Lifted Luxury got as far as the provisional stage for three Bay State marijuana businesses
First, they busted the boyfriend. Jasdrubal Perez. He was the head cheese of the “large-scale fentanyl trafficking conspiracy responsible for manufacturing and distributing millions of fentanyl pills made to look like oxycodone and Percocet.”
That was in December 2024. Last week, they followed up with his ex. Carolina Correa. According to federal prosecutors, “In late 2021 to early 2022, Perez enlisted his financially savvy girlfriend Correa to assist him in concealing his drug proceeds.”
Specifically, “Correa contacted a friend who was opening a marijuana dispensary in Massachusetts and seeking investors. Correa agreed to seek out investors in the dispensary and in exchange, she would get an ownership stake and the title of CFO of the marijuana dispensary.”
For her crimes, Correa, who prior to this was a community star and professional nonprofit fundraiser, was sentenced “to 42 months in prison to be followed by five years of supervised release,” and ordered to pay $500k between fines and forfeiture.
How the scheme worked
According to court documents, “In January 2022, Correa indicated that she had found ‘investors’ in the marijuana dispensary. Those ‘investors’ included a real estate investor based in North Carolina with whom Correa had a long-time personal, not professional, relationship as well as his associate.”
First, the couple had to do some arm-twisting though. It does not appear the dispensary owner knew what Correa and Perez were up to. The former reportedly told the latter “that she tried to convince [the dispensary owner] not to accept money from another source, suggesting that Correa may be able to get [the dispensary owner] a quarter million dollars (‘[I] told her, I was like What about if I get you a quarter mil by January, would you guys be able to hold and just not deal with other people’ and I think that’s our best bet, cause their hands are pretty much [tied] Jas’).”
“The investigation revealed that at some point … [the dispensary owner] informed Correa and Perez that [the dispensary owner] could not (or would not) accept a cash investment directly from Perez.” The prosecutor adds: “Although I believe that [the dispensary owner] decided not to accept funding directly from Perez, [the dispensary owner] was separately aware that Correa worked as a professional fundraiser for [the United Way].”
“At some point in approximately January 2022, Correa informed [the dispensary owner] that Correa had helped secure funding for the Marijuana Dispensary in the amount of $350,000 from two ‘friends’ of Correa’s who owned two separate real estate businesses in North Carolina for the sum of $350,000.”
“Shortly thereafter, Correa enlisted a friend to drive $350,000 in Perez’s drug proceeds from Rhode Island to Correa’s ‘investors’ in North Carolina. Financial records showed that the North Carolina ‘investors’ then wired [money] from two separate business accounts … to a bank account for an attorney for the marijuana dispensary. Those funds were then transferred from the attorney’s account to the marijuana dispensary’s business account.” (For an outstanding longform version of the Perez story, check out this Rhode Island Monthly feature here.)
The money-laundering dispensary that never was
Per an image of a pitch deck for the canna scam at the heart of the scandal seen above, the company in question was called Lifted Luxury, and appears to have started out like many other local independent and ambitious outfits aiming for vertical integration (cultivation, manufacturing, and retail). The founders scored their host community agreement with the Massachusetts town of Millville on the border of Rhode Island in 2020, and by 2021 had filed paperwork with the CCC.
It is unclear who knew what and when regarding how much investment money was flowing in from fentanyl proceeds. But in documents filed with the Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission, applicants wrote: “Lifted Luxury will use the $450,000 [from one particular investment tranche] to pay for services and items we are unable to finance through the distributors and cover operating expenses until our retail is ready to open.”
The timeline suggests that despite funding Correa brought in via Perez, the proposed pot op went south before any seeds were planted. A list of CCC licensees and their statuses from July 2023 lists all three of Lifted Luxury’s applications as being in the provisional stage, but the minutes from a Millville Board of Selectmen meeting only three months later noted that the company no longer had its location, failed to complete its state licensing, and consequently lost its host agreement.
Finally, it goes without saying that prohibitionists—namely, those attempting to end adult-use cannabis in Mass—will try to twist this story to suggest a connection between fentanyl and licensed marijuana dispensaries. When they do, remind them that this so-called business never grew a single plant, because movie stunts like this get detected and prosecuted by the DEA and US attorneys, in this case working with the FBI, state troopers on both sides of the border, and local police departments.
