Demon Fish (20 page)

We like seeing sharks, as long as they’re contained. The British conceptual artist Damien Hirst made the link between sharks and humans’ mortality when he put a freshly killed tiger shark in his piece
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living
in 1991; a decade later the piece fetched $8 million at auction. (The shark had decayed over time because it was not floating in formaldehyde, and Hirst ordered a new shark killed to replace it.) The hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen, who now owns the artwork and paid for its restoration, told
The New York Times
he “liked the whole fear factor” of the piece. “I grew up in the generation of ‘Jaws.’ I knew it was the piece of the 90’s.”
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In September 2008, Hirst created a second piece with a dead tiger shark, titled
The Kingdom
, which sold at Sotheby’s for more than $14 million, more than 30 percent above its asking price.
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Such exorbitant art sales are rare. But the preoccupation with sharks as pets is much more widespread and has provided a powerful financial incentive for plundering, a subterranean network that robs the natural world of some of its most prized residents. The international trade in wild animals, sharks among them, amounts to roughly $6 billion a year.
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And while much of the time these acts go unpunished, sometimes the perpetrators get busted. Whether it’s using old-fashioned undercover work or high-tech genetic analysis, government officials and academics have begun collaborating to track the illicit trade in sharks worldwide. In doing so, they have also discovered aspects of sharks’ movements, lineage, and behavior that were unimaginable just a few decades ago.

At least one site,
www.sharkwrangler.com
, gives a decent glimpse into the world of online shark trading. Like other men who make their living off sharks, Ken Moran appeals to consumers by tapping into their fear and fascination, assuring them he can handle the creatures they could never envision approaching. “Ken Moran, the shark wrangler, hunts, collects and transports large predator sharks for use in the aquarium industry,” his site states. “He was drawn to sharks as a child with the release of
Jaws
. Gripped by its ability to tap the primal public fear of sharks, he became fascinated with the ocean’s apex predators. Instead of fearing these powerful animals, he works confidently and carefully with them.” The site gives a long list of sharks he has “handled” (it does not specify which he has put in aquariums and which he has worked with in the wild), including nine-foot-long bull sharks, nine-foot-long sand tiger sharks, ten-foot-long hammerheads, and fifteen-foot-long tiger sharks. While he makes a point of saying he is “NO cowboy” when it comes to sharks, he also goes to great lengths to point out how risky his profession can be. In the case of a fifteen-foot tiger shark, the site notes in brackets, “This size animal is not a hold in your arms specimen!”

In reality, of course, Moran and other dealers make more of their living off smaller, bottom-dwelling sharks that can live in a glass tank. Leopard sharks, which are easily found off the coasts of California, Oregon, and Baja California, Mexico, are the sorts of sharks that most people see in aquariums—and are tempted to take home. Tan, with dark spots, the fish are physically striking and less demanding to maintain than other shark species. Rather than needing to constantly swim in order to breathe, like some species, they’re fine spending much of their time resting at the bottom of the sea, or in a tank. Spanning just ten inches when they’re born, they reach up to six or seven feet, and they can live as long as a quarter of a century. However, these sharks often die early in captivity.

While the illegal shark trade can be profitable, it poses risks both in and out of the water. For more than a decade Kevin Thompson—pastor of the Bay Area Family Church, a branch of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, in San Leandro, California—managed to pull it off, peddling leopard sharks on California’s central coast. That was before Roy Torres of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration started looking for him.

Torres, the son of Mexican immigrants, grew up in Imperial Beach, California, the most southwesterly city in the United States. Imperial Beach once held the title of “eighth funkiest town in the U.S.,” a fact Torres relates with pride as he’s navigating San Francisco’s streets in his blue Dodge truck. His career philosophy combines hard-nosed law enforcement with an emotional attachment to animals, especially those of the sea. “I believe what we’re doing is so important, enforcing the laws the people of the United States, through their representatives, have passed, to protect the places where they love, their fellow creatures,” he explains as he drives on a surveillance mission. “It’s kind of a deep thing with me.”

In 2003, an NOAA smuggling expert in Miami spotted an online ad for a baby leopard shark and started making inquiries, eventually handing off the case to Torres. Torres and his colleagues had been checking out sites in Las Vegas to see whether establishments such as Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino—which now boasts a Shark Reef exhibit that, according to its Web site, houses “over 2,000 animals in 1.6 million gallons of seawater”—were housing illegal leopard sharks. The casinos were clean, but the agents found leopard sharks less than thirty-six inches long—a violation of California law, since citizens cannot possess, take, sell, or buy leopard sharks that small—being sold in places as far away as Georgia. “There’s not a leopard shark in Georgia,” Torres says, adding that finding the fish for sale so far away from its natural habitat raised an automatic question within NOAA’s offices.

At the same time, other federal agents were becoming curious about what was happening in their respective jurisdictions. A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agent based in San Diego, Lisa Nichols, got a tip that a group was taking leopard sharks at night from San Francisco Bay. Then Nichols got a call from Dave Kirby, a Fish and Wildlife special agent in Chicago who had noticed that small sharks were starting to appear in pet stores in Illinois and in other parts of the Midwest. While a small percentage of marine ornamental fish can be raised from fish farming, more than 90 percent are caught in the wild. In the case of sharks, all specimens come from the sea—so any aquarium’s gain is the ocean’s loss.

Given the broad scope of any illegal animal-smuggling operation, Torres worked by tapping into law-enforcement authorities across the globe. Over the course of three years his team pulled in help from the U.K.’s Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs Fish Health Inspectorate and the Dutch General Inspection Service, along with Fish and Wildlife special agents from Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, New York, Texas, and Wisconsin. But when it comes to trading in marine ornamental fish in America, there are just three major commercial centers: Los Angeles, Miami, and Tampa. In the case of Kevin Thompson and the Unification Church, Miami was where their operation started to unravel.

Torres approached the probe with the same sort of strategy used to crack other criminal conspiracies: nab a low-level participant who is likely to turn on his or her superiors when exposed to legal scrutiny. Ricky Hindra, an aquarium dealer based in Miami, was the first to talk. Hindra suspected that his leopard shark supplier was two-timing him by peddling his animals to another dealer, and decided to engage in Dumpster diving to prove his suspicions were justified. During one of his trash raids he came up with a cardboard air bill from his Los Angeles supplier, showing a shipment from San Francisco to Miami on American Airlines. At the time Hindra didn’t know the significance of his find, and shoved the document into his office files. But when Torres spotted it, he used it to track down the shipper through the airline: it was Kevin Thompson.

That one air bill, however, was not enough to bust the pastor and his disciples. State and federal agents began learning how Thompson worked, how he recruited young men with low self-esteem, housed and fed them free of charge, and encouraged them to join his flock. The recruits served as the pastor’s fishing crew, while his top lieutenants handled the business side of the operation. Initially, Thompson and his adherents stuck to commercial fishing, but given the rough waters and declining fish stocks off the California coast, the business didn’t exactly thrive. One day, an associate of Thompson’s, John Newberry, spotted an ad for leopard sharks in a trade magazine and realized they could make money off something that they had already been catching by accident and tossing back into the water. At that point, in 1991, catching leopard sharks was legal, but just a few years later the state banned the practice and the group faced a choice: give up their cash cow, or go underground.

They chose the latter. They weren’t exactly slick about it, openly touting their business in faxes. In an August 15, 2006, plea agreement, the pet trader Ira Gass recounted, “Newberry solicited me via facsimile to buy sharks. I told Newberry that he should not widely distribute his facsimile solicitations because it was illegal to sell the sharks and he could get into trouble for doing so.”
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Thompson was also comfortable discussing his pet store supply ring with his congregation, inside the walls of his church. Moon denied knowledge of Thompson’s activities once he and five associates were indicted, but the pastor told his flock that Moon—who calls himself King of the Ocean—was well aware of the illicit shark business. According to an audiotape of a 2003 sermon Thompson delivered titled “Lessons from the Sharks,” which was first reported in the
East Bay Express
, the minister told his congregation their leader backed the plan. “When I had the chance to tell our founder Reverend Moon about it … he told me, you know, ‘You need
twenty
boats out there fishing!’ ” he said. “He had this big plan drawn out, you know.”

Thompson and his cohorts also liked to amuse themselves with the captured fish, as he playfully described in the same sermon. “We usually do diving competitions—throw them up by the tail and see if they land, you know, nose first into the water,” he told the audience. “Usually they do belly flops.”
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But one of the young men within the pastor’s circle, Brandon Olivia, didn’t embrace this illicit game plan. The entire enterprise disheartened Olivia, who decided to move across the country to a different Unification Church outpost in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Once Torres learned about Olivia and his disillusionment, he knew he could crack the case.

Olivia found work at True World Foods, the King of the Ocean’s commercial seafood operation based in Gloucester, which helps ensure the church’s place as one of the nation’s largest sushi wholesalers. Torres knew he would have to conduct a cold interview: once Olivia had a hint of what was coming, he might take off instead of ratting out his former mentor. So the agent contacted the Massachusetts environmental police, who were able to track down Olivia’s commercial fishing license. Local authorities made up a story about how there was a problem with Olivia’s license, and one afternoon Torres and a state officer showed up at the True World Foods seafood processing plant. Olivia was on the floor, and the three men headed outside to the parking lot to talk fish. They perched on the hood of Torres’s rental car as traffic whizzed by on a nearby road.

Torres started the conversation in a low-key way, inquiring politely about Thompson’s fishing ventures. Olivia prattled on about the various legal fish they caught: halibut, salmon, and other species.

After listening for a while, Torres got to the heart of the matter. “Can you tell me about the leopard sharks?”

Olivia got quiet. “Oh, you know about that?” he asked tentatively.

“Yeah,” the agent replied. “I need you to tell me the truth about the operation.”

That was when Olivia began to cry. In the end he told the officers everything he knew: about how Thompson and his cohorts targeted pregnant female sharks, egged on by escalating profits, even though they knew they were breaking the law. He confided how the entire business made him question his faith in the church. After initially demanding that Torres turn off his tape recorder, he agreed to tell the whole story again while it was rolling. “That was the last nail,” Torres says now.

Torres soon discovered Thompson took full advantage of the Unification Church’s resources in carrying out his trade, though it’s unclear whether Moon explicitly condoned the poaching. The fact that the church—formally known as the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity—has such a big seafood wholesale business made it even easier for the shark smugglers to operate. Thompson maintained three of the church’s fishing boats on True World’s lot and kept the juvenile sharks he and his allies had taken from the wild in tanks on the sushi distributor’s property.

Newberry, the pastor’s number two, told prosecutors and the court that Thompson used all the Unification tools at his disposal and funneled the profits back into his house of worship. “He directed me and other Church members to catch, store, ship and sell the sharks. We fished for the sharks using Church vessels and stored the sharks at a facility located in San Leandro, California, owned by a business associated with the Church,” he declared in his August 2, 2006, plea agreement. “I understand that monies made from selling the sharks were used to maintain Church boats which were used by Church members for ministry related activities in the Church’s ‘Ocean Church.’ The monies were also used to finance living expenses of members of the Ocean Church.”
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Torres can no longer talk about what the Unification Church did, or didn’t do, when it came to Thompson’s illegal enterprise. The church entered into a nonprosecution agreement with the U.S. district attorney in Oakland in which it agreed to pay $500,000.