by Sam Cooper
May 22, 2025
Welcome back to The Bureau. Today, we bring you a special cross-border collaboration—linking explosive findings from rural Maine to revelations inside Vancouver’s shadow economy.
Joining me is Steve Robinson, the investigative editor who got the ball rolling on a major story tying an illegal marijuana operation in Maine to the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department—Beijing’s foreign influence and intelligence arm. Steve’s reporting for The Maine Wire—later advanced by the Daily Caller News Foundation—traces how a so-called community group in New York City, the Sijiu Association, maintains close ties to the Chinese Consulate and has pledged financial support to United Front projects.
These findings echo what The Bureau has uncovered in Canada, where United Front operatives have used legalization as cover for a sprawling cannabis export and laundering network. In Vancouver, Toronto, and remote parts of British Columbia and Ontario especially, United Front-linked triads have quietly consolidated legal cannabis licenses, exploited illegal migrant labor, and shipped massive volumes of marijuana to the United States and Japan, with inroads to Europe too—laundering the proceeds back through Canadian banks.
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