Criminal - The Butterfly Smuggler

Episode Date: February 21, 2025

The first time Ed Newcomer went to the L.A. Bug Fair, he met a man who called himself the world’s most wanted butterfly smuggler. It took three years of undercover work for Ed Newcomer to catch him in the act. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, special merch deals, and more. 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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I came into the service thinking, oh, I'm going to be protecting tiger cubs and, you know, we're going to be rescuing elephants and things like that. Ed Newcomer worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for 20 years. He started as a special agent. The very first case that was kind of given to me myself to run was Yoshikojima, who was what he called himself the world's most wanted butterfly smuggler. I mean, this guy, he knew fish and wildlife were after him, and he loved it. YOSHI KOJIMA was so good at finding and capturing one specific butterfly in the Sierra Nevada

mountains that people said no one else could even find any for two years. Ed Newcomer first heard about Yoshikojima in 2003. Someone had called in a tip. We looked it up in our system and learned that he'd been under investigation for quite some time. In the 90s, Kojima was running around the Western U.S. illegally collecting insects from national parks, including Death Valley and the Grand Canyon National Park. And Kojima's a, he's a Japanese citizen, but he maintained a house in Los Angeles and a home in Kyoto, Japan. And what he would do is he would collect butterflies mostly, some insects or some beetles as well,

but mostly butterflies from the U.S. Take them back to Japan and sell them. And of course, by the time you're selling selling them they're all dead and they're pinned like you might see in a museum. And some of these things, you know, depending on where you're selling them, can sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars a piece. I didn't know that there is such a market for butterflies. Phoebe, there is a market for everything in the wildlife world.

You name it, somebody will buy it and be interested in it. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. So tell me a little bit more about how he would do it. So he would change things up pretty regularly. So he was getting butterfly species from other parts of the world, including endangered butterflies, like highly endangered, that museums cannot even get for their scientific collections. And he would then sell those around the world using the internet.

He was an early adopter of eBay and different internet sales sites and he was making good money. How would he smuggle the butterflies through customs? I'm trying to think about this. I don't want to go into too much detail because I don't want to give, you know, a one-on-one lesson on smuggling for anybody who's thinking about smuggling butterflies. But basically what he would do is he'd hide them kind of in plain sight. When a butterfly is shipped between collectors or buyer and a seller, its wings are not open. And there's a process that you can actually, you can moisten a butterfly, a dry one that's pinned and then fold its wings up, you know, as if its wings are together,

and then you put it, you dry it again, and you put it in an envelope and ship it. Well, when these butterflies have their wings in the up position, a lot of the colors and patterns that help us identify butterflies are not visible. In order to look at them, you'd have to break the wing or re-moisten it and spread the wing out. So what he would do is he'd ship them with the wings up, he'd put them in a little triangular envelope and then he would put them in with other butterflies

or moths that are common, not illegal, would not set off any alarm bells with a customs officer or a fish and wildlife inspector. And he would ship them that way, you know, basically rolling the dice that if somebody does even look at this shipment, they're not going to know what they're looking at and they're just going to let it go. And that's a pretty good bet. In 1998, a Canadian butterfly researcher was caught trying to smuggle butterflies inside a hollowed out book. And in 2023, a man was charged with smuggling butterflies to the US by labeling them as origami paper craft and wall decorations.

But when Yoshiko Jima started mailing his rare butterflies, they got through without a problem. How much was he selling these butterflies for? Well, it varied. Yoshid sold to high-end collectors. So at the high end, if he was selling you an endangered butterfly, it'd go $10,000-plus for a pair, a male-female pair, maybe even 10 grand for a single butterfly. Was not uncommon.

I mean, a standard price for him would have been somewhere between $700 and $800 per butterfly. So if you're taught you can easily, easily transport or ship hundreds of these folded enveloped butterflies at a time. You know, a single shipment could be more than a hundred grand. I mean, what type of butterfly is worth $10,000? There's a group of butterflies known as the bird wings. The scientific name is Ornithoptera, and they're big. They can be as big as dinner plates. There's one called the Ornithoptera alexandre, also known as Queen Alexandra's bird wing.

It's one of the largest butterflies in the world. They can measure around 11 inches across. That's the one he would charge 10 grand for. It's a hard one to get. Once, a man in the early 1900s saw one. It was too high to reach. So he took out his gun and shot it. He took it to a museum.

The man who tipped off fish and wildlife about Yoshikojima said that he was going to be at the Los Angeles Bug Fair. He was going to be selling insects. And he agreed to try to talk to Kojima and wear a wire. He was another bug specialist who legally collected and sold insects all over the world. So he had his own company. And he was, you know, annoyed that Kojima was undercutting his prices. So we made a plan. We met the informant at a hotel a few days before the bug fair, taught him how to use our undercover recording equipment, gave

him all the equipment he would need. We showed him how to, you know, attach it to his body, turn it on, turn it off, what to say when he turned it on. And then the plan was I was going to meet him at the fair and I was going to be basically keeping an eye on him. And then, you know, my only job really that day was to manage the informant and, you know, see if I could eyeball Yoshikojima and just verify that that's who, that it was in fact Yoshikojima. And we knew what he looked like because we, he had a California driver's who, that it was in fact Yoshikojima. And we knew what he looked like

because he had a California driver's license, so we were able to get his photograph and all of his details pretty easily. Ed spotted Yoshikojima at a table in the exhibition hall. He had thinning gray hair, and he always wore baggy, like cargo shorts, usually a Hawaiian shirt. And he always had a fanny pack around his waist positioned in

the front. He was doing a brisk business, and the informant actually had a table too, and his wasn't too far away, maybe 40 or 50 feet away. And yeah, I just waited and watched. I saw the informant go talk to Kojima a few times, but every time I would check in with the informant, he would say, yeah, he won't talk to me, he won't say anything, and the informant just got more and more jittery. And it wasn't going well. It definitely was not going well. So I just decided, you know, what the hell, I'm gonna go talk to this guy.

I just approached and was like, hey, I don't know anything about butterflies, and I started to point at different things that he was selling. And, you know, I was like, what's that? How much is that? How do you collect? You know, I just started asking a lot of really novice questions. And really my goal was just to get him to talk. I knew that nothing he was selling right there in front of the public was going to be illegal.

But Kojima did reach under the table. He pulled out this live beetle, and it was a Dynasties beetle, which are from South America, and they're huge. I mean, they're literally like six inches long. The male beetles have long horns that they use to fight each other. People often keep them as pets. You're not allowed to import live ones into the United States without a permit. That's a pretty minor violation but he did right there in front of me show me something that had to be a violation of US Department of Agriculture rules. Ed Newcomer told Yoshikojima that his name was Ted Nelson. There were probably two or three times when I sauntered over to Kojima's table and chatted

with him and joked. At the end of the day, I was standing in a group of people overhearing their conversation, and I felt somebody tap me on the shoulder. I turned around, and there's Yoshi standing right in front of me. It actually scared the crap out of me because I was not prepared for an impromptu meeting with Kojima that I hadn't arranged, you know? And he's got this little cardboard box in his hand and he hands it to me and as he's handing it to me he opens it and there's maybe, I don't know, a dozen kind of crappy butterflies pinned in that

box and he says, here, for your collection. And I'm like, well, you know, how much do you want for it? He's like, no, it's a gift. I'm going to help you start your collection. And, you know, I couldn't believe it. But what I really couldn't believe was that he had written his email address on the top of the box. We'll be right back. Thanks to Squarespace for their support. Building a website can seem intimidating if you've never done it before, but you don't need to worry when you use Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform to help you stand out and succeed online. No matter your level of experience, Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website

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go to squarespace.com slash criminal to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Support for Criminal comes from Hungry Root. Hungry Root can be your go-to place for meal planning and groceries. All you need to do is let them know what your health goals and dietary restrictions are, and they'll fill your cart with recipes you can get excited about and deliver the groceries to your door. All of Hungry Roots' recipes are designed to take 15 minutes or less to cook, and as they learn more about what you like, their meal recommendations get more personalized. I like their smoked salmon bowl with brussels sprouts and jasmine rice.

The whole thing takes less than 10 minutes to put together, so it's great when I need a quick lunch during the workday. You can take advantage of this exclusive offer. For a limited time, get 40% off your first box, plus get a free item in every box for life. Go to hungryroot.com slash criminal and use code CRIMINAL. That's hungryroot.com slash criminal. Code CRIMINAL to get 40% off your first box and a free item of your choice for life. When fish and wildlife agent Ed Newcomer got Yoshikojima's email address, he realized he was going to have to keep pretending to be Ted Nelson.

He waited a week before contacting Kojima. He wrote to say thank you for the butterflies and wrote that he had tried to identify them. He immediately wrote back and, you know, said, oh, thank you, you know, it's so great to meet you. But by the way, you got half of these wrong. So let me tell you what they are. So we kind of ended up with some, you know, friendly dialogue, a few emails back and forth. But then unexpectedly, he very quickly said, hey, let's meet for coffee at Starbucks in Los Angeles right off of Venice Boulevard and Robertson, which is, you know, a busy, busy part of town.

Guy reaches out to you and says, hey, I want to meet for coffee. Things are going well, right? You're not trying to push the relationship. He's pushing it. So we definitely are going to meet for coffee. But things were unfolding quickly, which made me nervous. But we made the plan and got all wired up. Et's boss, Marie Palladini, was also at the coffee shop watching.

Another fish and wildlife agent was watching from the parking lot. Were you nervous? I mean, this is the first real undercover meeting. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, nervous, not so much for personal safety because, you know, you cover agents there and Kojima was not known to be he had no violent history but nervous for sure because you know I screwed up right

every time I don't care when I did undercover work during my career and later in my career I did a lot I was always nervous you're always nervous you're nervous that you're you don't want to blow your cover you don't want to scare them off you don't want to ask a question that pisses them off. You gotta just do this very delicate dance where you're hanging out with somebody you actually would not hang out with normally and you don't approve of what they're doing,

but you have to pretend to be their friend and open to whatever they suggest and not offended. So it's just this very delicate dance. So you should be nervous about going in on these sort of things. And, yeah, of course I was. Sweating like crazy. Yeah, also, you wonder, oh my gosh, did I remember to turn on my recording device or did I accidentally turn it on and then off or did I bump it? So, what did you two talk about during that first meeting?

Just about everything. Talked about, you know, the bug fair, where I lived, what I did. He was pretty nosy. So, you know, he asked me a lot of questions about my background and where I lived, what I did for a living, why I was interested in insects. And luckily, we did have a very good backstory built for me in terms of I knew it well. What was it? My backstory was basically I lived in Torrance, which is where our field office was. I told him that my dad had owned a marine supply company

and had recently, you know, he'd given it to me and then I had sold it. So I didn't have to explain, you know, I didn't have to go to an office. I had had a business I sold and I had like money that I was kind of looking for something to do with the money. And that made him happy. And he wasn't interested in marine supplies, so it didn't matter. If he asked me something, I'd start talking about bilge pumps and he would

lose interest very quickly. So that was kind of it. But we had the driver's license. I had the Costco card in my wallet. If he ever looked in my wallet, he would see Ted Nelson. We had an explanation for why I used a P.O. box instead of getting mail at my house. I mean, everything was, there was an explanation for everything that made sense if he asked. Host 1 Yoshi Kojima offered to teach Ed how to mount butterflies and to give him the equipment for it. He asked Ed if he'd be interested in selling butterflies. Ed said yes. Did you get the sense that he completely trusted you? No, I did not get the sense that he trusted me at all.

And the real proof of that came after our meeting at Starbucks. He walked me out to my car. He started to walk around my vehicle. He did a full 360 degree tour of the outside of my vehicle. and he looked in the grill and he peered in the windows. He looked at the license plate and you know it would have been very unnatural for me not to have been like what the hell are you doing right. If I had just stood there and let him walk around my car peering all over it it would have been weird. So I said I said, I

said, Yoshi, what are you doing? And he goes, Oh, I'm looking to see if you have red and blue lights in your grill. And I wanted to check to see if you have your police shotgun in the car. Ed says he laughed it off. Kojima told him when he got back to Japan, he would start sending Ed butterflies to sell on eBay for him. He and Kojima kept him when he got back to Japan, he would start sending Ed butterflies to sell on eBay for him. He and Kojima kept in touch over email and sometimes talked on the phone. It was hard because this early 2000s, we actually did not have an undercover cell phone to use. We used an undercover hard line, which was located in a special room in the field office in Los Angeles.

So an agent who was doing undercover work would actually have to go into that room and use the Hardline to make undercover phone calls. And the phone was set up to do recordings and an answering machine that sounded like a business and all this stuff. But it was, and that's not ideal because on a Saturday night or even a weeknight, you know, there's nobody there, right? I'm not there. So Kojima would call sometimes,

because he's in Japan, so the time difference would screw us up too. And he'd get pissed off, because he'd keep getting my answering machine. He would get mad at me, because I wasn't available when he wanted me to be available. And so he'd stop talking to me for a week or two, which was really infuriating.

Months passed, and Yoshikojima never sent anything. Ed decided he'd get Kojima's attention by setting up his own eBay auctions. And I just decided, you know what, I'm going to reach out to every agent I know, and I'm going to ask them to go set up a covert eBay account and bid on my auctions. He asked other fish and wildlife agents to bid thousands of dollars on his butterflies. I did maybe 14 or 15 of them. They all came off perfectly. And I thought, okay, this is going to work.

Kojima is going to come back. He's going to say, where are you getting these? I can supply you with better material. I thought we were working together, that kind of thing. Nope. He reacted as if I was intentionally competing with him. Ed had used photos that Kojima had sent him in his listings.

Yoshi Kojima told Ed he should be ashamed, and that he was stealing his photos. He said they were copyrighted. At one point, Kojima told him they were no longer friends. It's like watching a train wreck. I was watching this undercover relationship I had built slowly degrade. You know, I'm new, and I'm the only one that's got a case that is slowly but surely on its way into a nosedive into the ground. And then one day, a California gay warden called Ed.

So this gay warden knew that I was investigating a butterfly guy and he said, hey, I don't know if you know this Ted Nelson guy, but we got a tip that he's selling illegal butterflies on eBay. And I said, okay, thanks, can you send me the recording? So he sent it to me and my whole office listened to it in the conference room. It was obviously Kojima and he had turned me in and everybody in the room was like, oh, dude, your case is over. Because once you report somebody to the Fish and Wildlife Service, you have to assume that an agent's going to make contact with this Ted Nelson guy and presumably flip him, or possibly flip him as an informant.

So if after being reported, Ted Nelson continues to be out there on eBay selling or continues to be in communication with Kojima, Kojima's going to naturally assume that Ted Nelson is now an informant and he's not gonna work with him. He's not gonna tell him anything. So, you know, Kojima wasn't answering any phone calls. He wasn't writing to me. He wasn't calling me anymore. And, you know, shoot, I thought the case was done. Dead. We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Mint Mobile.

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and he started looking into pigeon breeders in Los Angeles who were killing hawks to protect their birds. And then in 2006, he got a new tip. Another insect dealer said he had news. He'd heard that Yoshikojima was coming back to the bug fair. So I said, well, we've got to give it one more try, right? We're going to give it our all. At the time, he was in the middle of another undercover case. I had a big beefy kind of biker mustache at the time and didn't wash my hair very often. At the bug fair, Ed tried to find a way to run into Kojima.

He waited in the passage between two of the exhibition halls. And there was no way we were not going to run into each other. And yeah, we did. And he looked surprised and scared, which really kind of struck me. I think he was afraid I knew he had turned me into the Fish and Wildlife Service. And what happened? I was like open arms, like I was so happy to see him. And I said, hey, man, I owe you a huge, huge thank you.

I said, look, back when you and I were meeting, you gave me advice about what to do if fish and wildlife ever came to my house, which he did. He did give me some advice about what to say or what to do if fish and wildlife ever reached out and asked me where I was getting these things. And I said, look, you're not going to believe this, Yossi, but some asshole turned me into a fish and wildlife guy.

And these officers came to my house and they asked me a lot of questions and I did exactly what you told me to do. I didn't keep any material at my house. And I told them I don't know what they're talking about. And they left. And they left me alone. And he, his whole demeanor changed instantly.

He was so thrilled that he had given me advice that helped me and I think at that moment too, he viewed me now as a criminal. He's like, okay, Ted Nelson is also a butterfly crook. And he said, well, are you still selling? And I said, oh yeah. Ed told him he was working with a man from Germany who was sending him rare butterflies, but they kept showing up with broken wings and broken antennas.

And he said, hey, let's go to lunch. So we went out to this Korean barbecue place in somewhere in Koreatown in Los Angeles. In the course of that lunch, he said, look, I'm going to go back to Japan. He goes, have you ever heard of Skype? And this is like at the front end of video conference calling and stuff so Skype was it and I said yeah I've heard Skype. So he goes you need to sign up for Skype. We can talk in real time.

I'll be in Japan. I can use Skype to show you what I've got in my inventory and you can tell me if you want it and probably about a week after he got back to Japan the calls start in earnest. So I'm working during the day, I get home, I'm married at the time, I have dinner and then I pretty much wait for the Kojima call. I had to go in a separate room in the house. My now ex-wife could not make any noise. He didn't think I was married so he can't have her seen on the Skype video

in the background. She can't come into that room. She's off to bed. I'm still talking to Kojima on Skype. It was hard. And basically, sometime in there during those calls, I realized Kojima's got some type of an attraction to me. Sometimes Yoshi Kojima would make comments about finding Ed attractive. He asked if Ed was bisexual. He tried to show him porn. It's a very awkward situation to be in when you're doing undercover work.

I'd play it off. Eventually, Kojima started sending Ed butterflies. He sent swallowtail butterflies that are so rare, they're only found on Corsica and Sardinia, and peacock swallowtails that live high up in the mountains in the Philippines. Researchers don't know how many are left. He even sent two Queen Alexandra's bird wings. At last count, researchers estimated there were 21 left in the wild.

He has sold me every one of the most endangered butterflies in the world, including a $10,000 Ornithoptera alexandria. In total, he's offered to sell me $300,000 worth of butterflies, and every single one of those offers to sell is a violation of the Endangered Species Act. Ed brought the butterflies and the recordings of his Skype calls to the US Attorney's office. They convened a grand jury which eventually indicted Yoshiko Jima on 17 counts of illegally selling and smuggling endangered wildlife. I think maybe 13 of those counts were straight-up smuggling, which carries, you know, a 20-year maximum sentence

and a $250,000 maximum fine on each count. So we've got an indictment and an arrest warrant in hand. The only thing we need to do now is get our hands on Kojima, and he's in Japan. The next time Kojima said something suggestive to him on a Skype call, Ed replied, not until you come to LA, and laughed. On July 31, 2006, Ed got a call from U.S. Customs that Kojima was on a plane that was

going to land in Los Angeles in less than an hour. A team of agents went to the airport right away. Kojima was arrested as he came out of customs. Ed watched the arrest from behind a pillar. He wanted to make sure Kojima couldn't see him. Later, Ed went to the jail where Kojima was being held before his first court appearance. Ed Keefe, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President,

Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co-President, Co- He was really excited to see me. And then he looked down, he saw the special agent badge attached to my belt right by my holster. He didn't say anything to me, but I basically escorted him through this long tunnel that goes from the Bureau of Prisons lockup over to the courthouse. And he says, have you been a Fish and Wildlife guy the whole time I've known you? And I was like, yep.

He kind of put his head down. He didn't say anything else. He never asked me any questions about how it all happened. It was weird. It was just like we had this relationship, and then I arrested him, and the relationship was over. It had been three years since their first meeting at the bug fair. Yoshiko Jima pled guilty to all 17 counts of selling and smuggling endangered species. He was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison and fined almost $39,000.

When he was released in 2008, he was deported back to Japan. If you're a foreign national and you're convicted of a felony and deported, you can never return to the United States. So he cannot come into the US, period, ever. And so, yeah, I've never seen him again. I've heard some stories. Last I heard, he was selling antiques. That's the last I heard.

Nine years after Yoshiko Jima was arrested in 2015, a 25-year-old man named Alexander Bick was arrested at the Los Angeles International Airport. He had 150 endangered butterflies in his luggage, including birdwing butterflies. Fish and Wildlife had asked Ed to join the investigation because of his experience with butterfly smuggling cases. Ed interviewed Alexander Bick when he was arrested.

And I take him into an interview room, read him his rights, and I ask him if he wants to talk. He starts lying immediately about the whole situation. Out of nowhere, he goes, hey, have you heard of Yoshikojima? And I said, yeah, I've heard of Yoshikojima. And he goes, he's my mentor. ["The Time of the Year"] And he goes, he's my mentor. Yoshiko Jima has not agreed to any interviews since he was released from prison.

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