May 10, 2023 • 31 mins
On November 25, 2019 in Tortugas Bay, six fishermen prepare their boat and begin motoring out onto the water. Their Destination? Isla de Cedros. What appears to be an innocent fishing trip will result in the deaths of two of these men.
In this episode, plant poaching collides with organized crime: how cartels, mobs, and criminal syndicates might be connected to some of your favorite plants.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
School of humans.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
It's five in the morning, November twenty fifth, twenty nineteen,
and Ivonne Guthman, a thirty two year old fisherman from
Mexico's Baja Peninsula, looks out onto Tortugas Bay. The Pacific
rolls gently at his feet. The first glimmers of sunrise
reveal a patchwork of boats on the horizon. The waters
(00:33):
here are popular among sports fishers. Giant schools of black
sea bass and fat and yellowtail lure anglers from hundreds
of miles away. That's what brought Guthman here, and now
he and five other fishermen prepare their boat and begin
motoring out onto the water. Destination Isla de Stedros, a
(01:02):
two hour trip from the docks. The island is a
rocky spit of land home to just a few thousand people.
A few years back, Mitsubishi built a company town here
to store salt. But most locals depend on the fishing industry.
And then there's the few who rely on the islands well,
let's just call it the underground economy. The Sinaloa Cartel,
(01:30):
arguably the most powerful and dangerous drug trafficking syndicate in
the West, calls Sadros their turf, but the cartel does
not own a monopoly on these waters. Some drug traffickers
know SROs as a frontier, a place where small time
drug runners and splinter groups can get their start. Yvonne
Gooseman and his fishing buddies they know this, but they're
(01:53):
fishermen and they stay in their lane, or at least
that's what they tell people, because on that November day
they don't cast their lines into the water. Instead, they
steer their boat toward the northern point of Sadrus. They
cast anchor slosh onto shore and begun unloading dozens of
(02:17):
black plastic tubs. Within minutes, they're tossing hundreds of small
succulents into the boxes, and little do they know they
are being watched by evening search and rescue teams are
looking for the fishermen. One is found dead with a
bullet hole in the back of his head, another alive
(02:40):
with a gunshot wound to his arm, and Yvonne Gusman well,
they find him weeks later, his decaying body bloated, bobbing
on the surface of the bay, his legs tightly wound
with rope. In this episode, plant poaching collides with organized crime.
(03:02):
How cartels, mobs, and criminal syndicates might be connected to
some of your favorite plants. I'm Summer rain Oaks from
School of Humans and iHeart podcasts. This is bad seeds.
(03:32):
On is La de Seyros, there's a threatened succulent called
siempre viva or dudley A pachyphytom. It looks like a
starry clump of sea an enemies with delicate hints of
green and chalky white leaves. It's endemic to the island,
meaning it only grows there, and in recent years in
East Asia, a single wild Dudleya has been selling for
(03:56):
two hundred dollars a pop, and that's been attracting people
who are hungry to make money, including Mexico's drug cartels.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
Criminal activity and criminal networks are often driven by generating
profit making money.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
You may remember Jenny Felt them from the Wildlife Justice Commission.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
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 that service, regardless of whether it's
legal or not.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
In fact, this Dudleya has been luring criminals for a
while now. In twenty seventeen, the news outlet Masnotsios reported
that the Mexican military had stopped a tractor trailer driven
by three Korean nationals and a Mexican. When they pride
opened the back doors, they found nearly five thousand Dudley
apachef item one million dollars worth of poached succulents, but
(04:54):
that was small fry. More recently, the plant's been targeted
by major players in the world of organized crime.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Yet we had been saying in our own investigations with
wildlife crime was increasing intersection of wildlife crime with other
types of crime as well. If there are easy ways
to make money and ways to summit the regulatory system
around it, that's when other criminal groups might be interested
to exploit those networks.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
In other words, organized crime syndicats have been diversifying their
portfolios beyond drugs. Some cartel's mine iron, others steal gasoline
and grow avocados. The Cineloa cartel has an alarmingly large
stake in Mexico's legal seafood industry, and now they're moving
(05:46):
into succulents. In the case of the missing fishermen, rescuers
would find two of them alive not far from where
the succulents grow. One was uninjured, but the other was
stained in blood, clutching a bullet wound. Not far from them,
officials found dozens of tubs filled with dudley a pachyphytum,
(06:09):
and near those bins was the lifeless body of one
of their friends, faced down on the rocks. The survivors
told authorities everything that they had been hired by El Creq,
a sub chapter of the drug cartel. This group, according
to the Mexican newspaper and Signata, is involved in quote
(06:33):
drug trafficking, drug dealing, homicides, and illegal marketing of the
endemic plant siempre viva. The cartelts believed uses its vast
smuggling network to send these plants abroad with poached dudleya,
traveling to Tijuana, then LAPAs, then to Mexico City, and
then onward to China or Korea and onto the windowsills
(06:56):
of unsuspecting succulent collectors in Reais. The cartels are reportedly
paid in supplies that can be used to synthesize drugs.
It's basically a barter system. All of this, if I'm
being honest, sounds weird. Organized criminals and botany sound like
such unlikely bedfellows, but the truth is plants launched organized
(07:19):
crime as we know it. And I'm not talking about
marijuana or cocaine or all the other plants fueling the
international drug trade. I'm talking lemons. We're in Sicily the
nineteenth century and citrus fruits are in high demand. Scientists
(07:42):
recently discovered that vitamin C and lemons and oranges can
prevent scurvy, and now the shipping industry is knocking down
doors to get its hands on some cold, hard fruit.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
In these early days, it turned out that Sicily was
one of the few places is where oranges and lemon
were grown.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
That's doctor Ola Olson, by the way. He's a Swedish
economist and an expert on the weird link between lemons
and the mob.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Cecily could relatively quickly then answer to this greater demand,
and this led to kind of a boosting demand that
happened in a very weakly institutionalized community.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
In the mid eighteen hundreds. The state was too weak
to police the people, so rogues, marauders, brigands and highway
bandits plagued the countryside. Living in Sicily was every man
for himself.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
The general environment at this time was a very unstable,
weakly institutions, lot of mistrust in government.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
For lemon farmers, the picking season was a time to
watch your back. A smart poacher could steal a year's
harvest in just a night or two. Unable to rely
on the state for protection, farmers grabbed shotguns and built walls.
But this wasn't enough. The bandits kept coming, and growers
(09:07):
began looking for alternatives.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
The people who cultivated citrus then needed to employ different
types of security personnel, and often this personnel came from
groups that had established themselves locally as some kind of
strong men that could bring some order to the kind
of local chaotic situation. When this sort of state could
(09:32):
not really do that efficiently.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Hiring local roughnecks worked, at least for a while. Sicilian
lemon production actually skyrocketed three thousand percent over a decade.
Profits stored until the men hired to do the security well,
they began demanding a bigger piece of the cut.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
So in this institutional vacuum. This is together with this
huge demand for citrus fruits. That's why we believe that
the mafia rose.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
The guards watching the lemon groves began organizing and extorting farmers,
stealing from their trees and selling the lemons in private.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
They actually infiltrated in this way, both acting as middlemen,
but also acting more directly in the harbors, in the ports,
monitoring and also squeezing rents out of the trade in
different stages, so to speak, both directly and indirectly.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
The consequences for not cooperating could be dire. In eighteen
seventy two, one lemon grove owner, a doctor Golotti, fired
his warden for stealing fruit. He hired a new guard,
but then the warden's friends shot the new security. Detailed
(10:53):
dead menacing letters poured into Golotti's home demanding that he
rehire his old help. Intimidation, it turns out, worked. The
middlemen of the lemon trade group together swore oaths and
soon controlled much of the fruit supply chain. Some mafioso's
(11:13):
were so well organized that they were able to wrest
property from the farmers themselves. Eventually, the group expanded beyond fruit.
They got involved with local sulfur mines, and when Florida
overtook Sicily as a new citrus hub, these groups up
well how do I put it new business opportunities.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
Like smuggling of people or smuggling of arms. I would
say it's pretty is standard that these groups try eventually
to diversify as potentially one first origin in a sense,
but then they quickly move on to other goods.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
The point is organized crime and the plant and wildlife trade.
They are more intertwined than you can imagine. Militant groups
in East Africa, fron terrorists through ivory poaching the Talipan
made hundreds of millions controlling Afghanistan's poppy harmist A few
decades ago, insurgent maoists in Nepal beefed up their wartime
(12:13):
bank accounts by selling a pricey fungus called cordyceps that
and I'm not making this up, grows on caterpillars, and
detective agencies know this. Since twenty seventeen, sting operations staged
by Interpol's Wildlife Crime Working Groups have arrested more than
three thousand people, and when the dollars are counted, wildlife
(12:36):
smuggling only lacks behind human firearms and drug trafficking. The
United Nations projects that wildlife crime will continue to increase
five to seven percent each year. And yet, despite this
long history, and despite the obvious growth, efforts to stop
it have been pretty wimpy at best.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Environmental crime isn't prioritized by law enforcement compared to other
types of crime. You know, it sounds a rasourced compared
to other crime types. If the penalty is not even
one tenth of the profit, which is often the case,
it's just a cost of doing business. At the end
of the day, will have no impact in stopping or
deterring that crime.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Turns out, crime does pay. And if succulents and lemons
are enough to lure cartels in the mob, just imagine
what it must be like when an individual plant can
fetch fifty thousand dollars. A look inside the syndicates stealing
the most expensive plants on the planet. When we return,
(13:54):
I want you to close your eyes and imagine. Imagine
the world sixty five million years yars ago to the
age of dinosaurs. You're surrounded by jungle. It's muggy, the
sweat is beating on your brow. Above, winged reptiles sore below.
Giant beetles and primitive possums scurry through the undergrowth nearby,
(14:17):
munching on some plants is one of my favorites, the
long necked Alamosaurus. But I want you to imagine the
plant life too. It's so green. There are ferns and
conifers and Ginko's galore, some of the world's first flowering plants.
Beautiful pink blossoms are taking room. And then you notice
(14:40):
this strange stubby tree that is.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
A cycad s perfessional is looked like a palm.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
That's Anders Lindstrum. He's a botanist at the nong Nutched
Tropical Garden in Thailand, home to the largest collection of
cycads in the world, which I had the pleasure of
visiting a few years back.
Speaker 4 (15:00):
The main difference between a psycha and the palm is
I will reproductive structure. Palms have actually flowers, but the
fertile structure of psychad are looking like pine cones.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
These palmy greens are some of the oldest plants in
the world.
Speaker 4 (15:17):
They're ancient blond groups that spat back to the dinosaur time,
and they have survived and actually flourished off to the dinosaur.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Honders call cycads living fossils, and that means they could
command a high price a single cycad can fetch upwards
of one hundred thousand dollars. If you tallied the profits
from all the cycads poached over the last two decades,
(15:48):
you'd have more than six hundred million dollars. A lot
of those thefts have happened in South Africa. That country
is home to a tenth of all sieicad species. In
the two decades leading up to twenty fourteen, endangered psycads
there declined ninety percent. In the words of the Global
(16:11):
Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime.
Speaker 5 (16:14):
The illicit psycad trade in South Africa has grown so organized, lucrative,
and harmful that the authorities have identified it as a
priority wildlife crime alongside rhino, elephant and avaloni poaching.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
In fact, it's gotten so bad that some estimates suggest
that psychads are now the most endangered living organism in
the world. In some parts of South Africa, the rarest
wild cycads are now microchipped just in case they're ever stolen,
but thefts continue. One allure is, of course their rarity,
(16:50):
but also their longevity.
Speaker 4 (16:53):
Because they grows so slow, you can keep them probably
your lifetime, in your living room, and they will never
outgrow your living room, so it's like a piece of
vintage art or something. The plant you own is one
hundred or two hundred years old and therefore very expensive.
So unfortunately, a lot of people see that as an investment.
(17:14):
They pay a lot of money for these plants, and
they keep it their role life. In the end of
their life, they can still sell the plant. Further.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
This desirability prompted the New York Times back in two
thousand and five to proclaim that psychads were quote the
botanical equivalent of a garage full of rolls royces. A cult,
the Time said, has grown up around these plants that
include a cadre of bad guys who smuggle for profit.
These crooks are not drug cartels doing plant crime on
(17:45):
the side. These are full time psycad syndicates, and they're
doing the dirty work of smuggling these plants overseas with
devastating consequences.
Speaker 4 (17:57):
An area it has a couple one hundred plants, maybe
of some specie, and they have been there for ages,
of course, but then the people coming and poach them,
and the regeneration is very low. Usually out of three
four hundred seeds days. Yes, a few percent that actually
survive into majority. So when you're going to many of
(18:18):
these populations, if you take out the big plants that
set the seed and there is no seedlings to start with,
then the whole population has collapsed. When you take out
the mature plants, you basically cut the throat of the
whole population.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
These plants have been part of the Earth's ecosystem since
the dinosaurs. They've survived mass extinctions and global catastrophes, but
they may not survive human greed, which is why. In
two thousand and one, agents with the US Fish and
Wildlife Service courted one of the psychad syndicates responsible. The
(18:58):
mission was dubbed Opera Botany. Special agents opened a fake
business called Hugh Enterprises, and, using aliases, began seeking out
rare and illegal psycads. Their bids caught the attention of
smugglers Rolf Bauer and Yonfonfieren in South Africa. The men
were surprisingly open about how they smuggled endangered cycads into
the US. They poached the plants from the wild, and
(19:22):
before transporting them over seas, stripped the cycads of their leaves.
Naked the endangered cycads were unrecognizable, allowing the smugglers to
mislabel them fooling customs, and it worked. In a July
two thousand one shipment, the smugglers flew one hundred and
fourteen rare Encephalardis Muncii under a different name. In the end,
(19:47):
more than eight hundred and forty thousand dollars worth of
illegal cycads came through San Francisco International Airport and then
came the state. The agents invited the smugglers to Las
Vegas as a thank you. After a few nights of partying,
the men got into the car that they were told
(20:09):
would drive them to the airport for a private flight. Instead,
they got a visit from the fence. The eye don't mean,
but cases like this are the exception. Most pycad syndicates
work from Afar, much like the Mexican cartel enlisting poor fishermen.
(20:29):
Sycad crooks are now hiring locals to do the poaching.
But in Southern Africa, the ruse is exposing old fault
lines of race and class. Most of the ringleaders are
rich and white, but most of the people on the ground,
those at the greatest risk of getting busted, are poor
and black. One organized sycad ring in Zimbabwe, for instance,
(20:51):
was caught stealing eighty one cycads. More than half of
the poachers were unemployed locals, and the rates they earned
were a busy just six dollars for a three thousand
dollars plant, less than half a percent of the total cut.
We did dozens of interviews for this podcast, and that's
(21:14):
been a theme that as bad as poaching is, many
of the people doing it aren't the ring leaders. Many
are doing it out of desperation. But Anders has a
story of how he might be able to break that cycle.
Speaker 4 (21:29):
There was a cyca from China, Cycas debuensis, and they
said the population was like a thousand plants, and when
it was described, everyone went in to dig it with
the help of the locals because they needed money and everything.
And we went in there and we did an inventory
of the whatever plants were left in the wild, and
(21:51):
at the time we had less than one hundred plants left.
So what was the problem. Why why did the local
dig the plants? Oh they needed money, right, yeah, everyone
needs money, But for what This was a village shop
in the mountain, far away from everything. You can't just
go to a supermarket and buy a new car or something.
So what do you need the money for? Oh, the
(22:13):
kids needed school and the closest school was quite far away.
To get them to school was a major financial burden
for their village people. So we suggested that what only
get to school built nearby, actually right in the village.
And we also raised money from the Psychic Society in
(22:35):
the US and they provided the books, pencils, and so
on for their kids.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
And after a lot of wrangling and hobnobbing, the school
was built. Parents weren't so desperate for money, and the
kids got to stay home, and the plants well, they
started to thrive again.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
Now I believe it's over one thousand plants back in
the wild again. Everyone is happy. If we didn't step
in at that time, they probably wouldn't survive in the
long term. You can come in and say don't dig
this plant, don't do that. You know, you can fence
it all in and build a cage and whatever, or
you haven't solved the problem. Unfortunately, not a very common
(23:14):
approach in nature conservation.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
But Anders thinks that over time that could change. More
conservationists are realizing that band aids don't work that. If
we want to stop the cycle, we need to address
the root causes of poaching. When Yvonne Guzman and his
(23:41):
fellow fishermen set out on that November day, they didn't
give much thought to the macroeconomics, the market implications, or
the international supply chain. They were just trying to earn
a buck, and as news reports later showed, it appears
the money led fishermen to a fatal mistake. Reports suggest
that the men may have agreed to pick succulents for
(24:03):
not one, but multiple competing cartels. If true, it appears
that the word got out the fishermen had failed to
show loyalty, and so that day a boat of goons
ambushed them. In the end, two men, including Gusman, were murdered. Now,
(24:30):
admittedly succulents are still a pretty small part of the
cartel's portfolio, but stories like these are sadly becoming more
and more common, especially when you consider other plants, especially trees.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
With our research, we found that there's quite a strong link.
We've teamba crime and drug chaffee king. That link, he's
really strong, particularly in Central and South America.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
In fact, the experts already have a name for it.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Narco deforestation is sort of a term that's being used
more widely now. Forest's being cut for airstrips, for landing
planes to move product from where it's grown and producing
into consumer markets. There's forest clearing that happens for cattle ranching,
for laundering drug money. You've got forest areas being cleaned,
(25:23):
sometimes even in protected areas, to grow coca.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
And some groups are just cutting and stealing trees for
the old fashioned reason to make money. Take Columbia. When
FARK signed a peace agreement a few years ago, smaller
crime syndicates groups like Los Bontieros and the National Liberation
Army swarmed in and started clearing land. Just recently, a
(25:51):
criminal network was arrested for illegally chopping down eight hundred
and sixty five acres of forest in Central and South America.
Narco forestation has turned into a cottage industry. The timber
not only earns cartel's a tidy income, but also helps
hide the dirty dealings lurking in the shadows.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
So the timber industry could be used as a kava,
for example, a concealment method. And we've wildlife trafficking. We
often say that as well that team the companies can
be used as front companies.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
The reasons for it are by now obvious low risk,
high reward. But as species disappear, organized criminals are expected
to make more than one hundred and nineteen billion dollars
this year in the illegal trade of plants and animals,
but the ripple effects are worse. The estimated impact of
(26:46):
these environmental crimes is expected to cost more than half
a trillion dollars. Slaps on the wrist aren't going to
stop that kind of money, especially large cartels, which are
perfectly situated for this kind of business.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
They must have a chain of people who are buying
sourcing products, consolidating them to make those big shipments. People
who are organized in terms of liaising, getting the logistics
together to move that shipment, getting it through a port
or an airport to move it internationally.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
The bigger the group, the harder it is to find
who exactly is responsible. In fact, even when we know
these crimes are happening, it can be hard to stop them.
Take this case from twenty fifteen. So there is this containership.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Fully loaded with timber, and it's.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Set to sail from Peru to.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
The United States to Houston. Was it some final destination.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Well, on that day it's supposed to depart, everything stops.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
A public prosecutor came on board and tried to seize
a portion of the timber.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
Apparently the word got out that some of the timber.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
Fifteen percent of the total.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
Is illegal. The inspectors have a chat with the ship
captain and eventually they come to an agreement.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
Leave port, deliver the timber just returned with that fifteen
percent portion that was found to be illegal at the
end of the voyage.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
So the ship leaves port and the investigators they start
looking deeper into the keyse They.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Were looking at all the documentation from the timber where
it was extracted from to verify whether it was legal
or not.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
What they find sharks them letting the boat go was
a huge mistique.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
The entire shipment was actually illegal. Around ninety six percent
they found was illegal.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
But now it's too late.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
The ship had sailed and eventually it was delivered to
the United States.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
It's worth noting that this has led to dozens of
court cases, many happening right now, and it seems likely
that whoever was behind this illegal harvest, they probably had
some kind of connection to the people on the inside.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
If a company is paying to get a license in
a way that is outside of the official process, it's
very likely that that money has to flow up the
chain to the individuals signing off on that license or permit,
which is a person you know sometimes right at the top.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
You know the old phrase follow the money. Well, when
you follow the trail left by organized criminals, sometimes it
leads you to the halls of power.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
There've been other allegations in other countries involving very senior officials,
very high level individuals.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
To political leaders, and some of the companies you love
coming up.
Speaker 4 (30:01):
I'm in a terrible trouble, and they deserve to get
into trouble. The corruption was so high level that the
paperwork could be really seem pristine enough.
Speaker 5 (30:12):
They came in.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
Everybody, we heard, we're being rated.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
We're being rated. Everyone to the back. I'm 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 Oaks. Lucas Riley is our writer,
Gabby Watts is our producer, and Amelia Brock is our
(30:37):
senior producer. Fact Checking is by Savannah Hugely and Zoe Farrell.
Original music is by Claire Campbell. Sound design and scores
by Jesse Niswanger. Our show art is by Pam Peacock.
Development was by Brian Lavin and Jacob Selzer. Special thanks
for a voice actor Miranda Hawkins. Executive producers are Brian Lavin,
(30:59):
Elsie Crowley, Brandon Barr, Virginia Prescott and Jacob Selzer.
School of humans.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
It's five in the morning, November twenty fifth, twenty nineteen,
and Ivonne Guthman, a thirty two year old fisherman from
Mexico's Baja Peninsula, looks out onto Tortugas Bay. The Pacific
rolls gently at his feet. The first glimmers of sunrise
reveal a patchwork of boats on the horizon. The waters
(00:33):
here are popular among sports fishers. Giant schools of black
sea bass and fat and yellowtail lure anglers from hundreds
of miles away. That's what brought Guthman here, and now
he and five other fishermen prepare their boat and begin
motoring out onto the water. Destination Isla de Stedros, a
(01:02):
two hour trip from the docks. The island is a
rocky spit of land home to just a few thousand people.
A few years back, Mitsubishi built a company town here
to store salt. But most locals depend on the fishing industry.
And then there's the few who rely on the islands well,
let's just call it the underground economy. The Sinaloa Cartel,
(01:30):
arguably the most powerful and dangerous drug trafficking syndicate in
the West, calls Sadros their turf, but the cartel does
not own a monopoly on these waters. Some drug traffickers
know SROs as a frontier, a place where small time
drug runners and splinter groups can get their start. Yvonne
Gooseman and his fishing buddies they know this, but they're
(01:53):
fishermen and they stay in their lane, or at least
that's what they tell people, because on that November day
they don't cast their lines into the water. Instead, they
steer their boat toward the northern point of Sadrus. They
cast anchor slosh onto shore and begun unloading dozens of
(02:17):
black plastic tubs. Within minutes, they're tossing hundreds of small
succulents into the boxes, and little do they know they
are being watched by evening search and rescue teams are
looking for the fishermen. One is found dead with a
bullet hole in the back of his head, another alive
(02:40):
with a gunshot wound to his arm, and Yvonne Gusman well,
they find him weeks later, his decaying body bloated, bobbing
on the surface of the bay, his legs tightly wound
with rope. In this episode, plant poaching collides with organized crime.
(03:02):
How cartels, mobs, and criminal syndicates might be connected to
some of your favorite plants. I'm Summer rain Oaks from
School of Humans and iHeart podcasts. This is bad seeds.
(03:32):
On is La de Seyros, there's a threatened succulent called
siempre viva or dudley A pachyphytom. It looks like a
starry clump of sea an enemies with delicate hints of
green and chalky white leaves. It's endemic to the island,
meaning it only grows there, and in recent years in
East Asia, a single wild Dudleya has been selling for
(03:56):
two hundred dollars a pop, and that's been attracting people
who are hungry to make money, including Mexico's drug cartels.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
Criminal activity and criminal networks are often driven by generating
profit making money.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
You may remember Jenny Felt them from the Wildlife Justice Commission.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
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 that service, regardless of whether it's
legal or not.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
In fact, this Dudleya has been luring criminals for a
while now. In twenty seventeen, the news outlet Masnotsios reported
that the Mexican military had stopped a tractor trailer driven
by three Korean nationals and a Mexican. When they pride
opened the back doors, they found nearly five thousand Dudley
apachef item one million dollars worth of poached succulents, but
(04:54):
that was small fry. More recently, the plant's been targeted
by major players in the world of organized crime.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Yet we had been saying in our own investigations with
wildlife crime was increasing intersection of wildlife crime with other
types of crime as well. If there are easy ways
to make money and ways to summit the regulatory system
around it, that's when other criminal groups might be interested
to exploit those networks.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
In other words, organized crime syndicats have been diversifying their
portfolios beyond drugs. Some cartel's mine iron, others steal gasoline
and grow avocados. The Cineloa cartel has an alarmingly large
stake in Mexico's legal seafood industry, and now they're moving
(05:46):
into succulents. In the case of the missing fishermen, rescuers
would find two of them alive not far from where
the succulents grow. One was uninjured, but the other was
stained in blood, clutching a bullet wound. Not far from them,
officials found dozens of tubs filled with dudley a pachyphytum,
(06:09):
and near those bins was the lifeless body of one
of their friends, faced down on the rocks. The survivors
told authorities everything that they had been hired by El Creq,
a sub chapter of the drug cartel. This group, according
to the Mexican newspaper and Signata, is involved in quote
(06:33):
drug trafficking, drug dealing, homicides, and illegal marketing of the
endemic plant siempre viva. The cartelts believed uses its vast
smuggling network to send these plants abroad with poached dudleya,
traveling to Tijuana, then LAPAs, then to Mexico City, and
then onward to China or Korea and onto the windowsills
(06:56):
of unsuspecting succulent collectors in Reais. The cartels are reportedly
paid in supplies that can be used to synthesize drugs.
It's basically a barter system. All of this, if I'm
being honest, sounds weird. Organized criminals and botany sound like
such unlikely bedfellows, but the truth is plants launched organized
(07:19):
crime as we know it. And I'm not talking about
marijuana or cocaine or all the other plants fueling the
international drug trade. I'm talking lemons. We're in Sicily the
nineteenth century and citrus fruits are in high demand. Scientists
(07:42):
recently discovered that vitamin C and lemons and oranges can
prevent scurvy, and now the shipping industry is knocking down
doors to get its hands on some cold, hard fruit.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
In these early days, it turned out that Sicily was
one of the few places is where oranges and lemon
were grown.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
That's doctor Ola Olson, by the way. He's a Swedish
economist and an expert on the weird link between lemons
and the mob.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Cecily could relatively quickly then answer to this greater demand,
and this led to kind of a boosting demand that
happened in a very weakly institutionalized community.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
In the mid eighteen hundreds. The state was too weak
to police the people, so rogues, marauders, brigands and highway
bandits plagued the countryside. Living in Sicily was every man
for himself.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
The general environment at this time was a very unstable,
weakly institutions, lot of mistrust in government.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
For lemon farmers, the picking season was a time to
watch your back. A smart poacher could steal a year's
harvest in just a night or two. Unable to rely
on the state for protection, farmers grabbed shotguns and built walls.
But this wasn't enough. The bandits kept coming, and growers
(09:07):
began looking for alternatives.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
The people who cultivated citrus then needed to employ different
types of security personnel, and often this personnel came from
groups that had established themselves locally as some kind of
strong men that could bring some order to the kind
of local chaotic situation. When this sort of state could
(09:32):
not really do that efficiently.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Hiring local roughnecks worked, at least for a while. Sicilian
lemon production actually skyrocketed three thousand percent over a decade.
Profits stored until the men hired to do the security well,
they began demanding a bigger piece of the cut.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
So in this institutional vacuum. This is together with this
huge demand for citrus fruits. That's why we believe that
the mafia rose.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
The guards watching the lemon groves began organizing and extorting farmers,
stealing from their trees and selling the lemons in private.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
They actually infiltrated in this way, both acting as middlemen,
but also acting more directly in the harbors, in the ports,
monitoring and also squeezing rents out of the trade in
different stages, so to speak, both directly and indirectly.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
The consequences for not cooperating could be dire. In eighteen
seventy two, one lemon grove owner, a doctor Golotti, fired
his warden for stealing fruit. He hired a new guard,
but then the warden's friends shot the new security. Detailed
(10:53):
dead menacing letters poured into Golotti's home demanding that he
rehire his old help. Intimidation, it turns out, worked. The
middlemen of the lemon trade group together swore oaths and
soon controlled much of the fruit supply chain. Some mafioso's
(11:13):
were so well organized that they were able to wrest
property from the farmers themselves. Eventually, the group expanded beyond fruit.
They got involved with local sulfur mines, and when Florida
overtook Sicily as a new citrus hub, these groups up
well how do I put it new business opportunities.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
Like smuggling of people or smuggling of arms. I would
say it's pretty is standard that these groups try eventually
to diversify as potentially one first origin in a sense,
but then they quickly move on to other goods.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
The point is organized crime and the plant and wildlife trade.
They are more intertwined than you can imagine. Militant groups
in East Africa, fron terrorists through ivory poaching the Talipan
made hundreds of millions controlling Afghanistan's poppy harmist A few
decades ago, insurgent maoists in Nepal beefed up their wartime
(12:13):
bank accounts by selling a pricey fungus called cordyceps that
and I'm not making this up, grows on caterpillars, and
detective agencies know this. Since twenty seventeen, sting operations staged
by Interpol's Wildlife Crime Working Groups have arrested more than
three thousand people, and when the dollars are counted, wildlife
(12:36):
smuggling only lacks behind human firearms and drug trafficking. The
United Nations projects that wildlife crime will continue to increase
five to seven percent each year. And yet, despite this
long history, and despite the obvious growth, efforts to stop
it have been pretty wimpy at best.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Environmental crime isn't prioritized by law enforcement compared to other
types of crime. You know, it sounds a rasourced compared
to other crime types. If the penalty is not even
one tenth of the profit, which is often the case,
it's just a cost of doing business. At the end
of the day, will have no impact in stopping or
deterring that crime.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Turns out, crime does pay. And if succulents and lemons
are enough to lure cartels in the mob, just imagine
what it must be like when an individual plant can
fetch fifty thousand dollars. A look inside the syndicates stealing
the most expensive plants on the planet. When we return,
(13:54):
I want you to close your eyes and imagine. Imagine
the world sixty five million years yars ago to the
age of dinosaurs. You're surrounded by jungle. It's muggy, the
sweat is beating on your brow. Above, winged reptiles sore below.
Giant beetles and primitive possums scurry through the undergrowth nearby,
(14:17):
munching on some plants is one of my favorites, the
long necked Alamosaurus. But I want you to imagine the
plant life too. It's so green. There are ferns and
conifers and Ginko's galore, some of the world's first flowering plants.
Beautiful pink blossoms are taking room. And then you notice
(14:40):
this strange stubby tree that is.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
A cycad s perfessional is looked like a palm.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
That's Anders Lindstrum. He's a botanist at the nong Nutched
Tropical Garden in Thailand, home to the largest collection of
cycads in the world, which I had the pleasure of
visiting a few years back.
Speaker 4 (15:00):
The main difference between a psycha and the palm is
I will reproductive structure. Palms have actually flowers, but the
fertile structure of psychad are looking like pine cones.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
These palmy greens are some of the oldest plants in
the world.
Speaker 4 (15:17):
They're ancient blond groups that spat back to the dinosaur time,
and they have survived and actually flourished off to the dinosaur.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Honders call cycads living fossils, and that means they could
command a high price a single cycad can fetch upwards
of one hundred thousand dollars. If you tallied the profits
from all the cycads poached over the last two decades,
(15:48):
you'd have more than six hundred million dollars. A lot
of those thefts have happened in South Africa. That country
is home to a tenth of all sieicad species. In
the two decades leading up to twenty fourteen, endangered psycads
there declined ninety percent. In the words of the Global
(16:11):
Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime.
Speaker 5 (16:14):
The illicit psycad trade in South Africa has grown so organized, lucrative,
and harmful that the authorities have identified it as a
priority wildlife crime alongside rhino, elephant and avaloni poaching.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
In fact, it's gotten so bad that some estimates suggest
that psychads are now the most endangered living organism in
the world. In some parts of South Africa, the rarest
wild cycads are now microchipped just in case they're ever stolen,
but thefts continue. One allure is, of course their rarity,
(16:50):
but also their longevity.
Speaker 4 (16:53):
Because they grows so slow, you can keep them probably
your lifetime, in your living room, and they will never
outgrow your living room, so it's like a piece of
vintage art or something. The plant you own is one
hundred or two hundred years old and therefore very expensive.
So unfortunately, a lot of people see that as an investment.
(17:14):
They pay a lot of money for these plants, and
they keep it their role life. In the end of
their life, they can still sell the plant. Further.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
This desirability prompted the New York Times back in two
thousand and five to proclaim that psychads were quote the
botanical equivalent of a garage full of rolls royces. A cult,
the Time said, has grown up around these plants that
include a cadre of bad guys who smuggle for profit.
These crooks are not drug cartels doing plant crime on
(17:45):
the side. These are full time psycad syndicates, and they're
doing the dirty work of smuggling these plants overseas with
devastating consequences.
Speaker 4 (17:57):
An area it has a couple one hundred plants, maybe
of some specie, and they have been there for ages,
of course, but then the people coming and poach them,
and the regeneration is very low. Usually out of three
four hundred seeds days. Yes, a few percent that actually
survive into majority. So when you're going to many of
(18:18):
these populations, if you take out the big plants that
set the seed and there is no seedlings to start with,
then the whole population has collapsed. When you take out
the mature plants, you basically cut the throat of the
whole population.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
These plants have been part of the Earth's ecosystem since
the dinosaurs. They've survived mass extinctions and global catastrophes, but
they may not survive human greed, which is why. In
two thousand and one, agents with the US Fish and
Wildlife Service courted one of the psychad syndicates responsible. The
(18:58):
mission was dubbed Opera Botany. Special agents opened a fake
business called Hugh Enterprises, and, using aliases, began seeking out
rare and illegal psycads. Their bids caught the attention of
smugglers Rolf Bauer and Yonfonfieren in South Africa. The men
were surprisingly open about how they smuggled endangered cycads into
the US. They poached the plants from the wild, and
(19:22):
before transporting them over seas, stripped the cycads of their leaves.
Naked the endangered cycads were unrecognizable, allowing the smugglers to
mislabel them fooling customs, and it worked. In a July
two thousand one shipment, the smugglers flew one hundred and
fourteen rare Encephalardis Muncii under a different name. In the end,
(19:47):
more than eight hundred and forty thousand dollars worth of
illegal cycads came through San Francisco International Airport and then
came the state. The agents invited the smugglers to Las
Vegas as a thank you. After a few nights of partying,
the men got into the car that they were told
(20:09):
would drive them to the airport for a private flight. Instead,
they got a visit from the fence. The eye don't mean,
but cases like this are the exception. Most pycad syndicates
work from Afar, much like the Mexican cartel enlisting poor fishermen.
(20:29):
Sycad crooks are now hiring locals to do the poaching.
But in Southern Africa, the ruse is exposing old fault
lines of race and class. Most of the ringleaders are
rich and white, but most of the people on the ground,
those at the greatest risk of getting busted, are poor
and black. One organized sycad ring in Zimbabwe, for instance,
(20:51):
was caught stealing eighty one cycads. More than half of
the poachers were unemployed locals, and the rates they earned
were a busy just six dollars for a three thousand
dollars plant, less than half a percent of the total cut.
We did dozens of interviews for this podcast, and that's
(21:14):
been a theme that as bad as poaching is, many
of the people doing it aren't the ring leaders. Many
are doing it out of desperation. But Anders has a
story of how he might be able to break that cycle.
Speaker 4 (21:29):
There was a cyca from China, Cycas debuensis, and they
said the population was like a thousand plants, and when
it was described, everyone went in to dig it with
the help of the locals because they needed money and everything.
And we went in there and we did an inventory
of the whatever plants were left in the wild, and
(21:51):
at the time we had less than one hundred plants left.
So what was the problem. Why why did the local
dig the plants? Oh they needed money, right, yeah, everyone
needs money, But for what This was a village shop
in the mountain, far away from everything. You can't just
go to a supermarket and buy a new car or something.
So what do you need the money for? Oh, the
(22:13):
kids needed school and the closest school was quite far away.
To get them to school was a major financial burden
for their village people. So we suggested that what only
get to school built nearby, actually right in the village.
And we also raised money from the Psychic Society in
(22:35):
the US and they provided the books, pencils, and so
on for their kids.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
And after a lot of wrangling and hobnobbing, the school
was built. Parents weren't so desperate for money, and the
kids got to stay home, and the plants well, they
started to thrive again.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
Now I believe it's over one thousand plants back in
the wild again. Everyone is happy. If we didn't step
in at that time, they probably wouldn't survive in the
long term. You can come in and say don't dig
this plant, don't do that. You know, you can fence
it all in and build a cage and whatever, or
you haven't solved the problem. Unfortunately, not a very common
(23:14):
approach in nature conservation.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
But Anders thinks that over time that could change. More
conservationists are realizing that band aids don't work that. If
we want to stop the cycle, we need to address
the root causes of poaching. When Yvonne Guzman and his
(23:41):
fellow fishermen set out on that November day, they didn't
give much thought to the macroeconomics, the market implications, or
the international supply chain. They were just trying to earn
a buck, and as news reports later showed, it appears
the money led fishermen to a fatal mistake. Reports suggest
that the men may have agreed to pick succulents for
(24:03):
not one, but multiple competing cartels. If true, it appears
that the word got out the fishermen had failed to
show loyalty, and so that day a boat of goons
ambushed them. In the end, two men, including Gusman, were murdered. Now,
(24:30):
admittedly succulents are still a pretty small part of the
cartel's portfolio, but stories like these are sadly becoming more
and more common, especially when you consider other plants, especially trees.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
With our research, we found that there's quite a strong link.
We've teamba crime and drug chaffee king. That link, he's
really strong, particularly in Central and South America.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
In fact, the experts already have a name for it.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Narco deforestation is sort of a term that's being used
more widely now. Forest's being cut for airstrips, for landing
planes to move product from where it's grown and producing
into consumer markets. There's forest clearing that happens for cattle ranching,
for laundering drug money. You've got forest areas being cleaned,
(25:23):
sometimes even in protected areas, to grow coca.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
And some groups are just cutting and stealing trees for
the old fashioned reason to make money. Take Columbia. When
FARK signed a peace agreement a few years ago, smaller
crime syndicates groups like Los Bontieros and the National Liberation
Army swarmed in and started clearing land. Just recently, a
(25:51):
criminal network was arrested for illegally chopping down eight hundred
and sixty five acres of forest in Central and South America.
Narco forestation has turned into a cottage industry. The timber
not only earns cartel's a tidy income, but also helps
hide the dirty dealings lurking in the shadows.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
So the timber industry could be used as a kava,
for example, a concealment method. And we've wildlife trafficking. We
often say that as well that team the companies can
be used as front companies.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
The reasons for it are by now obvious low risk,
high reward. But as species disappear, organized criminals are expected
to make more than one hundred and nineteen billion dollars
this year in the illegal trade of plants and animals,
but the ripple effects are worse. The estimated impact of
(26:46):
these environmental crimes is expected to cost more than half
a trillion dollars. Slaps on the wrist aren't going to
stop that kind of money, especially large cartels, which are
perfectly situated for this kind of business.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
They must have a chain of people who are buying
sourcing products, consolidating them to make those big shipments. People
who are organized in terms of liaising, getting the logistics
together to move that shipment, getting it through a port
or an airport to move it internationally.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
The bigger the group, the harder it is to find
who exactly is responsible. In fact, even when we know
these crimes are happening, it can be hard to stop them.
Take this case from twenty fifteen. So there is this containership.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Fully loaded with timber, and it's.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Set to sail from Peru to.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
The United States to Houston. Was it some final destination.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Well, on that day it's supposed to depart, everything stops.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
A public prosecutor came on board and tried to seize
a portion of the timber.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
Apparently the word got out that some of the timber.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
Fifteen percent of the total.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
Is illegal. The inspectors have a chat with the ship
captain and eventually they come to an agreement.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
Leave port, deliver the timber just returned with that fifteen
percent portion that was found to be illegal at the
end of the voyage.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
So the ship leaves port and the investigators they start
looking deeper into the keyse They.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Were looking at all the documentation from the timber where
it was extracted from to verify whether it was legal
or not.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
What they find sharks them letting the boat go was
a huge mistique.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
The entire shipment was actually illegal. Around ninety six percent
they found was illegal.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
But now it's too late.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
The ship had sailed and eventually it was delivered to
the United States.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
It's worth noting that this has led to dozens of
court cases, many happening right now, and it seems likely
that whoever was behind this illegal harvest, they probably had
some kind of connection to the people on the inside.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
If a company is paying to get a license in
a way that is outside of the official process, it's
very likely that that money has to flow up the
chain to the individuals signing off on that license or permit,
which is a person you know sometimes right at the top.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
You know the old phrase follow the money. Well, when
you follow the trail left by organized criminals, sometimes it
leads you to the halls of power.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
There've been other allegations in other countries involving very senior officials,
very high level individuals.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
To political leaders, and some of the companies you love
coming up.
Speaker 4 (30:01):
I'm in a terrible trouble, and they deserve to get
into trouble. The corruption was so high level that the
paperwork could be really seem pristine enough.
Speaker 5 (30:12):
They came in.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
Everybody, we heard, we're being rated.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
We're being rated. Everyone to the back. I'm 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 Oaks. Lucas Riley is our writer,
Gabby Watts is our producer, and Amelia Brock is our
(30:37):
senior producer. Fact Checking is by Savannah Hugely and Zoe Farrell.
Original music is by Claire Campbell. Sound design and scores
by Jesse Niswanger. Our show art is by Pam Peacock.
Development was by Brian Lavin and Jacob Selzer. Special thanks
for a voice actor Miranda Hawkins. Executive producers are Brian Lavin,
(30:59):
Elsie Crowley, Brandon Barr, Virginia Prescott and Jacob Selzer.
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