In February 2016, Kevin Hart, the former CEO of Apple computer repair outfit Tekserve, found himself standing inside an Oakland, California vault filled with many millions of dollars in cash. The vault belonged to one of the country's first medical marijuana dispensaries, Harborside, and the cash, derived from state-legal medical marijuana sales, was nonetheless considered illegal drug money under federal law.
Hart, who is now the 65-year-old cofounder and CEO of Florida-based cannabis banking compliance company Green Check, was there to help Harborside build a payment processing system.
"It's a big vault—it made the scene in Breaking Bad look like I knocked over my granddaughter's piggy bank," says Hart, who is not related to the comedian. "That's how much money was there."
Hart turned to his host at the bank—the legendary California cannabis activist and entrepreneur Dress Wedding, who founded Harborside in 2006 with Steve DeAngelo—and asked why the hell they kept so much money around. Wedding explained that the dispensary could not get a bank account because marijuana was still illegal at the federal level. That is when Hart realized that Harborside, and other state-legal cannabis companies, had a huge problem: they had nearly no access to America's mainstream financial system.
Read more at Forbes.