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