Man gets 2 years in prison for stealing plants CA state parks, had run to South Africa to do same

[Demovictory9]

Man gets 2 years in prison for stealing plants worth $150,000 from California state parks

I posted about the plant stealer last year. update

Dudleya caespitosa is a succulent plant known by several common names, including sea lettuce.



https://www.sfgate.com/california-parks/article/Dudleya-succulent-plants-stolen-California-16806384.php

A man was sentenced to two years in federal prison last week for attempting to export at least $150,000 worth of wild succulents that he poached from native habitats in Northern California state parks, the United States Justice Department said.


On Oct. 11, 2018, Byungsu Kim, 46, and co-defendants Youngin Back, 47, and Bong Jun Kim, 46, traveled by car from Los Angeles International Airport to Crescent City, Calif., with plans to harvest wild plants and smuggle them to South Korea, the department said in a statement Jan. 20. Throughout October 2018, they pulled plants from the ground at DeMartin State Beach in Klamath, Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park in Crescent City and Russian Gulch State Park in Mendocino County, the department said. The Dudleya plants — a type of succulent with a pretty rose shape that grows along coastal cliffs — were then brought to a nursery operated by Kim in Vista, a town near San Diego.

Because growing Dudleyas in nurseries takes years, smugglers are known to harvest wild, living plants from the ground in Northern California and export them overseas where they are sold on the black market.


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Byungsu Kim and Back reportedly fled to Mexico on foot in May 2019 through the Tijuana-San Ysidro border crossing after learning of pending federal charges against them. With his fraudulent passport, Kim flew with Back from Mexico to China, and ultimately to South Korea, the department said.

Kim surfaced in South Africa in October 2019, where he was arrested for illegally collecting plants from protected areas for export to South Korea. After pleading guilty to the criminal charges in South Africa and spending a year in custody, he was extradited to the United States in October 2020, where he has been in federal custody since.

https://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/ny-california-state-parks-succulents-south-korea-20190602-clplzzlytfepvlsputjl2hgca4-story.html

[maxsolomon]

1. good. hopefully 2 years makes an impression on him.

i'm goddamn sick of poachers, flora or fauna.

[Baitball Blogger]

2. Glad they caught him.

[Hekate]

3. My neighbor has those, and I have some starts from her trimmings. Good grief, stealing them from--

… the wild is really bad, as it belongs to all of us, and disrupts the ecosystem.

I remember the previous story, and I’m glad to see justice done.

[ret5hd]

4. Sentence him to 5 years...

protecting/watering etc some rare plant in the middle of some huge National forest or park somewhere where he has to be helicoptered in to some sparse cabin WAY out in the middle of nowhere with bears and cougars all around (my gawd people…WILDLIFE! Get your minds out of the gutter!) and if that plant dies he has to spend another 5 years protecting another plant. No cell phone, just an emergency walkie-talkie. Air drop food supplies once a month. Cut his own firewood.


On edit: I think I just described my dream job.

[jeffreyi]

5. Good.

Here's a link to a youtube dealing with this issue: