He is building an empire of grass in New York. This makes it a bad guy?

Flynnstoned Cannabis Company, a dispensary in Syracuse, New York, has the size of a large clothing store. Its front wooden doors have iron handles with the end -shaped finals. Inside, cannabis flower pepper, infused candies and vaporizers are arranged in glass cases scattered on two stories. A salon in a skylight on the third floor hosts concerts and yoga lessons.

It is, for almost every measure, one of the successful stories of the nascent legal marijuana industry of New York. And the man behind Flynnstone, a 43 -year -old abandonment and rooftop entrepreneur named Michael Flynn, seems ready to build an empire of weeds, with Flynnnstone dispensaries from Brooklyn to Buffalo.

But the hard charge approach of Mr. Flynn has attracted anger from the communities in which he is trying to open multiple stores. And a recent madness to do business, in which he cut the branding agreements with dispensar in the whole state to use his name, has attracted the attention of the regulators, who are investigating if the spirit is violating, and perhaps the letter, of the law on the legalization of the state.

“They are trying to attack a pitchfork in me,” Flynn said.

Mr. Flynn, who has tattoos on the fingers that “Alto Vida” spell, is somehow the type of person that the state’s efforts of legalization were intended to support. His sentence for the possession of marijuana 25 years ago put it in front of the line for a state license to sell recreational cannabis products, part of the New York effort to correct the wrongs of the war on drugs.

And in a sense, the success of its activity is a bright point in the state implementation of marijuana in difficulty. While others struggled to take off, hindered by a combination of complex rules and a slow bureaucracy, Flynnstoned gained $ 30 million in his first year.

His ambitions also met some family road blocks. The aspiring near New York City have tried to block new shops on crime concerns and exposing children to marijuana.

At the same time, the boards of directors of the community and state regulators fear that his entrepreneurial attempt to sell the rights to the name Flynnstoned to about 30 dispensaries throughout the state is equivalent to prediting the holders of the marijuana license who are less fortunate.

“It seems not to be in the spirit to give their hand to those who previously had been negatively affected by anti-Cannabis laws,” said Jesús Pérez, district director of a board of directors in the East part of Manhattan, where Mr. Flynn is building a dispensary in what was the last hallmark shop in the city. “Only the red flag after the red flag seems to have emerged with which the community was not at ease.”

A call for life

Mr. Flynn sees Marijuana sell like his destiny.

“I feel like I was put on earth to do it,” he said in a recent interview. “I will continue to do it until I enjoy it.”

He said he had started selling grass when he was 12 years old, after his parents divorced and his father disappeared from his life. Leaving without supervision, he hooked himself to drugs. At 15 he moved, bouncing between apartments and flop houses before abandoning school. When he was 24 years old, he transported hockey bags full of grass on the border from Canada, loading about $ 2,400 in a pound in Syracuse, his hometown and $ 4,000 in pound in Florida.

He was sentenced for possession of low level marijuana when he was 18, paid a fine and avoided prison. Five years later, he left drugs and covered.

He started his first activity, the roofs, in 2006. He distinguished himself by offering financing to customers and, while his main competitors fell on the roadside, became rich.

“I was so dependent on drugs, alcohol and festive life,” he said. “I shot it and became dependent on success.”

He offered him a different life with his wife, Angela, a classmate of the high school who gave him a home depot credit card in his name to help start the business. The couple has five children and lives in a tailor -made hold in the middle of a grain field near Syracuse.

When New York has legalized recreational cannabis in 2021, Mr. Flynn showed the ability to manage an activity and his marijuana condemnation helped him win a license to open one of the first legal dispensaries of the state.

On Instagram, he shared the videos of the ribbon cutting ceremony in June 2023 interspersed with the photos of his Lamborghini Aventador green lime and a diamond necklace with the name of his shop surrounding a green marijuana leaf. The video was set to a song called “Blow Up” by rapper J. Cole, who sings: “This is a song for my haters/ made me feel like the biggest”.

As Flynnstoned grew, so also the opportunities that his founder began to see the fanatic in front of him.

Build the brand

According to the law on New York’s legalization, a shop owner is not authorized to check more than three dispensaries.

Mr. Flynn, say the regulators, may have found a way to get around that law.

In the wake of Flynnstoned’s success, other dispensar owners started contacting Mr. Flynn to ask for help and advice, he said. He soon started doing business with some of them.

These agreements have allowed other dispenser to use the name Flynnnnstoned in exchange for a small cut of their revenue, he said. Mr. Flynn added that he also connects entrepreneurs with friends who are investors but “not the boys of Wall Street”.

“At the beginning it was advice and help, and then it became, well, why don’t we also build the brand and we also help ourselves?” he said.

Flynn said that branding agreements do not make him owner or investor. He refused to say how many revenue takes, except for the fact that they were not “a lot”.

But state officials began to scrutinize the agreements, trying to prevent the great players from benefiting from small local entrepreneurs that the legalization would have had to take advantage. James Rogers, the director of a new unit Within the office for the management of cannabis that investigates the potential violations of the property, the licensees were free to sign agreements that make their activities work. But he said that his team would unroll agreements that give investors too much control.

“It’s the predatory behavior we are looking for,” he said.

The agency refused to say he was investigating Mr. Flynn, although Mr. Pérez, the official of the Board of Directors of the Community, said it was what had been told by state officials. Mr. Flynn also said that the agency was blocking some of the offers.

Robert Grannis, a 54 -year -old farmer, obtained a license in 2022 and plans to open a Flynnstoned store in Binghamton. He said he had sought the help of Mr. Flynn after The State did not provide the loan and the real estate sector he had promised To help the first licensees to open the dispensaries.

Mr. Flynn initially offered to buy his license, said Grannis, but settled with a branding agreement and Mr. Grannis hired an investor who paid for renovation. He refused to discuss the terms.

Mr. Grannis said that the agreement gave him tranquility because he had listened to horror stories of people who built their shops only for regulators to deny or delay their openings. Unlike liqueurs, cannabis licensees receive their final licenses only after the construction of their shops.

He said that Mr. Flynn was doing in the cannabis industry was no different from what Starbucks did for Coffee or McDonald’s for the hamburgers.

“We are not doing nothing but the American dream,” he said.

Axel Bernabe, a lawyer who has contributed to writing the law on the legalization of the state and the rules for the market, helps Mr. Flynn to structure the agreements. Some professionals have criticized his involvement, but Bernabe said there is nothing wrong with what he or Mr. Flynn is doing.

“This idea that this is super shaded is a confusion of confusion,” said Bernabe, adding, “is a show to build your brand and everyone is trying to do it”.

An unexpected turning point

The agreements were tried without hitches until Mr. Flynn began to expand to New York City, drawing a noisy reinforcement.

The residents protested his plan to put a dispensary in the former Hallmark shop, near the United Nations. In the Greenwich Village, where he is converting what had been a video shop for adults in a Flynnstoned, the community board of directors has carved out videos of him and others who smoke in his Syracuse shop, which is not allowed. A petition to prevent him from opening another position in the Greenpoint Savings Bank Building in Brooklyn has also earned hundreds of signatures.

“I am not anti-poot, but I am painful,” said Tania Arias, a real estate agent who lived around the corner from the Hallmark store website for 20 years. “It is not a shop that will meet the needs of our community.”

The same words as Mr. Flynn can cause him the greatest problem. In September, he told the East Side Community Board that he was the only owner of the next dispensary, who had already signed a lease and that the owners of the Hallmark shop had not paid for the rent for months.

None of these were true.

He said he did not expect the opposition, but it was included for the questions they considered intrusive. “Whatever I said in that board of directors it was exactly what I had to say to get out of there,” he said.

Kuljot Bhasin, 63 years old, who owned the Hallmark shop with his wife Amrita, sued Mr. Flynn for defamation. They are looking for at least $ 4 million damage. The lawyers of the defense of Mr. Flynn he said Their client had not spoken mischievously.

“To come to denigrants to get well to the Council, who infuriated us,” Bhasin said in an interview.

Mr. Bhasin, an American immigrant Sikh, said he wanted to reopen the business in a new location. But a part of him hopes that Mr. Flynn’s plans fall, he said, so that he can be able to return to the shop where he has sold cards and gifts for 22 years.

Alain Delaquerière Research contribution.