TALLAHASSEE — Two men who helped Rudy Giuliani dig up dirt on Trump's political rivals also tried to get into the pot business in Florida, but they were rebuffed by industry insiders who took them for bit players, according to previously unreported accounts of their dealings.

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman spent months trying to invest millions of dollars in a cannabis venture seeking to buy a Florida license, only to raise red flags among industry executives who said it became clear they didn’t know what they were doing.

According to the explosive indictment dropped Thursday, the two, plus businessmen David Correia and Andrey Kukushkin, allegedly funneled money from an unnamed foreign national to candidates for political office in Nevada who could change state laws about recreational marijuana licensing. The group intended to set up a recreational marijuana business and wanted to change licensing laws in multiple states to build the weed empire. [snip]

The gang allegedly planned to implement their scheme in both New York and Nevada and Correia drew up a table in September or October 2018 to estimate the amount of money they’d need to make inroads with the various state and federal political candidates. They calculated that to execute a “multi-state license strategy,” they would need between $1 and $2 million. The foreign funder wired two $500,000 deposits to a U.S. bank account controlled by Fruman and another unnamed individual, one on September 18 and one on October 16.

However, according to the indictment, the crew overlooked one small detail in their pot plot: the licensing application deadline in Nevada was back in September. By the point they started to put their plan into action, they were two months too late. The indictment alleges that they “did not timely apply for a recreational marijuana license in September 2018, the then-deadline for such applications in Nevada.”