Plant smuggling

Brian Jones (bjones@netcon.smc.edu)
Tue, 11 Apr 95 16:48:14 PDT

As reported in the _Los Angeles Times_ today, April 11, 1995 (Metro),
an Alameda county prosecutor plead guilty here to charges that he
smuggled more than 200 endangered tropical pitcher plants from
Indonesia and Malaysia into the United States.
He admitted that he and two other members of the Bay Area Carnivorous
Plant Society travelled to these nations and mailed or brought the plants
back to the U.S., without permits.
They did this by telling authorities that these packages contained gifts,
T-shirts, figures or engineering products.
He and two others, including the society president, plead guilty to
conspiring to import endangered plants, and face up to two years in
prison.