Tracking the Global Wildlife Smuggling Trade with Ed Newcomer

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Tonight we have such a unique and just incredible guest.
I am certain that y'all have no understanding of what
his job was, so we're going to get right to
it tonight. We have special Agent with the US Fish

(00:28):
and Wildlife Service. He served for over twenty years. Ed
Newcomer worked in Los Angeles. He did a variety of
international posts. He retired in twenty twenty two. But y'all,
during his career he conducted some high profile international wildlife

(00:50):
trafficking investigations. These investigations involved every continent. He even went
to Antarctica. Okay, he was not playing when it came
to investigating some of the most notorious wildlife criminals that
are out there. Most of y'all may not understand just
how these crimes occur in the organized criminal element that's involved.

(01:16):
He is the recipient of the Humane Law Enforcement Award
from the Humane Society of the United States. He has
a record of six law enforcement awards from the US
Attorney General's Office of Los Angeles. You can see him
talk about his work on several documentaries, including Primes, bug

(01:40):
Out A and E Undercover, Caught on Tape, and Animal Planets,
Animal Black Ops. Ed currently serves as the International law
Enforcement Advisor for the Wildlife Investigators Training Alliance. ED is
also the host of a hit crime podcast focusing on

(02:01):
wildlife crime called Nature's Secret Service. ED newcomer, Welcome to
Zone seven, Mac.

Speaker 2 (02:09):
Thank you so much for having me. I am a
huge fan of you and your show. I'm just so
honored to be here. And that was a very generous introduction.
So thank you very much.

Speaker 1 (02:19):
Well, you are mighty welcome. But you know, we both
know I left a lot out. You've gotten a lot
of awards. You served as an ambassador to animals. You
are somebody that law enforcement, prosecutors, the public all disrespect,
and we appreciate the work you have done.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
Well, thank you. You know what I got to say,
I had a blast. I had the greatest job on
the planet and I loved it. And honestly, I think
all the success that I had in my career can
be chalked up to just trying to keep up with
my colleagues and meet the high bar that they were
all setting around me.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
Amen. Well, you know, you and I have been able
to talk on the phone, and one evening we were
talking and we were talking about undercover work and the
danger and special ops and all that. When I hung up,
my husband said, who was that? What kind of special ops?
And I was like, man, he was doing some undercover
work on bugs and what it was like, is that

(03:21):
code for something? I said, No, I literally mean bugs.
And you know, it's something that people I don't think
really understand. And one of the conversations you and I
talked about was a theft that was done at a
bug emporium a museum in Philly, and it was like
nobody really knew about it, nobody was really talking about it.

(03:42):
But when I started researching it because I wanted to
do an article for Crime Online, I'm like, there are
these bugs that are so rare that somebody had to
have had inside information to know they were at this museum.
And there were things like the a eyed spider, and
you and I just talked about, you know, your average

(04:04):
police officer, if they were to pull somebody over with
his and cockroaches, they don't want a fool with them.
They're just going to say, have a good day, be
on your way. I don't think it would dawn on
them that these creatures could be being trafficked or harmed
in some way. Or being sold on the black market.

Speaker 2 (04:23):
Yeah, exactly. And you know, I think that a lot
of people when they hear about it, if they do
hear about it, they assume that it's you know, like
maybe a hobbyist that's gone rogue or an animal lover
who just got a little carried away. But in reality,
you know, these animals can be worth a lot of money,
including insects, fish, reptiles, mammals, and so the people that

(04:47):
are involved in criminal activity related to animals, they are
just criminals. They're in it for the money and there's
a lot of money to be had if you know
what you're doing.

Speaker 1 (05:00):
Try how did you get into this business? Like what
drove you to look at the US Fish and Wildlife Service?

Speaker 2 (05:09):
Yeah, it was actually really kind of a lucky happenstance, honestly.
I you know, from time I was a kid, I
wanted to be in law enforcement. I was always interested
in that type of career or you know, public service
in particular related to kind of doing the right thing.
And you know, for a long time, as a really
young kid, I thought I'll be a police officer someday,

(05:32):
and then I don't know, at some point in my
life I realized there was such a thing as a
game warden, and I thought, oh, police for a wildlife
that sounds kind of cool, because I always I grew
up in Denver near the Rockies, and my family always
instilled a very high appreciation for the natural world and wildlife,
you know, among all of us. And then really I

(05:54):
went to college at the University of Colorado, and I
was majoring in political science, thinking I was going to
go on to law school, and you know, that would
give me a lot of opportunities to pursue a lot
of different, you know, public service law, law enforcement oriented careers.
And I just made a shortcut through the biology building
to get to my classroom that I needed to go to,

(06:16):
and I just happened to look at the bulletin board
and I saw there was a job announcement for special
Agent for US Mission Wildlife Service, and it kind of
stopped me in my tracks. And I read about it,
and I was like, I didn't even know this, you know,
position existed. But as I read about it, I thought, shoot,
these guys and gals are the FBI agents for wildlife crime,

(06:40):
and that is exactly what I want to do. And
so I kind of you know, I went on and
went to law school. But about you know, as soon
as they had their first opening for special agents after
I graduated from law school, I put my application in.
For sure, I didn't get hired right away, because most
people don't, but I kept at it and accident I

(07:03):
accidentally practiced law for ten years because it took me
about ten years to get the attention of the Fish
and wild Life Service, get that interview and get.

Speaker 1 (07:11):
In Wow, what a perfect pairing. I mean, you already
love nature, you already love being outdoors, and now you've
got this solid decade of you know, legal training. I
mean what I give a few word to them.

Speaker 2 (07:27):
Well, it I didn't realize what a benefit it would
be to have been, you know, trained as a lawyer.
But also most of my career as a lawyer during
that ten years was as a prosecutor, and so you know,
I understood what prosecutors needed when they when they were
preparing a criminal case for trial. So it really it
made it easy for me to as I was conducting

(07:49):
investigations as a federal agent. It made me easy. It
made it easy for me to kind of look ahead
and say, Okay, I know what questions the prosecutor is
going to ask me when I bring this case to them,
and I know what they're going to want if we're
going to go to trial and win.

Speaker 1 (08:05):
Well, I've already said it, but you have some of
the most notable cases with the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
But you started off with an unexpected bang, didn't you.

Speaker 2 (08:18):
You know, I did, and it wasn't the one I wanted.
And it wasn't the one I expected because you know, honestly,
when you become a special agent for the Fish and
Wildlife Services, there's you know, twenty five plus federal wildlife
laws that we enforce, plus we can enforce the entire
Title eighteen Criminal Code. But you know, you're thinking, you

(08:40):
come on, you're a federal agent. You're working, you know,
you're going to be working on international wildlife trafficking, especially
because right out of the academy I was sent to
Los Angeles and Los Angeles, New York Miami are the huge,
you know, field offices that handle most of the international
trafficking cases. So you go there and you think, oh boy,

(09:02):
I'm going to I can't wait for my first case
involving a tiger, right, But no, really, First, the first
big case I was assigned to my on my own
was involved at kind of notorious insect trafficker, and I
kind of was like, oh, my gosh, I don't want
this bug case, you know, But as I kind of

(09:25):
dug into it, Basically the way it started is we
got a tip from another agent in our in an
field office in Texas. He had received information from a
possible informant that this wanted, kind of notorious insect trafficker
was going to be at this huge event in Los
Angeles called the Insect Fair or the bug Fare. And

(09:49):
so my boss was like, hey, Ed, you know you're new,
why don't you go down to the Bug Fair manage
this informant. He's going to try to make some contact
with this guy. And the more I looked into it,
I realized, you know, I found some old case reports
from a previous agent who had retired, who had looked
at this subject. And this guy was a bad dude.
He was going into national parks all over the country

(10:13):
basically poaching butterflies in particular, but beatles as well from
our national parks, packaging them up and shipping them overseas
where he would sell them for huge profits. And so,
you know, I'm looking at the case reports and I
see that this other agent had spent a lot of
you know, legwork and time trying to get this guy.

(10:33):
And by the way, the guy's name is Yoshi Kojima.
He's a Japanese national. And this other agent just you know,
was so close. He was always just like, you know,
a hair's breath away from catching Yoshi, but he just
couldn't get him. And ultimately, agent a guy, a great
agent named John Mendoza. Unfortunately, his supervisory chain of command

(10:57):
told him, hey, you got to close this case. We're
spending too much time on and it's a bug case.
There's nothing to it or not. And he very you know,
reluctantly closed his case down. And then a few years later, boom,
we get this tip that Pajima's kind of back in business.
He's back in the States. He's he's going to be
at this huge insect fair and I thought, okay, I'll

(11:20):
go check it out, and the thing freaking exploded right
on my lap.

Speaker 1 (11:24):
Yeah, and I'll tell you it's a hard sale to
get people to maybe be sympathetic to the dung beetle.
But but you know, butterflies. Everybody, I think sees the
beauty and you know just how magnificent they are when
they morph, and so that's the story. Even children, I think,

(11:46):
would resonate that this person is going to post these
animals and whether they stay alive or not, he's going
to sell them.

Speaker 2 (11:56):
Right, And you know what, that's a that's a great perspective,
because that was my perspective coming into it. Probably like
yours and many of your listeners, our experience with butterflies
is as kids running around with nets, catching you know,
swallowtails or whatever and letting them go or maybe we

(12:16):
had a little butterfly collection as kids. I didn't, but
you know a lot of kids did. And I never
you know, you don't think of insects as something that
might be endangered or in need of protection because they're
just everywhere normally, normally you're shoeing them away more than
anything else. But as I got into this case, I
realized that there are a lot of insects around the

(12:38):
world that are critically endangered, listed as threatened or endangered
under the US Endangered Species Act, protected by international treaty
known as Piety's which is the Convention on International trade
and endangered species. And as I thought about it, I thought,
you know, if an insect is endangered almost InCD, what

(13:01):
do you think is happening with the other animals in
that ecosystem? Right? So I'm telling you if a bird
wing butterfly in Indonesia is struggling to maintain, it's you know, species.
I guarantee you the tigers that live in that jungle
are having a problem, The rhinos that are in that
jungle are having a problem. Every animal they're all connected, yeah,

(13:22):
for sure, no doubt.

Speaker 1 (13:23):
Yeah. So it'll start with the frogs and lizards and
then it'll move to whatever eats them and whatever eats them,
and that's what happens. Yeah, And you know there's another
aspect to this case you're working though, when you're looking
at this thing internationally and you're seeing how he goes
to these different continents and he gets these different butterflies

(13:44):
and the way he sells them. There's this web of
criminality that he has has got to be a little
shocking to you.

Speaker 2 (13:54):
Yes, And that was very shocking as I got to know.
So that the way this rolled out, The plan was
we had an informant that was going to go to
the bug fair and make some contacts with Kojima and
just kind of get a field for what he was
up to, and maybe we'd get lucky and he'd admit
to making doing something illegal. And my job was really

(14:15):
just to manage the informant, help him operate his undercover equipment,
his recording equipment, and you know, make sure he was safe.
You know, we didn't think Yoshi Kojima was dangerous, and
this was at a public event, so nothing was going
to happen. But nonetheless, you have an agent there and
this poor guy. During the whole day, Yoshi just really
wouldn't talk to him anyway. So at the end of

(14:39):
the day I kind of got frustrated and I thought, Wow,
what the hell, I'm just going to walk up and
talk to Yoshi Kojima myself. Because I was there playing clothes,
he didn't know who I was, so I, you know,
played myself off as a novice, asked him a lot
of questions about what he was selling, which of course,
we're all legal. But as I and that kick started
this relationship that I built in an undercover capacity with

(14:59):
Kojima that lasted about three years and took me three
years to make a case against him, because, as I learned,
he was extremely paranoid. He had a heavy Japanese accent,
so he had trouble pronouncing fish and wildlife. So he
would often tell me, I mean, he had no idea

(15:20):
I worked for fish and wildlife. But he would often
tell me that I had to watch out and be
careful because the fish and wild guys were out there.
And he always called us the fish and wild guys.
And he had known that John Mendoza was after him
years before, and he bragged about how he outsmarted Special
Agent John Mendoza with the fish and wild guys. And

(15:40):
that really annoyed me. And you know, put the emphasis
in I guess the fire under me to make sure
that I didn't allow somebody to think that they pulled
one over on the fish and wild guys.

Speaker 1 (15:56):
After three years, you finally got a break. Somebody called
in a tip. Tell us who the person was if
you know that called in talking about a Ted Nelson.

Speaker 2 (16:09):
Well, I got to be honest with you, This was
not a break. This was actually the second time that
I thought I had completely driven this case right into
the ground. You know, I was a new agent and
all around me. All my fellow agents were basically killing
it and they were making case after case, and here
I am. I got this big opportunity. And Yoshi ko

(16:29):
Jima was a difficult person to work under cover. He
I always described him like a junior high school boyfriend
or girlfriend. If you didn't if you were not available
when he called or he wanted your attention, he would
stop talking to me for weeks at a time, and
it was it was frustrating. And yeah, there were a

(16:50):
couple of times there where he just would kind of
cut me off and I'd think, oh boy, this case
is over, and so let me back up a little
bit before I get to this tip you mentioned. Ultimately
after that, I introduced myself to him at that bugfair.
He took a liking to me, and he actually at
the end of the day he gave me a gift

(17:10):
of some really worthless dried butterflies. And to be clear
for your listeners, these are not live butterflies. They're captured
out in the wild. Usually what they do is they
capture the caterpillars. They bring the caterpillars in just like
you would as a kid. We put them in aquariums
or tanks and they let them cocoon.

Speaker 1 (17:28):
As soon as.

Speaker 2 (17:29):
They hatch, they kill them because now their wings are
in perfect condition, and then they're mounted. They're pinned in
a box, kind of like what you'd see at a museum,
and that's how they're valuable. They're sold pinned. And so
he gave me a box of pinneds dried butterflies that
weren't valuable as a gift, and this kind of sparked
off this three year relationship where ultimately he started to

(17:52):
invite me to go to lunch, dinner, go out for coffee,
and he very carefully groomed me to become a business
partner with him. And his idea was he would send
His plan was he was going to send me butterflies
from Japan that I would then facilitate selling online to
various collectors. And it was real clear all of us

(18:13):
in the office, we knew Okay well kajimas and by
the way, my undercover name was Ted Nelson. It was
it was clear to us, Okay Kajima's setting me up
to take the fall. He's going to set up this
business and if any if fish and wild guys come calling,
he'll feed them Ted Nelson and he'll walk away and
slink off in the background. So we knew that was happening,

(18:34):
but it didn't really matter because where our hope was, Okay,
he's going to send us some protected butterflies and hope
that Ted Nelson can sell them, but he wasn't. He
wouldn't send me anything. So between all this junior high
school behavior of not talking to me for weeks and
not sending me anything but promising to I decided, being
a young, new creative thinking agent, I said, Hey, I'm

(18:58):
going to lure this guy back by creating my own
I'm going to start selling what looks I'm going to
create a situation that looks like I'm selling butterflies on eBay.
I'm not really going to sell him. I'm just going
to create a fake eBay account. And so the idea,
of course, as you can imagine, is he will call
me and say, hey, Ted, where are you getting these?

(19:19):
I can supply you with better material for less money.
Well smart, I thought, But what happened was he started
to see me as a competitor and he started to
get mad at me, and I tried to reassure him.
I was like, hey, you know, you just weren't sending anything,
and so I had to find somebody else, and I'd
rather work with you, but he wasn't having it, and
he was getting more and more angry, and I was

(19:41):
getting more and more panic that the relationship was crashing
and burning. And this culminated in this tip you mentioned.
Now we come back to this tip. One day, I
get a phone call from a California State game warden
who monitors their tip line California State Fish and Wildlife,
which is the state agency that you know does enforced

(20:03):
the state wildlife laws. They have a tip line that
you can call that's one eight hundred number. And one
day this game warden checks and there's this heavy Japanese
accented caller who is reporting Ted Nelson for illegally selling
butterflies on eBay, And so I asked him to send
me the tape and we all listen to it at

(20:24):
my office and everybody, all the agents in the office
were like, oh, boy, Ed, you're never gonna get Kojima now,
because now that he's turned you in, if you stay
in the business, he's going to assume that you have
been flipped as an informant. He's never going to trust you.
So I thought, oh, okay, well cases over. I screwed

(20:44):
this case up and I kind of ignored it for
a while. And that was this big tip that came in.
It didn't help us at all. It actually really hurt
us because here are bad guy is turning in the
undercover agency.

Speaker 1 (20:57):
Yeah, not kidding that kid.

Speaker 2 (21:01):
Yeah, it wasn't good. And you know, I had learned
during this time, this is probably two years in. I
had learned that Kojima had this massive network of people
around the world who he paid to collect insects, mostly butterflies,
but also some beatles. All over the world. He'd take

(21:23):
advantage of local people. He'd basically recruit them to collect stuff.
They had no idea what they were collecting. They didn't
know it was worth. You know, they had a butterfly
it was worth ten thousand dollars that they just knew
they were going to get paid one hundred dollars from
Kojima for collecting it. And as a result of this
huge network, he could pretty much get any any insect

(21:45):
you wanted. So if you were interested in the one
of the most endangered butterflies in the world, let's say
the you know the ornithopter Alexandria, which is one of
the biggest butterfly in the world. It's about twelve inches
across wingspan and highly endangered. He could get it, and
you know, universities and museums can't even get those specimens

(22:07):
for their you know, scientific collections. So I realized this
guy was an important player. And here I screwed the
case up so much. So much for that great introduction
you just gave me. Right, here's this great agent basically
screwed up this.

Speaker 1 (22:20):
Case anyway, Ed, thanks for coming that.

Speaker 2 (22:24):
The end is on seven, one of your best episodes ever.

Speaker 1 (22:29):
But here's the thing, and this is what I want,
you know, young investigators listening to this show to think
about change the word butterfly to heroin. It could still
take you three years with a heavy hitter. You could
think you've ruined it multiple times. Stay in the game,
keep playing because it's going to possibly work out, and

(22:51):
if not, you're still going to learn something you can
use on the next case. So keep telling us what happened. Now.
You think everybody thinks, oh, well, Ed, that's over.

Speaker 2 (23:02):
You know that is actually a very good kind of
teaching moment. Right, You're absolutely right, and it is a
good lesson for young investigators because I certainly had this
feeling of being a little depressed that this case was over.
I was a little worried that I had, you know,
been burned or whatever. And I think a lot of
new agents, in particular, the first time they do undercover work,

(23:25):
they think they're at every moment, they think they're burned,
and the people know that they're cops. So what I did.
My boss actually suggested, she said, why don't she close
this case? And I kind of said.

Speaker 1 (23:41):
No.

Speaker 2 (23:42):
I kind of begged her to let me keep it open.
So I wasn't I didn't really work on the Kojima
case for a few months, but I kind of just
kept it on the corner of my desk and I
started to work on other things. Honestly, I picked up
other cases. I started to work on another pretty detailed
undercover case, and lo and behold, out of nowhere. You know,

(24:04):
Kojima kind of disappeared from the US after that. He
wasn't coming to the bug Fair anymore. He was still dealing.
We knew that, but nobody was really seeing him. And
Lo and Behold, you know, about a year and a
half later, maybe a year later, I get a just
a random phone call from somebody in the insect business,
a legitimate dealer, who says, hey, I heard a rumor

(24:26):
that Kojima's coming back to the insect fair and May,
which was May two thousand and six. And I said
to my boss, I said, you know what, I'm going
to give this one more shot. And I cooked up
this plan where I would go to the fair, I'd
find him, and then I'd just hope for the best
and try to manufacture an accidental encounter with the guy

(24:50):
and see what happened. I had a plan for what
would what I would say, and how things would go,
because you know, he knows he turned me in. He's
got to be wondering if I know he turned me in.
So I found him. I went to the fair that year,
and I found him as pretty easy ante character. Yoshiko
Ziba was a funny guy. He was in his mid

(25:11):
fifties then. He always wore cargo shorts, a Hawaiian shirt,
and a fanny pack that was adjusted to the front,
and he kind of had thinning hair that he didn't
call him very often. And the funny thing is in
that fanny pack if any crook in La had known
that this little Japanese man was walking around with ten
thousand dollars cash. I can't believe the guy never got

(25:34):
robbed in La, but he carried a lot of cash
in his fanny pack. So I saw him, and I
knew that there were two main hauls in the museum
where they were displaying all these insects that were being sold.
And these insect fairs are really crazy to go to,
if anybody ever has a chance to visit one. They're
open to the public, and there's a lot of just

(25:55):
regular you know, James and Joe's in there with their kids,
looking at insects that are very common, maybe sold for
a dollar or two to be penned in a collection.
But then there are also these heavy duty collectors and
they're in there looking for the insects that are being
sold for five, six hundred thousand dollars apiece for you know, collections.

(26:18):
So Kojima kind of moved in those circles, but I
knew that he was going to have to move from
one of the exhibit halls to the other through a
pretty narrow walkway, so I just kind of hung out
in there until I saw him coming, and then I
made it look like I was walking the other direction,
and sure enough he saw me. I saw him. I
feigned surprised. He looked genuinely surprised, and he looked nervous.

(26:39):
He looked scared, like he was afraid of me for
some reason, probably because he thought I knew he had
turned me in.

Speaker 1 (26:48):
Yeah, maybe somebody paid you a visit.

Speaker 2 (26:50):
Yeah, exactly. So I made the initial approach and I
kind of open arms, big smile on my face, you know,
acted so happy to see him. And one of the
very first things I said to him, which is something
I had planned out pretty carefully, was I thanked him
and I said I owe you a huge debt. And

(27:11):
he kind of, you know, looked at me in a
puzzled way, and I said, look, some a hole turned
me in to the fish and wild guys. And these
agents showed up at my house and they tried to
search my place, but thank you for the advice you
gave me years ago. They didn't find a damn thing.
They couldn't make a case against me, And thanks to you, Yoshi,

(27:33):
I'm not in jail. And well i'll tell you what
he fell for a hook line and sinker. He loved it.
He loved that he because he always valued that role
as the mentor right, and he he loved it. And
the first thing he said to me was, well, are
you still selling? And I said, oh, yeah, I am,
but I have a horrible supplier. I just made up

(27:56):
some that I said, I have a guy out of
Germany who's supplying me. He keeps sending me butterflies with
broken wings and no antenna. And Yoshi he bit, and
he said, let's have lunch, and he took me to
lunch that day, and he outlined his ability to send
me whatever I wanted, basically, And that was a turning

(28:19):
point in the case. He now believed that I was
a true criminal because he knew he had turned me in.
He believed my story when I told him that fish
and wild fish and wild guys had come to see me,
because that's what that's what happened to him back when
John Mendoza was looking at him. And now we were pals,
and we made a list right there at the table

(28:41):
at this restaurant we went to of the various butterflies.
I was interested in what he could sell them to
me for. And he said Okay, I'll tell you what.
I'm going to go back to Japan. This was mid
two thousand, so Skype was fairly new as a web
communication tool. He said, let's get on ski. I can
show you what I've got in Japan, and you tell

(29:03):
me if you want it, and I'll send it to you.
So here here I walk away from this, you know,
reinvigorated relationship, and Yoshi's telling me he's going to be
in his home in Japan. He's going to show me
protected butterflies on a camera that I can record, and
he's going to tell me here's how I'm going to
smuggle it into the United States. Here's how much you're

(29:25):
going to pay for it. I mean, if this happens,
I make my case. Right.

Speaker 1 (29:30):
He gave you every element you need exactly.

Speaker 2 (29:33):
I mean, if this was if this worked, this was
going to sink him. Right. This was something that was
really pretty pretty amazing, and we were all pretty stoked
about it at the office when this unfolded. And that's
exactly what happened. He went back to Japan and for
the next few months, just about every night because you know,

(29:55):
he lived in Kyoto, Japan, and so his he was
about what twelve hours, ten hours something like that ahead
of Los Angeles, so he would want to talk during
his daytime, my nighttime, so between like ten pm and
two am, I'd be on a skype caller just about
every night with Kojima. And this guy did exactly what
I just outlined. He let me give you an example.

(30:17):
One time he offered to sell me what are known
as Papilio hospitan butterflies, which are they're only found in
Corsica and they're very endangered. They're on the US Endangered
Species list. And he offered to send me two pairs,
male and female pairs, so I'd get four butterflies, and
on a skype call he in a very detailed explanation.

(30:43):
He explained to me, Okay, it's going to cost you,
you know whatever, it was two or three thousand dollars
for these and I'm going to smuggle them in a
way I even use those words. I'm going to smuggle
them in a package along with this other species that
looks a lot like them. I'm going to basically declare
them as this unprotected species that's very similar looking. And

(31:05):
by the way, if you see a female mark on
one if a female mark with the number one next
to it. That's going to be a male hospitime. It
was a complicated smuggling scheme, but he outlined it for
me on the skype call which I recorded, and then
those butterflies arrive, and that was one count of smuggling
that was ironclad against Yoshikojima. And that went on for months.

(31:30):
During the during the months that we had these skype calls,
he offered to sell me butterflies valued at more than
three hundred thousand dollars. Now, of course I didn't have
that kind of hundercover money to spend. I had about
thirty thousand, which even my bosses didn't want me to
spend that I ended up spending about eighteen thousand dollars.
But I was very careful what I bought from him,

(31:51):
and I bought butterflies that were, you know, protected, that
from different parts of the world that would show his
scope and his reach and the severity of what he
was doing. And after we made a plan, Okay, after
you get this many and these particular species, we're going
to indict him. And we did that. We after about

(32:16):
three or four months, I was able to go to
a Grand jury present the case to a US attorney.
We took a coup to a grand jury in federal court,
and they indicted Kojimon seventeen counts of trafficking in the
dangered species. You know, here's another crazy side story about this.
One time I asked him just I didn't actually expect

(32:38):
him to be able to supply me with some of
the most endangered stuff. One time I asked him, I said, hey,
I do have a customer that's interested in the ornithopter
at Alexandria. This big the biggest butterfly in the world
that museums and universities can't get. And I said, do
you think you could get one of those? And he said, ah,
it'll take me a couple of weeks, but yeah, I

(32:59):
can do it. Sure as heck. I paid him for it,
and a few weeks later he smuggled it into the
US for me using international mail. But now, of course, sure, ol,
we got a problem. He's in Japan, right right, that's right.
So we got an arrest want for him. We've got
seventeen count federal indictment. But now we've got to get

(33:22):
our hands on him. So there's two ways we can
do that. We can extradite him, which is a very length, long,
long process, very difficult, very labor intensive. Or we know
he comes to the States. So in my mind, I thought, well,
if he comes here on his own volition, we can
just hook him up when he arrives at the airport.
So I thought, well, there's got to be a way

(33:43):
to get him here, and at one way presented itself
very early in this relationship. So at the beginning, in
the first year and a half or so, Kojima was
just he was friendly with me. He was a little
stand office. She was very paranoid, like he used to
sometime I'm in the middle of a conversation, he'd be like, so,
how long have you been with the Fish and Wildlife Service,

(34:04):
you know, and just trying to trip me up. And
one time after we met for coffee, he very carefully
examined my vehicle. You know, he's looking in the grill,
looking at the license plate, peering in the windows, and
I was like, yo, see what are you doing? And
he saw him looking for the police lights in the
grill of your car to make sure, and I'm like,
come on, Yoshi, I don't even know what fish and
Wildlife is. And so at the beginning he was paranoid,

(34:28):
but at the end he was very friendly with me,
and I realized he had I think Kojima was probably bisexual,
and he he had developed some type of serious attraction
to me, and it might have had something to do
with the fact that I had grown this huge biker
mustache for the other undercap cover case.

Speaker 1 (34:47):
I was working on.

Speaker 2 (34:50):
What you got, That's right, So he it was awkward
because he would sometimes make very suggestive statements to me
on these record a skype calls, you know, like wanting
me to take my shirt off, and you can't do that.
You're an undercover agent. You cannot. You can't take your
shirt off for a suspect. You can't just can't engage
in that kind of thing. So I had to very

(35:11):
carefully play it off, you know, without offending him, because
remember he's like a junior high school boyfriend or girlfriend.
He might stop talking to me if I offend him.
So I kept playing him off. But at the end,
when we had this arrest warrant, I realized, Okay, this
is it. I gotta play curious here, and the next
time he started to make suggestive comments to me, I

(35:32):
played it off like you know, you're wearing me down. Yes,
you're such a great guy. I'm curious. I'll tell you what.
Next time you come to LA, we'll go on a date.
And don't you know, like forty eight hours later, this
guy booked a flight to Los Angeles.

Speaker 1 (35:47):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (35:47):
And yeah, he arrived in LA and it was like
straight out of the movies. He was taken into custody
without incident. We rested him at the airport and we
had him.

Speaker 1 (35:58):
Unbelievable. And I tell you something else. Here's another little
piece of advice. And I hope that the young investigators
are listening because you said something really important. In the beginning.
You wanted the tiger case, you want the polar bear case.
You're given a butterfly case. But you didn't just half
work it. And when we're given the opportunity to close

(36:20):
it took it. You did not. You stayed with that
case and the work that you were able to do.
I mean, that's what legends are made of. That's why
the US Attorney keeps giving you awards because what you're
able to do. I mean, you worked that thing like
it was heroin.

Speaker 2 (36:38):
Yeah, and honestly, that was my very first law enforcement
award from the US Attorney's Office was for the work
I did on the Cojima Kicks, and it did open
my eyes to the importance of all the other species.
You know. Yeah, working on a tiger cub smuggling case
is sexy and fun and gets a lot of media attention.

(36:59):
Protecting wolves grizzly bears is important and fun, but you know,
there's a lot of animals and wildlife and nature out
there that has no voice and nobody's sticking up for it.
And yeah, it kind of opened my eyes to the
scope of our job and the importance of our job.
And yeah, you know, I don't like criminals. I wasn't

(37:23):
gonna let Yoshiko Jima get away, and I really didn't
like the fact that he thought he had outsmarted one
of our agents, so that that was another thing all day. Yeah,
the agency pride goes a long way.

Speaker 1 (37:35):
Ray Amen, that goes a long way, and that's good
for everybody. And one thing too, I want to mention y'all,
when you're talking about these organized criminals, human trafficing plays
a role too. So when you're talking about a butterfly
or a tiger or a black bear. You can again
exchange that for a five year old boy, seventeen year

(37:55):
old girl, thirty six year old woman. They can get
people using the same routes that these smugglers use.

Speaker 2 (38:05):
Absolutely. Yeah, investigation is investigation and crime is crime. This
isn't directly what you're referring to, but you know a
lot of times once a smuggler has the systems and
the roots in place, they will engage in other types
of crimes. You know, if you can smuggle butterflies into
the US, you can also smuggle drugs, or you can
smark people.

Speaker 1 (38:24):
Well, look at pimps. Pimps are gonna run women, They're
gonna run drugs, they're gonna run guns.

Speaker 2 (38:31):
Absolutely, it's opportunity.

Speaker 1 (38:34):
And you know, after you had your butterfly case, you know,
you moved right into the fish smuggling. And here's what's
so funny. I have a buddy that works for Black
River Caviar and we were having a conversation because she
had somebody sort of famous say to her they prefer
wild caviar. And she said, well, if you've ever had

(38:55):
wild caviar, you've had black market caviar. Absolutely no, you
know you're not supposed to have caviat that didn't come
from a farm. Because sturgeon are endangered.

Speaker 2 (39:05):
Many species of them are, yeah, some of them critically.

Speaker 1 (39:08):
Well, tell us about your fish case.

Speaker 2 (39:10):
Oh my gosh, you know here, I'm still waiting for
my tiger case, right right, but yeah, right, not long
after the Kojima case, I picked up this interesting fish case.
And this is going to require a little bit of
explanation about the law. But I think given some of

(39:31):
your points about you know, maybe some of the lessons
we can all learn from different investigators experiences. These fish
cases can be really complicated and very very lucrative for
the people involved. There's a fish known as the Asian arijuana.
It's not the marijuana, it's the arijuana it is. It's

(39:55):
an interesting fish. It's found throughout Asia, Southeast Asia, Indonesia,
South Asia, and it is a predatory fish that can
get pretty big, maybe like two and a half feet
at it when it's a mature adult. They have an
upturned mouth, which is really interesting, and they're what are

(40:17):
called mouth brewers. So when their eggs hatch, all of
the baby fish will hang around mama because mama's a
tough you know. Sob and she will defend her clutch
of fish, a baby fish, and if there's a threat,
they all run into it. She'll open her mouth and
they all swim into her mouth and she kind of

(40:39):
hides them in her mouth. And that's what they call
mouth brewers, is the once the they're very interesting fish,
but they're they're aggressive. They'll protect their their territory, and
that becomes important later in this story. So the way
the law is for Asian arijuana. Under the US Endangered
Species Act, they are listed as endangered, but under the

(41:00):
Convention on International Trade and Endangered Species, which is the
international treaty regarding the movement of wild animals, they have
dual protection. If they're wild, they're listed as Appendix one,
which means it cannot be traded in the trade. If
they're raved in captivity, they're listed as what's called Appendix two,

(41:21):
which means they can be sold internationally and shipped internationally
if they have a site's export permit from the country
of origin. And most of them, most of them come
out of Indonesia. Now, the reason this is important is
because anytime you have a scheme like that, a legal
scheme like that, it creates an opportunity to launder fish.

(41:44):
So all you have to do is catch your wildfish
and make it look like it was raised in captivity
and bing bang boom, you get your permit and it
appears to be legal. And during this next investigation I'm
going to talk about, I was able to unco cover
really the insidious side of the Asian arijuana trade. There

(42:05):
is a lot of laundering of these fish going on.
There are really cool fish, they're unusual, and the fact
that they're being depleted from the wild under the guise
of having been captive raised is really like it's sinister.
It's almost sinister, right, and it really shows that the
people involved are greedy. They're interested in money. They don't

(42:29):
care about even their own environment, which to me is
just repulsive.

Speaker 1 (42:35):
So these fish go for about five grand.

Speaker 2 (42:38):
Yeah, depending on size. Now, normally to ship them, you know,
and have them live, they're going to have to be
fairly small, because to smuggle them you have to have
these Now that unlike the butterflies, these fish are only
valuable if they're alive. And the reason they're so valuable
is there's many cultures in the world that believe that
Asian Arajuanas bring good luck and they come in these

(42:58):
crazy color patterns, like there might be one that looks
like a gold bar and then another one will be
like bright red. It's all the same species, it's like
different morphs. So you could have a small fish that's
maybe four or five inches in length that would sell
between fifteen hundred and five thousand dollars from the initial
sale from the provider. If the fish starts to get

(43:21):
bigger and it's maybe twelve twelve to twenty inches, it
could easily go for ten thousand dollars or more. During
my investigation of this Asian arijuana case we're going to
talk about, which I called Operation RTG, there was a
report of one fish being sold for thirty thousand dollars,
just one live fish. As you can imagine, that kind

(43:44):
of money will draw criminal enterprises right to it. I
called this case RTG because one of the codes that's
often used in the criminal networks is for an Asian
arijuana is RTG, and that stands for Redtail Golden, and
it's a particular morph of Asian arijuana. They also sometimes
use a code name like dragonfish, or they might use SR,

(44:08):
which stands for super Red. But the way that started
for me and and I think this is the lesson
for younger or up and coming or people you know,
investigators or people who want to get into law enforcement
and do investigations. Always pay attention to those like be
available to talk to the public, pay attention to those
phone calls that come into the office, and don't sit

(44:31):
around in the office waiting for your supervisor to assign
a case to you are saying. In the Los Angeles,
you know, like I said, we had we had hard
charging agents in Los Angeles. We were one of the
busiest field offices in the country. If an agent was
waiting for a supervisor to assign a case to them,
our view as agents was, well, that agent is kind

(44:55):
of mediocre, right, They're not working very hard because you shouldn't.
You shouldn't have to wait around for your supervisor to it.
So fign'd something if your networked in. So that's how
this case came to me. I was kind of obsessed
with talking to the public and taking phone calls from
the public, and if somebody walked in our front door
and they wanted to talk to an agent, I'd sit
down and talk to them. And one of the things

(45:17):
that came up for me was I used to skulk around,
for lack of a better word, I used to snoop
around on these various bulletin boards and chat rooms on
websites that attracted people who were into really exotic fish.
And one of those places is called Aquaticpredators dot Com.

(45:39):
I don't know if they're still around, but they were
in the mid two thousands. So I used to just routinely,
if I had nothing else going on, I had an
undercover email account, and I would log into Aquatic Predators
dot Com and I'd just start snooping around in the
bulletin boards and see what people were talking about. And
one day I come across this posting by a guy
named Andre Ramsa, and he's just basically making this very

(46:03):
nonchalant inquiry about whether or not anyone in the US
knows how to get RTGs into the US. And I
immediately recognized that RTG was a code name for Asian arijuana.
And my thinking was, I need to reach out to
this guy, because I don't know how many thousands of

(46:23):
people are seeing this post, right, so I'm going to
try to intercept this. I'm going to try to be
the guy this guy's talking to, rather than somebody else
in the US who might actually be a smuggler. So
I reached out to him and I find out basically
in a short while few exchanges, that he's based out
of Indonesia, which is one of the places Asian Arijuanas

(46:44):
are found. And he tells me he's got a friend
in San Diego and he wants to send him to
Asian Arijuanas, but he knows it's illegal and he's not
sure how to do it, so he's passing it off
like he's not selling it. He's just send it as
a gift to a friend. And I said, now, interesting, Cheryl,

(47:08):
some of your listeners might say, Hey, isn't a newcomer
about to entrap? This guy will, and so maybe it's
worthwhile to just give a two second primer on what
entrapment is. And you know, for your listeners if they
don't know, entrapment means that, you know, law enforcement basically
creates the opportunity and gives the person the idea to

(47:31):
commit the crime when they wouldn't have had the idea
on their own or the opportunity on their own. And basically,
all you need to do as a law enforcement officer
to get past a defense of entrapment is provide what
the law or the courts referred to as a sentilla
of evidence that they were predisposed. And a scintilla is

(47:53):
not defined in the law, but we all know sintilla
is very little.

Speaker 1 (47:58):
It ain't much.

Speaker 2 (48:00):
Those are exact words I was about to use. It
ain't much. And so you know, already this Andre Ramsea
guy has already presented to me predisposition. He's told me
he wants to send RTGs to the US and he's
having trouble because it's illegal. So it's already this until
it's there. But there's a few more things I can

(48:21):
do to kind of shore that up as we go along.
But basically I told him, hey, I'm having the same problem.
It's hard to get things past customs, but I have
an idea, and that's all I said. And then I
let him make the next step, and he did. He
wanted to know what my idea was, and I thought, well,
I'm going to see what he's up to. So I

(48:41):
basically presented a scenario to him that I had a
friend who worked for US Customs who could help me
get things through unnoticed. And this is a guy in Indonesia,
a country where I know there's a lot of corruption,
so it would not be unusual for him to believe
that story. I mean, as far as in his world,
corruption is common. So he bit and he immediately started

(49:06):
talking to me about my plan and how he would
do it. And this quickly morphed into I actually made
some notes in preparation of our recording today, and I
realized that my first contact with him was on May third.
Between May sixth and May eighth, he started to introduce
me to not just a friend in San Diego, but

(49:28):
seventeen customers in the United States he had kind of,
you know, fostered who were very interested in purchasing Asian
arijuana fish from him. Yeah, so this was not a
guy who was sending fish as gifts. This was a
guy who was engaged in the business of selling Asian arijuana.
So we knew we had a case. And what I

(49:51):
did was I basically explained this plan not only to him,
but also to all of his customers, because they started
to call all my undercover cell phone and ask me,
how are you going to do this? And what I
was very careful to do with every single customer that
called me or potential customer. I said, hey, I said,

(50:11):
you're not a cop, are you, because this is illegal, right,
And I would basically get them to tell me what
the law was. And every single person I talked to
who was a potential customer of Andre was very aware
of the Endangered Species Act, very aware that Asian arijuanas
were not legal to import it to the United States,
even if captive bread and they wanted them. And these

(50:35):
guys were talking about paying between five hundred dollars and
three thousand fish, depending on the size they were getting,
and they wanted reassurance from me that I could get
the fish in illegally without getting caught. This case really
unfolded quickly. Like I said, by early May, I had
been in contact with seventeen people who wanted this to happen,

(50:59):
and by June twenty second, Andre's basically making plans to
send the first two fish as a test because he
wanted to see if this scheme would work right. So
I worked with US Customs and Homeland Security as well investigations,
and we Andre sent the shipment, and by this time

(51:21):
the US Fish and Wilife Service as an intelligence unit,
and they were able to decipher that Andrea's last name
was actually Gunna one rather than Ramza, so he was
using a fake name. So we identified him as a
guy named Andre Guna one out of the go Or, Indonesia,
and he decided he was going to send two fish
first as a test. He did. He sent them to

(51:46):
Ted Nelson, again was my undercover name. I received those
fish at LAX through Korea Air and I took pictures
and emailed back said, hey, your fish arrived. Everything's good.
We knew that he wanted to ship more, so we
wanted to. We didn't want to take the case down yet,
so we actually delivered those two fish to his first
two customers. In one instance, me and another agent drove

(52:11):
to San Diego and personally delivered the fish to a
guy named Sam in San Diego. And during that meeting,
Sam like literally, I think the quote in one of
my reports was whew, I'm so glad you're not a
federal agent, because I wasn't sure we were going to
get these fish through. And then he goes on to

(52:32):
explain the law to me, and I was like, you know,
the whole thing's recorded. It doesn't get better than that.
When the bad guy's telling you what the law is.

Speaker 1 (52:39):
Oh, that's fantastic.

Speaker 2 (52:40):
Yeah, it was fun. The other fish we shipped to
a guy, and this guy actually becomes important later in
this story. But we shipped the other fish via FedEx
to another guy in Kentucky, and we alerted. This is
the great thing about being a federal agent US Fish
and Wildlife Service. We have agent It's all over the country, right,

(53:02):
So I alerted the agents in Kentucky, and we actually
had agents doing surveillance on the house who observed the
fed Ex driver delivered this package that I had sent
and actually, you know, observed our suspect in Kentucky received
the package at his front door. So we knew, in
anticipation of future shirts warrants, that the fish went into

(53:23):
that house and that suspect, you know X, A guy
named Lee picked up the finish. The great news is ed.
Andre sends out an email to all these seventeen customers. Success.
It worked. Our scheme worked, and this this got us
past the hump of all suspicion. There was a there

(53:44):
was a guy with the last Nameku in Texas who
had been warning people, Hey, I think this Ted Nelson
guy is a US Customs agent. But so he didn't
want to order. He was supposed to order on that
first ship, and he was like, I'm not doing it
because I think Ted's I think Ted's a fed. And
once this shipment went through, all of a sudden, Tom

(54:05):
Tomko was his name, he put his orders in because
now he was convinced this was the legit deal. Oh yeah, well.

Speaker 1 (54:14):
That was kind of a coup with.

Speaker 2 (54:16):
Sale exactly, a coup right on the bad guys. So yeah,
very quickly after that, so now we're this is into July,
this is happening by late August, Andre Gunawan makes arrangements
to send twelve more fish to the US. So now

(54:36):
we kind of have a dilemma because these are endangered fish.
We suspect they're coming from the wild. We don't think
they're coming from captive breeding facilities. And basically we got
we can't let this go on too long. We want
to catch the people involved. We don't want to just
have two people we catch. We want to you know,
take down Andrey. We want to take down this customer base.

(54:59):
But we can't. But you know, the endangered fist trade
go on because we are it's not we are trying
to protect these animals. So we decide, okay, we're going
to do this next shipment and now we're going to
take everybody down. And sure enough, August, end of August
rolls around and the next shipment of twelve I'm sorry
ten fish comes in and we arranged to make a

(55:23):
personal delivery to the people in LA and I tell them,
all of the customers in LA need to meet me
at Target parking lot in Carson, California. And I said,
I'm delivering them in person because I'm afraid, you know,
I don't want them to die. Blah blah blah. So
sure enough, all of the people that had lived in
the LA area who were customers showed up at Target,

(55:46):
and we had a massive team of Fish and wild
Life special agents and Homeland Security special agents stationed around
the parking lot. We had a surveillance dand sitting in
the middle of the parking lot watching everybody. And I
met as Ted Nels at the back of my undercover
vehicle with these customers. I showed them the fish. Everything's recorded.

(56:07):
We had them actually sign a document saying they'd received it,
and it was beautiful. And then the coup de gras
was something I didn't expect We were all everybody was
so giddy and happy that they were receiving these valuable
and endangered fish. We all agreed to pose for a
photograph at the back of my vehicle together. So I

(56:30):
remember later my boss was like, I saw you posing
for the photo, and I was like, what in the
hell is he doing?

Speaker 1 (56:37):
But I can tell you that stakes exhibit A one exactly.

Speaker 2 (56:42):
And what I really wanted was I wanted them to
be holding their fish in the bag. And I said
to him, I said, hey, why don't you guys hold
your fish for the photo? And on the mic, you know,
I'm recording everything. One of the guys says, hell, no,
I'm not going to hold an illegal fish while I'm
in a photograph. Now that's exhibit ME. Just got better,
It just got better.

Speaker 1 (57:03):
Yeah, I made that, prosecutor. I mean, you want to
talk about dancing. Now, I have to ask one question
about the sure sure was your shirt own.

Speaker 2 (57:14):
Or fully clothed? Fully clothed?

Speaker 1 (57:18):
Oh well, we don't care about that. Move on.

Speaker 2 (57:20):
Yeah, yeah, but I did have the fancy big mustache
right on.

Speaker 1 (57:25):
Okay, So this is.

Speaker 2 (57:28):
What we call a deliver bust in the law enforcement world.
You're familiar with those, Cheryl. When everything's done, I gave
the signal and I walked away and income the lights
and sirens and the agents and their tactical gear, and
everybody got arrested. Now, the funny thing was we made
it look like I got arrested as well. And the

(57:49):
thing that really cracked me up is later that night,
I was back at the office. Everybody had been processed,
and I got an email from one of the guys
who'd lived outside of LA and the word had gotten
out there had been an arrest because he sent me
an email to Ted Nelson saying he'd reconsidered it and
he'd like to cancel his order. And I didn't even

(58:10):
answer the email because I was like, too late, You're
already under indictment, you know, so nice yeah, nice Trie.
As a result of this, we indicted. We didn't get
all seventeen of the customers that were originally on the list,
but we'd indicted seven people, and every single one of
them was indicted for a felony, and every single one

(58:32):
of them once they saw the evidence we had against them,
between email correspondence, recorded undercover phone calls, recorded in person meetings,
I forgot to mention some of these guys were so
paranoid about me they wanted to meet beforehand. So we
had some in person meetings in la where I'd meet
with them with another undercover agent posing as my girlfriend
or whatever, and I'd reassure them, yeah, I'm a regular guy,

(58:55):
and they'd walk away satisfied. There was no defeating the
evidence that we had, and every single one of those
seven people, with the exception of Gunawan, pleaded guilty and
they were all sentenced. They all have felonies on their record,
They had pretty significant fines, They weren't sent to jail,
they had long probations, two to three year probation periods,

(59:18):
and we never saw them ever engaged in anything like
this ever. Again, the fun thing was about this guy
Lee in Kentucky. One of the things we wanted to
do was we wanted to recover those two fish we'd
already delivered, So we had agents in San Diego and
Kentucky execute search warrants at those houses, and luckily we

(59:41):
were able to recover those two fish. They were still
at the house, but during that search warrant in Kentucky,
the agents interviewed the guy named Lee, and Lee acted
like he was cooperating, but he lied, lied, led. He
said he wasn't sure who the guy was in LA,
which would have been Ted Nelson. He gave a different
name for Andre Gunnawan. He basically tried to misdirect our

(01:00:03):
agents at all every opportunity, which is another federal crime.
You cannot lie to a federal agent. You don't have
to talk to a federal agent. But if you'd say,
if you do, as Martha Stewart, Mary and Jones and
many others have learned, if you do talk to a
federal agent and you lie, that's a felony. So later

(01:00:25):
that night, after our agents in Kentucky had conducted a
search warrant at his house and interviewed him, he actually
called me Ted Nelson on my undercover phone and told me, hey, Ted,
watch out the fish and Wildlife Services after you. They
were at my house today, they did a search warrant,
they seized the fish. They're coming for you. Don't worry.
I lied and told them all these stories about you know. Yeah,

(01:00:51):
and of course that's all recorded too.

Speaker 1 (01:00:53):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:00:55):
So the moral of the story is we shut them down.
We shut down, and we stopped something that could have
if an agent hadn't seen that original post by Andre,
somebody else would have picked it up. Somebody else would
have helped him do this smuggling scheme and they would
have gotten away with it.

Speaker 1 (01:01:13):
And that again is the lesson, because if they can
get a fish into this country, they can get a weapon. Absolutely,
And I think that's another brilliant move when you bring
in Homeland Security and everybody else to show them from
a chat room, this is where we got to San Diego, Kentucky, etc.
Now I do have one question. When you got the

(01:01:35):
fish back, where do they go?

Speaker 2 (01:01:37):
And that's another important thing. When you're a Fish and
Wildlife special agent, your evidence is often alive and requires
care feeding, and you have to find a home for it.
Right You don't want it to get back into the market.
It can't go back to Indonesia because you don't know
where it came from, and it can't be reintroduced or
read or put back in the wild because it might

(01:01:58):
introduce a disease. So the good news is we recovered
we had all twelve fish, they all lived, and they
were all transferred to the Pittsburgh Zoo, which of course
is an accredited Zoo under the Association of Zoos and
Aquariums and they went to the you know, they became
an educational exhibit at the Pittsburgh Zoo. So as far

(01:02:19):
as I was concerned as an agent, that's a good result.

Speaker 1 (01:02:22):
That's outstanding. And I tell you, you know, I run
the Wildlife CSI Academy, which you and I have talked about,
and just the idea that now they are a teaching
tool is to me a tremendous ending.

Speaker 2 (01:02:36):
That's one of the things whenever I donated, you know,
seized animals to a facility like that, I always I
couldn't force them to do it, but I always encourage
them to include some type of educational placard to let
the public know that these animals were recovered during a
criminal wildlife trafficking investigation, just so people know, you know,
these things are they're not They're expendable.

Speaker 1 (01:03:00):
Yep. Absolutely well ed newcomer. I cannot thank you enough
for coming on to Zone seven, for being just a
phone call away if we have a situation with an
animal that we need help with, and your career speaks.

Speaker 2 (01:03:13):
For itself, well you know what, thank you for having
me on. And if you don't mind. I'll make one
more plug for my podcast, and in the podcast, I'm
not telling my stories. I'm interviewing other agents and state
wildlife officers who have similar, really great stories from their careers.
So anybody who's interested in this kind of true crime,

(01:03:33):
don't feel like you're going to hear the newcomer story
when you tune into Nature's Secret Service, because you're going
to hear some awesome stories from some awesome federal and
state officers who work on wildlife crime.

Speaker 1 (01:03:44):
Love it Nature Secret Service, y'all get to it. The stories.
You will not believe what is going on in the
wildlife Arena. I'm just telling you you won't believe it.
But Ed, thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (01:03:57):
You're welcome, Cheryl. It's been a real pleasure. I've enjoyed it,
and I hope we can do it again sometime.

Speaker 1 (01:04:03):
I'm going to end Zone seven the way that I
always do with a quote, and I want you all
to think about Ed's mustache, because it was the inspiration
for this quote. My dad worked for the Fish and
Wildlife Service and he worked for the Department of the Interior,
you know, like the federal government. And consequently I spent
a lot of time outdoors in my life. I even

(01:04:26):
became the voice of Smoky the Bear, Sam Elliott. I'm
Cheryl McCollum and this is Zone seven.

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Sheryl McCollum

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