Jordan
This is a story about goods illegally crossing the border to Canada and where those goods came from and how they came to be in a package at the Calgary airport that was moving. This is a story about turtle smuggling, which is more common than you’d think, probably because you wouldn’t think it ever happened at all. But it does, in large numbers. There is demand around the world, including here in Canada, for a particular type of turtle that is prized for its aesthetically pleasing shell. It used to be prized for the soup that you could make from it. But that’s a whole different podcast. This podcast is about turtle smuggling and about the man who sent that moving package to Canada and other moving packages to other places across the globe. Why? How big was this smuggling ring? Who wanted these turtles in Canada? And for what? And how much, exactly are people willing to pay for a baby turtle freshly stolen from a New Jersey Marsh?
I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, this is The Big Story. Dr. Claire Fiesler is a journalist and a fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. She wrote this astounding piece in the Walrus. Hey, Claire.
Clare
Hi. It’s nice to be here. Nice to be with you.
Jordan
I’m so glad you are, because this story is like I said, astounding. It’s kind of crazy. Where did you find it?
Clare
These stories kind of find me to be honest. I don’t even know where to begin. I guess it all begins in a dinner party in Washington, DC. One of my close friends, I live in Washington, DC, and one of my close friends lives here, too. He works for the Department of justice, and he knows I’m from New Jersey. And he said, there’s this really interesting case going on in New Jersey and turtles. I can’t really talk about it because I think it’s still under investigation. But you should look into this. They’re trafficking turtles out of your home state for Asia. And I just thought to myself, wait, New Jersey? Where I’m from? And that just seemed like the colliding of worlds. And that was in 2018 that that conversation happened. And I just started digging from there.
Jordan
So tell me then about the mysterious package at the airport that started this whole thing.
Clare
So in August 2014, there are some staffers, I think they work for customs at the Calgary International Airport, and they’re sorting through packages, and all of a sudden, one of them starts moving. And the person who described this to me, who is the director general of wildlife enforcement for the Environment and Climate Change, Canada. His name is Sheldon Jordan, and Sheldon Jordan described it like this. He said, “packages don’t move unless it’s Harry Potter.” And the customs agent opens it up and comes spilling out, eleven tiny baby turtles no larger than a baseball.
And there was no food. There was no water. They were bound in multiple layers of packaging. And when the customs Inspector looked at the package closely, he saw that it comes from Pennsylvania and was marked just as a book. And the name on the package was the name Dave Sommers.
And so right away, they had a sense that things weren’t quite right because these turtles are not from Canada. They’re from America. What are they doing here? And this kind of sends off some alarm bells and goes all the way up to Sheldon Jordan, who I just described. He’s the director general, and he calls his counterparts in the United States and says, Can you look into this name? And then that was 2014. And it wasn’t until a couple of years later that Dave Sommers was arrested and brought into custody for, a few different crimes, including poaching.
But what’s interesting is that it wasn’t just this one guy whose name was on the package. The more I started digging, the more I realized that he was connected indirectly to this other wildlife trafficker who I’ve been reporting on completely separately. And so I was reporting for The Washington Post on this other man named Kang Juntao, who is a Chinese National. And I was reporting for the Walrus on this man, Dave Sommers. And it was only until, like, a year into the reporting both of these stories that they realized that they were connected.
Jordan
We’re going to get into that investigation in just a minute. But first, tell me about the turtles. What kind of turtles are they? What’s special about them?
Clare
I’m an American, and there are just some things in American culture that just kind of get into your psyche. They kind of exist in the pop culture zeitgeist. And these turtles do as well. They’re technically known as Northern Diamondback Terrapins. Mostly people call them Terrapins. And they’re known to me, at least, as being kind of this icon associated with the Grateful Dead. Are you familiar with the dancing bears of the Grateful Dead?
Jordan
Right. Yes.
Clare
So those turtles that are kind of associated, those are Terrapins. The Grateful Dead has an album called Terrapin Station. Like everyone else, I grew up listening to all sorts of music, including The Dead. So that’s what I knew them from. And then, as I got older, they’re a mascot here, the University of Maryland, they’re known as the Terrapins.
Jordan
Right, yeah. That’s where I know them from.
Clare
Yeah. And so I thought they were like a Maryland thing. I didn’t even know they existed in New Jersey. And I’m really embarrassed to admit this, because I am a marine ecologist. I have a PhD in ecology. The fact that I didn’t know that this animal that is a threatened species existed in my home state. I grew up at the beach. They live right there in the backwaters, in the salt marshes.
Jordan
Why do people want them?
Clare
That’s a great question. Well, they want them nowadays as pets. 100 years ago, they were really sought out for soup. Terrapin soup. Turtle soup. It was super popular. It was even the favourite meal of a US President. I think it was President Taft, his favourite meal was turtle soup, which they made from Terrapins. But the soup craze the Gilded Age sent the population plummeting, and the turtles were very scarce for a while. And then when they started rebounding in the 70s, which I talk about in the article, they started appearing on the pet market, and they just became really, really popular. And not just in the States, but they got really popular in Asia. So popular that people pay more for a Terrapin than I did for my Honda CRV a couple of years ago. Up to $25,000.
Jordan
For a pet turtle?
Clare
Yeah, that’s correct. Yeah. People pay up to $25,000 for a pet turtle, which is hard to wrap your mind around.
Jordan
Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. Where was the package going that the Canadian officials noticed?
Clare
Yeah. So the package was bound for Saskatchewan. And when I asked about this, why didn’t the officials interrogate and bring in the buyer from Saskatchewan? And it turns out, my sense is that that buyer was just an ordinary individual who just wanted a pet turtle. Well I guess eleven pet turtles. But they were completely unaware that they had been wild caught. They were assuming that they were captive raised because that’s how Dave Sommers advertised online. He duped a lot of his buyers.
Jordan
Explain the difference between captive raised and wild raised.
Clare
Captive raised turtles are turtles that are from captive breeding stock. They are animals that are raised entirely in captivity. They often are very docile. They are fed a diet mostly of processed pet food. They won’t be carrying diseases from the wild. They’re often protected from that. Animals that are poached from the wild, they often can carry diseases. They can often be very aggressive, and they often have markings from just interactions in the wild. And the most important thing here is that captive bred Terrapins, they cost a lot of money to raise and rear. And so they’ll often be more expensive. And the ones that are wild caught, the person who’s selling them is making a lot of money because they didn’t invest all the money into rearing them. And that’s why the wild caught ones are the ones on the black market, because they’re the ones you can make the most money off of.
Jordan
So authorities traced this package back to, as you mentioned, a David Sommers, who is he?
Clare
So Dave Sommers, he now is retired, he’s a grandfather. I found out during my reporting that he is a Little League baseball umpire. Really involved in his Church. He lives in the suburbs. But for 20 years, he was really well known in the Pennsylvania, New Jersey area for being a really dogged, hard nose reporter. He worked for The Trentonian , which is one of the New Jersey’s largest newspapers. He started kind of reporting in the tabloid style for a while, he interviewed celebrities. I mean, wow, when I first went to interview him in 2019, Dave Sommers told me that he had interviewed Mike Tyson and Bill Clinton.
He loved journalism, and that was his main profession. And as a journalist myself, it was so hard for me to understand how he could then enter into this world of poaching and trafficking. But I think I’ve come to understand a little bit more. I’ve had the opportunity to speak with him a couple of times. A lot of that was off the record. He was very cautious because he’s a journalist to speak with me on the record. But as I got to know him, I really started to understand why he did that. And a lot of that didn’t make into the piece because it was much more about the larger kind of system and networks of crime. But I actually have a lot of compassion for him and his situation, which also might be hard to understand. It’s just really complicated why and how people get into this.
Jordan
How did he do it? What is the actual process for trafficking turtles?
Clare
So to understand how you poach and traffic turtles, you need to know a little bit about their biology and their ecology. So if you want to just kind of come with me into the salt marshes in New Jersey for a second, I’ll try to make this brief.
Jordan
Yes, please.
Clare
Terrapins are really unique in the turtle world because they exist in both saltwater and freshwater. They’re the only turtle that can do that. And so they live in these areas called salt marshes. Some people know them as estuaries. A lot of people come swamps, but they’re not really swamps. They’re these coastal bodies of water that are brackish. So they have salt water, not as salty as the ocean, but not fresh, either.
And they live in these salty environments, and they can burrow down into the mud. And they spend a lot of their life actually kind of burrowed into the mud. And in the summertime, they kind of come out and they forage on the little fish that live there. It takes them up to eight years to kind of reach an egg laying phase. And so that’s a signal to us as biologists and ecologists, that they live a very long time. We actually don’t quite know how long they live. Some people think it’s 50 years. Some people think it’s over 100 years. I spoke to a zookeeper that claims that these animals are living well over 100 years. We don’t even know.
But what we do know is that every summer, around July, at least in New Jersey, the dates kind of fluctuate whether you’re in Massachusetts, which is the Northern part of the range, or all the way down in Texas which is the Southern part of the range. But in July, the females come out and they lay eggs kind of on the Sandy areas in the marsh, really similar to the way you might see on a BBC Nature documentary of sea turtles laying eggs on the beach. And so these animals are coming out and you know when they’re coming out, they do it at night. When they’re digging their eggs, they’re doing it very slow. They’re turtles after all.
And so if you know enough about where turtles are and the the good nesting areas and what that looks like, you can actually really easily poach them. What’s interesting about this is that there are certain sites in New Jersey that he poached from because they’re more protected as far as they’re away from the human coastal development. They’re away from the vacation sites and the tourist sites, which makes up a lot of the New Jersey coastline. And I actually got two emails from readers who are mad at me that I had revealed in my reporting where Dave Sommers had poached the turtles from because it’s so easy to poach them that they thought that maybe someone would just read the article and go take the turtles themselves.
To summarize, these turtles are coming out in July. The females are laying every July these eggs. If you know enough about their biology, you can go find them in July in the middle of the night doing this. And you’ll probably come across multiple or at least you’ll find their nests. And then what Dave Sommers would do is he would uncover the nests. I think one time an undercover investigator saw him dig over 35 different holes, which they thought were nests he had uncovered. He would take the eggs out of those holes, which are these kind of like sandy holes in the bank. Put those eggs in a bucket, and then in the middle of the night, he would go back into his garage, and he would hold those eggs up to a flashlight.
And this is called candling. Because the shell of the egg is so thin that when you hold it up to light, you can actually see the embryo inside. You can check the health of the embryo. You can actually see the embryo move if you work your flashlight just right next to the egg at nighttime. So you can check that they’re in good shape. And then he would take these eggs and he would kind of rear them in his house in his basement.
And it’s fascinating, because when investigators went with a search warrant to search his house in 2017, they found over 3000 turtles in his house. He was rearing in this way of taking these eggs. And then he would sell them online. And he would say online to people that these were captive raised. But federal prosecutors spent a lot of time following him. I mean, multiple nights, these investigators would camp out next to his house. And there’s actually a video. If you go to the Walrus website, there’s a video that I was able to get my hands on and provide to the Walrus, which is an actual undercover video of Dave Sommers in 2017 candling these turtle eggs in his garage.
And so there’s just no way that what he was selling online was captive raised. I mean, it was so clear that these were poached. But the problem there for the kind of consumer is that it is legal, it’s highly restricted, but it is legal to purchase turtles, terrapin turtles that are captive raised. It’s really hard to raise them in captivity. So it’s not as lucrative as just stealing them from the wild and then selling them.
And so something that I was saying to a colleague the other day, the problem here is that there’s a legal trade and there’s an illegal trade and one kind of hides the other. And that’s what makes it really hard to catch these wrong doers. In the case of Dave Sommers they were able to do it because he was working at such high volumes. But that’s really the hard part of this is that who’s to say whether something that’s sold at like a pet shop was captive raised or not. There are some indications that you can use, but it’s hard.
Jordan
So how then does Sommers fit into the big picture? Because this is the last aspect of the story that I want to talk to you about. He’s not the only guy doing this. You mentioned already that you’ve been reporting on somebody else doing this. Is there a network? Is this organized in any way or is this just a whole bunch of people who can get their hands on turtles trying to make money?
Clare
Yeah. So there is a much larger network, and I’m still reporting on this, because here in the United States and in Canada, investigators are still following different leads through this network. And the network, I think of it very similar to drug trafficking. There’s a person on the corner selling drugs, there’s a middleman, and then there are the people who are kind of like the real ringleaders. So Sommers was a little bit of a middleman here.
And there’s this other man named Kang Juntao, who was living in China. he was a medical student, actually in China, who was purchasing a lot of turtles, not just Terrapins, but different types of North American turtles, box turtles, wood turtles. And it’s hard, I was never able to uncover evidence that Kang Juntao purchased directly from Dave Sommers. I do know that they corresponded, and I do know that there was money that went between them. But the investigators were never able to kind of say beyond a reasonable doubt that that was for turtles.
I was able to identify this go between a man named Billy Gangemi Jr. Who was purchasing turtles from Dave Sommers and then he had been a supplier to Kang Juntao. But there are also many other suppliers. In my reporting, I’ve been able to identify at least eight to twelve people that have been found guilty or plead guilty within this ring and piece them together and how they’re all connected. But it’s really hard. It’s really hard to do that. I had to file Freedom of Information act requests to the government to try to get some of this information which is not publicly available. Some people want to talk, some people don’t want to talk.
So, Jordan, the thing that is an uphill battle for me is that I’m trying to piece together this network in the United States, this larger network, much bigger than Sommers, that is involved in the taking and the smuggling and the trafficking of our endemic reptiles. But some people don’t take it seriously because it’s turtles. It’s not Ivory. It’s not rhinos.
Jordan
That was going to be my next question, which is, aside from the fact that these turtles, are maybe not endangered, but are at risk, what’s the harm here? What is the potential downside?
Clare
Yeah. So I guess, to answer your question, I’ll reference this wonderful article that was published yesterday in Scientific American, and the headline was something like, ‘to conserve more species act while their numbers are high.’ And it was published by another writer, a journalist named Michelle Nijhuis. And she’s written a lot on the natural world and animal conservation. And she wrote it because yesterday just happens to be Lost Species Day, which, the point of Lost Species Day is to remember those animals that we’ve lost, like passenger pigeon, the Dodo bird. I can mention so many. But the idea here is that we can’t wait until these animals are on the brink to act. That’s the dangerous time. We need to act before they get in the red.
And we have to be grateful for the species that we have here in the United States. These Terrapin turtles are remarkable creatures. I mean, evolutionarily speaking, they’ve been around since the dinosaurs, and they have this tolerance for fresh water and salt water. And they live these incredibly long lives. And, yes, they’re not an elephant, but they are ours and they are here and they should be valued. And I think it’s hard for people to remember that and to take them seriously as animals worth protecting because they’re thought of as common.
Now, I will say, I do think there’s a little bit of this fascination that we have in the west for exotic species. And I think that’s really dangerous. Kind of exoticism, we want to be close to things that are unfamiliar and exotic, like elephants, like tigers. But for people living in Asia, our turtles are exotic. They are unfamiliar. And we forget that. And that is leading to this huge demand. Why is it so surprising that to us, as Americans and Canadians, that someone would pay $24,000 for a Terrapin turtle? Well, American and Canadian hunters are paying way more than that to go to Africa and shoot exotic species. There’s something dangerous here that’s larger that speaks to our fascinations and curiosities and obsessions with things that are exotic. And I think we need to confront that, too.
Jordan
Clare, thank you so much for this. It’s a fascinating piece. I can’t wait to see what’s next.
Clare
Yeah, well, I’ll be doing more reporting on this. There will be more. Don’t you worry. And I just want to quickly say that I was so happy to report this story, but the Canadian authorities that helped me report this story were so fantastic. So I just want to thank Sheldon Jordan and all the folks in Environment and Climate Change, Canada that spent a lot of time talking with me, in addition to my sources here in the States. So thanks to them.
Jordan
That’s so nice. Our government officials, not known for their transparency. So I’m glad you got some answers.
Clare
I have a very different opinion. I think there are a few really great government officials that are on the front lines of this work, and they’re doing great things and they know it’s important, and they were really willing to talk to journalists to get the story out. And I commend them for that.
Jordan
Well, thank you for talking to us.
Clare
Thank you for having me.
Jordan
Dr. Clare Fiesler writing in the Walrus. That was the big story. For more from us, head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. We have no stories other than this one about turtle smuggling, yet. You can also find us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. You can talk to us anytime via email, thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com [click here!]. You can find this podcast in every podcast player. You can tell your friends to listen to the one about the turtle smuggling.
Thanks for listening, I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, we’ll talk tomorrow.
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