April 12, 2023 • 31 mins
In 2020, police in Italy raided an apartment in a small coastal town in the Adriatic. Inside it were one million euros worth of stolen goods. But Italian police didn’t find firearms, drugs, or other contraband; they found succulents. Specifically, 1,000 specimens of Copiapoa cacti, all stolen from the Atacama desert in Chile.
This is just one of many stories like this. There’s a growing black market that deals in stolen plants. Since the pandemic, theft of plants has become more rampant and more lucrative. Not only is it causing more crime, but this “unscrupulous collection” of plants is one of the leading causes of extinction among plants. And the loss of biodiversity takes its toll on all of us. Join plant expert and author Summer Rayne Oakes as she plunges into the world of plant poaching.
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of humans Cha. It's the winter of twenty twenty
and police in Italy just received a tip. An apartment
(00:29):
in Senegalia, a small coastal town on the Adriatic, is
allegedly a stash house inside it one million euros worth
of stolen goods. Detectives hop on the case. They stalk
out the apartment and watch us streams of strange packages
move in and out. Most boxes, they learn are coming
(00:54):
from Greece and Romania, suspicious considering those countries have relatively
lax customs inspections. But that's just a red herring. As
police dig deeper into the case, they discover that this
flood of boxes isn't originating from Europe at all. The
(01:14):
packages are being sent from South America. Now this is fishy.
Officers with the Carabinieri decide they've seen enough. They secure
a search warrant and prepare a race. On a February day,
(01:35):
officers swarm the apartment door. They crack it open, step
into the living space, and are immediately greeted by walls
bursting with green. There are no illegal guns here, no
bricks of drugs, no hidden stashes of explosives. Instead, jammed
(01:56):
against the walls tetrist Amongst scaffolding and stacks of wood
shelves are hundreds thousands of cacti. The police wandered the
apartment in amazement, their cacti on the floor, Cacti climbing
the walls, Cacti under the bed. Cacti cover the counters,
and swing from every corner of the ceiling. According to
(02:20):
Sabado magazine, this is more than a mere stash house.
This is a nursery, a botanical wonder lamb stuffed with
more than one thousand specimens of illicit Copiapoa cacti. The
plants resemble stubby spiked thumbs. They're native to the Atacama
Desert of Chile, where the genus is threatened, with some
(02:41):
species listed under international protections. But they're relatively large. It
takes them ages to reach this size. When botanists review
police evidence, they estimate that some specimens are more than
two hundred years old, older than modern Italy itself. Police
(03:06):
arrests the apartment owner, Andrea pam Betty, and soon pieced
together his story. Pam Betty had stalked the deserts of
Chile in search of rare cacti. One by one. He
plucked plants from the sand and sent them home by
way of Greece a Romania. Then he stowed them in
his apartment on the Italian coast, where he sold them
(03:26):
piece by piece for five hundred dollars to fifteen hundred
dollars a pop. All told, his apartment easily held at
least one million dollars worth of plants, all ripped from
the desert illegally. The phrase black market evokes sinister images
(03:48):
stacks of ak forty sevens, crates of cocaine, caged tigers,
but potted succulents on a window sill. No one is
calling crime stoppers for that, And yet the biggest black
market you've never heard of is blooming right under your nose.
Whether it's a four thousand pound cactus shoveled from the
(04:08):
Arizona desert, or delicate orchids pinched from the tangled jungles
of Peru rare, plants are at the center of a
rapidly growing and lucrative world of crime. My name is
Summer rain Oaks, and on this podcast we're plunging straight
into it, talking to the buyers, the sellers, the obsessives,
(04:31):
and those who came face to face with the criminals
behind an underworld few know exist. From School of Humans
and iHeart podcasts. This is bad Seeds. If there's one
(04:59):
thing you need to know about me, it's that I
love plants. I mean a lot up in rural Pennsylvania,
and there we couldn't live life without them. My parents
got food from the garden, and during summer break, I'd
spend hours losing myself in the woods out back. When
I got older, I learned the scientific names for the
(05:19):
plants in my backyard, for Scythia intermedia, Daucus, carota, mitchella repents.
I studied environmental science and became something of an ecology nerd.
I started multiple YouTube channels like plant went On Me
in Flock, and wrote a few books. The latest one,
How to Make a Plant Love You, is about plants
(05:41):
and are evolving relationship to them. Over the course of
a decade plus, I transformed my Brooklyn apartment with over
a thousand plants and am now working on a botanical
oasis in central New York. So yeah, I like plants
just a little, and that is what drew me to
(06:03):
this store. Because something's happening in the world of plants.
Something you need to know about, something sinister. Take that
raid you just heard about in Italy. At first, blush,
it just sounds like a quirky news headline, like honestly,
(06:23):
who steals a cactus? But as it turns out, a
lot of people do. Thirty one percent of all the
world's cacti are at risk of extinction. That's a third
of the world's cacti, according to a twenty fifteen study.
Just a few months ago, a group of scientists writing
(06:45):
for the journal Nature Plants said cacti are quote one
of the most endangered groups of organisms on the planet.
Doctor Barbara Getch, a conservation biologist, is one of the
authors of that study. So basically, we assessed every extant
species actis for the UCN Red List of Threatened Species.
(07:09):
So what these doesuc tells you what's the probability of
a species going extinct? And what she found is frankly disturbing.
For threatened species, the main cause of threat, or the
main driver of threat was unscrupulous collection. Almost half of
the world's threatened cacti are at risk of extinction, not
(07:31):
because of problems like development or livestock grazing, but because
of poaching, and this threat isn't new. Back in nineteen
eighty five, The New York Times was already on it,
writing shortly after a rare species is described in a publication,
its habitat is invaded by well to do hobbyists who
(07:54):
simply must have a specimen. Within months, certain species have
become extinct after decades of unscrupulous collecting. We've reached a
tipping point. These plants have been poached for a very
long time. I think what has changed a lot in
the last years is how easily available they have become
(08:19):
online and through other platforms like WhatsApp. That has been
a complete game changer. The game changer here isn't just
a cactus problem, It's a plant problem. In the US,
home decor is a growing industry and rising with it
the demand for house plants. In twenty nineteen, the National
(08:42):
Gardening Association claimed that house plant sales in America had
risen almost fifty percent in just three years. And I'm
going to be honest, I feel a little bit responsible now.
A few years ago I uploaded one of the first
plant on boxing videos online. You may notice that I
have this big box right here of live plants, so
(09:04):
I thought we'd do an unboxing ceremony. I had no
clue that my plant filled apartment or videos like that
would go viral, but ever since then it's been copied
thousands of times over lucky viewers getting closed on Instagram
(09:24):
and YouTube. Plant aficionados like myself started to garner tens
of thousands of followers, and then the pandemic. The pandemic
happened during the first COVID lockdown. People trapped indoors, doom scrolling, TikTok,
and Instagram collectively decided to transform their homes into garden kingdoms.
(09:49):
I mean, what else was there to do. The demand
was instatiable, and potted plants, especially those rare items pursued
by hobbyists, started going for heinous asking prices. Like there
was a variegated rafadop four a tetrasperma marketed as a
Philodendron minima, which sold on a New Zealand auction site
(10:11):
for eight thousand, one hundred and fifty bucks. A year later,
a specimen of the same species with just eight leaves
would sell for more than twenty five grand. The point
is rare plants could go for a lot of money
right now, and where there's lots of money, there are
people with how do I put it, less puer motivations
(10:35):
trying to exploit it. My name's Jenny Feltham and I'm
working with the Wildlife Justice Commission, which is an ANGEO
that's based in the Hague in the Netherlands. Basically, what
the Wildlife Justice Commission does is it operates to tackle
the transnational organized crime issue. A few years back, Jenny
(10:57):
discovered that organized crime syndicates had taken up wildlife crimes
such as plant poaching. It is, in her words, of
the perfect crime. You want your money making activity to
be low risk. You want a low risk of being caught,
and you want also if you are caught, low penalties.
And environmental crime in general has ticked those boxes, so
(11:22):
you know, the lure of high profits is there in
timber crime, especially the numbers broadly, they're really big. It's
estimated to be twenty billion dollars a year type industry
where it's estimated to be the fourth largest illegal trade
in the world. And then on the risk side, we
(11:44):
often see environmental crime isn't prioritized by law enforcement compared
to other types of crime. There are countless examples, from
the million dollars of stolen cacti in Italy to the
time a woman in New Zealand tried to sneak pass
airport customs with nine hundred and forty seven succulents hidden underneath. So, yeah,
(12:07):
there is a demand for this because the other aspect
is consumer demand at the end of the supply chain.
That really drives the whole thing. If there's demand for
these high value wildlife commodities, if people are willing to
pay high prices for these things, criminal networks will want
to supply that. They will find a way to provide
(12:28):
that service, regardless of whether it's legal or not. The
whole problem with plant crime, though, is that nobody in
power really seems to care. That's unfortunately the way it
goes law enforcement authorities. They have a whole lot of
different types of priorities that they have to work under.
(12:51):
An environmental crime often is not at the top of
that list, and this has made plant thieves especially reason.
Take the Saint Helena abnue trokotapsis abne, a delicate white
flowering plant that grows in just one place in the world,
the island of Saint Helena deep in the South Atlantic Ocean.
(13:15):
The plant has been on the brink of extinction for decades,
and until recently, the last two wild plants were literally
clinging to life on the edge of a cliff. While.
A few years back, a horticulturist was browsing online when
he noticed somebody in California trying to sell the plant online.
According to an article by Sam Knight in The Guardian,
(13:37):
the scientists emailed the cellar and kindly implored them not
to sell the ebony. It was among the rarest of
the rare and had to be protected, and besides, selling
it online was illegal, extremely illegal. A few days later,
the scientist opened his inbox and found a reply. Screw you,
(13:59):
the seller said, this is capitalism. The tough thing about
the plant poaching crisis and the black market for wildlife
in general, is frankly getting people to care about it.
(14:21):
Even in the niche world of wildlife crime, plants get
the short stick. Everybody wants to save the elephants, the tigers,
the whales. Not many people are slapping bumper stickers onto
their subarus demanding we saved the Saint Helena ebony and
there's a reason for this, and you're probably suffering from
it right now. It's something called plant blindness. I would
(14:45):
describe it as people tend to overlook plant life, and
that there's a bias towards seeing, for instance, animal life
more prominently. That's doctor Jared Margulis, a professor at the
University of Alabama and an expert on the epidemic of
plant poaching. Around the last five years, I've been studying
(15:07):
various kinds of illegal and illicit trade and cactus and
succulent plants. According to doctor Margulis, plant blindness is essentially
a bias. Now, if I asked you to sit back
and close your eyes and dream up the world's most
vulnerable species, images of tigers or rhinos or even bumblebees
(15:27):
might dance through your head. But the truth is the
most threatened taxa in the world are plants. The sort
of botanical world around us where plant life is sort
of becomes this inert backdrop to a livelier animal world.
There's a sense of a bias towards being more concerned
(15:47):
about animals and other species that, for instance, move and
have eyes and appear more sentient than plant life. That
backdrop includes cacti, conifers, and psycats. In fact, a global
treaty designed to protect wildlife called Sites suggests that for
every threatened animal, there are at least five threatened plants.
(16:08):
But you wouldn't believe those numbers if you were to say,
examine wildlife policy. Plant blindness has very serious and negative
consequences for how we relate to plants, but also think
about the conservation of species. In the United States, for instance,
plants make up sixty percent of all endangered wildlife, but
(16:29):
if you look at the government's spreadsheets, you'll see that
in the country's wildlife protection budget just two percent two
percent goes towards plant life. Now, that is plant blindness.
Put simply, we're never going to see a sad Sarah
McLaughlin commercial with an uprooted orchid on screen, but perhaps
we should. Globally, two out of five plants are risk
(16:54):
of going extinct. And not to be alarmist, but this
is a huge issue. It is human centric to say
that without plants we would all be dead very quickly,
but I think it's also an important way of prompting
people to think about how important plants are and everything
we do in our ability to thrive and flourish on
the planet. Doctor Margulis is right. Just look around you.
(17:18):
As I shared in my book How to Make a
Plant Love You, the wooden beams, floorboards, tables, chairs, picture frames,
bookshelves and doors we pass through were all once trees.
The cotton sheets that cover us at night plants. Even
our polyester shirts, they were derived from storehouses of ancient
plants locked beneath the Earth's surface, as is most of
(17:42):
the fuel that powers our vehicles and warms our homes. Plants. Meanwhile,
latex from trees and the tropics make the tires of
airplanes and cars, and insulate the undersea internet cables that
make listening to this podcast possible. The lotions and bombs
we use to clean and soften our skin have all
(18:02):
originated or been synthesized from a plant. It's unique chemistry.
The coffee that gets us moving in the morning, the
tea that soothes us at night, and the wine or
beer we imbibed in wine, the oils that make our
candles are soaked. It's all plants. And what about high
fructose corn syrup? Even if you're on an all meat diet,
(18:25):
you indirectly eat plants. After all, do you think your
burger was grass fed or grain fed? Plants create roughly
seventy five percent of the oxygen we breathe. They make
up eighty percent of the food we eat. They are
the basis for most of the antibiotics and medicines that
keep us healthy. You're probably thinking, okay, okay, we get it.
(18:52):
But these are just a few examples of how crucial
plant life is to our lives. For humanity writ large,
we rely on so many different species in so many
different ways. As we lose more and more species on
the plant to extinction, and as more and more species
become vulnerable, there will be all kinds of negative consequences
when plants disappear. There's a cascading effect of bad news.
(19:17):
I think the author Ray Bradberry explained it best. In
nineteen fifty two, he published a short story called A
Sound of Thunder. In it, Bradberry imagined a future where
scientists cracked the secret to time travel. Naturally, investors celebrate
this milestone by monetizing it. One company sells time traveling safaris,
(19:39):
offering people the opportunity to go back to the late Cretaceous.
But on one of these trips, a tourist accidentally crushes
a single butterfly. When the tourist returns to the present day,
the world is strangely altered. People talk fight, the results
(19:59):
of a recent election have changed for the worse. One
small misstep changed everything. Ecology is really complex, and species
hold relationships with each other, and so, for instance, when
you poach or steal a plant towards extinction, what are
the pollinators that relied on that species to survive and
(20:19):
what happens to them and what species relied on those pollinators,
And so there's these cascading series of interactions in consequences,
and the reality is we don't know what most of
those consequences might yet be. But it's something that we
need to be very concerned about now That might sound
distant and theoretical. So here's a real world example. The
(20:40):
Ohia lehua tree of Hawaii, or Metrosideros polymorpha, is a
prominent plant on the islands and is featured in native mythology,
but livestock as well as imports of non native plants
from Portugal and South America have endangered it. Populations of
Ohia trees are declining and most recently, a foreign fungus
(21:02):
has strangled entire groves in a Bradbury and Twist. This
deadly fungus was likely introduced by a tourist who is
carrying it on their hiking boots and had meandered off
a hiking trail. The result has had a ripple effect
acrossed Polynesia. The e evie, a bright red tropical bird
with a crescent beak, depends on the Ohea for food
(21:25):
and breeding. But as plant populations have dwindled, so has
the bird, and with the bird, so goes the plants
it pollinates, including the Lobelia grayana, a spiky lavender look
alike that is now endangered. Who knows how far this
ripple effect continues. If the world of plants can teach
(21:47):
us anything, it's that everything is really connected. The world
we live in is like a game of Jenga. Even
a mild disturbance can lead to a total collapse. This
is especially true of the world's rarest plants. A single
death or a single theft can dis rupped an entire
ecosystems destiny. What that means for us is anyone's gas.
(22:24):
I want to introduce you to a plant. The living
rock cactus or Ariocarpus fisheratus. It's a squat and plush
cactus with wrinkled leaves and no spines. It is like
the jab of the hut of succulents. In other words,
it's sort of ugly. In its native habitat, it can
be easily mistaken, as the name suggests, for a pile
(22:46):
of rocks. To many passers by, it is completely unremarkable.
That is until it blooms. In midsummer, the living rock
cactus reveals a vibrant, electric pink blossom. Some consider it
the prettiest flowering cactus in the world. For hobbyists, the
(23:09):
nice thing about the living rock cactus is that it
doesn't require a bank loan. A single cactus costs around
one hundred bucks, which is expensive but attainable for an
entry level plant collector, and that has made it extremely
popular in places with a growing middle class like Asia.
One of the reasons the living rock is so popular
(23:31):
in the world, especially in Asia, is that it is
a long living plan that's Eric Jumper. He's a retired
special agent with the US Fish and Wildlife Service. People
will get one for a child when they're born, so
they can live their lives living. You know it's charming, right.
The problem is, the living rock cactus is a critically
endangered species. You cannot pluck it from the desert. This
(23:54):
living rock cactus is an Apendix one, which is the
most restrictive. It restricts all commercial trade in anything that's
listed as Appendix one. So they're afforded the highest amount
of protection. And in the early two thousands, Special Agent
Jumper started getting calls to look into a string of
rock cactus poaching. I was stationed in San Antonio. I
(24:16):
started getting calls from people in seculent societies, mostly out
of Austin, Texas, advising me about things they were seeing online.
I took notes on that, but just didn't really act
on it. I didn't know that there was a worldwide
market for cactus at that time. At some point in
twenty twelve, an inspector for the USDA also came to
(24:39):
me with a name of a business that was selling
a lot of cactus and a lot of them were endangered.
And then yeah to say, hey, you need to look
at this, and this is what started it. Jumpers started
digging into the case, learning everything he could about the
cactus and We kept getting different calls telling us, Hey,
(25:01):
this guy here, this guy in these Texas, this guy
in North Texas, this guy in West Texas is doing this.
He's the one supplying such and such. Working on that
tip Jumper put an alert airports to be on the
lookout for illicit packages making their way overseas. Those are
(25:21):
our two tasks to try to intersect the package, and
of course you do that by putting alerts out to
our inspectors at our airports, and then we tried to
find the source. At first, only a few cacti trickled in,
most of them turning up at the International Mail Sorting
(25:43):
facility at Chicago O'Hare Airport. Those boxes contained one or
two plants, but after a few years the poachers began
brazenly stuffing as many as forty cacti into a single shipment.
The seizures started happening, Boom, boom, boom. It took maybe
a year after alert went out and then boom they
(26:05):
started hidden. After that, you know, then we have a case.
Whatever happens from the air on, we have a case.
The vast majority of the boxes were postmarked for places
like Shanghai, Bangkok and Beijing, although a handful ended up
in Europe too. Regardless of destination, each box was mislabeled
as home decor or ceramic pottery suspicious right. Plus, none
(26:30):
of the shipments contained the appropriate paperwork for exporting plants.
Agents followed the paper trail. They traced the shipments to
southwestern Texas, just north of Big Ben National Park. Now
agents quickly discovered that the cacti were shipped by a
ring of organized cactus smugglers. We'll trying to run down
(26:52):
all of that stuff, and finally ended up running into
what turned out to be one of them. The main
sources was a ranch out in West Texas. Agents squared
their sights on six older Texans, all men, two of
whom claimed to own and operate cactus nurseries. Officials surveiled
(27:15):
their homes, They watched the men move in and out,
and then the warrants came in, signed by a judge,
and the raids began. At Troy Layton Baker's home, officials
seized one hundred and seventy seven living rock cacti. At
Mark Refield's home in Spicewood, agents found five hundred forty
(27:38):
nine A few hundred miles away at an RV park.
Agents stormed into Paul Armstrong's property and found six hundred
and fifty eight illegal cacti, But the biggest bust belonged
to Maurice Ray Carter, the owner of the so called
Texas Native Cactus Company. At his place in Terlingua, Texas,
agents found more than one thousand, six hundred and fifteen
(28:01):
living rock cacti, all illegally poached. In total, US Fish
and Wildlife Service agencies more than four thousand illegally harvested plants.
And then there were the weapons. In the home of
Mark Refield, another cactus business owner, the FEDS would seize
(28:21):
eleven pistols, two shotguns, and four military style assault rifles.
You had a huge compound out in the middle of
the desert, and we were lucky enough to catch them
leaving town going back there instead of at his perfect
because he told us if you had caught me at
(28:42):
my house, it would have went down. It had been
a shootout, a shootout over cacti. But as the six
men went to trial, it became clear why there was
a lot of money in those little stubby plants. The
men had grossed approximately seventy five thousand dollars just by
(29:06):
mislabeling plants that they had torn from the ground. All
six received a litany of fines and probation. A judge
ordered Morris Carter, the man hiding sixteen hundred living rocks
at his home, to pay sixty thousand dollars in restitution,
splitting it between the National Park Foundation and the US
Fish and Wildlife Service. Despite those heavy fines, Agent Jumper
(29:30):
isn't sure this was enough to deter them or others
from future crimes. Be honest, it probably made them smarter,
from what we can determine. I think the smarter practice
now is going to be trying to circumvent the rule
by sending them first to California using straw buyers, basically
using the middleman. But one thing is for certain, it's
(29:52):
not going to take so many phone calls this second
time around. I think it's on radar for everyone, and
I know when I retired there were several cases still going,
so it's certainly not on the backburn anymore. If the
smuggling operation in Texas proved anything, it's that plant crime
(30:15):
is not the domain of rogue, careless individuals. It's not
a one off and not something that can be written off.
It is becoming more organized and far more dangerous, and
that is what we're going to explore on this podcast
coming up. On this season of Bad Seeds ended up
(30:36):
going to this really kind of sketchy pototists flown cartel
Knockati territory in Mexico and this guy met us on
the side of the highway on his motorbike and he
was departure. They've been other allegations in other countries involving
very senior officials. You may be financing the destruction of
an irreplaceable ecosystem that cannot come back, tied up with
(30:58):
what looked like garden string behind now backs these big
M sixteen stop to our heads time Summer rain Oaks
join us again next time for Bad Seeds. Bad Seeds
is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts.
I'm your host Summer rain Oakes. Lucas Riley is our writer,
(31:22):
Gabby Watts is our producer, and Amelia Brock is our
senior producer. Fact Checking is by Savannah Hugilely and Zoey Farrow.
Original music is by Claire Campbell. Sound design and score
is by Jesse Niswanger. Development was by Brian Lavin and
Jacob selzer. Executive producers are Brian Lavin, Elsie Crowley, Brandon Barr,
(31:43):
Virginia Prescott and Jacob Selzern School of Humans
School of humans Cha. It's the winter of twenty twenty
and police in Italy just received a tip. An apartment
(00:29):
in Senegalia, a small coastal town on the Adriatic, is
allegedly a stash house inside it one million euros worth
of stolen goods. Detectives hop on the case. They stalk
out the apartment and watch us streams of strange packages
move in and out. Most boxes, they learn are coming
(00:54):
from Greece and Romania, suspicious considering those countries have relatively
lax customs inspections. But that's just a red herring. As
police dig deeper into the case, they discover that this
flood of boxes isn't originating from Europe at all. The
(01:14):
packages are being sent from South America. Now this is fishy.
Officers with the Carabinieri decide they've seen enough. They secure
a search warrant and prepare a race. On a February day,
(01:35):
officers swarm the apartment door. They crack it open, step
into the living space, and are immediately greeted by walls
bursting with green. There are no illegal guns here, no
bricks of drugs, no hidden stashes of explosives. Instead, jammed
(01:56):
against the walls tetrist Amongst scaffolding and stacks of wood
shelves are hundreds thousands of cacti. The police wandered the
apartment in amazement, their cacti on the floor, Cacti climbing
the walls, Cacti under the bed. Cacti cover the counters,
and swing from every corner of the ceiling. According to
(02:20):
Sabado magazine, this is more than a mere stash house.
This is a nursery, a botanical wonder lamb stuffed with
more than one thousand specimens of illicit Copiapoa cacti. The
plants resemble stubby spiked thumbs. They're native to the Atacama
Desert of Chile, where the genus is threatened, with some
(02:41):
species listed under international protections. But they're relatively large. It
takes them ages to reach this size. When botanists review
police evidence, they estimate that some specimens are more than
two hundred years old, older than modern Italy itself. Police
(03:06):
arrests the apartment owner, Andrea pam Betty, and soon pieced
together his story. Pam Betty had stalked the deserts of
Chile in search of rare cacti. One by one. He
plucked plants from the sand and sent them home by
way of Greece a Romania. Then he stowed them in
his apartment on the Italian coast, where he sold them
(03:26):
piece by piece for five hundred dollars to fifteen hundred
dollars a pop. All told, his apartment easily held at
least one million dollars worth of plants, all ripped from
the desert illegally. The phrase black market evokes sinister images
(03:48):
stacks of ak forty sevens, crates of cocaine, caged tigers,
but potted succulents on a window sill. No one is
calling crime stoppers for that, And yet the biggest black
market you've never heard of is blooming right under your nose.
Whether it's a four thousand pound cactus shoveled from the
(04:08):
Arizona desert, or delicate orchids pinched from the tangled jungles
of Peru rare, plants are at the center of a
rapidly growing and lucrative world of crime. My name is
Summer rain Oaks, and on this podcast we're plunging straight
into it, talking to the buyers, the sellers, the obsessives,
(04:31):
and those who came face to face with the criminals
behind an underworld few know exist. From School of Humans
and iHeart podcasts. This is bad Seeds. If there's one
(04:59):
thing you need to know about me, it's that I
love plants. I mean a lot up in rural Pennsylvania,
and there we couldn't live life without them. My parents
got food from the garden, and during summer break, I'd
spend hours losing myself in the woods out back. When
I got older, I learned the scientific names for the
(05:19):
plants in my backyard, for Scythia intermedia, Daucus, carota, mitchella repents.
I studied environmental science and became something of an ecology nerd.
I started multiple YouTube channels like plant went On Me
in Flock, and wrote a few books. The latest one,
How to Make a Plant Love You, is about plants
(05:41):
and are evolving relationship to them. Over the course of
a decade plus, I transformed my Brooklyn apartment with over
a thousand plants and am now working on a botanical
oasis in central New York. So yeah, I like plants
just a little, and that is what drew me to
(06:03):
this store. Because something's happening in the world of plants.
Something you need to know about, something sinister. Take that
raid you just heard about in Italy. At first, blush,
it just sounds like a quirky news headline, like honestly,
(06:23):
who steals a cactus? But as it turns out, a
lot of people do. Thirty one percent of all the
world's cacti are at risk of extinction. That's a third
of the world's cacti, according to a twenty fifteen study.
Just a few months ago, a group of scientists writing
(06:45):
for the journal Nature Plants said cacti are quote one
of the most endangered groups of organisms on the planet.
Doctor Barbara Getch, a conservation biologist, is one of the
authors of that study. So basically, we assessed every extant
species actis for the UCN Red List of Threatened Species.
(07:09):
So what these doesuc tells you what's the probability of
a species going extinct? And what she found is frankly disturbing.
For threatened species, the main cause of threat, or the
main driver of threat was unscrupulous collection. Almost half of
the world's threatened cacti are at risk of extinction, not
(07:31):
because of problems like development or livestock grazing, but because
of poaching, and this threat isn't new. Back in nineteen
eighty five, The New York Times was already on it,
writing shortly after a rare species is described in a publication,
its habitat is invaded by well to do hobbyists who
(07:54):
simply must have a specimen. Within months, certain species have
become extinct after decades of unscrupulous collecting. We've reached a
tipping point. These plants have been poached for a very
long time. I think what has changed a lot in
the last years is how easily available they have become
(08:19):
online and through other platforms like WhatsApp. That has been
a complete game changer. The game changer here isn't just
a cactus problem, It's a plant problem. In the US,
home decor is a growing industry and rising with it
the demand for house plants. In twenty nineteen, the National
(08:42):
Gardening Association claimed that house plant sales in America had
risen almost fifty percent in just three years. And I'm
going to be honest, I feel a little bit responsible now.
A few years ago I uploaded one of the first
plant on boxing videos online. You may notice that I
have this big box right here of live plants, so
(09:04):
I thought we'd do an unboxing ceremony. I had no
clue that my plant filled apartment or videos like that
would go viral, but ever since then it's been copied
thousands of times over lucky viewers getting closed on Instagram
(09:24):
and YouTube. Plant aficionados like myself started to garner tens
of thousands of followers, and then the pandemic. The pandemic
happened during the first COVID lockdown. People trapped indoors, doom scrolling, TikTok,
and Instagram collectively decided to transform their homes into garden kingdoms.
(09:49):
I mean, what else was there to do. The demand
was instatiable, and potted plants, especially those rare items pursued
by hobbyists, started going for heinous asking prices. Like there
was a variegated rafadop four a tetrasperma marketed as a
Philodendron minima, which sold on a New Zealand auction site
(10:11):
for eight thousand, one hundred and fifty bucks. A year later,
a specimen of the same species with just eight leaves
would sell for more than twenty five grand. The point
is rare plants could go for a lot of money
right now, and where there's lots of money, there are
people with how do I put it, less puer motivations
(10:35):
trying to exploit it. My name's Jenny Feltham and I'm
working with the Wildlife Justice Commission, which is an ANGEO
that's based in the Hague in the Netherlands. Basically, what
the Wildlife Justice Commission does is it operates to tackle
the transnational organized crime issue. A few years back, Jenny
(10:57):
discovered that organized crime syndicates had taken up wildlife crimes
such as plant poaching. It is, in her words, of
the perfect crime. You want your money making activity to
be low risk. You want a low risk of being caught,
and you want also if you are caught, low penalties.
And environmental crime in general has ticked those boxes, so
(11:22):
you know, the lure of high profits is there in
timber crime, especially the numbers broadly, they're really big. It's
estimated to be twenty billion dollars a year type industry
where it's estimated to be the fourth largest illegal trade
in the world. And then on the risk side, we
(11:44):
often see environmental crime isn't prioritized by law enforcement compared
to other types of crime. There are countless examples, from
the million dollars of stolen cacti in Italy to the
time a woman in New Zealand tried to sneak pass
airport customs with nine hundred and forty seven succulents hidden underneath. So, yeah,
(12:07):
there is a demand for this because the other aspect
is consumer demand at the end of the supply chain.
That really drives the whole thing. If there's demand for
these high value wildlife commodities, if people are willing to
pay high prices for these things, criminal networks will want
to supply that. They will find a way to provide
(12:28):
that service, regardless of whether it's legal or not. The
whole problem with plant crime, though, is that nobody in
power really seems to care. That's unfortunately the way it
goes law enforcement authorities. They have a whole lot of
different types of priorities that they have to work under.
(12:51):
An environmental crime often is not at the top of
that list, and this has made plant thieves especially reason.
Take the Saint Helena abnue trokotapsis abne, a delicate white
flowering plant that grows in just one place in the world,
the island of Saint Helena deep in the South Atlantic Ocean.
(13:15):
The plant has been on the brink of extinction for decades,
and until recently, the last two wild plants were literally
clinging to life on the edge of a cliff. While.
A few years back, a horticulturist was browsing online when
he noticed somebody in California trying to sell the plant online.
According to an article by Sam Knight in The Guardian,
(13:37):
the scientists emailed the cellar and kindly implored them not
to sell the ebony. It was among the rarest of
the rare and had to be protected, and besides, selling
it online was illegal, extremely illegal. A few days later,
the scientist opened his inbox and found a reply. Screw you,
(13:59):
the seller said, this is capitalism. The tough thing about
the plant poaching crisis and the black market for wildlife
in general, is frankly getting people to care about it.
(14:21):
Even in the niche world of wildlife crime, plants get
the short stick. Everybody wants to save the elephants, the tigers,
the whales. Not many people are slapping bumper stickers onto
their subarus demanding we saved the Saint Helena ebony and
there's a reason for this, and you're probably suffering from
it right now. It's something called plant blindness. I would
(14:45):
describe it as people tend to overlook plant life, and
that there's a bias towards seeing, for instance, animal life
more prominently. That's doctor Jared Margulis, a professor at the
University of Alabama and an expert on the epidemic of
plant poaching. Around the last five years, I've been studying
(15:07):
various kinds of illegal and illicit trade and cactus and
succulent plants. According to doctor Margulis, plant blindness is essentially
a bias. Now, if I asked you to sit back
and close your eyes and dream up the world's most
vulnerable species, images of tigers or rhinos or even bumblebees
(15:27):
might dance through your head. But the truth is the
most threatened taxa in the world are plants. The sort
of botanical world around us where plant life is sort
of becomes this inert backdrop to a livelier animal world.
There's a sense of a bias towards being more concerned
(15:47):
about animals and other species that, for instance, move and
have eyes and appear more sentient than plant life. That
backdrop includes cacti, conifers, and psycats. In fact, a global
treaty designed to protect wildlife called Sites suggests that for
every threatened animal, there are at least five threatened plants.
(16:08):
But you wouldn't believe those numbers if you were to say,
examine wildlife policy. Plant blindness has very serious and negative
consequences for how we relate to plants, but also think
about the conservation of species. In the United States, for instance,
plants make up sixty percent of all endangered wildlife, but
(16:29):
if you look at the government's spreadsheets, you'll see that
in the country's wildlife protection budget just two percent two
percent goes towards plant life. Now, that is plant blindness.
Put simply, we're never going to see a sad Sarah
McLaughlin commercial with an uprooted orchid on screen, but perhaps
we should. Globally, two out of five plants are risk
(16:54):
of going extinct. And not to be alarmist, but this
is a huge issue. It is human centric to say
that without plants we would all be dead very quickly,
but I think it's also an important way of prompting
people to think about how important plants are and everything
we do in our ability to thrive and flourish on
the planet. Doctor Margulis is right. Just look around you.
(17:18):
As I shared in my book How to Make a
Plant Love You, the wooden beams, floorboards, tables, chairs, picture frames,
bookshelves and doors we pass through were all once trees.
The cotton sheets that cover us at night plants. Even
our polyester shirts, they were derived from storehouses of ancient
plants locked beneath the Earth's surface, as is most of
(17:42):
the fuel that powers our vehicles and warms our homes. Plants. Meanwhile,
latex from trees and the tropics make the tires of
airplanes and cars, and insulate the undersea internet cables that
make listening to this podcast possible. The lotions and bombs
we use to clean and soften our skin have all
(18:02):
originated or been synthesized from a plant. It's unique chemistry.
The coffee that gets us moving in the morning, the
tea that soothes us at night, and the wine or
beer we imbibed in wine, the oils that make our
candles are soaked. It's all plants. And what about high
fructose corn syrup? Even if you're on an all meat diet,
(18:25):
you indirectly eat plants. After all, do you think your
burger was grass fed or grain fed? Plants create roughly
seventy five percent of the oxygen we breathe. They make
up eighty percent of the food we eat. They are
the basis for most of the antibiotics and medicines that
keep us healthy. You're probably thinking, okay, okay, we get it.
(18:52):
But these are just a few examples of how crucial
plant life is to our lives. For humanity writ large,
we rely on so many different species in so many
different ways. As we lose more and more species on
the plant to extinction, and as more and more species
become vulnerable, there will be all kinds of negative consequences
when plants disappear. There's a cascading effect of bad news.
(19:17):
I think the author Ray Bradberry explained it best. In
nineteen fifty two, he published a short story called A
Sound of Thunder. In it, Bradberry imagined a future where
scientists cracked the secret to time travel. Naturally, investors celebrate
this milestone by monetizing it. One company sells time traveling safaris,
(19:39):
offering people the opportunity to go back to the late Cretaceous.
But on one of these trips, a tourist accidentally crushes
a single butterfly. When the tourist returns to the present day,
the world is strangely altered. People talk fight, the results
(19:59):
of a recent election have changed for the worse. One
small misstep changed everything. Ecology is really complex, and species
hold relationships with each other, and so, for instance, when
you poach or steal a plant towards extinction, what are
the pollinators that relied on that species to survive and
(20:19):
what happens to them and what species relied on those pollinators,
And so there's these cascading series of interactions in consequences,
and the reality is we don't know what most of
those consequences might yet be. But it's something that we
need to be very concerned about now That might sound
distant and theoretical. So here's a real world example. The
(20:40):
Ohia lehua tree of Hawaii, or Metrosideros polymorpha, is a
prominent plant on the islands and is featured in native mythology,
but livestock as well as imports of non native plants
from Portugal and South America have endangered it. Populations of
Ohia trees are declining and most recently, a foreign fungus
(21:02):
has strangled entire groves in a Bradbury and Twist. This
deadly fungus was likely introduced by a tourist who is
carrying it on their hiking boots and had meandered off
a hiking trail. The result has had a ripple effect
acrossed Polynesia. The e evie, a bright red tropical bird
with a crescent beak, depends on the Ohea for food
(21:25):
and breeding. But as plant populations have dwindled, so has
the bird, and with the bird, so goes the plants
it pollinates, including the Lobelia grayana, a spiky lavender look
alike that is now endangered. Who knows how far this
ripple effect continues. If the world of plants can teach
(21:47):
us anything, it's that everything is really connected. The world
we live in is like a game of Jenga. Even
a mild disturbance can lead to a total collapse. This
is especially true of the world's rarest plants. A single
death or a single theft can dis rupped an entire
ecosystems destiny. What that means for us is anyone's gas.
(22:24):
I want to introduce you to a plant. The living
rock cactus or Ariocarpus fisheratus. It's a squat and plush
cactus with wrinkled leaves and no spines. It is like
the jab of the hut of succulents. In other words,
it's sort of ugly. In its native habitat, it can
be easily mistaken, as the name suggests, for a pile
(22:46):
of rocks. To many passers by, it is completely unremarkable.
That is until it blooms. In midsummer, the living rock
cactus reveals a vibrant, electric pink blossom. Some consider it
the prettiest flowering cactus in the world. For hobbyists, the
(23:09):
nice thing about the living rock cactus is that it
doesn't require a bank loan. A single cactus costs around
one hundred bucks, which is expensive but attainable for an
entry level plant collector, and that has made it extremely
popular in places with a growing middle class like Asia.
One of the reasons the living rock is so popular
(23:31):
in the world, especially in Asia, is that it is
a long living plan that's Eric Jumper. He's a retired
special agent with the US Fish and Wildlife Service. People
will get one for a child when they're born, so
they can live their lives living. You know it's charming, right.
The problem is, the living rock cactus is a critically
endangered species. You cannot pluck it from the desert. This
(23:54):
living rock cactus is an Apendix one, which is the
most restrictive. It restricts all commercial trade in anything that's
listed as Appendix one. So they're afforded the highest amount
of protection. And in the early two thousands, Special Agent
Jumper started getting calls to look into a string of
rock cactus poaching. I was stationed in San Antonio. I
(24:16):
started getting calls from people in seculent societies, mostly out
of Austin, Texas, advising me about things they were seeing online.
I took notes on that, but just didn't really act
on it. I didn't know that there was a worldwide
market for cactus at that time. At some point in
twenty twelve, an inspector for the USDA also came to
(24:39):
me with a name of a business that was selling
a lot of cactus and a lot of them were endangered.
And then yeah to say, hey, you need to look
at this, and this is what started it. Jumpers started
digging into the case, learning everything he could about the
cactus and We kept getting different calls telling us, Hey,
(25:01):
this guy here, this guy in these Texas, this guy
in North Texas, this guy in West Texas is doing this.
He's the one supplying such and such. Working on that
tip Jumper put an alert airports to be on the
lookout for illicit packages making their way overseas. Those are
(25:21):
our two tasks to try to intersect the package, and
of course you do that by putting alerts out to
our inspectors at our airports, and then we tried to
find the source. At first, only a few cacti trickled in,
most of them turning up at the International Mail Sorting
(25:43):
facility at Chicago O'Hare Airport. Those boxes contained one or
two plants, but after a few years the poachers began
brazenly stuffing as many as forty cacti into a single shipment.
The seizures started happening, Boom, boom, boom. It took maybe
a year after alert went out and then boom they
(26:05):
started hidden. After that, you know, then we have a case.
Whatever happens from the air on, we have a case.
The vast majority of the boxes were postmarked for places
like Shanghai, Bangkok and Beijing, although a handful ended up
in Europe too. Regardless of destination, each box was mislabeled
as home decor or ceramic pottery suspicious right. Plus, none
(26:30):
of the shipments contained the appropriate paperwork for exporting plants.
Agents followed the paper trail. They traced the shipments to
southwestern Texas, just north of Big Ben National Park. Now
agents quickly discovered that the cacti were shipped by a
ring of organized cactus smugglers. We'll trying to run down
(26:52):
all of that stuff, and finally ended up running into
what turned out to be one of them. The main
sources was a ranch out in West Texas. Agents squared
their sights on six older Texans, all men, two of
whom claimed to own and operate cactus nurseries. Officials surveiled
(27:15):
their homes, They watched the men move in and out,
and then the warrants came in, signed by a judge,
and the raids began. At Troy Layton Baker's home, officials
seized one hundred and seventy seven living rock cacti. At
Mark Refield's home in Spicewood, agents found five hundred forty
(27:38):
nine A few hundred miles away at an RV park.
Agents stormed into Paul Armstrong's property and found six hundred
and fifty eight illegal cacti, But the biggest bust belonged
to Maurice Ray Carter, the owner of the so called
Texas Native Cactus Company. At his place in Terlingua, Texas,
agents found more than one thousand, six hundred and fifteen
(28:01):
living rock cacti, all illegally poached. In total, US Fish
and Wildlife Service agencies more than four thousand illegally harvested plants.
And then there were the weapons. In the home of
Mark Refield, another cactus business owner, the FEDS would seize
(28:21):
eleven pistols, two shotguns, and four military style assault rifles.
You had a huge compound out in the middle of
the desert, and we were lucky enough to catch them
leaving town going back there instead of at his perfect
because he told us if you had caught me at
(28:42):
my house, it would have went down. It had been
a shootout, a shootout over cacti. But as the six
men went to trial, it became clear why there was
a lot of money in those little stubby plants. The
men had grossed approximately seventy five thousand dollars just by
(29:06):
mislabeling plants that they had torn from the ground. All
six received a litany of fines and probation. A judge
ordered Morris Carter, the man hiding sixteen hundred living rocks
at his home, to pay sixty thousand dollars in restitution,
splitting it between the National Park Foundation and the US
Fish and Wildlife Service. Despite those heavy fines, Agent Jumper
(29:30):
isn't sure this was enough to deter them or others
from future crimes. Be honest, it probably made them smarter,
from what we can determine. I think the smarter practice
now is going to be trying to circumvent the rule
by sending them first to California using straw buyers, basically
using the middleman. But one thing is for certain, it's
(29:52):
not going to take so many phone calls this second
time around. I think it's on radar for everyone, and
I know when I retired there were several cases still going,
so it's certainly not on the backburn anymore. If the
smuggling operation in Texas proved anything, it's that plant crime
(30:15):
is not the domain of rogue, careless individuals. It's not
a one off and not something that can be written off.
It is becoming more organized and far more dangerous, and
that is what we're going to explore on this podcast
coming up. On this season of Bad Seeds ended up
(30:36):
going to this really kind of sketchy pototists flown cartel
Knockati territory in Mexico and this guy met us on
the side of the highway on his motorbike and he
was departure. They've been other allegations in other countries involving
very senior officials. You may be financing the destruction of
an irreplaceable ecosystem that cannot come back, tied up with
(30:58):
what looked like garden string behind now backs these big
M sixteen stop to our heads time Summer rain Oaks
join us again next time for Bad Seeds. Bad Seeds
is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts.
I'm your host Summer rain Oakes. Lucas Riley is our writer,
(31:22):
Gabby Watts is our producer, and Amelia Brock is our
senior producer. Fact Checking is by Savannah Hugilely and Zoey Farrow.
Original music is by Claire Campbell. Sound design and score
is by Jesse Niswanger. Development was by Brian Lavin and
Jacob selzer. Executive producers are Brian Lavin, Elsie Crowley, Brandon Barr,
(31:43):
Virginia Prescott and Jacob Selzern School of Humans
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