Smugglers roam the California wilderness to illegally ship succulents to Asian markets

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Three men were charged with stealing more than $600,000 worth of wild succulents that retail for as much as $50 each

The men traveled Highway 101 in budget rental cars, stopping at remote state parks with stunning vistas as they snaked their way along the Northern California coast. To a casual observer, Byungsu Kim, 44, Youngin Back, 45, and Bong Jun Kim, 44, might have seemed like yet another group of road-tripping tourists on the famously scenic highway, marveling at the towering redwoods and the waves crashing against dizzying bluffs.

“Right now these plants are a boom in Korea, China and Japan,” Patrick Freeling, a game warden with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, told the Guardian last year. “It’s huge among domestic housewives. It’s a status thing.” Though Dudleya can be grown in nurseries, they take years or even decades to mature, and commercial growers have struggled to keep up as succulent mania spreads from South Korea to China. Kang Suk-Jung, who owns a nursery in Hojawon, South Korea, told NPR last year that once Chinese customers started buying succulents, “even tens of thousands of plants would not meet the demand.” Besides, he said, it was tough to replicate the look of the most sought-after species.

Freeling, the game warden who received the tip, asked U.S. Customs and Border Protection to X-ray the packages. The tipster had suspected that the boxes held abalone, a type of edible sea snail often illegally harvested by divers in Northern California. Instead, they turned out to contain dozens of succulents, he told NPR. That on its own wasn’t necessarily illegal, but Freeling had a hunch he had stumbled onto something bigger.

In 2018, as they became aware of the scale of the threat to natural succulent habitats, wardens started looking closely at Byungsu Kim, who operated a nursery in San Diego County, and who they suspected was exporting Dudleya plants to Korea.

 

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