Episode 1: Unscrupulous Collection

lax customs inspections. But that's just a red herring. As police dig deeper into the case, they discover that this flood of boxes isn't originating from Europe at all. The packages are being sent from South America. Now this is fishy. Officers with the Carabinieri decide they've seen enough. They secure a search warrant and prepare a race. On a February day, officers swarm the apartment door. They crack it open, step into the living space, and are immediately greeted by walls

bursting with green. There are no illegal guns here, no bricks of drugs, no hidden stashes of explosives. Instead, jammed against the walls tetrist Amongst scaffolding and stacks of wood shelves are hundreds thousands of cacti. The police wandered the apartment in amazement, their cacti on the floor, Cacti climbing the walls, Cacti under the bed. Cacti cover the counters, and swing from every corner of the ceiling. According to Sabado magazine, this is more than a mere stash house.

This is a nursery, a botanical wonder lamb stuffed with more than one thousand specimens of illicit Copiapoa cacti. The plants resemble stubby spiked thumbs. They're native to the Atacama Desert of Chile, where the genus is threatened, with some species listed under international protections. But they're relatively large. It takes them ages to reach this size. When botanists review police evidence, they estimate that some specimens are more than

two hundred years old, older than modern Italy itself. Police arrests the apartment owner, Andrea pam Betty, and soon pieced together his story. Pam Betty had stalked the deserts of Chile in search of rare cacti. One by one. He plucked plants from the sand and sent them home by

way of Greece a Romania. Then he stowed them in his apartment on the Italian coast, where he sold them piece by piece for five hundred dollars to fifteen hundred dollars a pop. All told, his apartment easily held at least one million dollars worth of plants, all ripped from the desert illegally. The phrase black market evokes sinister images stacks of ak forty sevens, crates of cocaine, caged tigers,

but potted succulents on a window sill. No one is calling crime stoppers for that, And yet the biggest black market you've never heard of is blooming right under your nose. Whether it's a four thousand pound cactus shoveled from the Arizona desert, or delicate orchids pinched from the tangled jungles of Peru rare, plants are at the center of a

rapidly growing and lucrative world of crime. My name is Summer rain Oaks, and on this podcast we're plunging straight into it, talking to the buyers, the sellers, the obsessives, and those who came face to face with the criminals behind an underworld few know exist. From School of Humans and iHeart podcasts. This is bad Seeds. If there's one thing you need to know about me, it's that I love plants. I mean a lot up in rural Pennsylvania,

and there we couldn't live life without them. My parents got food from the garden, and during summer break, I'd spend hours losing myself in the woods out back. When I got older, I learned the scientific names for the plants in my backyard, for Scythia intermedia, Daucus, carota, mitchella repents. I studied environmental science and became something of an ecology nerd. I started multiple YouTube channels like plant went On Me

in Flock, and wrote a few books. The latest one, How to Make a Plant Love You, is about plants and are evolving relationship to them. Over the course of a decade plus, I transformed my Brooklyn apartment with over a thousand plants and am now working on a botanical oasis in central New York. So yeah, I like plants just a little, and that is what drew me to this store. Because something's happening in the world of plants. Something you need to know about, something sinister. Take that

raid you just heard about in Italy. At first, blush, it just sounds like a quirky news headline, like honestly, who steals a cactus? But as it turns out, a lot of people do. Thirty one percent of all the world's cacti are at risk of extinction. That's a third of the world's cacti, according to a twenty fifteen study. Just a few months ago, a group of scientists writing for the journal Nature Plants said cacti are quote one of the most endangered groups of organisms on the planet.

Doctor Barbara Getch, a conservation biologist, is one of the authors of that study. So basically, we assessed every extant species actis for the UCN Red List of Threatened Species. So what these doesuc tells you what's the probability of a species going extinct? And what she found is frankly disturbing. For threatened species, the main cause of threat, or the

main driver of threat was unscrupulous collection. Almost half of the world's threatened cacti are at risk of extinction, not because of problems like development or livestock grazing, but because of poaching, and this threat isn't new. Back in nineteen eighty five, The New York Times was already on it, writing shortly after a rare species is described in a publication, its habitat is invaded by well to do hobbyists who simply must have a specimen. Within months, certain species have

become extinct after decades of unscrupulous collecting. We've reached a tipping point. These plants have been poached for a very long time. I think what has changed a lot in the last years is how easily available they have become online and through other platforms like WhatsApp. That has been a complete game changer. The game changer here isn't just a cactus problem, It's a plant problem. In the US, home decor is a growing industry and rising with it

the demand for house plants. In twenty nineteen, the National Gardening Association claimed that house plant sales in America had risen almost fifty percent in just three years. And I'm going to be honest, I feel a little bit responsible now. A few years ago I uploaded one of the first plant on boxing videos online. You may notice that I have this big box right here of live plants, so

I thought we'd do an unboxing ceremony. I had no clue that my plant filled apartment or videos like that would go viral, but ever since then it's been copied thousands of times over lucky viewers getting closed on Instagram and YouTube. Plant aficionados like myself started to garner tens of thousands of followers, and then the pandemic. The pandemic

happened during the first COVID lockdown. People trapped indoors, doom scrolling, TikTok, and Instagram collectively decided to transform their homes into garden kingdoms. I mean, what else was there to do. The demand was instatiable, and potted plants, especially those rare items pursued by hobbyists, started going for heinous asking prices. Like there was a variegated rafadop four a tetrasperma marketed as a Philodendron minima, which sold on a New Zealand auction site

for eight thousand, one hundred and fifty bucks. A year later, a specimen of the same species with just eight leaves would sell for more than twenty five grand. The point is rare plants could go for a lot of money right now, and where there's lots of money, there are people with how do I put it, less puer motivations trying to exploit it. My name's Jenny Feltham and I'm working with the Wildlife Justice Commission, which is an ANGEO

that's based in the Hague in the Netherlands. Basically, what the Wildlife Justice Commission does is it operates to tackle the transnational organized crime issue. A few years back, Jenny discovered that organized crime syndicates had taken up wildlife crimes such as plant poaching. It is, in her words, of the perfect crime. You want your money making activity to be low risk. You want a low risk of being caught, and you want also if you are caught, low penalties.

And environmental crime in general has ticked those boxes, so you know, the lure of high profits is there in timber crime, especially the numbers broadly, they're really big. It's estimated to be twenty billion dollars a year type industry where it's estimated to be the fourth largest illegal trade in the world. And then on the risk side, we often see environmental crime isn't prioritized by law enforcement compared

to other types of crime. There are countless examples, from the million dollars of stolen cacti in Italy to the time a woman in New Zealand tried to sneak pass airport customs with nine hundred and forty seven succulents hidden underneath. So, yeah, there is a demand for this because the other aspect is consumer demand at the end of the supply chain.

That really drives the whole thing. If there's demand for these high value wildlife commodities, if people are willing to pay high prices for these things, criminal networks will want to supply that. They will find a way to provide that service, regardless of whether it's legal or not. The whole problem with plant crime, though, is that nobody in power really seems to care. That's unfortunately the way it

goes law enforcement authorities. They have a whole lot of different types of priorities that they have to work under. An environmental crime often is not at the top of that list, and this has made plant thieves especially reason. Take the Saint Helena abnue trokotapsis abne, a delicate white flowering plant that grows in just one place in the world, the island of Saint Helena deep in the South Atlantic Ocean.

The plant has been on the brink of extinction for decades, and until recently, the last two wild plants were literally clinging to life on the edge of a cliff. While. A few years back, a horticulturist was browsing online when he noticed somebody in California trying to sell the plant online. According to an article by Sam Knight in The Guardian, the scientists emailed the cellar and kindly implored them not

to sell the ebony. It was among the rarest of the rare and had to be protected, and besides, selling it online was illegal, extremely illegal. A few days later, the scientist opened his inbox and found a reply. Screw you, the seller said, this is capitalism. The tough thing about the plant poaching crisis and the black market for wildlife in general, is frankly getting people to care about it. Even in the niche world of wildlife crime, plants get

the short stick. Everybody wants to save the elephants, the tigers, the whales. Not many people are slapping bumper stickers onto their subarus demanding we saved the Saint Helena ebony and there's a reason for this, and you're probably suffering from it right now. It's something called plant blindness. I would describe it as people tend to overlook plant life, and that there's a bias towards seeing, for instance, animal life

more prominently. That's doctor Jared Margulis, a professor at the University of Alabama and an expert on the epidemic of plant poaching. Around the last five years, I've been studying various kinds of illegal and illicit trade and cactus and succulent plants. According to doctor Margulis, plant blindness is essentially a bias. Now, if I asked you to sit back and close your eyes and dream up the world's most vulnerable species, images of tigers or rhinos or even bumblebees

might dance through your head. But the truth is the most threatened taxa in the world are plants. The sort of botanical world around us where plant life is sort of becomes this inert backdrop to a livelier animal world. There's a sense of a bias towards being more concerned about animals and other species that, for instance, move and have eyes and appear more sentient than plant life. That

backdrop includes cacti, conifers, and psycats. In fact, a global treaty designed to protect wildlife called Sites suggests that for every threatened animal, there are at least five threatened plants. But you wouldn't believe those numbers if you were to say, examine wildlife policy. Plant blindness has very serious and negative consequences for how we relate to plants, but also think

about the conservation of species. In the United States, for instance, plants make up sixty percent of all endangered wildlife, but if you look at the government's spreadsheets, you'll see that in the country's wildlife protection budget just two percent two percent goes towards plant life. Now, that is plant blindness. Put simply, we're never going to see a sad Sarah McLaughlin commercial with an uprooted orchid on screen, but perhaps we should. Globally, two out of five plants are risk

of going extinct. And not to be alarmist, but this is a huge issue. It is human centric to say that without plants we would all be dead very quickly, but I think it's also an important way of prompting people to think about how important plants are and everything we do in our ability to thrive and flourish on the planet. Doctor Margulis is right. Just look around you.

As I shared in my book How to Make a Plant Love You, the wooden beams, floorboards, tables, chairs, picture frames, bookshelves and doors we pass through were all once trees. The cotton sheets that cover us at night plants. Even our polyester shirts, they were derived from storehouses of ancient plants locked beneath the Earth's surface, as is most of

the fuel that powers our vehicles and warms our homes. Plants. Meanwhile, latex from trees and the tropics make the tires of airplanes and cars, and insulate the undersea internet cables that make listening to this podcast possible. The lotions and bombs we use to clean and soften our skin have all originated or been synthesized from a plant. It's unique chemistry.

The coffee that gets us moving in the morning, the tea that soothes us at night, and the wine or beer we imbibed in wine, the oils that make our candles are soaked. It's all plants. And what about high fructose corn syrup? Even if you're on an all meat diet, you indirectly eat plants. After all, do you think your burger was grass fed or grain fed? Plants create roughly seventy five percent of the oxygen we breathe. They make

up eighty percent of the food we eat. They are the basis for most of the antibiotics and medicines that keep us healthy. You're probably thinking, okay, okay, we get it. But these are just a few examples of how crucial plant life is to our lives. For humanity writ large, we rely on so many different species in so many different ways. As we lose more and more species on the plant to extinction, and as more and more species become vulnerable, there will be all kinds of negative consequences

when plants disappear. There's a cascading effect of bad news. I think the author Ray Bradberry explained it best. In nineteen fifty two, he published a short story called A Sound of Thunder. In it, Bradberry imagined a future where scientists cracked the secret to time travel. Naturally, investors celebrate this milestone by monetizing it. One company sells time traveling safaris, offering people the opportunity to go back to the late Cretaceous.

But on one of these trips, a tourist accidentally crushes a single butterfly. When the tourist returns to the present day, the world is strangely altered. People talk fight, the results of a recent election have changed for the worse. One

small misstep changed everything. Ecology is really complex, and species hold relationships with each other, and so, for instance, when you poach or steal a plant towards extinction, what are the pollinators that relied on that species to survive and what happens to them and what species relied on those pollinators, And so there's these cascading series of interactions in consequences, and the reality is we don't know what most of

those consequences might yet be. But it's something that we need to be very concerned about now That might sound distant and theoretical. So here's a real world example. The Ohia lehua tree of Hawaii, or Metrosideros polymorpha, is a prominent plant on the islands and is featured in native mythology, but livestock as well as imports of non native plants from Portugal and South America have endangered it. Populations of Ohia trees are declining and most recently, a foreign fungus

has strangled entire groves in a Bradbury and Twist. This deadly fungus was likely introduced by a tourist who is carrying it on their hiking boots and had meandered off a hiking trail. The result has had a ripple effect acrossed Polynesia. The e evie, a bright red tropical bird with a crescent beak, depends on the Ohea for food

and breeding. But as plant populations have dwindled, so has the bird, and with the bird, so goes the plants it pollinates, including the Lobelia grayana, a spiky lavender look alike that is now endangered. Who knows how far this ripple effect continues. If the world of plants can teach us anything, it's that everything is really connected. The world we live in is like a game of Jenga. Even a mild disturbance can lead to a total collapse. This

is especially true of the world's rarest plants. A single death or a single theft can dis rupped an entire ecosystems destiny. What that means for us is anyone's gas. I want to introduce you to a plant. The living rock cactus or Ariocarpus fisheratus. It's a squat and plush cactus with wrinkled leaves and no spines. It is like the jab of the hut of succulents. In other words, it's sort of ugly. In its native habitat, it can be easily mistaken, as the name suggests, for a pile

of rocks. To many passers by, it is completely unremarkable. That is until it blooms. In midsummer, the living rock cactus reveals a vibrant, electric pink blossom. Some consider it the prettiest flowering cactus in the world. For hobbyists, the nice thing about the living rock cactus is that it

doesn't require a bank loan. A single cactus costs around one hundred bucks, which is expensive but attainable for an entry level plant collector, and that has made it extremely popular in places with a growing middle class like Asia. One of the reasons the living rock is so popular in the world, especially in Asia, is that it is a long living plan that's Eric Jumper. He's a retired special agent with the US Fish and Wildlife Service. People will get one for a child when they're born, so

they can live their lives living. You know it's charming, right. The problem is, the living rock cactus is a critically endangered species. You cannot pluck it from the desert. This living rock cactus is an Apendix one, which is the most restrictive. It restricts all commercial trade in anything that's listed as Appendix one. So they're afforded the highest amount of protection. And in the early two thousands, Special Agent Jumper started getting calls to look into a string of

rock cactus poaching. I was stationed in San Antonio. I started getting calls from people in seculent societies, mostly out of Austin, Texas, advising me about things they were seeing online. I took notes on that, but just didn't really act on it. I didn't know that there was a worldwide market for cactus at that time. At some point in twenty twelve, an inspector for the USDA also came to me with a name of a business that was selling a lot of cactus and a lot of them were endangered.

And then yeah to say, hey, you need to look at this, and this is what started it. Jumpers started digging into the case, learning everything he could about the cactus and We kept getting different calls telling us, Hey, this guy here, this guy in these Texas, this guy in North Texas, this guy in West Texas is doing this. He's the one supplying such and such. Working on that tip Jumper put an alert airports to be on the

lookout for illicit packages making their way overseas. Those are our two tasks to try to intersect the package, and of course you do that by putting alerts out to our inspectors at our airports, and then we tried to find the source. At first, only a few cacti trickled in, most of them turning up at the International Mail Sorting

facility at Chicago O'Hare Airport. Those boxes contained one or two plants, but after a few years the poachers began brazenly stuffing as many as forty cacti into a single shipment. The seizures started happening, Boom, boom, boom. It took maybe a year after alert went out and then boom they started hidden. After that, you know, then we have a case. Whatever happens from the air on, we have a case.

The vast majority of the boxes were postmarked for places like Shanghai, Bangkok and Beijing, although a handful ended up in Europe too. Regardless of destination, each box was mislabeled as home decor or ceramic pottery suspicious right. Plus, none of the shipments contained the appropriate paperwork for exporting plants. Agents followed the paper trail. They traced the shipments to

southwestern Texas, just north of Big Ben National Park. Now agents quickly discovered that the cacti were shipped by a ring of organized cactus smugglers. We'll trying to run down all of that stuff, and finally ended up running into what turned out to be one of them. The main sources was a ranch out in West Texas. Agents squared their sights on six older Texans, all men, two of

whom claimed to own and operate cactus nurseries. Officials surveiled their homes, They watched the men move in and out, and then the warrants came in, signed by a judge, and the raids began. At Troy Layton Baker's home, officials seized one hundred and seventy seven living rock cacti. At Mark Refield's home in Spicewood, agents found five hundred forty nine A few hundred miles away at an RV park.

Agents stormed into Paul Armstrong's property and found six hundred and fifty eight illegal cacti, But the biggest bust belonged to Maurice Ray Carter, the owner of the so called Texas Native Cactus Company. At his place in Terlingua, Texas, agents found more than one thousand, six hundred and fifteen living rock cacti, all illegally poached. In total, US Fish and Wildlife Service agencies more than four thousand illegally harvested plants.

And then there were the weapons. In the home of Mark Refield, another cactus business owner, the FEDS would seize eleven pistols, two shotguns, and four military style assault rifles. You had a huge compound out in the middle of the desert, and we were lucky enough to catch them leaving town going back there instead of at his perfect because he told us if you had caught me at my house, it would have went down. It had been

a shootout, a shootout over cacti. But as the six men went to trial, it became clear why there was a lot of money in those little stubby plants. The men had grossed approximately seventy five thousand dollars just by mislabeling plants that they had torn from the ground. All

six received a litany of fines and probation. A judge ordered Morris Carter, the man hiding sixteen hundred living rocks at his home, to pay sixty thousand dollars in restitution, splitting it between the National Park Foundation and the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Despite those heavy fines, Agent Jumper isn't sure this was enough to deter them or others from future crimes. Be honest, it probably made them smarter,

from what we can determine. I think the smarter practice now is going to be trying to circumvent the rule by sending them first to California using straw buyers, basically using the middleman. But one thing is for certain, it's not going to take so many phone calls this second time around. I think it's on radar for everyone, and I know when I retired there were several cases still going,

so it's certainly not on the backburn anymore. If the smuggling operation in Texas proved anything, it's that plant crime is not the domain of rogue, careless individuals. It's not a one off and not something that can be written off. It is becoming more organized and far more dangerous, and that is what we're going to explore on this podcast

coming up. On this season of Bad Seeds ended up going to this really kind of sketchy pototists flown cartel Knockati territory in Mexico and this guy met us on the side of the highway on his motorbike and he was departure. They've been other allegations in other countries involving

very senior officials. You may be financing the destruction of an irreplaceable ecosystem that cannot come back, tied up with what looked like garden string behind now backs these big M sixteen stop to our heads time Summer rain Oaks join us again next time for Bad Seeds. Bad Seeds is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts. I'm your host Summer rain Oakes. Lucas Riley is our writer, Gabby Watts is our producer, and Amelia Brock is our

senior producer. Fact Checking is by Savannah Hugilely and Zoey Farrow. Original music is by Claire Campbell. Sound design and score is by Jesse Niswanger. Development was by Brian Lavin and Jacob selzer. Executive producers are Brian Lavin, Elsie Crowley, Brandon Barr, Virginia Prescott and Jacob Selzern School of Humans