On the morning of July 21, 2020, more than a dozen police vehicles converged on Narrow Gauge Distributors, a medical marijuana cultivation business housed in a former shoe factory on High Street in Farmington.
By noon, investigators were tossing large marijuana plants pulled from the building into the back of a shipping container and hoisting boxes of evidence into a U-Haul truck. State and federal agents also were busy searching for and seizing marijuana, cash and firearms from other marijuana facilities and homes in western Maine.
For more than a year, federal authorities remained tight-lipped about why they had raided the buildings and what exactly they were investigating.
The documents paint a detailed picture of a complex criminal operation allegedly led by a man named Lucas Sirois of Farmington that, according to federal investigators, benefited from the help and protection of four law enforcement officers, a Rangeley selectman and an assistant district attorney, among others. A dozen people, including Sirois’ father and estranged wife, are accused of having a hand in marijuana distribution and money laundering.
Two of the officers were promised partial ownership of Sirois’ business and given company cars for helping with its operation, running license plates and picking up marijuana from another location, according to court documents. A witness told investigators that the men would sometimes show up at the cultivation site in uniform and hide when other officers pulled into the shoe factory’s parking lot.
The operation’s primary financier, 69-year-old Randal Cousineau of Farmington, was charged separately and pleaded guilty in federal court on Oct. 27 to conspiring to possess and distribute more than 1,000 kilograms of marijuana and 1,000 marijuana plants. Cousineau made hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit through the illegal sale of marijuana in Maine and elsewhere, according to court documents. As part of a plea deal, he agreed to serve a maximum of just over five years in prison and forfeit nearly $650,000 in illegal drug proceeds. His sentencing hearing has not been scheduled.
The alleged scheme was outlined in a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Bangor on the same day Cousineau pleaded guilty. It charges the 12 defendants with a range of offenses, including conspiracy to distribute controlled substances, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. All but one were indicted last week by a federal grand jury.
Sirois, who has been a prominent figure in the medical marijuana community and had applied for three of eight dispensary licenses issued when Maine first began allowing dispensaries in 2010, structured his operations to appear as though they complied with the state’s medical marijuana rules, the complaint alleges. But investigators say he regularly sold bulk marijuana on the illicit market in a scheme that netted him and his co-conspirators more than $13 million in six years.
In 2018-19, the complaint alleges, Sirois moved $1 million worth of marijuana for out-of-state distribution using the services of co-defendant Brandon Dagnese, 27, of…
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