Reptile dealers smuggled thousands of creatures worth $5 million from the US, feds say

A pair of reptile dealers smuggled ball pythons, blood pythons and more protected creatures for years out of the U.S. with the help of a man from Miami, Florida, federal prosecutors said.

Now one of the reptile dealers is headed to prison after the others involved were sentenced, according to the Justice Department. Prosecutors said at least 107 crimes were carried out in the case.

As part of the smuggling scheme, nearly 9,000 reptiles — valued at more than $5 million and protected by an international treaty — were illegally shipped to Asia, prosecutors said.

This went on for several years as the two reptile dealers would often travel to the U.S. to use the Miami man, who owned a reptile breeding business in the city, as their “conduit” for smuggling creatures out of the country, court documents say.

A judge sentenced the one reptile dealer, a Canadian national, to one year and two months in federal prison on Monday, Jan. 30, the Justice Department announced in a news release. The other reptile dealer was sentenced to one year and one month in prison in February 2022.

Sam Rabin, the first man’s attorney, told McClatchy News on Jan. 31 that his client was “sincerely remorseful” over the case and “took full responsibility for his actions.”

Rabin also represented the second reptile dealer but declined to comment on his sentencing. McClatchy News contacted attorneys representing the Miami man, who officials said was sentenced to one year and a day in prison in November, for comment and didn’t immediately receive a response.

The 8,738 protected animals smuggled out of the U.S. were species listed on Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) treaty, meaning they could face extinction if their trade isn’t strictly regulated, prosecutors said.

Alongside ball and blood pythons and Argentine tegus, common tegus and iguanas were also protected animals that were smuggled, according to officials.

How the illegal reptile smuggling worked

The two reptile dealers ran a reptile business in Hong Kong, according to a complaint. The most recent dealer sentenced had a history of exporting snakes, turtles and geckos from the U.S. to Hong Kong, the complaint says.

The two men would travel to the U.S. to buy protected reptiles and worked with the Miami man, who owns Dynasty Reptiles, to smuggle them with fake paperwork, prosecutors said. Specifically, they’re accused of using the Miami man’s CITES permit and submitting fraudulent paperwork to the U.S. government to do so.

Under the CITES treaty, the endangered or threatened species trade is legally enforced through permits, officials said.

The men’s “fraudulent shipments” of protected species also contained 61,622 animals, including several smuggled creatures, not protected by the CITES treaty, according to prosecutors.

The men “abused a system designed to streamline the exportation of captive-bred reptiles for law-abiding breeders,” Assistant Attorney General Todd Kim of the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division said in a statement.

“They allowed other business owners to sell and ship reptiles to buyers in Asia without going through the federal agency vetting process.”

The trio was also accused of a conspiracy to violate the Lacey Act, which seeks to stop illegal wildlife trafficking, prosecutors said.

Each of them pleaded guilty “to conspiracy to falsely label wildlife being exported from the United States and to smuggle goods and merchandise out of the United States as well as submitting false records and false identification of wildlife intended to be exported,” the release said.

Rabin said the prison term of the man most recently sentenced was below the guidelines prosecutors recommended because his client “dealt exclusively with captive-bred animals as opposed to those captured in the wild, the conduct historically proscribed by CITES and the Lacey Act.”

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