School of Humans. On March thirtieth, nineteen thirty, Howard Gates wrote a letter from the warmth of a campfire somewhere in the Baja California Desert.
I see spines in my sleep. I have been down to the axle a dozen times in mud, stuck in sand, had to carry my load up grades, bumped over rocks, broke a universal joint in l Aornoso, and again on a hill. Been through l Purgatorio and down the grade into El Inferno. Turned the truck flat on its side. Been in perils on the seashore and mountaintops, under overhanging rocks, and leaning cardons between the living rock and deep pits.
I drank water out of ruts in the road, forgotten what a bridge looks like, and been sick in the mooly hay. Trip has been wonderful.
Gates was a cactus breeder, seller, and collector. Later in life, he'd become president of the Cactus and Succulent Society of America. By old age, people hailed him as Mister Cactus, but in nineteen thirty he was just a guy who loved plants. Gates routinely flocked the desert to see his favorite specimens, sometimes risking his life in the world's most inhospitable climates to see them in the wild. And he wasn't alone. You may not realize it, but there's a world of
cactus obsessives out there just like him. Consider Joelle Lode In past lives. He was a bank employee, a television actor, a librarian. But then he decided to do well, let's say bigger things.
I went with my bicycles to go around the world.
From his native France, Loday pointed his bicycle tires east and began peddling around the world. The trip would change his life. Cycling through the deserts of Turkey and Iran, he was mystified by the plants he passed along the way, charmed by their endurance and their ability to survive in such harsh environments. Later, biking across California, he'd have that same feeling when he encountered his first wild cactus.
When I saw the first flowers on the cactai, I was really in love because the flower was so beautiful. In these desert where there is apparently nothing very nice, just snakes, scorpions as spies everywhere, But this flower were very attracting me.
Lode couldn't help but get a closer look.
I hadn't any signs in the fingers and everywhere in the body.
So it is veryy painful, very difficult. But the flower are so wonderful, many many different colors, very exaggerated.
From that moment, Lode was hooked. He bicycled across Death Valley, visited every country between Kenya and El Salvador, and dodged sniper fire and Yemen. He suffered heat stroke, encountered tomb raiders in South America, and was even deported out of China, all for the chance to photograph rare plants.
I was in love with them, and I am still in love with them.
Joelle Lode and Howard Gates are just two people out there, two people who have planned their entire lives around seeing their favorite plants in the wild. But there are many others with the same passion, and that love can be the fuel driving a meaningful, well lived life. But there is always a line, a line that divides passion from obsession, a hobby from a fixation. Sometimes obsession can blind you, It can make it difficult to see which side of
that line. You're on. It can open a gateway to a life of danger and even a life of crime. From School of Humans and iHeart podcasts, This is Bad Seeds. I was browsing a store recently when a greeting card caught my eye. On the front was a pretty illustration of a cactus in full flower. Underneath it the words the desert works constantly to forbid it, and still the
cactus blooms. I get it, it's one of those cheesy inspirational quotes, but you know what they're really is poetry and a cactus's spines, and it draws people in.
This is a contrast between the beauty of the flower and the dangerousity of the plant. And this contrast between two things completely opposite are attraction to this plant.
The cactus embodies the romance and grit of the wild West. It is rugged party. It stares adversities square in the face and dares to live in the world's harshest conditions. And not only does it live, it thrives, sometimes for hundreds of years. But put aside the romance, cacti are reclusive too. They sprout in far flung places, the sorts of locales that only in Indiana, Jones might explore.
My first field trip to South America was in two thousand and sixteen, and I decided I wanted to come and say the cop be a part in Chile.
That's Stefenberger, but a lot of people just call him the Cactus Explorer. He is crisscross South America on the hunt for some of the world's rarest cacti. The adrenaline rush of finding them, he says, can be like stumbling upon riches.
It became kind of addictive. I mean, there's so many species defined, and some of them are quite difficult to access, and so it took me a long time to actually travel around and see all of the species. But I became really fascinated with how they survive where they do, and the ecology behind them and the story behind all of that. Living on the edge of the welds drissed Desert, the Ota Kama Desert.
There's a book of photographs by the owners of the Cactus Store in Los Angeles called Xerophile, and it describes this pursuit beautifully. Cactus hunters, it says, are quote willing to spend months planning a trip across the globe, weeks driving town dirt roads, hiking across mountaintops, and riding on muleback, all the hope of finding that one habitat, that one plant they are seeking. Often they don't find it, so they keep looking, or return the next year, or never leave.
It describes Burger perfectly.
It takes a lot of internal motivation to actually be like, right, Okay, I want to plan a trip to Peru, and I want to go to this isolated mountain range, and I have to learn Spanish or you know, work out what I need to do to get there. And it's not always easy. It takes a lot of effort, and it costs a lot to go and see a lot of
these plants and habitats. So you have to be really passionate about it and really genuinely interested in habitat any college or else, you just won't have the motivation to go and do it.
It's that last part, the very real risk of failure, that makes cactus hunting more than just a peculiar hobby for me.
The fun in it is it's kind of like a It's like it's like a parking moon haunt. It's like a treasure haunt. Set of thing. You know, you got looking for something difficult, you find it gives you a lot of satisfaction.
For some, that satisfaction is addictive, and it can be taken too far. In the federal government, the US Fish and Wildlife Service employs criminal investigators, undercover cops who scour the murky underworld of wildlife crime in search of people who are well, perhaps a little too addicted. One of those investigators is Albert Gonzalez.
I'm a special agent based in Opaso, Texas.
By twenty fourteen, he'd been working as a special agent with the US Fish and Wildlife Service for nearly a decade. That September, Gonzales got a call from a Customs and Border Patrol agent in Denver. The agent had been surveilling a ring of plant fanatics in Russia and Eastern Europe.
You know, cactus doesn't occur everywhere else. That's what makes it so sought after by the from Europe and that part of the world, because cactus doesn't exist there.
These men, he said, had traveled many times to the southwestern deserts of the US, posting photos and GPS coordinates of rare cacti. This itself wasn't unusual. Many cactus hunters use this information to build their itineraries, a way to set travel plants. But the agent in Denver thought, this list, there's something fishy about this. The coordinates, he believed, were more than just a cactus nerd sightseeing guide. They were a hit list.
Our ultimate goal is to protect our resources. Some of these species of cacti. There are so few left in the wild that any disturbance, any type of threat to them could make them go extinct. The thought process of well, it's just a plant, it'll grow back. In many cases, on some of these species, it won't. I'll never see it again.
A few months later, a customs agent noticed that one of these collectors, a Slovak man named Igor Drob, was planning a trip to the American Southwest. He posted an advertisement online inviting other cactus lovers to join. Now that's when Special Agent Gonzales got the call. A group of five hobbyists Polish, Slovak, and Russian would be arriving at Lax soon. The FEDS would need to keep a close eye on them.
We followed them through about six different states for a period about two weeks. Sometimes we would have to leap frog from one location to another. It was challenging to keep up with them.
Everything that follows we know thanks to public court documents. At Immigration, the five men are questioned. They show officials they're a itinerary three weeks of camping with Stops and Joshua Tree, White Sands, Arches, Brice and Monument. Immigration waves them through, but not before an agent makes note of a paper they're carrying showing the GPS coordinates and the scientific names of cacti. One of the passports belongs to
a Russian named Yevguina Safronov. In twenty eleven, he visited the US and made a similar road trip, posting a travel blog of his favorite plants. At Lax, the men rent a white Chevy Tahoe. Gonzalez notes the plate number seven ff X two three four and quickly alerts the National Park Service. Four days later, two agents find the vehicle outside of Benson, Arizona, parked on a dusty, desolate stretch of road. Years earlier, Igor Drob had visited this
exact spot on a check website. He had recorded finding Mammillaria hedarei and faro cactus was Lendsieye. The little Nipple and candy Barrel cactus, respectively. The two special agents, dressed under cover, pull off to the side of the road. One steps out of the vehicle, and, pretending to be a fellow cactus hunter, approaches the men. The tourists don't seem bothered, squatting their faces pointed to the dirt. They're
just too busy snapping photographs. One of the men is friendly enough to approach the agent and say that they're quote looking for flowering cacti. The agent smiles and nods. She's small talks discussing cacti and snakes before ambling back to her truck. She and her partner wait until the men motor off, a plume of dust rising behind them. When the area clears, the special agent steps out and begins scouring the landscape, looking for any signs of wrongdoing.
In a place like Bens in Arizona, temperatures easily reach ninety degrees fahrenheit in May. In that heat, the exterior of a cactus will look mat and dry. But when the agents approach where the tourists had been tramping, they find a cactus, but it's shimmering under the desert sun. The cactus pads appear bright and moist, clear signs that somebody had sliced off a piece.
Some plants, if they're damage like that, they die.
The agents return to their truck and begin writing down case notes. The tourists had stolen a seed pod. This patch of desert is no longer just a great place for sight seeing. It's a I'm seeing. In the hyper obsessed world of cactus hunters, it's not unusual to use GPS coordinates to track down rare plants. The trouble, Steffan Burger tells us is when that information is exploited.
When I went to Mexico, I was given some really known localities for certain types of plants, and it was just starkly obvious that plants had been taken from the habitat. I mean, you can see the holes in the ground for the habitats that I've been to many many times. You can see changes, you can see plants just basically disappear, and you're pretty much, yeah, you're just seeing holes in the ground with the remains of root systems kind of hanging out of the earth.
For a cactus hunter, Lake Burger, who may spend lots of time and money traveling to see just one type of plant. This is frustrating. He recalls one time searching for a rare cactus in Mexico.
When it was discovered it was highly poached. That was just flocks of people going there taking the plants, and yeah, it was more or less wiped out. It's very, very difficult to go there and find any plants.
At all there.
But despite the setback, he was still hungry to see it.
I got put.
In contact with someone, and the guy who gave me the information was like, he knows where there's another planet. It's not near the top locality, but you know, I must warn you that he is a poacher. And I was like, okay, well, look I really want to see
this plan. And so he ended up going to this really kind of sketchy part of Tamil Leipis, which was, you know, it's got a reputation for me, just full on Cartel Marcota territory in Mexico, and we were just in the middle of nowhere, and this guy met us on the side of the highway on his motorbike and he was the poacher. He basically walked us through this kind of sclerophytic scrub land. I mean, we must have seen over twenty plants in about forty minutes or so walking around.
It dawned on Burger that when it comes to cactus hunting, poachers are often a step ahead of hobbyists and scientists.
I just couldn't believe it that we were actually seeing so many of this species and habitat because it's just such, you know, scarce information about it. It's so highly endangered. And I started asking him questions about how the poaching things work, you know, because I noticed there were some holes in some of the places that we went to, and he's, oh, they were the biggest ones, like the biggest ones. He had taken and sold them and he made, you know, for him a lot of money in Mexico,
you know. And he was just like, Yeah, I couldn't believe ho much mine I made out of just something that grows in my backyard.
Essentially, that's how so many of us see plants, at least when you're plant blind, just as some thing growing out in the backyard. And frankly, that kind of attitude makes rare plants easier to exploit, especially when you're in a rough patch yourself.
He grows in such a poor part of Mexico on somewhere that's been just oh, you know, extorted by the nacos and stuff. And he saw the numbers declining after he was taking them, when he's like, oh, he expected the next year for that to be an abundant supply of cacti a game, but it's just not like that, because you know, they take decades to reproduce, and especially to grow and produce new plants.
Berger realized that this poacher was just a poor guy trying to make ends meet, which was kind of hard to come to terms with because as a cactus lover and a cactus hunter, not that takes the wind out of your sails, like seeing the environment you love torn apart.
It's great to see a lot of plants in localities and things like that, but if you see any kind of harm or destruction, it just kind of taints the whole experience. So, you know, that's what got me interested in conservation in the beginning, because I could just see the evidence there of the plants being exploited. Essentially, I mean, there's animals and insects that rely on that plant for a food source, for example. So they're part of a food chain.
You know.
The pollen in a flower is right at the very very base of the food chain that supports us as humans, you know, and it comes from a plant flower most of the time. So they're parts of ecosystems, and taking them out of habitat is throwing all of that, of course, and reducing the amount of biodiversity out there.
Coaching takes a toll. Cactive provide food and for at least twenty five species of wild animal, including deer and coyote. They're necessary for the survival of multiple pollinators, and they are a major habitat for ants, the food source for so many desert dwellers. Every plant that is ripped from the land hurts the survival of every species that relies on it. And these plants they don't grow back quickly. You may remember doctor Barberaketch from our first episode.
When you do this, you basically affect the number of seedlings and new plants that are going to get into your population. These plants grow very slowly. Some plants, for example, like the sawara, they don't start producing flour until they're thirteen years old.
And some species only grow in hyperlocal areas.
As in many other cases of people getting obsessed with things is the rarity of them. These plants, like cactus, more than seventy percent of Mexican species are found in Mexico and nowhere else in the world, and they tend to occur in very small areas and sometimes also in very small numbers.
With such small numbers, sometimes one poacher can wipe out an entire genus in one afternoon, and that's prompted scientists to become tight lipped with new discoveries, to act kind of like a botanical illuminati, guarding the secrets of the most vulnerable species. Here's an example. It's nineteen fifty two and a botanist named doctor Norman Bog is visiting the Crosby Hotel in Siouda Drecuna, a Mexican city across the
border from Del Rio, Texas. There at the hotel, doctor Bog spies a tiny cactus growing in a coffee can. It's a pigmy sized specimen nested in pebbles. It resembles a cloud of brilliant white stars, a corona of Fuschia flowers with a Yoki centers. Doctor Bok's never seen a cactus like this before, so he asks the hotel's owner how she got it. She shrugs and tells a story of a mining prospector some guy who had found it while traping through the deserts of Coah Wheela. For a
cactus expert, this was not useful information. Coaheela is the third largest state in Mexico. It's deserts are some of the most inhospitable parts of the country. But Bok thanks the proprietor, takes a few photos and vows to look for this new cactus. Little does he know he just committed to finding the holy Grail, because for the next
four decades, botanists search and search and search. Two of the most dominant cactus hunters alive claim it holds quote undisputed first place in the Great North American cactus Hunt, but the desert is unkind. During one mission, more than fifty people fanned the sand together in search of the plant.
No luck.
For forty four years, the little cactus eludes discovery, and like any treasure hunt, failure causes most people to give up, but for a select few, the dead ends just fuel their desire to find it. Two men hell bent on tracking the plant down are botanist Jonis Luti and George Hinton. In nineteen ninety six, they started exploring the cattle farms
near the Sierra del Carmen, close to the US border. There, among yucca and agave and lowing cows, they stumble upon the sasquatch of cacti and they make an agreement with one another they will keep the plants location a secret.
When a plant gets discovered, the describing author has to put down a type, locality, and this can be really general. It can be as general as a certain state or province from a country. You'll find that there's a lot of cacta that have been described by somebody, but they haven't populations haven't been found since.
As Paul Haxey rates in The Cactus Explorer, the discovery and subsequent secrecy surrounding its habitat had earned it a near mythical status for cactus explorers.
In Mexico, plants and plant distributions especially is such a double edged sword. On the one hand, we want to know where these plants are so we can monitor them and introduce them into cultivation in ethical way, so people can have them. But you know, then there's other people who will exploit that information because these plants, as probably many people know, have become highly valuable, especially plants that are not common in cultivation or take a long time
to reach mature. Do you like someone can take one hundred years to reach adacent size and it has really attractive characteristics that you can't replicate in cultivation. So having the information in the wrong hands can lead to exploitation of these species.
And some secrets are doomed to be revealed rather than quell the search. The discovery of the plant called Luti's pin pushing cactus or Mammalaria lutii fan, the desires of obsessives cactus hunter's legal and illegal alike became more desperate to see the plant. Today, it's become easier to find Mammalaria luti in the market. Two legally cloned specimens spawned a cottage industry, with the little guys selling for around twenty bucks apiece, But in nature the plant remains rare.
The only thing protecting the wild population from extinction is its very elusiveness. It would take only one irresponsible cactus hunter somebody willing to leak the GPS coordinates of the plant's location to risk this rare cactus falling into the hands of the wrong people, people like yev Guinea sophrona. About five hundred and sixty miles from the first crime scene in Benson, Arizona, the white Chevy Tahoe turns up again, this time at Big Bend National Park in South Texas.
The area lays claim to some stunning vistas, towering rock cliffs, muddy dykes, the meandering Rio Grande. For ye have Guinea sifrona of Big Bend is familiar territory. Years earlier, he had visited the national park and had posted more than fifty photos online of the sites, but mostly photos of cacti. Little does he know a federal agent is tailing. Here's Special Agent Albert Gonzalez again.
It was challenging because in many areas that we were attempting to watch them, it was just them. A wide open field and it was just them, so we had to be cognisant of that. We kept our distance. It was a shot in the dark because many times we weren't in a position to have up close visual surveillance on them.
On Maverick Road near Rattlesnake, mountain, a ranger finds their car and follows them deeper into the desert. Now Big Bend is larger than the state of Rhode Island, it's an easy place to hide, so from a high point, the ranger watches the men through a pair of binoculars. From a distance, he sees them examining the ground, but he can't quite make out exactly what they're doing, so he waits. When the tahoe tears away, the ranger descends onto a patch of a Puntia humafusa, or prickly pear cacti.
The prickly pear is a flat and fleshy cactus with eye popping pink flowers. It resembles a mound of discarded ping pong paddles, and its fruit you may be familiar with, tastes a bit like watermelon flavored bubblegum, and although a prickly pear is in margaritas and other foods, it is illegal to remove from federal land like Big ben National Park.
So the ranger follows a tire tracks and their footprints until he comes upon a prickly pear, and, like the agents in Arizona, he finds the same bright sheen of a freshly injured cactus. The ranger gets back in his car and tries to catch up with the tahoe. Later that night, as the sun skates the horizon, the ranger pitches a tent at the same campsite as the tourists
and begins to secretly snap photos of his neighbors. He grabs a shot of that slip of paper with GPS coordinates he watches as you be Guinea Siffronov knife in hand, stuffs the pad of a prickly pair into an empty box of Uncle Ben's rice.
As J.
Weston Pippen reports in the Atlantic that ranger would do more than surveil their every move under the cover of darkness. He would slink toward their vehicle. He'd bend down as if tying a shoe, and then quietly stick a GPS tracker under their car. Satellites follow the men's every move. Now soon the GPS shows them in Utah, exploring Arches
National Park, where special agents are waiting. They watch the men wander a trailhead, occasionally bending over as if they keep dropping some but when the agents comb the site, they find a hole an entire prickly par cactus has been uprooted.
One of the requests that we had from the US Attorney's Office was if we had the opportunity to approach them in a normal encounter, you know, to make them aware that taking anything out of a national park is against federal law. At one of the national parks, we were able to arrange a contact with the park rangers to talk with them casually saying, you know, hey, we realize you're here visiting. You may not be aware of our laws, but it is illegal to take anything out
of the national parks. You can look, but don't touch, don't remove. They acknowledged that they understood that, so they.
Were made aware, and even with this awareness, the tourists continue to pluck the plants from the parks. The Feds have seen enough that Juna lax. The men are at the Aeroflot check in desk bound for Moscow. Special agents with the US Fish and Wildlife Service are waiting for them. They open and search the men's luggage. In Sofronov's bag, they discover thirty four cacti, twenty five cactus fruits, and
thirty six cactus seed packs. The specimens are stuffed in nylon stockings, in trail mix containers, and even an old bag of Crispy creams, and of course that one in a box of Uncle Ben's. Their loot runs the gamut, cotton top, hedgehog, turk's head, and fish hook cactus, among many others. Sofronov seems to have the whole desert in
his suitcase, all of it illegal now. According to Convention seventeen of the International Trade and Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora better known as Sydie's many of these plants are listed as Appendix two. That is, at risk plants, it's illegal to harvest them without a permit, doubly so on federal property. Sophronov is sauntering down the Arrow flot jetway when police catch up to him. Officials ask if he has any plants on him, and he shakes his head.
After pressing, he admits that he had packed some pine cones. The police press harder, Sophronov starts to sweat. Finally he breaks. He admits that he had no permits for the sixty plus cacti hidden in his luggage. Customs and Border Patrol escort him out of the airport. He's detained and his passport is confiscated. Months later, Sophrona pleads guilty before a magistrate judge. His crime carries a recommendation of up to six months in jail, but instead of serving hard time,
he's fined five hundred and twenty five dollars. So yeah, anti climactic, huh. All that detective work, all that following Sophrona around North America and for what a slap on the wrist. That's the problem we're facing because these mild penalties detern nobody. They don't stop obsessives, and as we'll soon learn, they don't stop organized criminals, mobsters, cartels, and government leaders from dipping their toes into plant crime either.
Coming up the session defined rare Plants leads one of our guests to stare down the barrel of an AK forty seven.
These figures just ran to us, all their machine guns, bandanas on their heads, and obviously not recommending the experience because you know you're gonna die.
I'm Summer rain Oaks. Join us again next time for Bad Seeds. Bad Seeds is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts. I'm your host Summer rain Oaks. Lucas Riley is our writer, Gabby Watts is our producer, and Amelia Brock is our senior producer. Fact Checking is by Savannah Hugily and Zoe Farrow. Original music is by Claire Campbell. Sound design and scores by Jesse Niswanger. Development was by Brian Lavin and Jacob Selzer. Special thanks for
a voice actor Mike Coscarelli. Our show art is by Pam Peacock. Executive producers are Brian Lavin, Elsie Crowley, Brandon Barr, Virginia Prescott and Jacob's Elser.
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