Six
Smugglers have yet another acronym to fear: the “Effen W”—the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In the 1990s, this organization launched a series of ingenious undercover operations to halt the illegal trade in endangered plants and animals. If you are hungry for jaguar fangs, staghorn coral or Australian cockatoos, these are the people to watch out for.
The F&W history begins in 1885, with the creation of the Division of Economic Ornithology in the Department of Agriculture. Among other tasks, it studied the flight paths of migratory birds and their impact on agriculture. The division expanded and in 1905 was renamed the Bureau of Biological Survey.
In 1900 Iowa Congressman John Lacey introduced and passed an act of Congress aimed at preserving game and wild birds. The Lacey Act prevented hunting them (or collecting their eggs) in one state and selling them in another. Since then the law has been amended significantly to expand not only its penalties, but also the variety of plants and animals protected. Its reach is now global. But defiance of the rules is still a Lacey Act violation.
In 1934 the Biological Survey received a new chief when President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Jay “Ding” Darling to run the operation. Today the appointment would be highly controversial because Darling was a nationally syndicated editorial cartoonist with a very pro-environment attitude. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice (1924 and 1942) for his drawings. Darling ran the Biological Survey for two years before returning to Iowa and his drawing board. It was a short tenure with long implications. He vastly increased the acreage in the National Wildlife Refuge system; he implemented the National Duck Stamp program, required by all duck hunters; and he designed the wildlife refuge logo still in use.
In 1934 the Duck Stamp Act was passed and Darling designed the first stamp himself. The stamp is a federal license to hunt waterfowl and to date has generated $670 million, of which 98 percent has been spent acquiring waterfowl habitat for inclusion into the National Wildlife Refuge program. Darling left the Biological Survey in 1935. Residents of Sanibel Island are familiar with the name Jay “Ding” Darling; the large wildlife preserve on that island is named after him.
The Fish and Wildlife Service—the “Effen W”—was created in 1939 by combining the Biological Survey with the Bureau of Fisheries. In 1973 Congress passed the Endangered Species Act with F&W as the enforcement arm.
The same year, also in Washington, representatives of 80 nations gathered to sign another document—the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. The acronym is CITES (pronounced site-eze). It entered into force in 1975. Today 169 nations are members.
The CITES secretariat reports to the United Nations Environmental Program. It is also party to a number of memorandums of understanding with Interpol, the World Customs Organization, country-specific organizations (such as U.S. Fish and Wildlife) and the nongovernmental organization TRAFFIC, which monitors trade in endangered species for the World Wildlife Fund.
The CITES document has three appendixes. Appendix I lists the most endangered species. Any species transferred out of its wild home must be accompanied by an export permit and an import permit, and is allowed only “under exceptional circumstances.” On Appendix I, listed as endangered are 827 species, 52 subspecies and 19 populations.
Appendix II lists species that are “not necessarily now threatened with extinction but that may become so unless trade is closely controlled.” That list includes 32,540 species, 49 subspecies and 25 populations.
Appendix III is a list of species included at the request of any CITES signatory already regulating trade in a species that needs the cooperation of other countries to prevent unsustainable or illegal exploitation. On Appendix III, 291 species, 12 subspecies and 2 populations appear.
A violation of CITES in America is a Lacey Act violation under United States law. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is the agency empowered to go hunting for wildlife smugglers.
Congressman Lacey was concerned about interstate transport of birds more than a century ago. The trade in contraband wildlife is at least that old. The law bearing his name enforces America’s international fight against the trafficking of all endangered species. Possession of long-dead relics of the species—the old fangs of a jaguar or a particular breed of tortoise shell—can put you in jail, even if you inherited it, if you try to move it across a border. Museums, for example, require a CITES permit when they dispatch a traveling exhibition containing forbidden feathers, fangs and shells to another museum abroad.
Violation of the CITES treaty by importing and exporting endangered plants and animals is a huge business. An Associated Press report in May 2006 by John Heilprin said, “The United States and China are the biggest markets for an estimated $10 billion global trade in illegal wildlife. The black market in wildlife and wildlife parts is second only to trafficking in arms and drugs.”
CITES created not only a new role for the Fish and Wildlife Service, it also created a new type of contraband. And where there is contraband, there will be smugglers.
BLACK MARKET, BLACK CAVIAR
One Florida-based smuggling operation had roots in the Caspian Sea area, where people fish for sturgeon. The contraband is its caviar. Long a favorite appetizer of the rich and royal, caviar is the salted eggs of an ancient fish species. It takes about twenty years for a sturgeon to reach sexual maturity and ovulate. Harvesting for roe kills the fish.
Connoisseurs favor caviar from the Beluga sturgeon of the Caspian Sea, bordered by Iran and Russia. After the 1917 revolution, the Soviet Union began tightly regulating sturgeon fishing to prevent depletion or destruction of the fish population.
Moscow set up two Russian émigré brothers in the caviar business in Paris in the 1920s. Petrossian Paris became the primary conduit for Russian caviar to the west, the holy-of-holies for the caviar connoisseur. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the enforcement of controls on production and export of caviar evaporated. Caspian Sea fishermen became poachers under the wing of the emerging Russian mafia, which created a clever smuggling market based in Poland. Production soared.
While increased caviar production was good for food snobs, it was a disaster for the fish. In a short time, sturgeon stocks plummeted.
In 1998 sturgeon was added to the list of animals protected under CITES. Under the new rules, caviar now required a valid foreign export permit issued by the country of origin, or a valid foreign reexport certificate issued by the country of reexport. These rules opened a huge market for smuggled caviar.
Victor Tsimbal, a forty-two-year-old Russian citizen living in Miami, was the owner of Beluga Caviar, Inc. Instead of being forced out of business by the CITES requirements, Tsimbal found an economic opportunity.
He capitalized on his existing supplier network, now taken over by the Russian mafia. In addition Tsimbal recruited individuals in Miami to smuggle caviar from Poland, offering airplane tickets, hotel accommodations and $500 per trip to his mules—civilians recruited into smuggling. The mules viewed it as a free European vacation.
In Poland they received prepackaged suitcases full of Beluga caviar from the Russian mafia. The Polish hand-over kept the smuggler’s passports untainted by stamps from Iran, Russia or any of the new nations (called “the–stans”) created after the fall of the Soviet Union. Poland’s president was eventually implicated in the scandal.
Even at $1,000 per pound, caviar remained in high demand in South Florida. Tsimbal approached Optimus, Inc., a Miami-based company operating Markey’s Caviar and the International Food Emporium. Tsimbal was not their only supplier. Optimus was using the services of four other caviar smuggling rings to feed the demand.
Tsimbal decided to diversify his clients but blundered into the cops. A search warrant turned up $500,000 worth of caviar at his business, and a trail that led to Optimus. A Department of Justice press release on August 26, 2002, gave an idea of the magnitude of Tsimbal’s activity: “Tsimbal admitted to using false documents to smuggle more Beluga caviar from Russia into the United States via Poland in 1999 than the entire Russian export quota for the year, according to a detailed factual statement filed in court.”
But that was nothing compared to Optimus. It was charged with the illegal import of 5.9 tons of caviar, worth nearly $12 million on the retail market. That’s a lot of fish eggs.
On June 2, 2002, Tsimbal pled guilty to conspiracy, smuggling and money laundering. He received a forty-one-month prison sentence and forfeited the $36,000 he was carrying when he was arrested at Miami International Airport. He was the ninth individual convicted of caviar smuggling in Miami in a two-year period.
As for Optimus, it also pled guilty as a corporation, agreed to pay a $1 million fine and promised to comply with all appropriate regulations in the future.
In June 2001, the United Nations organization enforcing CITES declared a total worldwide ban on the trade of caviar. Eve Vega with Petrossian Paris told the London Telegraph, “That is a disaster. Totally banning the trade, rather than taking the more difficult route of properly policed protection, simply hands the whole industry over to the bandits. It is now Prohibition and Al Capone.” Eight months later, after Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan agreed to reduced quotas, trade was allowed to resume.
In 2003, nearly a ton of caviar (worth nearly $2 million) arrived at the Port of Miami from Kazakhstan. Was it Beluga caviar? Federal wildlife inspectors put the load in cold storage and tested the caviar to determine if it came from a CITES-listed species. Tests indicated the slaughtered sturgeon from which the caviar was produced were not on the CITES list. But six months later, the Kazakh company agreed to donate $90,000 to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and ship the caviar back to Kazakhstan.
In January 2006, the secretariat of CITES banned the international trade of all caviar by refusing to approve any quotas until producing nations could develop a plan to ensure the survival of their sturgeon stocks.
On June 30, 2006, the European Union hosted an international meeting to discuss methods of caviar control. The monitoring organization TRAFFIC reported on its website:
The participants agreed on a set of rigorous measures to improve the exchange of intelligence and co-ordination, undertake joint international investigations and to implement measures such as the universal labeling system for caviar. Other measures included the registration and licensing of all caviar processing, re-packaging and trading businesses in order to ensure that only legal caviar is filtering through to markets, to step up controls of any suspicious caviar trader and closely monitor smuggling routes and to make more widespread use of DNA tests that can help to identify the origin and source of the caviar and thereby detect fraud and mis-declaration.
The European Union is the world’s largest consumer of caviar. It sponsored the meeting, which included all producer countries. The only legal caviar at this writing comes from existing legal stockpiles or sturgeon “farmed” in aquaculture facilities.
ONE HOT LADY–SLIPPER
The last place you would expect a federal raid is the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota, Florida. The gardens are lush with tropical foliage and the organization is world famous for its orchids. So when Michael Kovach showed up with a gorgeous, previously unknown specimen and offered it for identification, the gardens were grateful for the opportunity.
Kovach, a Virginia orchid collector, found the plant at a roadside stand in the Peruvian Andes. He’d never seen anything like it, with its hand-sized blossom of pink shading into purple. He bought three for $3.60, and gave two of them to a friend. The third he offered to Selby on June 4, 2002.
It was a member of the lady-slipper family but a new species. In a press release, the gardens hailed it as the most important orchid discovery of the last one hundred years. The little celebrity needed a name so it was dubbed Phragmipedium kovachii in honor of its discoverer and a description was rushed into print. It was a new “frag” (to use the slang name of the genus).
Wild orchids are protected under the CITES treaty, which bans collection of endangered plants in the wild. Only plants grown in nurseries or laboratories can be sold. And lady-slippers—the “frags”—are on Appendix I, the most endangered species list of CITES.
The orchid world is very small, and news travels both far and fast in these electronic times. The Peruvian government complained and quicker than you can say Phragmipedium kovachii, federal agents conducted their first-ever raid on a botanical garden—on the trail of a hot orchid.
After a further year of investigation, a federal grand jury indicted Kovach, Selby Gardens and one of the garden’s orchid experts, Wesley Higgins, for various felonies. The three pled guilty to misdemeanor possession. Higgins received two years’ probation and a $2,000 fine. Kovach received two years’ probation and a $1,000 fine. The gardens received three years’ probation and paid a $5,000 fine, the first American botanical garden to admit violating CITES. The garden was required to take a full-page ad in an orchid magazine to apologize for its part in the lady-slipper caper. And further, the judge required the gardens to petition the international body responsible for naming new species to revoke the name Phragmipedium kovachii. Oddly, that’s unlikely. Today you can view two pages of “frag” blossoms on Google Images. It’s become a hot flower in the hothouse orchid world.
The notoriety of the Selby case—reported worldwide—did not stem the tide of orchid smugglers. Manuel Arias-Silver, a well-known Peruvian orchid exporter, was arrested at Miami International Airport in 2004 for trying to smuggle more lady-slippers into Florida. The indictment alleged Arias-Silver had been moving the flowers for more than two years through Miami to George and Kathy Norris of Spring, Texas, who resold them to others for high-end prices.
A search warrant in Texas turned up years of correspondence between Arias-Silver and the Norris family. One letter—the Miami Herald reported on March 6, 2004—urged shipment through Miami: “Miami is so overloaded with plant shipments that they rarely open boxes and do not look at many plants. Make sure they are wrapped with moss and paper and in plastic as marked as Maxilliarias as before.”
HERE, LUCKY BIRD
Florida’s first known export was a bird—a red cardinal—which was considered good luck by the early Spanish sailors. There are very early reports of Native Americans from Florida selling cardinals to sailors in Havana. Today the trade moves in the other direction and it is grim. Not since slavers plied the ocean has one faction of smugglers been so indifferent to loss of life in transit. They are today’s smugglers of birds.
Miami and Los Angeles are the two main ports of entry for birds. Parrots come from the jungles of Africa and South America, cockatoos come from the scrublands of Australia and some are tiny birds from Cuba.
Once birds are captured it’s very difficult—most experts say impossible—to reintroduce them back into the wild. From an ecological point of view, it makes no difference whether the birds are killed or kidnapped. In either case, the removal from their native habitat is permanent.
The case of Adolph “Buzz” Pare, owner of the Gators of Miami pet shop, provides a window into the world of bird smuggling. His $300,000 fine and year in jail are the most stringent penalties given to a bird smuggler up to that time. But he was not the initial object of the investigation. It began in a ratty warehouse in Los Angeles, spread throughout the world and concluded with the conviction of one of the world’s most famous parrot experts.
The lead investigator was Rick Leach, a fish and wildlife agent. He told interviewers for a PBS Nova documentary, “The Great Wildlife Heist,” broadcast on April 11, 1997: “As it turned out, it involved some of the largest bird importation companies in the U.S., as well as some very complex smuggling schemes that were very difficult to detect, and the illegal activity here encompassed millions of dollars of smuggled birds.”
Leach was assigned to check a tip from a California pet shop owner that birds smuggled in from Tijuana carried disease. He went undercover south of the border to check it out. A variety of vendors not only offered birds, but also told him how to smuggle them into the United States. Put it in a paper bag, they said, and put the bag in the trunk. In Tijuana’s heat, it’s easy to understand why many of the birds don’t survive the trip.
Leach returned and consulted with colleagues. He then convinced his superiors to start a wide-ranging investigation of bird smuggling, which was dubbed Operation Renegade. The objective was not to bust the cross-border smugglers, but to find and prosecute the masterminds of the trade.
To do that, they decided to become part of the process. All birds entering the United States must undergo a thirty-day quarantine to check for disease. While these quarantine stations are inspected by the Department of Agriculture, they are owned by private individuals—often people in the pet business. So Leach found a quarantine station for sale and the government bought it. It was located in a gang-infested section of Los Angeles.
The previous owner of the station was Richard Furzer, a major importer of birds. He suggested to Leach that they should go to Africa and buy parrots. He even explained how to smuggle them.
The most popular parrot in America is the African Grey. It lives in the Congo and Zaire, and for whatever reason is the best “talker.” Unlike other birds, Greys are robust, healthy and usually friendly. Pet shops can’t stock enough of them.
Unfortunately the Republic of the Congo and Zaire forbid their export. So a minor industry developed, capturing African Grey parrots and transporting them to Senegal, Sierra Leone or the Ivory Coast, which have no export restrictions. The fact that these countries are outside the African Grey’s natural habitat is a minor inconvenience, easily repaired with cash and fabricated documents. Call it “bird laundering.”
In an interview, Furzer told Nova, “I was aware that the birds did not come from the Ivory Coast or Guinea, and to my mind, it didn’t make any difference. They don’t have border laws in west Africa like we do here, and they don’t care where the birds came from, and I really didn’t think that it was a crime. I realized that I was lying to the government, telling them the birds came from one country instead of another, but morally, it was fine by me.”
Furzer and Leach imported millions of dollars worth of African Greys and other birds with questionable papers. By day, Leach would tend the birds in quarantine. By night, he would photograph and measure the birds, so wildlife officers and academic ornithologists could identify the species and probable country of origin.
These were the lucky birds, imported through the usual channels with official-looking documentation, although there were still losses in transit. Leach told Nova, “You would have 30 to 40 birds per shipping crate. I would always see a number of dead birds in shipments that came in. Dead birds was an inherent part of the wild bird trade. There’s no way around it.”
Birds smuggled by individuals across borders display a much higher mortality rate. Birds are often stuffed in a stocking or wrapped in tape to immobilize them. They are also stuffed inside PVC tubes cut with small slits for ventilation. These tubes can be arranged inside a suitcase.
Thomas Goldsmith, a veterinarian who worked with Operation Renegade, told Nova, “We see them coming in in suitcases here in Miami, or in the hulls of boats, and ridiculous numbers of them are dead, suffocated…If you are caught smuggling drugs, you do hard time. If you are caught smuggling animals, in most cases, they slap you on the wrist, they take away the animals. The worst cases that I’ve seen, six months, and it’s worth the risk. And their profits are substantial. So there’s a great impetus.”
The investigation continued and spread to Australia, where smugglers were stealing eggs from bird nests because eggs were easier to smuggle than live birds. Australia prohibited the export of birds almost a half-century ago, yet a huge variety of Australian cockatoo species are available in pet stores worldwide. Everywhere Leach looked, the problem grew larger. Australian authorities were brought into the operation.
On January 16, 1992, federal agents sprung into action. More than thirty locations were raided including Buzz Pare’s shop in Miami. A total of three hundred birds were taken into custody. The Australians rolled up their end of the net. Twenty-nine Americans were convicted, including Furzer, who received an eighteen-month sentence. Pare received a year in prison and a $300,000 fine.
Pare was considered the largest importer of African Greys in the United States. His indictment indicates he was responsible for bringing in more than four thousand “laundered” Greys from Sierra Leone and Senegal, buying them for about $85 apiece and selling them for $600 to $1,000.
Ronald Martinolich of Cocoa, Florida, was also ensnared in Operation Renegade. He was an egg smuggler, indicted for smuggling hundreds of cockatoo eggs from Australia. The eggs were hidden in vests worn underneath street clothing. Any egg that began to hatch on the long airplane trip between Australia and the United States was destroyed. Once delivered and hatched, each bird would bring between $1,500 and $12,500.
The biggest and most surprising catch was Tony Silva of Chicago. He began collecting birds at age nine and by sixteen, he was writing articles about them. He published his first bird book at age twenty. He went to South America, and began writing about the cruel trade of bird smuggling, how the birds were trapped and then transported clandestinely to American wholesalers, pet stores and individual collectors.
Although self-educated, he was considered a leading expert not only on the birds, but the dangers they face. In 1989, he wrote A Monograph of Endangered Parrots and in 1991, Psittaculture: The Breeding, Rearing and Management of Parrots.
At exactly the same time he was writing, he was smuggling, court documents allege:
Between 1986 and 1991, Mr. Silva conspired with Gila Daoud (his mother), Hector Ugalde, Gisela Caseres, and several unindicted co-conspirators (Horacio Cornejo, Larry Lafeber, Mario Trabaue and others) to smuggle protected parrots and macaws into the United States. Cornejo obtained many of these birds illegally in South American countries and sold them to Lafeber. Lafeber would then ship them to the United States. One of Cornejo’s sources was Caseres, who smuggled the birds from Paraguay or Brazil to Argentina. The shipments of illegal birds were commingled with shipments of legal birds. Mr. Silva and Lafeber then separated the shipments at the quarantine station and removed the illegal birds while the United States Department of Agriculture employee was distracted. Mr. Silva then sold them to purchasers who were unaware that the birds had been imported illegally and had not been quarantined.
On January 30, 1996, Silva pled guilty to smuggling 450 rare and endangered birds into the United States, and selling them for nearly $1.4 million to well-heeled collectors. Later in the year, he was sentenced to nearly seven years in jail, and fined $100,000—one of the most severe penalties ever levied against an animal smuggler.
Silva tried to have his guilty plea withdrawn, and appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit. He claimed he was tricked into pleading guilty, and was the focus of a government conspiracy. On August 18, 1997, his appeal was denied.
The seminal organization of the fish and wildlife service—the Division of Economic Ornithology of 1885 —was America’s first foray into fighting species extinction. It is noteworthy that its descendant is still on the front line of fowl preservation.
EVERY FEATHER COUNTS
The CITES treaty also forbids importation and trade in parts of endangered animals and plants, as Milan Hrabovsky found out when federal agents raided his business in Gainesville on March 12, 2003. The indictment said, “Rain Forest Crafts, Tribal Arts and Morpho Ventures sold handicrafts and other products containing parts of protected species of wildlife at markets and craft fairs throughout the U.S. and over the Internet.” Hrabovsky was busted for selling feathers and teeth.
“The protected species included feathers from Blue and Yellow Macaws, Red and Green Macaws, Scarlet Macaws and Great Egrets. Court documents reveal these feathers as well as Jaguar teeth were used in Brazilian Indian ceremonial headdresses, masks and necklaces which Hrabovsky sold to a Special Agent of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife through the mail,” court documents indicated.
Hrabovsky was indicted on 545 separate counts of smuggling and pled guilty to 17 felonies. He cooperated with investigators, who then arrested ten of Hrabovsky’s biggest customers. They paid nearly $40,000 in fines. This seems to indicate that mere possession of forbidden feathers and fangs is a crime. Meanwhile Brazilian police rounded up eleven suppliers—all government employees of the National Indian Foundation.
On June 20, 2003, Hrabovsky was sentenced to forty months in federal prison. The evidence seized in the raid—hundreds of tribal headdresses, masks and ornaments—was added to the collection of the Florida Museum of Natural History.
“I NEED A GORILLA”
Just about every animal known to Noah has slipped through customs in Florida. But this anecdote almost defies belief with a combination of audacity and stupidity.
Miami animal dealer Mathew Block of Worldwide Primates was implicated in a Thailand case of smuggled apes and agreed to help U.S. prosecutors any way he could to avoid jail. So when Victor Bernal, director of zoos and parks for Mexico, approached Block and asked for a little illegal help, Block was delighted. Bernal said one of his gorillas had died in a Mexican zoo and he needed another. Could Block help?
The dealer was happy to introduce Bernal to “Señor Blanco,” the undercover Fish and Wildlife Officer Jorge Picon. The sting was set in motion with a visit to gorillas at the Miami MetroZoo. Picon convinced Bernal the apes were actually his and on loan to the MetroZoo. Picon asked how many Bernal needed. One would be fine, a big one, Bernal said.
Bernal flew back to Mexico City to get authorization for the purchase. The price was $92,000. Meanwhile in Miami, Picon arranged the next part of the sting. A DC-3 was borrowed from customs, and parked at the Opa-Locka Airport. A cage was borrowed from the MetroZoo, complete with a stash of gorilla dung for ambiance. In the cage was Wildlife Officer Terry English, dressed in a shabby gorilla suit.
When Bernal arrived, it was dark. He peered inside the cage at “his gorilla.” English thought he was getting too close and might smell a rat (instead of the gorilla dung), so he jumped at the door and gave it a mighty thump with his forearm. Bernal jumped back and said, “That’s a big one!”
At that point, another wildlife agent playing the role of pilot put Bernal under arrest. With that done, English—who was sweaty and itchy—opened the door to the cage and started climbing out. Bernal panicked, thinking the gorilla was going to attack him, and started to flee. Two more agents tackled him, and the trio turned to watch English pull the head off his costume. That was even more grotesque, as English had long hair and a beard, all matted with sweat. Bernal panicked again.
Picon’s “Señor Blanco” persona—flashy cowboy boots of endangered leathers (from the evidence room) and a foul-mouthed Colombian accent—fooled more than Bernal. For decades, Picon’s undercover work in south Florida led to the arrest and conviction of scores of CITES violators. He retired in 2004 as head of Miami enforcement of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. As for Bernal, he received seventy days in jail.
REPTILES ON THE RUN
The case of Keng Liany “Anson” Wong gives insight into the universe of reptile smuggling. Although indicted for smuggling endangered Fiji iguanas, Bengal monitor lizards and Indian soft-shelled turtles into Florida in 1992, they didn’t catch him. Wong continued to run his extensive reptile smuggling operation from his hideout in Penang, Malaysia.
While Wong was careful not to return to the United States after his indictment, in 1996 he began to deal with a reptile import-export business called PacRim Enterprises. It was actually another U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service sting operation, this one run by George Morrison.
On the heels of Leach’s Operation Renegade, Morrison set up Operation Chameleon in 1993, using many of the same techniques. It quickly reeled in Wong. “Through phone calls and fax exchanges with Morrison, Wong negotiated deals that allegedly delivered illegally imported Komodo dragons, plowshare tortoises, Chinese alligators, radiated tortoises (all endangered species), and other prized exotic reptiles to PacRim. At one point, Wong boasted of his ability to secure any animal Morrison desired, saying, via fax, ‘I can get anything here from anywhere. It only depends on how much certain people get paid. Tell me what you want, I will weigh the risks, and tell you how much it’ll set you back,’” U.S. Fish and Wildlife News reported in its November/December 1998 newsletter.
Morrison wanted more and Wong agreed to meet face-to-face in Mexico City. When he arrived on September 14, 1998, he was arrested by Mexican authorities and jailed. The United States pressed for extradition, but Wong fought it for two years from a Mexican jail before finally agreeing to come to the United States.
He pled guilty to forty felony counts on December 13, 2000. In all, Wong had made fourteen illegal shipments worth $500,000 to PacRim. He was sentenced the following June to seventy-one months in federal prison and to pay a $60,000 fine.
The roll call of Wong’s smuggled inventory reads like a list of rare and endangered reptiles. The June 8, 2001 Department of Justice press release following his guilty plea noted,
[The] endangered species traded by Wong included two particularly rare reptiles from island nations. The Komodo dragon, the world’s largest lizard, is native only to a relatively small area of Indonesia. The plowshare or Madagascan spurred tortoise, believed by many to be the rarest tortoise species, occurs only on the island of Madagascar, off the southeastern coast of Africa. These species bring particularly high prices on the black market. Both the Komodo dragon and the plowshare tortoise can each fetch up to about $30,000 in the illegal trade.
Wong also trafficked in such rarities as the Chinese alligator (which inhabits the lower course of the Yangtze River); the false gavial (a crocodile whose range is restricted to parts of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and southern Thailand along the Perak River); and the radiated tortoise, another species found only on Madagascar. Black market prices for these endangered reptiles range from $5,000 to $15,000. Other species smuggled by Wong included Grey’s monitor lizards, spider tortoises, Burmese star tortoises, Indian star tortoises, Boelen’s pythons, Timor pythons, green tree pythons, and Fly River turtles.
If nothing else, Operations Renegade and Chameleon made animal smugglers more careful about with whom they do business. While two “kingpins” were taken out of the picture, the $10-billion-per-year business in wildlife smuggling has not slacked.
HOT CORAL
By the close of the twentieth century, prosecutions based on CITES violations increased in number, severity and category. In 1999, for the first time in American history, a person was sentenced to jail for smuggling coral.
Petros “Pete” Leventis received eighteen months in jail, served five years on probation and paid a $5,000 fine. His company was forced to pay a $25,000 fine for shipping protected corals and seashells from the Philippines. His Tarpon Springs-based gift shop, Greek Island Imports, brought in a variety of illegal corals, including the blue, organ-pipe, branch, brush, staghorn, finger, brown stem, mushroom and feather varieties—all on the CITES list. Some of the shells were illegal too: giant clams, China clams, bear’s paw clams, helmet shells and trumpet shells.
When authorities inspected a forty-foot shipping container bound for Greek Island Imports in 1998, they found it contained four hundred boxes of shells and corals. Customs agents and the Fish and Wildlife Service backtracked the cargo to Esther Flores in the Philippines, who runs Esther Enterprises, a seashell and souvenir exporting business in Cebu City. Her extradition to the United States was requested. When agents looked at the record, they found Leventis and Flores had conducted the business for six years, back to 1991. The Philippine government had banned coral exports in 1977.
DEMAND PULL ECONOMICS
Virtually all of the trade in CITES species is created by commercial requests to meet consumer demand. The import of tons of caviar or thousands of birds is beyond the scope of individual gourmands or pet collectors. The trade is made possible by its middlemen, the specialists who run seashell shops, supermarkets and pet stores.
Some bird fanciers claim they are helping “save the species.” This assertion is discredited by their suppliers who steal eggs from nests in Australia and buy parrots fresh from forbidden jungles. Add the fact that these birds will never be able to return to the wild and the impact of the theft is clear: species annihilation. The list of traded endangered species is longer than this book.
While some smugglers may claim “Robin Hood status” by supplying folks what they want, the contraband they peddle is sustainable—cigars, marijuana, cocaine, arms and money. Wildlife is not. From the fins of sharks to the hands of gorillas to the horns of rhinoceros, animals around the globe are being slaughtered for their parts to tickle the fancies of the wealthy.
If animals and their parts were not considered valuable, the trade would cease immediately. Economic demand lies at the heart of smuggling and the category of plant and animal products is no different.