I find so many of these... so I will post them here since they usually aren't newsworthy of discussion... but still fairly interesting... like this one!
www.bbc.com
Long story short... some Chinese-American asshole named Irving Lin, a seventy year old retired real estate developer who emigrated from Taiwan decades ago and still wants to make money, found a new money making opportunity in marijuana cultivation. Teaming up with a Navajo chap named Dineh Benally who was the San Juan River Farm Board president. Together they hatched a plan to lease land from Navajo landowners while Irving Lin and other investors held seminars in LA to attract money and "workers" for their "hemp" operation that would be located in the Navajo Reservation.
Within weeks dozens of greenhouses and cheap lodgings were built and hundreds of semi-migrant Chinese workers were shipped in to work cultivating marijuana plants and soon overwhelmed the community. They took up spots at the motel, the entire area stank of weed, and the weed farms employed armed guards with tactical gear and (using media language) assault weapons to keep away locals who rapidly began to protest the sudden developments in their community. Local law enforcement was hampered because Reservation Police couldn't arrest the Asian migrants and outside police couldn't arrest natives etc etc.
Eventually they all got together with the State Police, DEA, DHS and FBI etc and raided all of those properties and found, shockingly, that the operation was involved in illegal human trafficking and illegally growing and distributing marijuana illegally with too high THC concentrations and distribution across state lines etc etc etc. Thousands of pounds of pot was seized, hundreds were arrested (but most were released) and several Chinese-American investors lost lots of money. Those Natives who either leased the land or helped intimidate the locals are being sued or otherwise punished and even exiled/shunned from the community. Now there's acres of land covered in dead cannabis plants, abandoned buildings and greenhouses and heaps of trash and detritus. Dineh Benally is apparently facing significant legal action but it's not all a sad story.
Irving Lin, the mastermind of this operation, for reasons that the article didn't explain, somehow escaped justice and restarted his operations in Oklahoma where he's bringing in more loads of Chinese-American sourced investment and migrant workers to traffic in to swamp the local small business based competition. He is also complaining that the locals and local law enforcement are prejudiced against Chinese for some reason. 🤷♀️
Chinese dreams on Native American land: A tale of cannabis boom and bust
How the pandemic cannabis boom led to chaos on the Navajo Nation, pitting two minorities against each other.
www.bbc.com
Long story short... some Chinese-American asshole named Irving Lin, a seventy year old retired real estate developer who emigrated from Taiwan decades ago and still wants to make money, found a new money making opportunity in marijuana cultivation. Teaming up with a Navajo chap named Dineh Benally who was the San Juan River Farm Board president. Together they hatched a plan to lease land from Navajo landowners while Irving Lin and other investors held seminars in LA to attract money and "workers" for their "hemp" operation that would be located in the Navajo Reservation.
Within weeks dozens of greenhouses and cheap lodgings were built and hundreds of semi-migrant Chinese workers were shipped in to work cultivating marijuana plants and soon overwhelmed the community. They took up spots at the motel, the entire area stank of weed, and the weed farms employed armed guards with tactical gear and (using media language) assault weapons to keep away locals who rapidly began to protest the sudden developments in their community. Local law enforcement was hampered because Reservation Police couldn't arrest the Asian migrants and outside police couldn't arrest natives etc etc.
Eventually they all got together with the State Police, DEA, DHS and FBI etc and raided all of those properties and found, shockingly, that the operation was involved in illegal human trafficking and illegally growing and distributing marijuana illegally with too high THC concentrations and distribution across state lines etc etc etc. Thousands of pounds of pot was seized, hundreds were arrested (but most were released) and several Chinese-American investors lost lots of money. Those Natives who either leased the land or helped intimidate the locals are being sued or otherwise punished and even exiled/shunned from the community. Now there's acres of land covered in dead cannabis plants, abandoned buildings and greenhouses and heaps of trash and detritus. Dineh Benally is apparently facing significant legal action but it's not all a sad story.
Irving Lin, the mastermind of this operation, for reasons that the article didn't explain, somehow escaped justice and restarted his operations in Oklahoma where he's bringing in more loads of Chinese-American sourced investment and migrant workers to traffic in to swamp the local small business based competition. He is also complaining that the locals and local law enforcement are prejudiced against Chinese for some reason. 🤷♀️
