School of humans.
It's five in the morning, November twenty fifth, twenty nineteen, and Ivonne Guthman, a thirty two year old fisherman from Mexico's Baja Peninsula, looks out onto Tortugas Bay. The Pacific rolls gently at his feet. The first glimmers of sunrise reveal a patchwork of boats on the horizon. The waters here are popular among sports fishers. Giant schools of black sea bass and fat and yellowtail lure anglers from hundreds
of miles away. That's what brought Guthman here, and now he and five other fishermen prepare their boat and begin motoring out onto the water. Destination Isla de Stedros, a two hour trip from the docks. The island is a rocky spit of land home to just a few thousand people. A few years back, Mitsubishi built a company town here to store salt. But most locals depend on the fishing industry. And then there's the few who rely on the islands well,
let's just call it the underground economy. The Sinaloa Cartel, arguably the most powerful and dangerous drug trafficking syndicate in the West, calls Sadros their turf, but the cartel does not own a monopoly on these waters. Some drug traffickers know SROs as a frontier, a place where small time
drug runners and splinter groups can get their start. Yvonne Gooseman and his fishing buddies they know this, but they're fishermen and they stay in their lane, or at least that's what they tell people, because on that November day they don't cast their lines into the water. Instead, they steer their boat toward the northern point of Sadrus. They cast anchor slosh onto shore and begun unloading dozens of
black plastic tubs. Within minutes, they're tossing hundreds of small succulents into the boxes, and little do they know they are being watched by evening search and rescue teams are looking for the fishermen. One is found dead with a bullet hole in the back of his head, another alive with a gunshot wound to his arm, and Yvonne Gusman well, they find him weeks later, his decaying body bloated, bobbing on the surface of the bay, his legs tightly wound
with rope. In this episode, plant poaching collides with organized crime. How cartels, mobs, and criminal syndicates might be connected to some of your favorite plants. I'm Summer rain Oaks from School of Humans and iHeart podcasts. This is bad seeds. On is La de Seyros, there's a threatened succulent called siempre viva or dudley A pachyphytom. It looks like a starry clump of sea an enemies with delicate hints of
green and chalky white leaves. It's endemic to the island, meaning it only grows there, and in recent years in East Asia, a single wild Dudleya has been selling for two hundred dollars a pop, and that's been attracting people who are hungry to make money, including Mexico's drug cartels.
Criminal activity and criminal networks are often driven by generating profit making money.
You may remember Jenny Felt them from the Wildlife Justice Commission.
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.
In fact, this Dudleya has been luring criminals for a while now. In twenty seventeen, the news outlet Masnotsios reported that the Mexican military had stopped a tractor trailer driven by three Korean nationals and a Mexican. When they pride opened the back doors, they found nearly five thousand Dudley apachef item one million dollars worth of poached succulents, but that was small fry. More recently, the plant's been targeted by major players in the world of organized crime.
Yet we had been saying in our own investigations with wildlife crime was increasing intersection of wildlife crime with other types of crime as well. If there are easy ways to make money and ways to summit the regulatory system around it, that's when other criminal groups might be interested to exploit those networks.
In other words, organized crime syndicats have been diversifying their portfolios beyond drugs. Some cartel's mine iron, others steal gasoline and grow avocados. The Cineloa cartel has an alarmingly large stake in Mexico's legal seafood industry, and now they're moving into succulents. In the case of the missing fishermen, rescuers would find two of them alive not far from where the succulents grow. One was uninjured, but the other was
stained in blood, clutching a bullet wound. Not far from them, officials found dozens of tubs filled with dudley a pachyphytum, and near those bins was the lifeless body of one of their friends, faced down on the rocks. The survivors told authorities everything that they had been hired by El Creq, a sub chapter of the drug cartel. This group, according to the Mexican newspaper and Signata, is involved in quote drug trafficking, drug dealing, homicides, and illegal marketing of the
endemic plant siempre viva. The cartelts believed uses its vast smuggling network to send these plants abroad with poached dudleya, traveling to Tijuana, then LAPAs, then to Mexico City, and then onward to China or Korea and onto the windowsills of unsuspecting succulent collectors in Reais. The cartels are reportedly paid in supplies that can be used to synthesize drugs. It's basically a barter system. All of this, if I'm
being honest, sounds weird. Organized criminals and botany sound like such unlikely bedfellows, but the truth is plants launched organized crime as we know it. And I'm not talking about marijuana or cocaine or all the other plants fueling the international drug trade. I'm talking lemons. We're in Sicily the
nineteenth century and citrus fruits are in high demand. Scientists recently discovered that vitamin C and lemons and oranges can prevent scurvy, and now the shipping industry is knocking down doors to get its hands on some cold, hard fruit.
In these early days, it turned out that Sicily was one of the few places is where oranges and lemon were grown.
That's doctor Ola Olson, by the way. He's a Swedish economist and an expert on the weird link between lemons and the mob.
Cecily could relatively quickly then answer to this greater demand, and this led to kind of a boosting demand that happened in a very weakly institutionalized community.
In the mid eighteen hundreds. The state was too weak to police the people, so rogues, marauders, brigands and highway bandits plagued the countryside. Living in Sicily was every man for himself.
The general environment at this time was a very unstable, weakly institutions, lot of mistrust in government.
For lemon farmers, the picking season was a time to watch your back. A smart poacher could steal a year's harvest in just a night or two. Unable to rely on the state for protection, farmers grabbed shotguns and built walls. But this wasn't enough. The bandits kept coming, and growers began looking for alternatives.
The people who cultivated citrus then needed to employ different types of security personnel, and often this personnel came from groups that had established themselves locally as some kind of strong men that could bring some order to the kind of local chaotic situation. When this sort of state could not really do that efficiently.
Hiring local roughnecks worked, at least for a while. Sicilian lemon production actually skyrocketed three thousand percent over a decade. Profits stored until the men hired to do the security well, they began demanding a bigger piece of the cut.
So in this institutional vacuum. This is together with this huge demand for citrus fruits. That's why we believe that the mafia rose.
The guards watching the lemon groves began organizing and extorting farmers, stealing from their trees and selling the lemons in private.
They actually infiltrated in this way, both acting as middlemen, but also acting more directly in the harbors, in the ports, monitoring and also squeezing rents out of the trade in different stages, so to speak, both directly and indirectly.
The consequences for not cooperating could be dire. In eighteen seventy two, one lemon grove owner, a doctor Golotti, fired his warden for stealing fruit. He hired a new guard, but then the warden's friends shot the new security. Detailed dead menacing letters poured into Golotti's home demanding that he rehire his old help. Intimidation, it turns out, worked. The middlemen of the lemon trade group together swore oaths and
soon controlled much of the fruit supply chain. Some mafioso's were so well organized that they were able to wrest property from the farmers themselves. Eventually, the group expanded beyond fruit. They got involved with local sulfur mines, and when Florida overtook Sicily as a new citrus hub, these groups up well how do I put it new business opportunities.
Like smuggling of people or smuggling of arms. I would say it's pretty is standard that these groups try eventually to diversify as potentially one first origin in a sense, but then they quickly move on to other goods.
The point is organized crime and the plant and wildlife trade. They are more intertwined than you can imagine. Militant groups in East Africa, fron terrorists through ivory poaching the Talipan made hundreds of millions controlling Afghanistan's poppy harmist A few decades ago, insurgent maoists in Nepal beefed up their wartime bank accounts by selling a pricey fungus called cordyceps that and I'm not making this up, grows on caterpillars, and
detective agencies know this. Since twenty seventeen, sting operations staged by Interpol's Wildlife Crime Working Groups have arrested more than three thousand people, and when the dollars are counted, wildlife smuggling only lacks behind human firearms and drug trafficking. The United Nations projects that wildlife crime will continue to increase
five to seven percent each year. And yet, despite this long history, and despite the obvious growth, efforts to stop it have been pretty wimpy at best.
Environmental crime isn't prioritized by law enforcement compared to other types of crime. You know, it sounds a rasourced compared to other crime types. If the penalty is not even one tenth of the profit, which is often the case, it's just a cost of doing business. At the end of the day, will have no impact in stopping or deterring that crime.
Turns out, crime does pay. And if succulents and lemons are enough to lure cartels in the mob, just imagine what it must be like when an individual plant can fetch fifty thousand dollars. A look inside the syndicates stealing the most expensive plants on the planet. When we return, I want you to close your eyes and imagine. Imagine the world sixty five million years yars ago to the age of dinosaurs. You're surrounded by jungle. It's muggy, the
sweat is beating on your brow. Above, winged reptiles sore below. Giant beetles and primitive possums scurry through the undergrowth nearby, munching on some plants is one of my favorites, the long necked Alamosaurus. But I want you to imagine the plant life too. It's so green. There are ferns and conifers and Ginko's galore, some of the world's first flowering plants. Beautiful pink blossoms are taking room. And then you notice this strange stubby tree that is.
A cycad s perfessional is looked like a palm.
That's Anders Lindstrum. He's a botanist at the nong Nutched Tropical Garden in Thailand, home to the largest collection of cycads in the world, which I had the pleasure of visiting a few years back.
The main difference between a psycha and the palm is I will reproductive structure. Palms have actually flowers, but the fertile structure of psychad are looking like pine cones.
These palmy greens are some of the oldest plants in the world.
They're ancient blond groups that spat back to the dinosaur time, and they have survived and actually flourished off to the dinosaur.
Honders call cycads living fossils, and that means they could command a high price a single cycad can fetch upwards of one hundred thousand dollars. If you tallied the profits from all the cycads poached over the last two decades, you'd have more than six hundred million dollars. A lot of those thefts have happened in South Africa. That country is home to a tenth of all sieicad species. In the two decades leading up to twenty fourteen, endangered psycads
there declined ninety percent. In the words of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime.
The illicit psycad trade in South Africa has grown so organized, lucrative, and harmful that the authorities have identified it as a priority wildlife crime alongside rhino, elephant and avaloni poaching.
In fact, it's gotten so bad that some estimates suggest that psychads are now the most endangered living organism in the world. In some parts of South Africa, the rarest wild cycads are now microchipped just in case they're ever stolen, but thefts continue. One allure is, of course their rarity, but also their longevity.
Because they grows so slow, you can keep them probably your lifetime, in your living room, and they will never outgrow your living room, so it's like a piece of vintage art or something. The plant you own is one hundred or two hundred years old and therefore very expensive. So unfortunately, a lot of people see that as an investment. They pay a lot of money for these plants, and they keep it their role life. In the end of their life, they can still sell the plant. Further.
This desirability prompted the New York Times back in two thousand and five to proclaim that psychads were quote the botanical equivalent of a garage full of rolls royces. A cult, the Time said, has grown up around these plants that include a cadre of bad guys who smuggle for profit. These crooks are not drug cartels doing plant crime on the side. These are full time psycad syndicates, and they're doing the dirty work of smuggling these plants overseas with devastating consequences.
An area it has a couple one hundred plants, maybe of some specie, and they have been there for ages, of course, but then the people coming and poach them, and the regeneration is very low. Usually out of three four hundred seeds days. Yes, a few percent that actually survive into majority. So when you're going to many of these populations, if you take out the big plants that set the seed and there is no seedlings to start with,
then the whole population has collapsed. When you take out the mature plants, you basically cut the throat of the whole population.
These plants have been part of the Earth's ecosystem since the dinosaurs. They've survived mass extinctions and global catastrophes, but they may not survive human greed, which is why. In two thousand and one, agents with the US Fish and Wildlife Service courted one of the psychad syndicates responsible. The mission was dubbed Opera Botany. Special agents opened a fake business called Hugh Enterprises, and, using aliases, began seeking out
rare and illegal psycads. Their bids caught the attention of smugglers Rolf Bauer and Yonfonfieren in South Africa. The men were surprisingly open about how they smuggled endangered cycads into the US. They poached the plants from the wild, and before transporting them over seas, stripped the cycads of their leaves. Naked the endangered cycads were unrecognizable, allowing the smugglers to
mislabel them fooling customs, and it worked. In a July two thousand one shipment, the smugglers flew one hundred and fourteen rare Encephalardis Muncii under a different name. In the end, more than eight hundred and forty thousand dollars worth of illegal cycads came through San Francisco International Airport and then came the state. The agents invited the smugglers to Las Vegas as a thank you. After a few nights of partying, the men got into the car that they were told
would drive them to the airport for a private flight. Instead, they got a visit from the fence. The eye don't mean, but cases like this are the exception. Most pycad syndicates work from Afar, much like the Mexican cartel enlisting poor fishermen. Sycad crooks are now hiring locals to do the poaching. But in Southern Africa, the ruse is exposing old fault
lines of race and class. Most of the ringleaders are rich and white, but most of the people on the ground, those at the greatest risk of getting busted, are poor and black. One organized sycad ring in Zimbabwe, for instance, was caught stealing eighty one cycads. More than half of the poachers were unemployed locals, and the rates they earned were a busy just six dollars for a three thousand dollars plant, less than half a percent of the total cut.
We did dozens of interviews for this podcast, and that's been a theme that as bad as poaching is, many of the people doing it aren't the ring leaders. Many are doing it out of desperation. But Anders has a story of how he might be able to break that cycle.
There was a cyca from China, Cycas debuensis, and they said the population was like a thousand plants, and when it was described, everyone went in to dig it with the help of the locals because they needed money and everything. And we went in there and we did an inventory of the whatever plants were left in the wild, and at the time we had less than one hundred plants left. So what was the problem. Why why did the local
dig the plants? Oh they needed money, right, yeah, everyone needs money, But for what This was a village shop in the mountain, far away from everything. You can't just go to a supermarket and buy a new car or something. So what do you need the money for? Oh, the kids needed school and the closest school was quite far away. To get them to school was a major financial burden for their village people. So we suggested that what only get to school built nearby, actually right in the village.
And we also raised money from the Psychic Society in the US and they provided the books, pencils, and so on for their kids.
And after a lot of wrangling and hobnobbing, the school was built. Parents weren't so desperate for money, and the kids got to stay home, and the plants well, they started to thrive again.
Now I believe it's over one thousand plants back in the wild again. Everyone is happy. If we didn't step in at that time, they probably wouldn't survive in the long term. You can come in and say don't dig this plant, don't do that. You know, you can fence it all in and build a cage and whatever, or you haven't solved the problem. Unfortunately, not a very common approach in nature conservation.
But Anders thinks that over time that could change. More conservationists are realizing that band aids don't work that. If we want to stop the cycle, we need to address the root causes of poaching. When Yvonne Guzman and his fellow fishermen set out on that November day, they didn't give much thought to the macroeconomics, the market implications, or the international supply chain. They were just trying to earn a buck, and as news reports later showed, it appears
the money led fishermen to a fatal mistake. Reports suggest that the men may have agreed to pick succulents for not one, but multiple competing cartels. If true, it appears that the word got out the fishermen had failed to show loyalty, and so that day a boat of goons
ambushed them. In the end, two men, including Gusman, were murdered. Now, admittedly succulents are still a pretty small part of the cartel's portfolio, but stories like these are sadly becoming more and more common, especially when you consider other plants, especially trees.
With our research, we found that there's quite a strong link. We've teamba crime and drug chaffee king. That link, he's really strong, particularly in Central and South America.
In fact, the experts already have a name for it.
Narco deforestation is sort of a term that's being used more widely now. Forest's being cut for airstrips, for landing planes to move product from where it's grown and producing into consumer markets. There's forest clearing that happens for cattle ranching, for laundering drug money. You've got forest areas being cleaned, sometimes even in protected areas, to grow coca.
And some groups are just cutting and stealing trees for the old fashioned reason to make money. Take Columbia. When FARK signed a peace agreement a few years ago, smaller crime syndicates groups like Los Bontieros and the National Liberation Army swarmed in and started clearing land. Just recently, a criminal network was arrested for illegally chopping down eight hundred and sixty five acres of forest in Central and South America.
Narco forestation has turned into a cottage industry. The timber not only earns cartel's a tidy income, but also helps hide the dirty dealings lurking in the shadows.
So the timber industry could be used as a kava, for example, a concealment method. And we've wildlife trafficking. We often say that as well that team the companies can be used as front companies.
The reasons for it are by now obvious low risk, high reward. But as species disappear, organized criminals are expected to make more than one hundred and nineteen billion dollars this year in the illegal trade of plants and animals, but the ripple effects are worse. The estimated impact of these environmental crimes is expected to cost more than half
a trillion dollars. Slaps on the wrist aren't going to stop that kind of money, especially large cartels, which are perfectly situated for this kind of business.
They must have a chain of people who are buying sourcing products, consolidating them to make those big shipments. People who are organized in terms of liaising, getting the logistics together to move that shipment, getting it through a port or an airport to move it internationally.
The bigger the group, the harder it is to find who exactly is responsible. In fact, even when we know these crimes are happening, it can be hard to stop them. Take this case from twenty fifteen. So there is this containership.
Fully loaded with timber, and it's.
Set to sail from Peru to.
The United States to Houston. Was it some final destination.
Well, on that day it's supposed to depart, everything stops.
A public prosecutor came on board and tried to seize a portion of the timber.
Apparently the word got out that some of the timber.
Fifteen percent of the total.
Is illegal. The inspectors have a chat with the ship captain and eventually they come to an agreement.
Leave port, deliver the timber just returned with that fifteen percent portion that was found to be illegal at the end of the voyage.
So the ship leaves port and the investigators they start looking deeper into the keyse They.
Were looking at all the documentation from the timber where it was extracted from to verify whether it was legal or not.
What they find sharks them letting the boat go was a huge mistique.
The entire shipment was actually illegal. Around ninety six percent they found was illegal.
But now it's too late.
The ship had sailed and eventually it was delivered to the United States.
It's worth noting that this has led to dozens of court cases, many happening right now, and it seems likely that whoever was behind this illegal harvest, they probably had some kind of connection to the people on the inside.
If a company is paying to get a license in a way that is outside of the official process, it's very likely that that money has to flow up the chain to the individuals signing off on that license or permit, which is a person you know sometimes right at the top.
You know the old phrase follow the money. Well, when you follow the trail left by organized criminals, sometimes it leads you to the halls of power.
There've been other allegations in other countries involving very senior officials, very high level individuals.
To political leaders, and some of the companies you love coming up.
I'm in a terrible trouble, and they deserve to get into trouble. The corruption was so high level that the paperwork could be really seem pristine enough.
They came in.
Everybody, we heard, we're being rated.
We're being rated. Everyone to the back. 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 Hugely and Zoe Farrell. Original music is by Claire Campbell. Sound design and scores by Jesse Niswanger. Our show art is by Pam Peacock.
Development was by Brian Lavin and Jacob Selzer. Special thanks for a voice actor Miranda Hawkins. Executive producers are Brian Lavin, Elsie Crowley, Brandon Barr, Virginia Prescott and Jacob Selzer.