Business as usual: Two culprits in cannabis corruption case released early

Anyone who has been paying attention to Michigan cannabis news, or even just news in general, can probably recall the recent corruption scandal that landed a former state senator and three others in federal prison. The case was pretty far-reaching, with The Detroit News calling it “the largest public corruption scandal to hit Michigan’s capital in 30 years.”

In 2017, former Republican state Sen. Rick Johnson was appointed by then-Gov. Rick Snyder to chair the state’s newly formed Medical Marijuana Licensing Board, the administrative board that was charged with overseeing the rollout of medical marijuana licenses.

After a long and widespread investigation by the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Michigan, Johnson was found guilty of soliciting and accepting bribes from two cannabis lobbyists and a potential medical cannabis operator. He received more than $100,000 worth of cash payments, flights on private aircraft, dinners, lunches and, in a dark but somewhat humorous twist, visits with a prostitute who was instructed to refer to the career politician as “Batman.”

It’s worth noting that the notion that there was corruption in the medical marijuana licensing process was pretty widely known and talked about before Johnson was convicted. The board held monthly meetings where it would debate the merits of potential licensees and vote on them one by one. These meetings had public comment periods, and almost every time, multiple people would accuse the board of wrongdoing.

In September 2023, Johnson was sentenced to 55 months in a federal facility in Minnesota. He asked for compassionate release, citing a long list of health conditions, but his request was denied. He’s set to be in prison until 2027 and will likely stay there his full term, barring any major health conditions.

Johnson is many things, but it turns out a snitch isn’t one of them. He didn’t cooperate with the federal investigation and only implicated himself. An insider familiar with the federal system indicated that a culprit’s level of cooperation often has a big influence on early release.

The scheme also involved cannabis lobbyist Vince Brown, who was released from a low-security facility in Pennsylvania on Aug. 6. He served less than nine months of his 20-month sentence, an indication that he cooperated heavily with the feds’ investigation. He and his business partner, Brian Pierce, admitted to paying Johnson $40,000 in bribes. The lobbyist was known to tell people he “owned the senator.”

Also walking around free is John Dalaly, an Oakland County businessman who operated two companies that “were formed with the purpose of obtaining various operating licenses from the MMLB or exploring the licensing of a digital currency platform for medical marijuana financial transactions,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Michigan. Dalaly was released from his minimum-security prison in West Virginia about three weeks prior to Brown. He was convicted of paying about $68,000 to Johnson over the course of his companies’ application processes.

The high stakes and insane early profits made the medical cannabis system ripe for corruption. These individuals represent what’s wrong and broken with our government. Access to power is often bought and sold — these guys are just the ones who got caught this time.

Most people know there’s probably an underlying level of political corruption, but this case was egregious in its scale and scope. It’s unacceptable that corrupt people are able to squirm out of their punishments, even if they were helpful to further investigations, while people like Danny Trevino are sitting in prison for selling cannabis. These men attacked our democracy and the very integrity of the institutions one of them claimed to devote his life to. The fact that any one of them is free early is a miscarriage of justice.

All in all, though, it’s business as usual: one set of consequences for the poor and people of color and one for the powerful, well-connected and wealthy.