Demon Fish (21 page)

Thompson and all five of his co-defendants did not get off so easily. After being indicted, they all pleaded guilty under the Lacey Act, which prohibits the interstate sale of wildlife taken in violation of state laws. The pastor admitted that between 1992 and 2003, he had led other church members in a scheme to illegally catch and sell leopard sharks to aquarium dealers in the United States and Europe: in return he was sentenced to pay a $100,000 fine and serve a year and one day in prison. While they sold some of the leopard sharks locally, according to their guilty pleas, the poachers shipped most of them out of the Oakland and San Francisco airports, selling them for prices ranging between $9 and $75 each. In a pet store, leopard sharks can fetch as much as $240 for a single animal.

During the time the criminal ring was operating, authorities estimate, Thompson and his associates—all of them church members—took as many as 25,000 baby leopard sharks out of San Francisco Bay and sold them for profit. They sold the sharks far and wide: in their indictment federal authorities accused the ring of selling 465 juveniles to companies in Miami; Chicago; Houston; Romulus, Michigan; Milford, Connecticut; and overseas in Britain and Holland.

The successful prosecution ultimately yielded a payoff for the region’s wildlife: authorities established a $1.5 million partnership between the federal government and private foundations in order to restore habitat for sharks and other animals living in San Francisco Bay. The shark smugglers’ $410,000 in fines, combined with a $500,000 contribution by the Unification Church and $600,000 from an environmental group and three foundations, provided the money for the fund. While the money is still in the process of being spent, it will help to restore 630 acres of tidal habitat for endangered species and 230 acres of pond habitat in an area called Eden Landing Ponds. The money will also help create a seasonal loop trail, a raised walkway, and a kayak launch, so people can visit the area and view wildlife without damaging the habitat.

A few of the smugglers’ sharks managed to make it out alive. Officials from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Chicago’s John G. Shedd Aquarium, and the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Pedro, California, all helped care for the thirty-six baby leopard sharks state and federal agents had confiscated during the course of the investigation. While seven died because they were in such poor condition when they were recaptured, aquarium officials returned twenty-five of them to the ocean and kept four of them on exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The ones kept on display have microchips implanted in them, a precautionary measure officials took in case they needed to bring them into court as evidence against the shark traffickers. Agents called the effort Operation Finding Leo.

While the sting ended in success, Fish and Wildlife’s Lisa Nichols is still fuming over the minister’s hypocrisy. During the search of Thompson’s house, agents came across large amounts of religious education materials that promoted the importance of ethics, she recalls, and the disconnect between Thompson’s preaching and his criminal activities rankled her.

“When someone’s the pastor of a church, and they consistently preach about being moral and ethical, and you have literature in your house that says you’re a good family man, you’re ethical and moral, and then you think, ‘We’re going to sell this animal to make money,’ it doesn’t matter what you use that money for. It doesn’t matter if you spend it on kids, and taking them to sea to learn about the ocean,” she says. “That doesn’t make sense to me.”

On the other hand, Nichols has spent enough time dealing with wildlife traffickers to know why leopard sharks proved to be such a big seller before federal authorities cracked down on the trade. Nichols saw the creatures in California’s fast-food restaurants and casinos, to say nothing of the pet shops that she would visit from time to time.

When it comes to the wildlife collector’s mentality, Nichols explains, “if it’s cool, and rare, and unusual, and nobody else has it, I want it. I don’t care if it’s illegal, I want it. I don’t care what it does to the animal, I want it. I don’t care if it’s bad for the environment, I want it.”

Globalization has only boosted wildlife trafficking, as electronic commerce has made it easier to connect buyers and sellers worldwide. It’s taking sharks out of the sea, one transaction at a time.

While Torres catches his suspects by chasing their colleagues down across the country and tracking their activities through secretive documents, Mahmood Shivji nails his in the confines of his lab. Shivji is a calm man with a confident air, the kind of academic who revels in getting a bunch of shark fins or frozen fish from a restaurant thrown on his laboratory table and telling you exactly which species they represent and why it matters. An Indian raised in Kenya, Shivji now makes his home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he directs the Guy Harvey Research Institute at Nova Southeastern University. Nova Southeastern is, in many ways, America’s school of the future. Founded in 1964, it now ranks as the largest independent institution of higher learning not only in Florida but in the entire Southeast. The school took off in the 1980s when its leaders decided to seize upon emerging computer technology and make online and distance learning a central part of its mission. It now has more than twenty-six thousand students, many of whom spend much of their time learning online.

As part of the school’s transformation, university officials decided in 2005 to jettison their traditional mascot, the Knight (as in shining armor), for the Shark. For a school that lacked a distinctive image for decades, adopting this marine mascot has given it a sense of place, as well as a connection to some of its academic pursuits. “It has been the greatest thing we’ve done,” says Nova Southeastern’s president, Ray Ferrero Jr. While that may sound like an overstatement, Ferrero is serious, given the school’s historic lack of identity. The campus’s university center has a 250-foot-high mural featuring seventeen different shark species, and students—who suggested the switch in the first place—have embraced the new standard-bearer with enthusiasm. The change suits the school, which boasts classroom outposts on the Atlantic.

While Nova Southeastern’s main campus is right in the middle of Fort Lauderdale’s suburban sprawl, Shivji’s lab is by the sea. His workplace in Dania Beach is distinctly less glamorous than the university’s newer grounds: some of his researchers work in what amounts to a converted trailer. But Shivji’s students seems unfazed by these details.

A plant geneticist by training, Shivji hadn’t planned to work on sharks at the outset of his career. Shortly after arriving at Nova Southeastern, he happened to read a story in a local newspaper that detailed how authorities had difficulty keeping track of how many quantities of different sharks were being landed in the U.S. fishery because the animals looked so similar. Imagine a pile of gray logs: that’s what sharks look like once you’ve cut off their heads, tails, and fins. Since they’re so difficult to distinguish by the time they land on the dock, government officials often have no way of determining which imperiled species might have been hooked in a given catch.

“I didn’t know anything about sharks at the time,” Shivji recalls. “I thought to myself, as a scientist, ‘That’s not a complex question if you look at the DNA.’ ” He called up Lisa Natanson, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist based in Narragansett at the time, and asked whether she’d be willing to share some of her shark samples with him. Natanson complied, and Shivji’s career headed in an entirely different direction.

Shivji set about developing diagnostic, species-specific “primers”: short single-strand pieces of DNA that will bond only with DNA from specific shark species when put through a machine that makes copies of DNA using a chemical process called a polymerase chain reaction, or PCR. Shivji describes it as “a diagnostic fingerprint.” He now has species-specific primers for thirty-two different kinds of sharks, which he provides to others for free.

Shivji’s work has produced scientific breakthroughs, defining new species and forcing researchers to rethink some of their basic preconceptions about sharks. Demian Chapman pursued his doctoral work under Shivji, and the two collaborated on the revolutionary paper that confirmed a virgin shark birth in the Omaha zoo. In 2002, Shivji collaborated with three other scientists to prove that skates and rays, which were long thought to have evolved from sharks, actually belong to an ancient sister lineage.

But Shivji does not devote the bulk of his time to publishing academic papers. He’s a pragmatist who’s invested in producing concrete policy outcomes, which is why he’s spent his time developing so many easy-to-use DNA tests. When law-enforcement officials are sorting through a passel of sharks that have just been unloaded on a dock, they’re hoping to get an instant answer about whether the boat has brought in illegal goods. To do that, they need a test that can deliver a verdict quickly. While he describes his original motivation for studying sharks as academic—“I was looking at this from a science perspective; we can likely solve this problem through genetics”—Shivji takes pleasure in the fact that his innovations have translated so readily to the practical. In one study, he traced scalloped hammerhead shark fins on the Hong Kong fin market all the way back to their geographic origin in the western Atlantic, where they’re classified as endangered.
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“It’s infrequent that academic research makes a practical impact as quickly as this has,” he observes. After all, other researchers don’t have federal agents showing up at their lab with, say, moldy suitcases a woman from Ecuador tried to smuggle in through Miami, asking them to take a look. It turned out the luggage was stuffed with dried shark fins, sea horses, and fish swim bladders. Shivji wonders what the smuggler was thinking at the time. “You look at these suitcases bulging, and they smell. How would anyone imagine they would get by customs?” he ponders. But shark fins are light, easy to pack, and not likely to break in transit, making them ideal for smuggling across borders.

Many scientists work under the assumption they have years to produce a final result, and can spend significant sums toward achieving that end, but Shivji recognizes that law-enforcement officers in the developing world face both budgetary and time pressures when they’re trying to analyze illicit goods. “In most parts of the world, they don’t have the resources to do DNA sequencing. It’s not something a resource-poor country can have their fishery managers do.”

Shivji’s analysis has already spread to developing countries. South African law-enforcement officials have asked Shivji’s lab to conduct an analysis of confiscated fins, as has a Palau-based conservation group. An intergovernmental group representing Southeast Asian countries, SEAFDEC, asked him to determine if a group of fins they nabbed included any from the three shark species protected under international law. While none of the fins they sent to the lab violated the law, the group was impressed enough to dispatch one of its experts to learn forensic techniques at Shivji’s lab in the spring of 2008.

Even law-enforcement officers in richer countries see the advantages of using rapid genetic tests to identify shark species. Before Shivji developed his form of analysis, NOAA agents would have to ship samples of confiscated shark meat packed in dry ice to the NOAA lab in Charleston, South Carolina. Often, it would take as long as a month for scientists there to conduct a test of the fatty lipids contained in the meat and make a positive identification. Shivji requires just a small section of a fin—the amount equivalent to the graphite tip of a pencil—and he and his colleagues can deliver a verdict within four hours. During peak times of operation, the lab can analyze eighty to a hundred samples in a single workday.

In the process of his experimentation, Shivji has become a shark forensics specialist, working with law-enforcement authorities and researchers alike to analyze dead sharks. And that, in turn, has led to more shark busts.

Even shriveled shark samples can yield some significant results. In 2003, officials from NOAA and New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation were touring a seafood warehouse in New York City’s Navy Yard on a routine inspection concerning black sea bass caught in North Carolina. Jim Cassin, an NOAA special agent based in New York at the time, and his two colleagues noticed the warehouse had a large number of shark fins in storage, along with a fairly elaborate fin-drying operation. Then they spotted a massive fin from a basking shark—a species that is strictly controlled under international trade laws—stretching more than three feet high.

“It’s giant, there’s no denying it,” Cassin recalls. “We saw it almost immediately, but we tried not to let on we had noticed.” In addition, they saw a huge nylon sack of fins that said “porbeagle” on the outside, signaling the fins came from a legally fished shark species, with a label on the inside reading
blanco
, or white, in Spanish. That, the agents suspected, meant the fins came from great whites, another one of the three internationally protected shark species.

After raising the issue with the business’s owner, Marc Agger, who downplayed the matter, the agents kept the conversation light and took off. A week later they were back, with a search warrant, which enabled them to confiscate the bag and bring it to Shivji’s lab for testing. The lab determined that more than 230 pounds of the fins came from species that are prohibited from harvest, including basking and dusky sharks. The bag that first alerted authorities contained twenty-one sets of fins taken from great whites.

On August 1, 2006, the Brooklyn-based Agger Fish Corporation agreed to pay $750,000 to settle the case, a rare win in the realm of shark fin smuggling. The seafood dealer agreed not to contest that it bought shark meat and fins without a federal permit, failed to report most of those purchases to federal authorities, and possessed fins from seven shark species that are prohibited under federal law. In addition to the federal penalty, Agger Fish had to forfeit nearly a thousand pounds of dried shark fins, including the prohibited species catch worth roughly $80,000. To this day, Cassin isn’t sure whether Agger was deliberately flouting the law or just too lazy to check which species of shark fins he had stored in his warehouse. But he adds, “He was in that industry. He should have been making the effort.”