The Chinese mafia is building a black-market marijuana empire across rural America—buying family homes, churches, even schools.
Maine is ground zero.
Award-winning investigative journalist Steve Robinson traveled thousands of miles across rural Maine to document and expose how Chinese drug cartels are transforming the once bucolic woods of rural Maine into festering, pesticide-laced, drug-producing sweatshops.
They’re lacing marijuana with poisonous fumigants, laundering money, stealing electricity, destroying middle-class homes, and bankrupting honest, law-abiding cannabis businesses.
They’re flooding the American market with unregulated, untested poison-laced weed that could harm someone you love.
It’s a multi-billion-dollar industry.
But Maine Gov. Janet Mills and top officials in Augusta haven’t lifted a finger to stop the foreign invasion of our homeland.
In The Maine Wire’s first-ever feature-length documentary, Robinson and investigative producer Graham Pollard set out to reveal how Chinese mafia networks have quietly taken root in rural America—sometimes right next door.
This is a story you won’t hear anywhere else. And it’s high time to stop looking the other way.
We owe a special thank you to the hundreds of Mainers in the cannabis industry, law enforcement, and throughout Maine’s rural towns who helped make this film a reality. Thank you also to Tucker Carlson and the talented team at the Tucker Carlson Network for seeing the value of the film and agreeing to publish and promote it.
Some so-called news outlets prefer to make documentaries about global warming, the plight of the piping plover, or Janet Mills’ turgid poetry. We take a different approach. In the coming years, The Maine Wire hopes to deliver more compelling documentaries about the things that matter to Mainers — the things that affect our daily lives, our livelihoods, and the future lives we hope our children can live in this state.
If you like our work and want to support our journalism, please consider signing up for a paid subscription (or inquire about advertising opportunities).
More generous donations are always welcome, too. Every dollar we raise goes directly to supporting our driving purpose: uncovering and exposing the information Mainers need to know. In 2025, our journalists made national headlines over and over and over again, culminating with the Maine Wire winning the Dao Prize for Best Multi Media Reporting. Our reporting has been featured in Fox News, the Daily Mail, the New York Post, Newsmax, the Tucker Carlson Show, the Shawn Ryan Show, the Liz Wheeler Show, One America News Network, the Daily Wire, Breitbart, Daily Caller, and many, many more. Our investigations have been cited in Congressional reports and Congressional testimony, and our ground-breaking work has even been used as the basis for criminal search warrants.
Indeed, an unsealed indictment in the District of Massachusetts revealed that our reporting on Chinese organized crime was so prescient that even the now-indicted human traffickers were sharing our stories on the Chinese Communist Party’s encrypted chat app, WeChat. And — not to brag — but we’re pretty dang popular on Somali Tiktok! We’re the only outlet in New England that is literally scaring the foreign communists.
The Maine Wire’s remarkable success these past three years is not an accident. Unlike the other taxpayer-funded outlets, we’re not here to cover clam festivals and local music venues. We’re here to expose corruption, criminality, and even evil. That means we take a different approach to covering the stories that matter to Mainers. We’re curious, we’re aggressive, we’re brash and maybe a little sarcastic. But above all, we’re deeply suspicious of power — especially when it smiles.
As the Editor-in-Chief of the Maine Wire, I can promise you that we could easily keep a team of 20 investigative reporters busy on a full-time basis. If you would like to schedule a meeting to talk about our plans for 2026 and how you can support us in this work, please send me an email and we can find a time to meet. Until then, I hope you enjoy High Crimes: The Chinese Mafia's Takeover of Rural America.
