The Butterfly Smuggler

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0:36Or are you stuck in one you've outgrown? Or never wanted in the first place? Sure, you can probably list the reasons for staying, but are they actually just excuses for not leaving? Let a career coach from strawberry.me help you get unstuck. Discover the benefits of having a dedicated career coach in your corner. Go to strawberry.me slash unstuck to claim a special offer. 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.

1:20The very first case that was kind of given to me myself to run was Yoshi Kojima, 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 Yoshi Kojima 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.

2:10illegally collecting insects from national parks, including Death Valley and the Grand Canyon National Park. And Kojima, 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 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.

2:49I 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.

3:15So 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 a 101 lesson on smuggling for anybody who's thinking about smuggling butterflies.

3:58But basically what he would do is he'd hide them kind of in plain sight. When a butterfly is shipped between collectors or a 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.

4:42So 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.

5:23And in 2023, a man was charged with smuggling butterflies to the U.S. by labeling them as origami paper craft and wall decorations. But when Yoshi Kojima started mailing his rare butterflies, they got through without a problem. How much was he selling these butterflies for? Well, it varied. Yoshi sold to high-end collectors. So, you know, at the high end, if he was selling you an endangered butterfly, it'd go$10 ,000 plus for a pair of male-female pair, maybe even$10 ,000 for a single butterfly. Was not uncommon. I mean, a standard price for him would have been somewhere between$700 and$800 per butterfly.

6:10So, you know, 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?

6:34There'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 Yoshi Kojima said that he was going to be at the Los Angeles bug fair.

7:21He 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.

8:07And then, you know, my only job really that day was to manage the informant and, you know, see if I could eyeball Yoshi Kojima and just verify that that's who it was, in fact, Yoshi Kojima. 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 Yoshi Kojima at a table in the exhibition hall. He had thinning gray hair, and he always wore baggy 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 informants actually had a table too, and his wasn't too far away, maybe 40 or 50 feet away.

8:50And 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 going to 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, what's that? How much is that? How do you collect? You know, I just started asking a lot of really novice questions.

9:32And 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 U.S.

10:10Department of Agriculture rules. Ed Newcomer told Yoshi Kojima that his name was Ted Nelson. There were probably two or three times when I, you know, sauntered over to Kojima's table and chatted with him and joked. And 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. And I turned around and there's Yoshi standing right in front of me. And 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.

10:50And 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.

11:22We'll be right back.

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13:37When Fish and Wildlife agent Ed Newcomer got Yoshi Kojima'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 a Starbucks in Los Angeles, right off of Venice Boulevard and Robertson, which is, you know, busy, busy part of town.

14:22And a 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're definitely going to meet for coffee. But, you know, things were unfolding quickly, which made me nervous. But we made the plan and got all wired up. Ed'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.

15:07He 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 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've got to 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.

15:45So it's just this very delicate dance. 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 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 what was it my backstory was basically I lived in 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.

16:51So 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.

17:31I mean, there was an explanation for everything that made sense, if he asked. 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.

18:11He 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, 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 in touch over email and sometimes talked on the phone.

18:53It was hard because early 2000s, we actually did not have an undercover cell phone to use. We used an undercover hardline, 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 uh you know there's nobody there right i'm not there uh so kojima would call sometimes because he's in japan so time lift 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 Yoshi Kojima never sent anything.

19:55Ed 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's 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.

20:32Nope. 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 game warden called Ed. So this game 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.

21:27And 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 going to work with him or he's not going to tell him anything.

22:10So, 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.

22:25We'll be right back.

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23:16It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system. Impressive. Let me try. At T-Mobile, you can save up to 20 % versus the other big guys. You heard them. T-Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible trade-in in any condition. Check them out to see how much you can save versus the other big guys at T-Mobile.com slash switch. Ed Newcomer moved on to other cases. He investigated a case of fish being smuggled in from Indonesia, and he started looking into pigeon breeders in Los Angeles who were killing hawks to protect their birds.

23:49And then, in 2006, he got a new tip. Another insect dealer said he had news. He'd heard that Yoshi Kojima 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.

24:33which 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, um, I said, look, you're not going to believe this Yossi, but some asshole turned me into a fish and wildlife guys.

25:17And, uh, 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 him, 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. And 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.

26:04But 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 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 of 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.