Woman smuggled sea cucumbers into U.S. in luggage at Fort Lauderdale airport
A 38-year-old woman has been sentenced to one month in federal prison after pleading guilty Monday to smuggling shark fins, seahorses and sea cucumbers into the country and passing them off as “fish belly” and to attempted smuggling of American ginseng out of the country, which requires a federal permit to export.
Xiao Pingping was alleged to have been shipping packages containing the wildlife into the U.S. from Brazil since at least 2021, according to a criminal complaint. Several of her packages were seized in Oregon that year, but the shipments continued.
Pingping sent a package from Brazil to a Florida resident in January 2022 labeled as containing “fish belly,” according to a factual proffer, when in actuality it contained 33 seahorses, 435 sea cucumbers and 16 shark fins. The wildlife is required by federal regulation to be declared to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and an export permit is required for the seahorses, but she intentionally mislabeled them.
Sea cucumbers belong to the animal group that include starfish and sea urchins. They are shaped like cucumbers and are covered in tentacle-like appendages to move and feed on the ocean floor, according to the National Wildlife Federation. They are found in most marine environments across the world and their populations are stable. They are considered a delicacy in some countries, according to the wildlife federation.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of California announced earlier this year the guilty pleas of two people who were illegally importing a protected sea cucumber species into the U.S. without the necessary permits, according to federal prosecutors’ news release. Zunyu Zhao and Xionwei Xiao had trafficked a total of $10,222 worth of sea cucumbers during the conspiracy between 2017 and 2019.
In 2017, the Southern District of California prosecuted two business executives and their company for illegally trafficking $17 million worth of sea cucumbers between 2010 and 2012. The demand for sea cucumbers as a delicacy has spiked the illegal trading and caused significant declines in their population in some parts of the world, federal prosecutors said in a 2018 news release announcing the executives’ sentence of paying over $1.2 million in fines.
In mid-November, Pingping was stopped at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport by U.S. Customers and Border Protection after arriving from Nicaragua. An X-ray scan of her luggage showed “various anomalies,” the factual proffer said.
Pingping told the agents she was not carrying any wildlife she needed to declare, but they found 11 sea cucumbers hidden in clothing in the luggage, the factual proffer said. She said they were “fish belly” at first but later admitted they were sea cucumbers.
Five days later, she was attempting to board a flight from Fort Lauderdale back to Nicaragua when Customs and Border Patrol officials stopped her on the jet bridge. She had checked a cardboard box onto the flight, which was found to have organic materials inside, the factual proffer said.
She again told authorities she had nothing inside the cardboard box or her carry-on luggage, the factual proffer said. After searching both, authorities found nine bags and four boxes of American ginseng, which is a federally protected plant species and requires an export permit.
The plant is native to the U.S. and grows in forests, and while some states and tribes allow the harvesting and trading of it in certain conditions, it is illegal to harvest the roots on most state lands and in all National Park Service lands, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
According to a criminal complaint, Pingping’s alleged shipments dated back to at least 2021. She was accused of shipping several packages that purportedly also had “fish belly” inside from Brazil to people in South Florida, Oregon, Illinois and California.
A U.S. Wildlife inspector seized three of Pingping’s packages in Portland, Oregon, in 2021, according to the complaint, altogether allegedly containing thousands of grams of dried shark fins, chocolate chip sea cucumbers and dried meat.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forensic lab determined the shipments included fins from scalloped hammerhead sharks, great hammerhead sharks, silky sharks, shortfin mako sharks, blacktip sharks and bull sharks, according to the criminal complaint. The dried meats were allegedly spectacled caiman and black caiman, which are crocodilians.
The species of sharks and caiman that were allegedly found in Pingping’s seized packages in Oregon are classified by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora as species that, while not currently threatened with extinction, could be in the future if trade is not closely regulated, according to the convention’s definitions.
She pleaded guilty Monday to two counts of smuggling shark fins, sea horses, and sea cucumbers into the United States and one count of smuggling American ginseng out of the United States and was sentenced the same day to one month in prison, federal prosecutors said in a news release Thursday.
