Feds target US companies caught in lucrative shark fin trade
MIAMI — It’s one of the seafood industry’s most gruesome hunts.
Every year, the fins of as many as 73 million sharks are sliced from the backs of the majestic sea predators, their bleeding bodies sometimes dumped back into the ocean where they are left to suffocate or die of blood loss.
But while the barbaric practice is driven by China, where shark fin soup is a symbol of status for the rich and powerful, America’s seafood industry isn’t immune from the trade.
A spate of recent criminal indictments highlights how US companies, taking advantage of a patchwork of federal and state laws, are supplying a market for fins that activists say is as reprehensible as the now-illegal trade in elephant ivory once was.
A complaint quietly filed, last month, in Miami federal court accused an exporter based in the Florida Keys, Elite Sky International, of falsely labeling some 5,666 pounds of China-bound shark fins as live Florida spiny lobsters. Another company, south Florida-based Aifa Seafood, is also under criminal investigation for similar violations, according to two people on the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing probe. The company is managed by a Chinese-American woman who, in 2016, pleaded guilty to shipping more than a half-ton of live Florida lobsters to her native China without a license.
The heightened scrutiny from law enforcement comes as Congress debates a federal ban on shark fins — making it illegal to import or export even foreign-caught fins. Every year, American wildlife inspectors seize thousands of shark fins while in transit to Asia for failing to declare the shipments.
While not all sharks are killed just for their fins, none of the other shark parts harvested in the US and elsewhere — such as its meat, jaws or skin — can compete with fins in terms of value. Depending on the type of shark, a single pound of fins can fetch hundreds of dollars, making it one of the priciest seafood products by weight anywhere.
“If you’re going out of business because you can no longer sell fins, then what are you actually fishing for?,” said Whitney Webber, a campaign director at Washington-based Oceana, which supports the ban.
Since 2000, federal law has made it illegal to cut the fins off sharks and discard their bodies back into the ocean. However, individual states have wide leeway to decide whether or not businesses can harvest fins from dead sharks at a dock, or import them from overseas.
The legislation working its way through Congress would impose a near-total ban on trade in fins, similar to action taken by Canada, in 2019. The legislation, introduced, in 2017, by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, has majority support in both the House and Senate.
Among those opposing the proposed ban is Elite, which has hired lobbyists to urge Congress to vote against the bill, lobbying records show.
It’s not known where Elite obtained its fins. But in the criminal complaint, the company was also accused of sourcing lobster from Nicaragua and Belize that it falsely stated was caught in Florida. The company, affiliated with a Chinese-American seafood exporter based in New York City, was charged with violating the Lacey Act, a century-old statute that makes it a crime to submit false paperwork for any wildlife shipped overseas.
An attorney for Elite wouldn’t comment nor did two representatives of Aifa when reached by phone.
Overfishing has led to a 71% decline in shark species since the 1970s. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, a Switzerland-based group that tracks wildlife populations, estimates that over a third of the world’s 500-plus shark species are threatened with extinction.
Contrary to industry complaints about excessive regulations, the US is hardly a model of sustainable shark management, said Webber. She pointed to a recent finding by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that less than 23% of the 66 shark stocks in US waters are safe from overfishing. The status of more than half of shark stocks isn’t even known.
The situation in Europe is even worse: a new report from Greenpeace, called “Hooked on Sharks,” revealed what it said is evidence of the deliberate targeting of juvenile blue sharks by fishing fleets from Spain and Portugal. The report found that the US is the world’s fourth-largest shark exporter behind Spain, China and Portugal, with exports of 3.2 million kilograms of meat — but not fins — worth over $11 million, in 2020.
Webber said rather than safeguard a small shark fishing industry, the US should blaze the trail to protect the slow-growing, long-living fish.
“We can’t ask other countries to clean up their act if we’re not doing it well ourselves,” said Webber.
She said the current laws aren’t enough of a deterrent in an industry where bad actors drawn by the promise of huge profits are a recurrent problem.
Case in point: Mark Harrison, a Florida fisherman who, in 2009, pleaded guilty to three criminal counts tied to his export of shark fins, some of them protected species. He was ordered to pay a $5,000 fine and was banned from having anything to do with the shark fin trade, for five years.
But federal prosecutors allege that he reconnected to associates of his former co-conspirators, in 2013, in violation of the terms of his probation. He was arrested, in 2020, on mail and wire fraud conspiracy charges as part of a five-year investigation, called Operation Apex, targeting a dozen individuals who also allegedly profited from drug trafficking. Prosecutors allege Harrison’s Florida-based Phoenix Fisheries was a “shell company” for individuals based in California, where possession of fins has been illegal since 2011.
As part of the bust, the Feds found documents about some 6 tons of shark fin exports and seized 18 totoaba fish bladders, a delicacy in Asia taken from an endangered species. They also seized 18,000 marijuana plants, multiple firearms and $1 million in diamonds — pointing to a criminal enterprise that transcended illegal seafood and stretched deep into the Mexican and Chinese mafia underworlds.