Criminal - Dropping Like Flies

Episode Date: April 24, 2014

Every year for the past few years, tens of thousand of flytraps have gone missing – from the wild, from gardens, from nurseries. And, really, nobody knows where they go. What’s cropped up in rural North Carolina is essentially a Venus Flytrap crime ring — with lackies, middle men, and a mysterious end buyer who’s perpetuating the market. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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But it is kind of, you know, an eerie feeling when you're out here by yourself and you're dealing with four or five guys and, you know, three or four of them is carrying machetes because that's a common tool to trade, the machetes. You got to be careful. I mean, it's not a game. You got to be on your P's and Q's and, you know, no situation is the same. So you got to expect the unexpected. Brandon Dean is an officer with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, the

State Nature Cops. Dean patrols the Green Swamp, more than 17,000 acres of savanna and swampland in the southeasternmost corner of the state. It's known mostly for its bird watching and longleaf pines, but it's also ground zero for an obscure black market, one that's exploded in the last few years and shows no sign of slowing down. See, you walk in, you wouldn't even notice it. Oh, wow. And that's what they would dig up right there and sell. They're so small. It's like a fingernail. Yeah, those are really small. Like I said, some of them you can get. That's because the Green Swamp is one of the only places in the world where you can find an especially rare plant, one that's disappearing by the thousands, the Venus flytrap.

Obviously, this place here has been hit pretty hard because you used to come out here and they'd be everywhere. And now we're scrounging to find a couple. You could get so many. Yes. Every year for the past few years, tens of thousands of fly traps have gone missing, from the wild, from gardens, from nurseries, decimating the population. And really, nobody knows where they go. What's cropped up in rural North Carolina is essentially a Venus fly trap crime ring,

with lackeys, middlemen, and a mysterious end buyer who's perpetuating the market. Our producer Eric Menel decided to look into this black market to try to figure out who's running it, who's funding it, and why. Here's today's story. I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is Criminal. Could you just sort of describe when you first walked in what the scene looked like? Like a hurricane had hit. It was pots everywhere. Cindy Evans and Joe Wood run a nursery and craft business in Brunswick County, North Carolina, called Flytrap Farm. It's about 10 miles south of the Green Swamp.

Flytrap Farm, as you might have guessed, specializes in the bulk sale of Venus flytraps. One night, last September, a group of people broke into Joe and Cindy's greenhouses. What they did was pull the plants out of the pots. They didn't take the pots. They just pulled the plants out, put them in our bags that they had come in here, broke in and, yeah,

stolen our trash bags. All the windows out back here, and they took them all out and laid them on the ground on pieces of cardboard so they wouldn't break. Cindy pulled out her iPhone and swiped through picture after picture of the scene, footprints in the spilled soil, tire marks in the field behind the greenhouses. This is where they came in. This is where they broke out the back of that greenhouse there all the way in the back. How many plants are we talking? What Audrey counted up was about $65,000 worth.

About 18,000 plants in total, the vast majority of which were Venus fly traps. As far as anyone I've talked to can tell, it's the largest single theft of fly traps ever. It totally shot our whole fall and early spring shipping schedule. We're so behind right now. Only behind, we're way in debt again, too, because we borrowed money, borrowed money, borrowed money to try and get things caught back up. It set us back 15 years, just like when we started. Why would they do that? Because there's a black market for them.

You tell people it grows here, and they're like, I thought it grew in the Amazon rainforest. Angie Carl works for the Nature Conservancy, the nonprofit that owns most of the Green Swamp. I say I'm a paid arsonist. She does controlled burns to keep the plant growth in check. I met her not far from the Green Swamp in Wilmington, North Carolina, a.k.a. Flytrap Central. This part of the state is literally the only place in the world where Venus flytraps grow in the wild. There's a park nearby called Flytrap Downs and a Flytrap 5k run every year. You can't come down here and not be exposed to the flytrap. It only grows within a 90 mile radius of Wilmington,

North Carolina. Yeah, it's a pretty incredible species. It is pretty incredible, but likely not for the reasons you think. First off, and let's just get this reference out of the way, it does not look anything like the plant from Little Shop of Horrors. Feed me now! I can't. Must be blood. Tooey, that's disgusting.

Must be fresh. People think that there are huge plants that can eat people, and they can eat your mother-in-law if you've got a good blender. That's the only... Gotta mulch them good. Again, Cindy and Joe at Flytrap Farm. The biggest flytraps only get to be about four or five inches tall, but that doesn't make them any less impressive. The Venus Flytrap.

This BBC One documentary is basically flytrap porn. The plants are tiny, green. The inside of the actual trap is usually a bright red, which makes them highly visible to insects. It makes itself very attractive. Ooze a nectar across the brim of each leaf. Now, this might be silly to point out, but the fly trap doesn't actually know there's a bug in the trap. Because, as Angie Carl had to remind me, plantsants don't have brains. What they do have is a series of trigger hairs, almost like whiskers. Think of it like a mousetrap, where it's always in this suspended

state of tension, until something comes along and taps the trigger hair. The insect can hit one of those trigger hairs and be totally fine. But... But a timer has been set. Two of those trigger hairs are touched really quickly in succession. Snap. Closes shut.

And the fly is doomed. It's likely fly traps were all over this part of North Carolina a hundred years ago. But, like with other plants and animals, development did a number on the population. And what's left has been relegated to a few protected preserves. And for years that was fine, nothing to be concerned about. People knew about the plant, but it was sort of a novelty. Until the last few years, when something in the market shifted. Somebody, somewhere, has increased their demand for fly traps.

And it's causing all sorts of problems. Joe and Cindy at Flytrap Farm aren't the only victims of flytrap burglary, not by a long shot. Just a few months before the break-in, somebody dug up and stole an estimated $20,000 worth of flytraps from a park in Wilmington. Joe and Cindy have all kinds of stories about thefts around town. A friend of ours, his wife died a couple years ago, and they did a memorial garden for her. We brought a bunch of plants up there, and they planted them and grew them, and they were expanding and doing very well,

and then all of a sudden they came in there and stole all of them. They steal them all the time, but nobody's got that many fly traps for them to steal. Even Fly Trap Farm, at 18,000000 plants wasn't enough to satisfy the market. Plants are still disappearing, mostly from the biggest concentration of all, the green swamp. It's almost impossible to catch them. This is Brandon Dean again, the officer with the Wildlife Resources Commission. They get dropped off and it's like ghost in the dark. You never know they're even there. They run across the road, get into the woods,

and normal passerby, they can't see them because of the savannas. When people poach fly traps from the ground, they're on their hands and knees below the grass line. But occasionally, Dean will be driving by and see a couple of heads pop up in the swamp, almost like prairie dogs. He'll hop out of his car, chase them down on foot, and ideally have them arrested and

confiscate the traps. I've gotten anywhere from 800 plants to over 2,000 plants. It all depends on how experienced the trapper is and what time of year it is and if they get into a good cluster of fly traps. So when you catch these people, what do they have on their person? What are they carrying the fly traps in? How many are they carrying? What are they using to dig them up? I've seen them carry fly traps from a pillowcase all the way to a backpack. You know, whatever kind of satchel they can get to throw them in there. I've seen tools from spades you use in your garden to crowbars that are cut off to swing sets. Swing sets?

Like the bar on a swing set, they'll break the bar off, you know, it's probably half an inch diameter, flatten out the end to where it's flat, they got a handle, they stick it in the ground and pop them right up. Oh, that's kind of inventive. Oh yeah, yes, they work harder at not working than they would if they had a job. What time of day does this happen? Depends on their schedule, whenever they wake up. A lot of them, they already have charges pending, such as drug charges. So they don't have a job, so whenever they get the urge to go take fly traps, they get somebody to drop them off, and they spend all day out here digging traps.

They're really hard to catch. We've put cameras out. They've stolen my cameras. Again, Angie Carl with the Nature Conservancy. I think that their marking areas will go out and find spoons and stuff in areas. Wait, so they're leaving spoons behind or they're like leaving them there as like a signal, like leaving breadcrumbs kind of thing? They're leaving them there so when they come back, they know where they were digging and they can move on from there. In more ways than one, the culture of poachers is pretty similar to that of other black markets. For instance, it's every man for himself. We've had poachers call me and say that I see poachers out in the savannah and then two days later that same person who called

me gets arrested because they were out poaching so they were calling in their competition. There's other fly trappers that are jealous because they're on their so-called turf. They call us and tell us they're out here doing it, and we come out here and track them up and find them. Oh, it's literally like a turf war. Oh, yeah. Other fly trappers call on other fly trappers. They'll tell you, say, I've been in there. This is where they're going to go. This is the time of day they're going to do it.

And, I mean, you have to go because you don't know when they're going to be picked up and when they're not. Pretty comical if you think about it. Admittedly, it's hard not to laugh a little at the idea of a Venus flytrap crime ring. But in the last three years, things have gotten really bad. The flytrap has some federal and state protections, but there's just not enough information to actually call it threatened or endangered. And this is one of the most frustrating parts of this story. Nobody actually knows how many flytraps there are. Nobody actually knows how many fly traps there are. Nobody knows exactly how many are being poached.

The only number any academic has come up with is 35,000 left in the wild. But it's unclear how accurate that number is. We do know they only grow in a handful of places. We do know they're disappearing by the thousands from the wild. And it's also clear the poachers are not just hoarding the plants. They're selling them. When Brandon Dean has caught poachers in the past, they've told him they sell to local nurseries, who pay anywhere from 10 to 25 cents a plant. 1,000 plants in a day could turn into a couple

hundred bucks. Where do you get a sense that they're selling them to? We've never really looked into it. You know, most of them say that they sell them to a place called Flytrap Farms. I just have to ask you because, you know, it's part of my job just to be honest, like, have you ever knowingly bought from poachers? Oh, sure. That was a little tough to hear, but Joe Wood admits he has bought from poachers in the past. On a couple of carnivorous plant message boards, people have accused Joe Wood and Fly Trap Farm of buying poached plants for years. One person I talked to called a break-in at Joe's nursery, quote, karma. And Joe doesn't hide the fact that he bought from locals. In fact, it's not illegal to buy the plants, only to dig them up from the wild. But Joe likes to make a distinction.

They had licenses to buy. I mean, we always had licenses. What is considered poachers now, they used to all be considered farmers. Turns out, people have been digging up plants in Brunswick County for decades, but it was always sort of a controlled chaos. The state would give out licenses, and you could ask permission to pull from other people's property. Problem is, a flytrap from someone's backyard looks exactly like a flytrap from protected lands. There's no way to verify where it actually came from. So when someone showed up at Fly Trap Farm with a license and a backpack filled with a thousand traps, Joe could buy them. But now, Joe says, he won't even do that. The state has gotten stricter, and if he got caught buying poached plants, he's afraid he'd get shut down. There are a handful of nurseries in the state that deal mainly in carnivorous plants.

What everyone seems to agree on is that these nurseries, be it Flytrap Farm or some of their competitors, are not the end buyer. They're just the middlemen. Somebody is buying in bulk, at a rate unlike anything before. And most people have the same theory. There's a guy in New York, and he's got a deal going where he claims the juice from these plants will cure cancer. There's something that's called carnivore that is being deemed like a thing that will get rid of your cancer, you know, and it has a picture of a fly trap on it. So he's buying about 4 million plants a year and crushing them and taking the juice from them. And then he's mixing it with something else and he claims it's a cure for cancer.

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Carnivore was created by a German physician in the 1970s named Helmut Keller. The company has two products, liquid drops and capsules, made from what it calls pure extract of Venus flytrap. It's billed as nature's nutritional powerhouse. I called Carnivora headquarters, hoping I might talk with Helmut Keller, the creator. He's around, but not on this side, Eric. This is Richard Ostro, now the owner and CEO of Carnivora. He's on the other side. He had passed away about four years ago. Oh, okay. I'm sorry to hear that.

That's okay. Ostro got interested in the company well over a decade ago, when he says he saw firsthand what the product could do. The reason that I had met Dr. Keller originally is because my mother needed his services. She had smoked since she was 14, and you know what can happen there. And so she ended up with a disease that were prohibited from mentioning in this country. He's talking about cancer. And we brought her over to an Irish clinic where he was at the time, and he was literally bringing her back to life. But the story didn't end well because he had to leave the clinic and go back to Germany, and the FDA

would not allow me to import carnivora to the United States, and she lost her battle. Because you couldn't get carnivora here in the States? 100% absolutely yes. Because of FDA restrictions, carnivora cannot claim to actually cure any diseases. We can say this is a powerful immune defense supplement, which of course it is, and that it wakes up specific immune cells to turn on your immune system to do the job that it's meant to do. Right, but just to make sure I'm clear, in other countries, you're allowed to claim that it either prevents or helps cure many diseases such as cancer?

I won't answer that question in the United States. But, here's the but, we can say any damn thing we choose in freer countries of which there are many. Chances are you've never heard of Carnivora, but as Richard Ostro tells it, the company is doing just fine. In fact, the last couple of years, they've been in the market for more fly traps. A lot more. The growth in the U.S. has been astronomical in the last five years. What kind of growth are we talking about?

Can I ask how many customers, give or take? Well, how do I show the growth here? The best way to find out is we're in the midst of hiring a PR firm because we're launching our pet division. And they're going to put the word out there in the United States like never before. Do you import, or rather buy fly traps from North Carolina then? No. No, we don't touch North Carolina. They couldn't possibly supply us the amount of Venus fly traps that we would need. Oster says Carnivora buys fly traps by the kilogram, not the plant.

And they're not just buying wild grown plants. They're also buying something called tissue culture. Tissue culture is essentially cloned fly traps. Giant labs, mainly in the Netherlands and China, have taken fly trap tissue and used it to make a massive number of genetically identical fly traps. Yes, even an indigenous American carnivorous plant is now made in China. Ostro says carnivora is a mix of wild-grown and tissue-cultured fly traps. And he says the company hasn't gone near North Carolina traps in eight or nine years. The demand is higher than North

Carolina can handle, he says. But he won't go any further. Can I ask maybe from what state or country you're able to help meet those demands? I can't get into that either. The reason I won't get into that is because I'm not tipping off anybody who could use it against us. At every step of the way, it's harder to know who's telling the truth. The poachers could be lying about who they sell to. The nurseries could be lying about who they buy from. And if the fast-growing alternative medicine market isn't driving the poaching,

it's unclear what is. So what do you do? Back in Brunswick County, the sheriff's office has charged someone with a robbery at Flytrap Farm. A local man. He's 23 years old, charged with two felony counts of breaking and entering and two counts of felony larceny. In a lot of ways, it's one of the more serious penalties ever levied against someone for fly trap theft, which sounds great.

But frankly, it'll probably just make poachers more cautious and keep them out of nurseries and in the swamps where the penalties are negligible. Brandon Dean. The thing about it is it's so hard to catch them. When you do catch them, they pretty much laugh at you, and they tell you they're making too much money, because they only get caught once a year, once every three years,

and they're doing it pretty much every day they can, so they're making out like a bandit. Yeah, so even if they got charged $150 in fines or whatever, that's one night's worth of fly traps? That's correct. That's correct. And you know, that's the problem we have. Until there's a stiffer penalty put in place, they're going to continue to come out here and rape the resources, so to speak. There's always going to be a criminal element. If there's money to be made and a lot of it,

they're going to steal the fly traps regardless. Angie Carl at the Nature Conservancy disagrees with Officer Dean. She thinks going after the poachers won't have much effect at all. She thinks going after the middlemen, the nurseries who are buying the poach plants, is the best way to stop the market. Cut the snake off at the head sort of thing. There are efforts at the state level to make fly trap poaching a felony, but it's unclear how much weight there is behind the idea. So there's a possibility the plants will become even rarer. And as silly as it may seem, anytime a species disappears, there's one thought that comes to mind. I mean, what if

it is the cure for cancer, you know, and we've now just decimated all of our populations? Even if that's overstating it, the other alternative is simply that we lose an important part of American biodiversity. The reality that, if you want to see a Venus flytrap, a plant endemic to the American South, you'll have to buy a clone from a lab in China. So, for now, Angie Carl and the Nature Conservancy are doing the only thing they can think of. They're trying to learn more about the market. They need more details in order to pressure lawmakers to help protect the plant.

And they're going the route of any other organization with limited resources. They've hired a summer intern to look into it. She started this month. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 If you like the show, you can subscribe on iTunes. Our website is thisiscriminal.org. We're also on Facebook and Twitter, at Criminal Show. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. We'll see you next time. over vehicle that's been completely revamped for urban adventure. From the design and styling to the performance, all the way to features like the Bose Personal Plus sound system, you can get closer to everything you love about city life in the all-new, reimagined Nissan Kicks. Learn more at www.nissanusa.com slash 2025 dash kicks. Available feature, Bose is a registered trademark

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