This all over the place today but I couldn't find one article the listed the names.
State Officials Charge 17 in Illegal Animal Trade
By A. G. SULZBERGER
Published: March 19, 2009
The smugglers moved their goods across borders using secret compartments, a Maryland meat processing plant and the help of a corrupt Louisiana turtle farm. Their lucrative product: rattlesnakes, snapping turtles and salamanders.
This was the portrait of a trade in illegal reptiles and amphibians that New York State environmental authorities painted on Thursday, when a two-year undercover investigation called
Operation Shellshock ended with criminal charges against 17 people. More charges were filed by officials in other states and Canada, the New York officials said.
The case had the familiar ring of a drug bust, but it was instead built in the unlikely world of
herpetological shows and included charges against leaders at organizations like the
New York Turtle and Tortoise Society, the
Long Island Herpetological Society, and the pet Web site
turtlesale.com, a Florida-based company that is also facing New York charges.
“Our investigators began this operation with a simple question: Is there a commercial threat to our critical wildlife species?”
Pete Grannis, the commissioner of the
State Department of Environmental Conservation, which conducted the investigation, said in a statement.
What they found alarmed them. “A very lucrative illegal market for these creatures does exist, fostered by a strong, clandestine culture of people who want to exploit wildlife for illegal profit,” Mr. Grannis said.
In New York, 17 people were charged with 14 felonies, 11 misdemeanors and dozens of violations. Six people were charged in Pennsylvania, and one in Canada. The United States attorney’s office for the Western District of New York is pursuing charges against a Maryland meat processor, Turtle Deluxe, and a Louisiana turtle farm that was not identified, the authorities said.
The authorities said that Emanuele Tesoro, a prison guard from Watertown, Ontario, drove 33 endangered
Massasauga rattlesnakes — hidden throughout his van in door compartments, behind speakers and in the trunk hatch — across the border to make a deal with undercover authorities in a parking lot in Niagara Falls, N.Y. To reduce suspicion, his wife and children were also in the van as he crossed into the United States, said Capt. Michael Van Durme, of the environmental crimes investigation unit.
Two Long Island men, Adam C. Borisuk and Michael D. Brooks, sent tens of thousands of young snapping turtle hatchlings, collected from ponds and lakes throughout the area, to a turtle farm in Louisiana, Captain Van Durme said. The farm’s owner would then mix the illegally harvested
common snapping turtles with the
alligator snapping turtles he was licensed to farm, for export to China and eventually dinner plates, he said.
New York State law prohibits the illegal commercialization of wildlife and possession of protected species, and a 2006 law specifically protects all reptiles and amphibians.
The case began after an entire population of spotted turtles being studied by students at the University of Buffalo simply disappeared, said Captain Van Durme, who supervised the investigation. State environmental protection officials had learned of cases breaking up reptile smuggling rings in other states, and opened an undercover investigation. Officers made contacts while pretending to operate a wildlife photography booth at reptile shows, then moved to buying and selling animals as they built their case.
Buyers included collectors who paid thousands of dollars to add highlights to their collections with hard-to-get specimens, as well as Chinese consumers with a well-known taste for snapping turtle meat, which can be had at roughly $1 a pound.
Frank Indiviglio, a former keeper at the Staten Island and Bronx Zoos who has written and spoken extensively about reptiles, said that while illegal trade was well known, it did not reflect the reptile-loving community in general.
“The local herpetological societies are almost always conservation-oriented,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/ny...l?ref=nyregion
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