School of Humans.
The Gibson Guitar Plant in Nashville is not much to look at. It's a one story brick building seven miles east of downtown, wedged between a bend in the road and a few parking lots. But this is where music history is literally made. Bb King, Joan Jett, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Sister Rosetta Tharp, Eddie van Halen, and Muddy Waters, even Sheryl Crowe. Gibson is the guitar choice of legends. That magic is what attracted Bill Gibbs to take a job there.
Imagine growing up being a kid who played guitar all your life, and now you get to work at the candy store where all the goodies are made.
It was a dream job, at least at first. Gibbons admits the work wore him down. The demands were high, the hours long. And then on November seventeenth, two thousand and.
Nine, I was on a lunch break. One of my Gibson friends from the plant texted me and said, dude, we're being raided.
Dozens of armed officers, federal marshals, and special agents with the US Fish and Wildlife Service storm the floor. They tell everybody to stop working and begin rummaging through the shop. Agents tear through containers, boxes and palaces. They rifle through papers and filing cabins, and then they crack open four green tubs holding planks of wood, deep black in color.
Bingo, my friend that text me back. Apparently it's about illegal wood.
The wooden question is called Diospyros pararii, but most people know it as ebony. It's from Madagascar. It's dense, rare, and perfect for making high end guitars. Givens and the team are confused. Ebeny is precious, sure, but it's also been used on guitars for decades. Like, what's the deal.
They're like, ah, you know, it's probably nothing. You know, might have been a mistake or whatever.
The government confiscates all the wood, and eventually Givens would go back to work and forget all about it until two years later, August twenty eleven, and it happens again.
It was one of those days where we knew it was going to be a long night. I think we were all exhausted and they came in. We heard we're being rated. We're being rated. Everyone to the back and they all gathered us all into like the lumberyard area.
Thirty federal officers entered the guitar factory. Many of them aren't.
Apparently there were ar fifteens. It was never like a threatening or scary environment at all. It was just like, okay, well, let's let them in.
The Feds turn the place upside down. All in all, they seize an estimated half a million dollars worth of Dalbergia sissu, a rosewood from India.
And it was just like, oh God, here we go again.
I'm Summer rain Oaks from School of Humans and iHeart podcasts. This is bad seeds. Okay, do you want to say something dad?
Hello? Yeah?
Okay, that's working perfect, all right? So you brought over your black less Paul. This has been yours for how long?
When did you get this?
I boked this in nineteen seventy three?
And why did you buy it? What was the allure?
The allure was a friend of mine was in a band and he had a black less Paul custom. I said, if you ever want to sell it, let me know. So he said, yeah, I'll sell it to you. I played it in garage bands when I was up and coming, and.
I mean it is black. It's black as night.
I mean, is this like a like? Is this ebony or like?
What kind of Is it a hardwood?
It's got an ebony fretboard.
Gibson guitars are frankly part of my family, especially they're less Pall models, which is considered one of the finest guitars ever made. I remember seeing it around the house, hearing my dad play it a bit, but I never really thought much about the black wood it was made of or where it came from. At Gibson Gene Knicks
had to think about those questions. In June of two thousand and eight, he boarded a flight for Madagascar, and for the next two and a half weeks, he and two other major guitar makers explored the country as part of a fact finding mission, learning if it was still possible to legally harvest Diospiro's Parade Madagascar ebony. After the trip, Nix discussed the challenges in an email with his colleagues.
The true ebony species preferred by Gibson Musical instruments is found only in Madagascar. This is a slow growing tree species with very little conservation protection and supplies are considered to be highly threatened in its native environment due to overexploitation.
High end musical instrument manufacturers you should know, are picky about their wood, and for good reason. Every tree has a different density that affects the quality of an instrument's sound, and certain woods are better than others. Alan Schwartz is a good friend of mine and he's supplied wood for instruments, and it's a tough job.
I have for a while supplied African blackwood, which has been used to make woodwend instruments because it's extreme stability and the fact that I don't know if you've ever played a woodwind instrument, I mean they get really disgusting in guy and messy and full of spitz and mucus and god knows what else when you play it. It has to be a material that does not change with moisture, because otherwise the notes will change.
Each instrument is different. High end clarinets sound best made from woods like grenadilla from Eritrea, ukuleles from the Flowering Poetry of Hawaii, and piano soundboards spruce, and the more high end and instrument, the pickier a manufacturer is. Take pianos, American maid steinways only use Sitka spruce from British Columbia.
The Austrian brand Buzendorferm only uses Austrian spruce grown at a very specific elevation, and Betzioli in Italy only uses spruce from the Fima Valley of northern Italy, the same forest that produced the world famous Strata Varius violins. Problem is what's good for the instrument isn't always good for the tree, like the African blackwood. Alan once supplied.
African blackwood, which grows in all of Dry Africa and even up the Rift Valley as far north as Armenia as a plant, was used in Biblical times for woodwind instruments, but it has become successively rarer.
As one's gone along, a lot of musical woods are becoming exceedingly rare, and it's putting manufacturers in a bind. In the violin world, the best bows are made from Brazilian pernambuco aka pow Brasilia echinata, but today the tree is endangered. Guitar makers face the same problem making fingerboards. Diospiro's Paraii or Madagascar ebony, is one of the woods
of choice. It's dense and handsome, deep black in color, but it's slow to grow and difficult to replace, and now it's illegal to harvest unless an act of God, such as a storm, causes the tree to fall. In fact, according to side the International Treaty Guiding the Trade of Plants and Animals, quote, nearly all of the large diospirros parie trees have disappeared from western Madagascar.
When you watch the movies of Madagascar, you really have this expectation of a tremendously feaken place, and when you get there it is definitely not that. It really just doesn't have any of that biodversity left.
In two thousand and eight, Gibson execs landed in Madagascar in hopes of finding some of that lost biodiversity. When they returned, they came home with news of a miracle. A local ebony supplier had all the right paperwork. All of the boxes were checked with notorizations and signatures from all the proper government officials. When Gibson began exporting the ebony to custom officials in Africa and Europe gave shipments a thumbs up. But when it got to the Gibson warehouse,
well you know the rest of the story. The Feds pounced and Gibson CEO Henry Juskowitz was livid.
At first. I thought it was a joke because we make guitars and I'm not aware of any threatening issues with the guitar business.
Bill Gibbons remembers the company blasting the government for overreach.
They got their media team together because I think they knew they were going to be under the radar, and they put together this short film talking about the government coming after them.
In a letter to the court, the company's lawyers argued that the wood was perfectly legal, and they had the paperwork to prove it.
This is not a case of inaction by the Maticascer government, nor is it a case where ebony wood was cut and shipped under cover of darkness without the knowledge of Madagascar officials.
With this statement, the Gibson legal team was alluding to a very real problem in the United States and the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Washington State, a ring of wood thieves stole about eight hundred thousand dollars worth of protected timber, and they were trafficking it to musical instrument manufacturers, including PRS Guitars, an American company that makes guitars for musicians like Carlos Santana. Gibson's lawyers were adamant, hey, we're
not doing that. They were sourcing wood from a German supplier with a century's worth of experience. The wood was certified by NGOs like the Rainforest Alliance and the Forest Stewardship Council. But was this seizure really a miscarriage of justice or did the government know something we don't. The raid at Gibson happened because of a one hundred and twenty two year old law, one that originally had nothing to do with guitars or wood, or, for that matter,
plants at all. The law was originally about feathers. It's the late nineteenth century, and if you're a Manhattan socialite looking to turn heads, then you've got to wear a hat, be dazzled in flowers, jewels and ribbons. But if you really want to impress, you got to have bird feathers. Feather hats are all the rage at some department stores. They sell for more than three thousand dollars in today's money. In fact, the feather fashion industry employs some eighty thousand people.
Folks living in wetlands from Massachusetts to Florida are happy to meet the demand too, with bird feathers selling for more than fifteen dollars an ounce. They slaughter approximately five million birds a year, but not everybody is happy about this. By the late eighteen hundreds, Americans have watched beavers and bison nearly disappear. Birds are next. The newly founded Audubon
Society begins pleading with the government do something. Audubon finds a sympathetic ear in Congressman John F. Lacey, a conservationist. Lacey authors a bill making it a federal crime to transport wildlife from one state to another. The new Lacy Act has an immediate impact. It becomes illegal to kill birds in Florida and sell the feathers in New York. It effectively kills the trend and saves many birds from extinction.
Over the century, the Lacy Act would balloon. By two thousand and eight, it would expand to protect plants and trees, and its enforcement powers are wide because if you or your supplier commit a wildlife crime outside the country, the US still has the authority to enforce the law. When Feds raided Gibson, they pointed to the Lacy Act. Somewhere along the supply chain. They claimed there was wrongdoing. Gibson CEO did not like that explanation.
We have affid davids from government officials in Madagascar that say that it's perfectly legal to do what we did.
The issue became a cause celeb among the political right, even making its way into the halls of Congress.
Last month, agents rated the Gibson Guitar factory in Tennessee. Why because Gibson bought wood overseas to make guitars in America And.
There's no Grizzly Bears in downtown Nashville or in Gibson Guitar that we need to be concerned with.
But inside Gibson, people like Gibbons were starting to wonder.
I figured maybe there was nothing to see here. I don't know what this is the second rate I'm aware of. At this point, I'm thinking something's going on.
None of this makes sense, Neither did the paper trail. Court filings show that Gibson ordered the wood through a company in Hamburg, Germany. The Germans had purchased the ebony from an exporter in Madagascar, a guy named Roger Tuna. The wood was sign at Tunam's mill, placed on a vessel from Portavuima and stowed on a ship called the Liverpool Express, which traveled from Hamburg to New York to Charleston,
South Carolina. In court documents, Gibson's lawyers argued the paperwork proved there was no violation of the Laciact.
Neither the import from madagasc Or into Germany nor the subsequent export from Germany to the USA were objected by the German or European community authorities.
Lawyers for the wood supplier in Germany were even more forceful.
My client protests with all emphasis against the allegations said he as a member or supporter of a worldwide Lumba mafia, said unlawfully exploits topic rainforests.
But all the paperwork in the world and all these claims of innocence didn't wipe away the fact that something was fishy, because Roger Tuna, the man running the mill in Madagascar, was not who he was made out to be, and it would take a retired marine working under cover to unmask him.
My name is Alexander von Bismarck, and I'm the executive director of the Environmental Investigation Agency the problem is that when you buy the furniture or something, it's really hard to know what criminality is at the beginning, and who knew in the middle right of the chain.
The person selling to you can say I had no idea. Everybody told me this was fine.
But von Bismarck's a smart guy. He's a Harvard grad and an expert on wildlife poaching. He's heard these excuses before, and for.
That reason particularly, we tend to go undercovered.
In two thousand and nine, Alexander von Bismarck assumes a new identity. He sets up a fake timber company with a phony website and fake business cards. He flies south to Madagascar and weasels his way into the country's timber mafia, claiming he's a businessman on the hunt for a legal rosewood.
When you're having open business to business conversations, the truth reveals itself pretty quickly.
Von Bismarck comes to the timber barons armed with questions, how.
Do you do this, how much does the wood cost, how many bribes do you have to pay, who do you have to pay? How do you get it out? Even though there's a zero export quota.
In fact, those conversations lead him right into the office of Roger Tuna. The timber baron has no clue that his guest is carrying hidden cameras and a GPS. Tunam shows him around the lumberyard and discussions quickly turn to how Tunam sources his trees. They're not being felled by acts of God, They're being deliberately and illegally chopped down from a national For von Bismarck, this confession isn't enough.
He asks to see the product for himself. Tunam agrees, and a logger leads von Bismarck deep into the nationally protected forest. He sees the stumps with his own eyes. He tags locations with the GPS. His guides even show him the towering trees that are quite literally on the chopping block. When they take von Bismarck down to a nearby river, he floats past two hundred boats hauling the trunks of illegally logged trees, and then he visits Tunam's mill.
There are saw blades screaming with stacks of ebony piled four hundred yards deep. At one point, he asks his guides about a stack of dark planks. They speak nonchalantly. How that would it's being cut for guitars. I can't say it's the same as going under cover, but I remember having a similar experience. I was lucky enough to visit Madagascar ten years ago, and I remember we were walking this large field with our guide and I kept seeing these ferns growing and I thought, this is weird.
Ferns don't grow in fields. Ferns grow in and around forests. And when I spotted this chameleon, this poor chameleon, and I thought, again, you'd expect it to be living in a bunch of trees. And then we started seeing the stumps and I realized this is the forest or it was. It's gutting, and not only does it hurt the forest,
it hurts the people who live around it. My friend Alan, the guy who sourced wood for instruments, he was there with me, and he recalls seeing people carving a plain white wood and then treating it with something.
What they were doing is taking a mix of red and black shoe polish to kind of give.
It a with the most beautiful woods destroyed. People recovering plain woods with shoe polish to pass them off as ebony. Allan who does most of his work in Mozambique, has seen the effects of this indiscriminate cutting firsthand.
The number of timber exporters has diminished dramatically. The government claims that it is clamped down and it has reduced the log exports, but it's not reduced because the government did anything, because they did nothing. It's reduced because there isn't anything left to sell.
Madagascar has technically tried to avoid this same fate. It's passed laws to keep lumber collection sustainable. In two thousand, the government made it illegal to explore unfinished wood products from the country. This included the sawed down wood Gibson was received, and in two thousand and six they banned the cutting and extra action of any type of rosewood or ebony. Then in two thousand and nine they made a list of just thirteen people who were licensed to
export rosewood and ebony. Roger Tunam was not on that list. Gibson's ebony collection violated all of those laws, and it was very likely coming from a national protected park. Faced with this information, Gibson's lawyers appear to have moved the goalposts.
If the wood had been illegal, or if Tunam did not have government authorization to export the wood, then one of the many Malagasy officials involved in the process would have prevented the shipments from leaving the country.
If the wood was so illegal, then how did Tunam get these shipments rubber stamped by the government? How did he sneak it past NGOs like the Rainforest Alliance. Alexander von Bismarck has an answer to that.
The corruption was so high level that paperwork could be really seem pristine enough to get through even neighboring countries that are supposed to not allow that trade.
In fact, it was good enough to fool the Forest Stewardship Council or FSC if you don't.
Know exactly where it's from. Unfortunately, even a sticker like FSC is not a guarantee these days at all.
That's because at the time FC didn't verify or control the legitimacy of a wood harvest. It based its ratings on risk assessments, and apparently the risks were higher than they had imagined. In a country where the majority of the nation lives on a dollar a day and the rule of law is weak, bribes go far. Here's what one malagassy official told the Environmental Investigation.
Agency Rumorzebat ve carription of our agents circulate where involvement would consist of closing their eyes when vice surprise lagers in the park in exchange for a c amount.
In fact, not long before von Bismarck had made his undercover visit, the district head of environment and Forests, the person with the power to issue and collect permits, was arrested and Roger tunam while it was an open secret that he was a timber bearer. In the words of one local.
Official, Tuna mis not a business man, He's a traffica.
The question is did Gibson know this and if they did, when did they know it. Here are the facts. The man supplying Gibson with the goods was a known documented poacher. The wood was extracted illegally, it was exported illegally with phony paperwork, and since Gibson was in possession of illegal timber, the Leasy Act gave the federal government a right to seize it. But Gibson's management still cried foul. After all, it wasn't their fault. They were just trusting their supplier
in Germany. They were trusting the certifications from prominent NGOs. This sounds fair at first, blush, but Alan doesn't have much sympathy.
You look at the guys who relied on a certifier to say that they would was fine a third party, and they bought timber from Madagascar, and they got into terrible trouble because even though it was certified, when somebody actually looked at it closely, it may have had a certificate,
but it was actually illegal. And that was Gibson. They're gone in a terrible trouble, and they deserve to get into trouble because they bought stuff which they didn't actually check properly, and they relied on some bloody tick box to tell them that it was okay.
In court documents, Fed suggests that Gibson could file a civil lawsuit if they had unknowingly bought corrupted wood, then that made them victims of fraud, but Gibson never sued. The reason why is anybody's guess. But according to court documents, Gibson's top brass allegedly knew about Roger Tunam because remember Gene Nix, the Gibson employee who visited Madagascar in two thousand and eight in search of a solid legal source
of ebony, he had visited Tunam's lumberyard. In an email, he wrote that Tunam's supply was under seizure from the Madagascar government.
It's under temporary seizure. It cannot be moved, substantial stored quantities of cut items for export, including blanks for various instruments, mostly ebony.
In another email, Nis openly told his colleagues that at the time exporting wood was banned.
All legal timber and wood exports are prohibited because of widespread corruption and theft of valuable woods like rosewood in ebony.
In other words, Gibson's own man on the ground notified leadership of the risks. The following year, an email received by eleven top people at the company contained an attachment showing that only one person had any legal right to export Madagascar ebony. That person was not Roger Tunam. In fact, a government affidavit shows that quote all the legal ebony stock inventories which had been approved by the Madagascar government had been exported prior to April two thousand and nine.
Yet the guitar maker continued ordering wood from Tunam through its middleman in Germany. As Nicks put it in.
An email, mister Tunam should now be able to supply our middleman with all the rosewood and ebony for the gray market.
The market a shady market that put the survival of this gorgeous ebony at risk. But when those raids happened at the Gibson plant in Nashville, Bill Gibbons says, that didn't seem to be a concern.
Nobody cared about the environmental impacts. From my perspective and what I saw, it was about keeping the machine going, and those motivations varied depending on who you talked to.
Gibson would ultimately settle with the government. It agreed to pay a three hundred thousand dollars fine plus a fifty thousand donation to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Gibson's CEO insisted the settlement was not an admission of guilt, and while the facts of the Gibson raid were a bad look for the guitar manufacturer, it was worse for the Forest Stewardship Council and the Rainforest Alliance, which had mistakenly certified illegal wood. These certifications are relied upon by
corporations across the globe. Later investigations by the Tennesseean newspaper would reveal that, starting in two thousand and six, the Rainforest Alliance had accepted yearly cash gifts from Gibson ranging from three hundred and fifteen thousand dollars to three hundred and ninety thousand dollars, making the guitar manufacturer one of
the Alliance's biggest donors. The Alliance has denied the donations had any influence, but the investigation revealed other holes, namely, the Gibson's chairman and CEO, Henry Jeskowitz, was serving on the Rainforest's Alliance board of directors at the time the ebony was being certified. All of these connections might convince you to grab a tinfoil hat to find a conspiracy in the works.
Now.
We reached out to Gibson to hear if they had any response. In an email, they insisted, quote, this was well over a decade ago. Gibson is an entirely new company, and that's true. The company's leadership is now very different, and frankly, we're not trying to stick Gibson's nose in it. Rather, it's a bit of a parable of a much larger problem that verifying the sustainability of wood is really really challenging. But it's not impossible. I know, because Alan has a story.
So Taylor guitars use ebony for their fingerboards, and they had previously been buying from Central Africa, Congo whatever through dealers and Bob Taylor he was buying stuff and he said, you know, I don't really understand all of this because in reading the documentation that he got from the certified timber, he said, you know, I remember hearing a story about the bullshit that was going on in Congo. So he
called me and he said, what's the story? And I said, look at the bloody disas that these guys have got a certification but they've actually looked it out to the forest and it's all legal, but it's certainly not moral. And he said, well what do we do? And I said, well, you know, let's look for somebody who's also got ebony and see if they are doing it sustainably. And you couldn't find anybody. He wrote an incredibly fat check to the guys in the bush to say this is what
you need in order to make this sustainable. He then to know fat check to the forestry department of the university and said, you've got to work out how to do this and make sure that I'm having proper sustainable ebony for mar guitars. And there's a different level of responsibility. They actually are doing the job to see to it directly that it is sustainable.
In other words, the best way to know the source of your wood is to actually go to the source. And this kind of sustainability it isn't just a buzzword or a box to check. Honestly, it's just a good business.
And more important, they are going to outlift all the other guitar mankers because they're going to have the materials.
Coming up.
Five years ago, you see mccule ere, we were Yees Province.
Now there is nothing.
The corruption was so high level that the paperwork could be really seem pristine enough to get through even neighboring countries that are supposed to not allow that trade.
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 Farrow. Original music is by Claire Campbell. Sound design and score is by Jesse Niswanger. Our show art is by Pam Peacock. Development was by
Brian Lavin and Jacob Selzer. Special thanks to our voice actors Andy Sandford, Joel Ruiz, ben Etter and Dicana Riccotto. Executive producers are Brian Lavin, Elsie Crowley, Brandon Barr, Virginia Prescott and Jacob Selzer.