New York
He’s Building a Weed Empire in New York. Does That Make Him a Villain?
The FlynnStoned Cannabis Company, a dispensary in Syracuse, N.Y., is the size of a large clothing store. Its wooden front doors have iron handles with finials in the shape of cannabis leaves. Inside, nuggets of cannabis flower, infused candies and vaporizers are laid out in glass cases spread over two stories. A lounge under a skylight on the third floor hosts concerts and yoga classes.
It is, by nearly any measure, one of the success stories of New York’s nascent legal marijuana industry. And the man behind FlynnStoned, a 43-year-old high school dropout and roofing entrepreneur named Michael Flynn, appears poised to build a weed empire, with FlynnStoned dispensaries from Brooklyn to Buffalo.
But Mr. Flynn’s hard-charging approach has drawn ire from communities where he is seeking to open more stores. And a recent deal-making spree, in which he has cut branding agreements with dispensaries all over the state to use his name, has drawn the attention of regulators, who are investigating whether he is violating the spirit, and perhaps the letter, of the state’s legalization law.
“They’re trying to stick a pitchfork in me,” Mr. Flynn said.
Mr. Flynn, who has tattoos on his fingers that spell “HIGH VIDA,” is in some ways the type of person whom the state’s legalization efforts were intended to support. His conviction for marijuana possession 25 years ago put him at the front of the line for a state license to sell recreational cannabis products, part of New York’s effort to right the wrongs of the war on drugs.
And in some ways, the success of his business is a bright spot in the state’s troubled marijuana rollout. As others struggled to get off the ground, hamstrung by a combination of complex rules and a slow bureaucracy, FlynnStoned made $30 million in revenue in its first year.
His ambitions have also encountered some familiar roadblocks. Would-be neighbors in New York City have sought to block new stores over concerns about crime and exposing children to marijuana.
At the same time, community boards and state regulators worry that his entrepreneurial attempt to sell the rights to the FlynnStoned name to about 30 dispensaries around the state amounts to preying on marijuana license holders who are less fortunate.
“It seems to not be in the spirit of giving the helping hand to those who were previously adversely impacted by anti-cannabis laws,” said Jesús Pérez, the district manager of a community board on Manhattan’s East Side, where Mr. Flynn is building a dispensary in what was the city’s last Hallmark store. “Just red flag after red flag seems to have come up about this that the community was not comfortable with.”
A Lifelong Calling
Mr. Flynn sees selling marijuana as his destiny.
“I just feel like I’ve been put on Earth to do this,” he said in a recent interview. “I’m just going to keep doing it as long as I’m having fun.”
He said he had started selling weed when he was 12, after his parents divorced and his father disappeared from his life. Left unsupervised, he got hooked on drugs. At 15, he moved out, bouncing among apartments and flop houses before dropping out of school. By the time he was 24, he was carrying hockey bags full of weed across the border from Canada, charging about $2,400 a pound in Syracuse, his hometown, and $4,000 a pound in Florida.
He was convicted of low-level marijuana possession when he was 18, paid a fine and avoided jail. Five years later, he quit drugs and took up roofing.
He started his first business, The Roofing Guys, in 2006. He set himself apart by offering customers financing and, as his main competitors fell to the wayside, he got rich.
“I was so addicted to drugs, alcohol and the party life,” he said. “I turned that around and got addicted to success.”
It has afforded him a different life with his wife, Angela, a high school classmate who gave him a Home Depot credit card in her name to help start the business. The couple have five children and live on a custom-built estate in the middle of a cornfield near Syracuse.
When New York legalized recreational cannabis in 2021, Mr. Flynn’s demonstrated ability to run a business and his marijuana conviction helped him win a license to open one of the state’s first legal dispensaries.
On Instagram, he shared video from the ribbon-cutting ceremony in June 2023 interspersed with photos of his lime-green Lamborghini Aventador and a diamond necklace bearing his store’s name encircling a green marijuana leaf. The video was set to a song called “Blow Up” by the rapper J. Cole, who sings, “This is a song for my haters/ Y’all got me feeling like the greatest.”
As FlynnStoned grew, so did the opportunities its founder began to see fanning out before him.
Building the Brand
Under New York’s legalization law, one shop owner is not allowed to control more than three dispensaries.
Mr. Flynn, regulators say, may have found a way to skirt that law.
In the wake of FlynnStoned’s success, other dispensary owners began reaching out to Mr. Flynn for help and advice, he said. Soon, he started to make deals with some of them.
Those deals allowed other dispensaries to use the FlynnStoned name in exchange for a small cut of their revenue, he said. Mr. Flynn added that he also connects the business owners with friends who are investors but “not Wall Street guys.”
“At first it was advice and help, and then it became, well, why don’t we just build the brand and help ourselves, too?” he said.
Mr. Flynn said the branding agreements do not make him an owner or investor. He declined to say how much revenue he takes, except that it was “not that much.”
But state officials have begun scrutinizing the deals, seeking to prevent big players from taking advantage of small, local business owners whom legalization was supposed to benefit. James Rogers, the director of a new unit within the Office of Cannabis Management that investigates potential ownership violations, said licensees were free to sign agreements that make their businesses work. But he said his team would unwind deals that give investors too much control.
“It’s the predatory behavior that we’re after,” he said.
The agency declined to say whether it was investigating Mr. Flynn, though Mr. Pérez, the community board official, said that was what he had been told by state officials. Mr. Flynn also said the agency was blocking some of the deals.
Robert Grannis, a 54-year-old farmer, got a license in 2022 and plans to open a FlynnStoned store in Binghamton. He said he had sought Mr. Flynn’s help after the state failed to provide the financing and real estate that it had promised to help early licensees open dispensaries.
Mr. Flynn initially offered to buy his license, Mr. Grannis said, but they settled on a branding deal, and Mr. Grannis took on an investor who paid for renovations. He declined to discuss the terms.
Mr. Grannis said the deal gave him peace of mind because he had heard horror stories of people building out their stores only for regulators to deny or delay their openings. Unlike liquor stores, cannabis licensees receive their final licenses only after their stores are built.
He said that what Mr. Flynn was doing in the cannabis industry was no different than what Starbucks did for coffee or McDonald’s did for hamburgers.
“We’re not doing anything but the American dream,” he said.
Axel Bernabe, a lawyer who helped to write the state’s legalization law and the rules for the market, helps Mr. Flynn structure the deals. Some industry insiders have criticized his involvement, but Mr. Bernabe said there is nothing wrong with what he or Mr. Flynn is doing.
“This idea that this is super shady is mudslinging business,” Mr. Bernabe said, adding, “It’s a play on building your brand, and everybody’s trying to do that.”
An Unexpected Turn
The deals had proceeded smoothly until Mr. Flynn began expanding in New York City, drawing vociferous backlash.
Residents protested his plan to put a dispensary in the former Hallmark store, near the United Nations. In Greenwich Village, where he is converting what had been an adult video store into a FlynnStoned, the community board dug up videos of him and others smoking at his Syracuse store, which is not allowed. A petition to stop him from opening another location in the Greenpoint Savings Bank building in Brooklyn also gained hundreds of signatures.
“I’m not anti-pot, but I am anti-dispensary,” said Tanya Arias, a Realtor who has lived around the corner from the Hallmark store site for 20 years. “It’s not a store that’s going to service the needs of our community.”
Mr. Flynn’s own words may cause him the most trouble. In September, he told the East Side community board that he was the sole owner of the forthcoming dispensary, that he had already signed a lease and that the Hallmark store’s owners had not paid their rent in months.
None of it was true.
He said he had not expected the opposition, but he bristled at questions that he felt were intrusive. “Whatever I said in that community board was just whatever I had to say to get the hell out of there,” he said.
Kuljot Bhasin, 63, who owned the Hallmark store with his wife, Amrita, sued Mr. Flynn for defamation. They are seeking at least $4 million in damages. Mr. Flynn’s defense lawyers said their client had not spoken maliciously.
“To come and disparage us to make himself look good to the board, that infuriated us,” Mr. Bhasin said in an interview.
Mr. Bhasin, a Sikh American immigrant, said he plans to reopen the business in a new location. But a part of him hopes that Mr. Flynn’s plans fall through, he said, so that he might be able to return to the shop where he sold cards and gifts for 22 years.
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
This summer’s World Cup will bring millions of soccer lovers to stadiums across North America. But whether it lives up to organizers’ lofty expectations could come down to fans like Brett Shields and John Milce of New South Wales, Australia.
Both men are longtime supporters of the Socceroos, their country’s men’s national soccer team, and both have traveled to the World Cup before. But only one is planning to go to this year’s tournament, which runs from June 11 to July 19 in the United States, Canada and Mexico.
Mr. Shields, 59, is coming. He already has the proper travel authorization from past visits to see his daughter, who lives in San Francisco. He plans to stay with her and attend Socceroos matches there and in Seattle.
Mr. Milce, 76, who has been to six World Cups since 1966, is staying home. He said he had made comments online about President Trump’s policies and feared that he could be denied entry at the border because of the administration’s proposed social media checks and broader immigration crackdown.
“I’m not a poor man, but with the costs involved, it was too much to risk,” Mr. Milce said.
With the first kickoff less than 60 days away, tourism and hospitality leaders in the 11 U.S. host cities are watching international fans closely. The United States was the only major nation to register a decline in international tourism in 2025, and hints of lackluster demand have anxiety running high.
The research firm Tourism Economics projects that more than 1.2 million international visitors will travel to the United States for the World Cup. That includes nearly 750,000 who would not have otherwise come, amounting to a roughly 1.1 percentage point increase in international arrivals.
Still, the firm this month revised down its forecast for the rate of recovery from last year’s drop in tourists. Visa restrictions, fears of immigration agents (including at World Cup matches), an increase in phone searches at borders and, for fans, the exorbitant costs of match tickets and transportation are just some of the barriers keeping people away.
Mr. Shields said that if he didn’t already have his travel authorization and a free place to stay, “I doubt whether I’d probably travel over to the World Cup in the current climate.”
Safety Concerns and Travel Bans
The World Cup, which drew 3.4 million spectators in Qatar in 2022, is a blockbuster pretty much by definition, and organizers expect a large share of bookings, both domestic and international, to come in the final two months.
The U.S. Travel Association said this month that the World Cup has “extraordinary potential to deliver major economic gains” across the United States, but added that “safety concerns, policy perceptions and entry barriers could limit America’s ability to fully capitalize on the opportunity.”
In Seattle, the number of expected domestic World Cup visitors has grown by 30 percent since 2024, said Michael Woody, the chief engagement officer for Visit Seattle. At the same time, the expected number of international visitors has fallen by 17 percent, driven by a particularly sharp drop-off in Canadians.
Fans coming from countries like Haiti and Iran, on a list of 19 countries whose citizens Mr. Trump has barred from entering the United States, won’t be able to attend their national teams’ group stage matches at all. Supporters of soccer powerhouses like Ivory Coast and Senegal, among the 14 African nations whose citizens face tight visa restrictions, could be forced to post bonds of up to $15,000 to enter the country.
Adem Asha, 32, a Turkish citizen who lives in Slovakia, obtained a U.S. visa last year in order to watch Lionel Messi, of Argentina, and Cristiano Ronaldo, of Portugal, in what could be their last World Cup. But Mr. Asha, who was born in Syria, worried he could still be targeted by immigration agents. He decided this spring to call off his trip, a conclusion that left him “disappointed but also relieved.”
“I really don’t feel like going there, or spending that much money to go there, and then being denied at the port of entry,” said Mr. Asha, who said he did not consider going to Canada or Mexico because the matches he wanted to see, and the other sites he hoped to visit, were all in the United States.
Banking on Late Bookings
U.S. host cities are pinning their hopes on last-minute travelers. Zane Harrington, a spokesman for Visit Dallas, said he expected “a majority” of fans heading to the city to book their stays in the two months remaining before kickoff — or even during the tournament as teams advance out of the group stage.
Martha Sheridan, the chief executive of Meet Boston, the city’s marketing and tourism organization, said ticket sales for Gillette Stadium’s seven matches were “robust,” and that they were split roughly in thirds among New Englanders, domestic visitors from the rest of the country and international travelers.
Demand for hotels in Boston in June is up about 11 percent compared with the same period last year, she said. That increase was smaller than what her team had expected to see by this point when it began planning in 2024, she added, but she felt “very optimistic” that bookings would continue to rise in the coming weeks.
FIFA in recent weeks released blocks of thousands of hotel rooms across the three host countries, while local host committees downsized fan festivals in locations including New Jersey, San Francisco and Seattle, fueling discussion over whether demand was falling short of expectations.
But Jamie Lane, the chief economist and senior vice president for analytics at AirDNA, a company that collects and analyzes short-term-rental data, said it was common practice for major event hosts to scale back their room blocks as they make final preparations for staffing and sponsorships, and that the changes were not a sign of sluggish demand.
A spokesman for FIFA said the changes to fan festivals were not made in response to demand, noting that some of the events will now take place in several neighborhoods rather than in a large central location.
A Bigger, Less Predictable Event
Data published this month by AirDNA shows a rise in short-term-rental bookings, to varying degrees, in every host city. Bookings on group stage game days were up the most in Monterrey, Mexico, rising 564 percent, on average, compared with the same dates last year.
Bookings were up 209 percent in Mexico City, 171 percent in Kansas City, 152 percent in Miami and 52 percent in Toronto, according to AirDNA.
A range of factors, including which teams are competing and to what extent cities regulate short-term rentals, influence those figures. In San Francisco, where short-term-rental bookings were up 28 percent on group stage game days, Anna Marie Presutti, the chief executive of the San Francisco Travel Association, said she thought demand didn’t rise to its full potential because the war in Iran is complicating travel for fans from Jordan and Qatar, two teams that are playing there.
In New York, where short-term rentals are tightly restricted, hotel bookings during the World Cup period are “more or less the same” compared with the same period last year, said Vijay Dandapani, the chief executive of the Hotel Association of New York City.
International travelers generally stay longer and spend more money than Americans, giving them an outsize economic impact. An analysis published by Airbnb in February found that non-Americans coming to the United States for the World Cup planned to visit more destinations and travel three nights longer, on average, than Americans.
Sylvia Weiler, the president of global destinations at the travel marketing and data company Sojern, said the revamped structure of this World Cup — spread across three countries and featuring a record 48 teams — made it hard to project how travel patterns would play out as the tournament approached.
“We talk about what was expected,” Ms. Weiler said. “I would always put a slight caveat, because we did not know what to expect.”
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A 76-year-old man died on Friday after being shoved down the stairs at the 18th Street subway station in Manhattan, and the police arrested a suspect who had been arrested multiple times in recent months and had been discharged from Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric ward just hours before.
The victim, Ross Falzone, landed on his head at the bottom of the stairs and suffered a traumatic brain injury, a fractured spine and a fractured rib after a stranger rushed forward and pushed him, the police said.
Mr. Falzone had been walking north on Seventh Avenue toward the subway station in the Chelsea neighborhood on Thursday evening, said Brad Weekes, assistant commissioner of public information for the Police Department. Walking about 30 yards behind him was the stranger, according to surveillance footage from the scene, Mr. Weekes said. As Mr. Falzone reached the station, the man rushed forward and pushed him down the stairs. He was taken to Bellevue where he died shortly before 3 a.m. on Friday.
The death sparked outrage at City Hall. Mayor Zohran Mamdani quickly called for an investigation into how Bellevue handled the discharge of the suspect and suggested that institutional problems at the hospital might have led to the random attack.
“I am horrified by the killing of Ross Falzone and the circumstances that led to it,” Mr. Mamdani said in a news release on Friday, in which he ordered “an immediate investigation on what steps should have been taken to prevent this tragedy.”
Police identified the suspect as Rhamell Burke, 32.
In the three months preceding the attack, Mr. Burke was arrested four times, Mr. Weekes said, including an arrest on Feb. 2 in connection with an assault on a Port Authority police officer.
Mr. Burke’s most recent interaction with the police began at around 3:30 p.m. Thursday, when he approached a group of N.Y.P.D. officers outside the 17th Precinct station house on East 51st Street, Mr. Weekes said. He grabbed a stick from a pile of garbage on the street and approached the officers, who told him to drop the stick. When he did, officers placed Mr. Burke in a police vehicle and drove him to Bellevue, where he was admitted to the emergency room at around 3:40 p.m., Mr. Weekes said. Mr. Burke was taken to the hospital’s Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program for evaluation and treatment, Mr. Weekes said, and was released from the hospital one hour later.
He was just a mile and a half from the hospital when he encountered Mr. Falzone at around 9:30 p.m. Thursday.
On Friday afternoon, police officers found Mr. Burke in Penn Station, where they arrested him. He was in custody on Friday evening. It was unclear Friday if Mr. Burke had a lawyer.
The mayor said he had requested help from the New York State Department of Health, which will investigate the decision to release Mr. Burke from Bellevue and conduct a review of similar cases at the hospital. The state agency also will investigate psychiatric evaluation and discharge procedures across NYC Health and Hospitals, the city’s public hospital system, according to the news release.
Mr. Falzone was a retired high school teacher who lived alone for many years in an apartment building on the Upper West Side. His friends were in shock on Friday about his death. They shared memories of an affable but private man who rarely spoke about his family or personal life.
Mr. Falzone had been recovering from a recent surgery and seemed more mobile and happy, said Marc Stager, 78, Mr. Falzone’s next-door neighbor on a tree-lined block of West 85th Street. He was known as a cheerful “yapper,” said Briel Waxman, a neighbor. He was the kind of New Yorker who enjoyed chatting with neighbors about historical details of his building and seeing performances at Lincoln Center with friends.
“He was always out and about,” said Ms. Waxman, 35, who often returned to her apartment at midnight or 1 a.m. to find Mr. Falzone arriving home at the same time. “I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’m proud of you or embarrassed of myself,’” she remembered telling him.
Mr. Falzone had wide taste in music — opera, classical, jazz, pop — and neighbors could tell he was home when they heard notes escaping from under his apartment door, Mr. Stager said.
He was “a helpless old guy,” said Mr. Stager, who added that he was “disappointed and shocked, frankly, that somebody could do such a thing” as shove such a defenseless person down the stairs.
When Ms. Waxman moved into the building five years ago, Mr. Falzone was among the first people to welcome her, she said. He once brought a package to her door that had been delivered to the wrong unit and shared that what is now a blank wall in her apartment had once been a fireplace.
Ms. Waxman sat in her living room on Friday and cried as she talked, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. She remembered Mr. Falzone as “just overall, nice, talkative, genuine human.”
A suicide note purported to be written by the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein while he was in jail in 2019 uses language that in some cases echoes his past writings to friends and family.
One phrase found in the apparent suicide note — “No Fun” — also appears on a handwritten page found in Mr. Epstein’s jail cell at the time of his death, as well as in emails he sent over the years.
And another saying in the suicide note — “watcha want me to do — bust out cryin!!” — appears in emails that Mr. Epstein had written to people close to him.
A cellmate claimed that Mr. Epstein left the suicide note before he was found unresponsive in their cell weeks before his death. The New York Times reported on the note last week and successfully asked a federal judge to unseal it.
If authentic, the note gives a view into Mr. Epstein’s mind-set before he was found dead at age 66 in August 2019. The New York City medical examiner ruled his death a suicide.
‘NO FUN’
A different handwritten note was found in Mr. Epstein’s cell when he died, and investigators believed it was written by him. In that document, Mr. Epstein complained about jail conditions — burned food, giant bugs and being kept in a locked shower. He concluded it with the underlined phrase, “NO FUN!!”
Mr. Epstein also used the phrase in emails when describing things he was unhappy about, or situations that had not gone his way.
‘watcha want me to do — bust out cryin’
Mr. Epstein used the phrase “watcha want me to do — bust out cryin” with friends, and in messages to his brother, Mark Epstein.
Like the note released by the judge, Mr. Epstein’s emails were often short, with staccato phrases and erratic punctuation. The emails were contained in millions of pages of documents the Justice Department released in response to a law passed last year requiring disclosure of records pertaining to Mr. Epstein.
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