New Yorkers affiliated with Yezi, are both connected to the sprawling network of illicit cannabis activities that sprang up under the banner of Green Future LLC and Blue Future Corporation. Although Green Future and Blue Future were primarily located in the Lewiston-Auburn-Turner area, including the 57 Conant Road location where William Robinson was murdered in Dec. 2024, the Green Future Gang was also known to cultivate at the 333 Brunswick Ave, Gardiner, spot where Li was an assistant.
No information was ever released about the raid on Yezi by either the Maine State Police or federal law enforcement. But depending on how deeply that probe looks, it might unfurl the entire triad weed plot and perhaps shed a little light on why Gov. Mills’ brother has so many Chinese clients with a penchant for growing pot.
- Triad Weed: How Chinese Marijuana Grows Took Over Rural Maine
- Illegal Chinese Marijuana in Maine: The Shadowy Network of Johnny Wu and Green Future LLC (PART II)
- Maine Gov. Janet Mills’ Brother Helped Transfer Nine-Acre Black Market Cannabis Grow to Chinese National “Mother” Living in Guangdong Province
- How the U.S. Treasury Department Helps Chinese Organized Crime Transform American Homes Into Drug Dens
- Maine Sheriff Raids Another Black Market Drug House Run by Chinese Organized Crime — Cannabis and Meth Seized
- The Restaurateur: Bangor Business Owner Linked to Illicit Marijuana Grows
- Raid on Illegal Chinese Marijuana Operation in Western Maine Seizes Illicit Drugs Worth $1M+
- Three Chinese Nationals Caught Sneaking Into Maine from Canada Amid Asian Organized Crime Epidemic
- The Triad’s Electrician: Meet the 87-Year-Old “Frontman” for Chinese Marijuana Grows in Maine
- Welcomed to Maine by LePage, Eastport Seafood Biz Devolved Into Illicit Marijuana Trafficking Operation with Ties to Hong Kong
- One NYC Bank Financed More Than 50 Illicit Chinese Marijuana Grow Houses in Rural Maine
- Second Chinese National Arrested in Connection with Illegal Marijuana Grows in Maine Faces Federal Charges
- Maine Sheriff Raids 20th Chinese Mafia Drug House of 2024
- Maine State Police Raid Illicit Marijuana Grow in York County Linked to NH Restaurant
- Collins Grills FBI Chief Wray Over Chinese Mafia Drug Trafficking in Maine
- WATCH: CBS Morning News Features Maine Wire’s Steve Robinson and Triad Weed Investigative Series
- Triad Weed: Here Are All the Raids Maine Cops Have Conducted on Illegal Chinese Drug Trafficking Operations
- Illegal Marijuana Vexes Northern Maine Town Officials as Out-of-State Criminals Prosper
