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they're all different you know some when you catch them hey they throw their hands up and you got them but it is kind
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of you know a eerie feeling when you're out here by yourself and you're dealing with
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four or five guys and you know three or four of them's carrying machetes because
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that's a common tool to trade the machetes you got to be careful i mean it's not a
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game you got to be on your p's and q's and you know no situation's the same so you got to expect unexpected
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brandon dean is an officer with the north carolina wildlife resources commission the state nature cops
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dean patrols the green swamp more than 17 000 acres of savannah and swamp land in the southeastern most corner of the
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state it's known mostly for its bird watching and longleaf pines but it's also ground
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zero for an obscure black market one that's exploded in the last few years and shows no sign of slowing down you
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walk it you wouldn't even notice it see oh wow and that's what they would dig up right
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there and sell they're so small it's like a fingernail yeah those are really small like i said
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some of them you can get that's because the green swamp is one of the only places in the world where you can find
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an especially rare plant one that's disappearing by the thousands the venus flytrap obviously this place here has
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been hit pretty hard because youth could come out here and they'd be everywhere and now we're scrounging to find a
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couple you could get so many yes every year for the past few years tens of thousands of fly traps have gone
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missing from the wild from gardens from nurseries decimating the population and really
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nobody knows where they go what's cropped up in rural north carolina is essentially a venus flytrap
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crime ring with lackeys middlemen and a mysterious end buyer who's perpetuating the market
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our producer eric metal decided to look into this black market to try to figure out who's running it who's funding it
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and why he is today's story i'm phoebe judge and this is criminal could you just sort of describe when you
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first walked in what the scene looked like like a hurricane it had it was pots everywhere
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cindy evans and joe wood run a nursery and craft business in brunswick county north carolina called fly trap farm it's
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about 10 miles south of the green swamp flytrap farm as you might have guessed specializes in the bulk sale of venus
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fly traps one night last september a group of people broke into joe and cindy's greenhouses what they did was
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pull the plants out of the pots they didn't take the pots they just pulled the plants out put them
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in our bags that they had come in here broken and yeah stolen our trash bags and all the
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windows out back here and they took them all out and laid them on the ground on pieces of cardboard so
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they wouldn't break cindy pulled out her iphone and swiped through picture after picture of the
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scene footprints in the spilled soil tire marks in the field behind the greenhouses this is where they came in
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this is where they broke out the back of the of that greenhouse there all the way
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in the back how many plants are we talking what audrey counted up was about sixty
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five thousand dollars worth about eighteen 000 plants in total the vast majority of which were venus fly traps
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as far as anyone i've talked to can tell it's the largest single theft of fly traps ever it totally shot our whole
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fall and early spring shipping schedule we're so behind right now we're only behind we're weighing debt again too
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because we've borrowed money borrowed money and borrow money try and get things caught back up it set us back 15
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years just like when we started why would they do that because there's a black market for them
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[Music] you tell people it grows here and they're like i thought it grew in the amazon rainforest angie carl works for
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the nature conservancy the non-profit that owns most of the green swamp i say i'm a paid arsonist
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she does controlled burns to keep the plant growth in check i'm enter not far from the green swamp in wilmington north
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carolina aka fly trap central this part of the state is literally the only place
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in the world where venus flytraps grow in the wild there's a park nearby called flytrap downs and a fly trap 5k run
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every year you can't come down here and not be exposed to the fly trap but only grows within a 90 mile radius of
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wilmington north carolina yeah it's a pretty incredible species it is pretty incredible but likely not for the
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reasons you think first off and let's just get this reference out of the way it does not
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look anything like the plant from little shop of horrors feed me now i can't must be blood
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tui that's disgusting must be fresh people think that they're huge plants that can eat people
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and they can eat your mother-in-law if you've got a good blender that's the only
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gotta mulch them good again cindy and joe at flytrap farm the biggest fly traps only get to be about four or five
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inches tall but that doesn't make them any less impressive the venus flytrap this bbc one documentary is basically
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flytrap porn the plants are tiny green the inside of the actual trap is usually a bright red which makes them highly
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visible to insects it makes itself very attractive oozing nectar across the brim
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of each leaf now this might be silly to point out but the flytrap doesn't actually know
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there's a bug in the trap because as angie carl had to remind me plants don't have brains what they do have is a
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series of trigger hairs almost like whiskers think of it like a mouse trap where it's always in the suspended state
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of tension until something comes along and taps the trigger hair the insect can hit one of those trigger
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hairs and be totally fine but but a timer has been set two of those trigger hairs are touched really quickly
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in succession snap closes shut and the fly is doomed it's likely fly traps were all over this
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part of north carolina a hundred years ago but like with other plants and animals development did a number on the
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population and what's left has been relegated to a few protected preserves and for years that was fine nothing to
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be concerned about people knew about the plant but it was sort of a novelty until the last few years when something
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in the market shifted somebody somewhere has increased their demand for fly traps and it's causing
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all sorts of problems [Music] joe and cindy at flytrap farm aren't the only victims of flytrap burglary not by
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a long shot just a few months before the break-in somebody dug up and stole an estimated 20 thousand dollars worth of
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fly traps from a park in wilmington joe and cindy have all kinds of stories about thefts around town friend of ours
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his wife died a couple years ago and they did a memorial garden for her we brought a bunch of plants up there
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and they planted them and grew them and they were expanding and doing very well and then all of a sudden
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they came in there and stole all them now they steal them all the time but but nobody's got that many flytrap for them
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to steal even flytrap farm at 18 000 plants wasn't enough to satisfy the market plants are still disappearing mostly
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from the biggest concentration of all the green swamp it's almost impossible to catch them this is brandon dean again
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the officer with the wildlife resources commission they get dropped off and like
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ghost in the darks you never know they're even there they run across the road get into the woods and normal passerby
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they can't see them because of the savannas when people poach fly traps from the ground they're on their hands
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and knees below the grass line but occasionally dean will be driving by and see a couple of heads pop up in the
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swamp almost like prairie dogs he'll hop out of his car chase them down on foot and ideally have them arrested and
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confiscate the traps i've gotten anywhere from 800 plants to over 2 000 plants it all depends on how experienced
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the trapper is and what time of year it is and if they get into a good cluster of fly traps
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so when you when you catch these people what do they have on their person are they what are they carrying the fly
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traps in how many are they carrying what are they using to dig them up i've seen
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them carry fly traps from a pillow case all the way to a backpack you know whatever kind of satchel they can get to
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throw them in there i've seen tools from spades you use in your garden to crow bars that are cut off to swing sets
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swing sets like the bar on a swing set they'll break the bar off you know it's probably half an inch diameter
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flattening out the end to where it's flat they got a handle they stick it in the ground and pop them right up oh
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that's kind of inventive oh yeah yes it's they they work harder at not working than they would if they had a job
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what time of day does this happen it depends on their schedule whenever they wake up
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a lot of them they already have charges pending such as drug charges so they they don't have a job so whenever
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they get dirt to go take five traps they get somebody to drop them off and they spend all day out here digging traps
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they're really hard to catch we've put cameras out they've stolen my cameras again angie carl with the nature
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conservancy i think that their marking areas will go out and find spoons and stuff in areas wait so they're leaving
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spoons behind or they're like leaving them there as like a signal like leaving breadcrumbs kind of thing they leave
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them there so when they come back they know where they were digging and they can move on from there
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in more ways than one the culture of poachers is pretty similar to that of other black markets
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for instance it's every man for himself we've had poachers call me and say that i see poachers out in the savannah and
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then two days later that same person who called me gets arrested because they were out poaching so they were calling
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in their competition there's other fly trappers that are jealous because they're on there so quote turf they call
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us and tell us they're out here doing it and we come out here and track them up and find them oh it's literally like a
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turf war oh yeah the other fly trappers call on other fly trappers they'll tell you say i've been in there this is where
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they're gonna go this is the time of day they're gonna do it and i mean you have
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to go because you don't know when they're gonna be picked up and when they're not
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pretty comical if you think about it admittedly it's hard not to laugh a little at the idea of a venus flytrap
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crime ring but in the last three years things have gotten really bad the fly trap has some federal and state
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protections but there's just not enough information to actually call it threatened or endangered
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and this is one of the most frustrating parts of this story nobody actually knows how many fly traps there are
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nobody knows exactly how many are being poached the only number any academic has
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come up with is 35 000 left in the wild but it's unclear how accurate that number is
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we do know they only grow in a handful of places we do know they're disappearing by the thousands from the
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wild and it's also clear the poachers are not just hoarding the plants they're selling them
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when brandon dean has caught poachers in the past they've told them they sell to
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local nurseries who pay anywhere from 10 to 25 cents a plant 1 000 plants in a day could turn into a couple hundred
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bucks where do you get a sense that they're selling them to we've never really looked into it you
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know most of them say that they sell them to a place called flytrap farms um i just have to ask you because you
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know it's part of my job just to be honest like have you ever knowingly bought from poachers oh sure
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[Music] that was a little tough to hear but joe wood admits he has bought from poachers
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in the past on a couple of carnivorous plant message boards people have accused joe wood in fly trap farm of buying
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poached plants for years one person i talked to called the break in at joe's nursery quote karma
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and joe doesn't hide the fact that he bought from locals in fact it's not illegal to buy the plants only to dig
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them up from the wild but joe likes to make a distinction they had licenses to buy i mean we always had
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licenses what is considered poachers now they used to all be considered farmers turns out people have been digging up
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plants in brunswick county for decades but it was always sort of a controlled chaos the state would give out licenses
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and you could ask permission to pull from other people's property problem is a fly trap from someone's
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backyard looks exactly like a fly trap from protected lands there's no way to verify where it actually came from
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so when someone showed up at flytrap farm with a license and a backpack filled with a thousand traps joe could
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buy them but now joe says he won't even do that the state has gotten stricter and if he
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got caught buying poached plants he's afraid he'd get shut down [Music] there are a handful of nurseries in the
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state that deal mainly in carnivorous plants what everyone seems to agree on is that
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these nurseries be it fly trap farm or some of their competitors are not the end buyer they're just the middle men
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somebody is buying in bulk at a rate unlike anything before and most people have the same theory
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there's a guy in new york and he's got a deal going where he claims the juice from these plants will
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cure cancer there's something that's called carnivore that is being deemed like a thing that will get rid of your
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cancer you know with and it has a picture of a fly trap on it so he's buying about four million plants a year
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and crushing him and taking the juice from them so and then he's mixing it with something else and he claims it's a
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cure for cancer carnivore research international carnivore was created by a german
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physician in the 1970s named helmut keller the company has two products liquid drops and capsules made from what
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it calls pure extract of venus flytrap it's billed as nature's nutritional powerhouse i called carnivora
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headquarters hoping i might talk with helmut keller the creator he's around but not on this side eric this is
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richard ostrow now the owner and ceo of carnivora he's on the other side he had passed away about four years ago
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oh okay i'm sorry to hear that that's okay austral got interested in the company well over a decade ago when he
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says he saw firsthand what the product could do the reason that i had met dr keller
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originally is because my mother needed his services she had smoked since she was 14 and you
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know what can happen there and so she ended up with a disease that were prohibited from
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mentioning in this country he's talking about cancer and we brought her over to an irish clinic
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where he was at the time and he was literally bringing her back to life but the story didn't end well because he
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had to leave the clinic and go back to germany and the fda would not allow me to import
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carnivora to the united states and she lost her battle because you couldn't get carnivora here
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in the states uh 100 absolutely yes because of fda restrictions carnivora cannot claim to actually cure any
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diseases we can say this is a a powerful immune defense supplement which of course it is
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and that it wakes up specific immune cells to turn on your immune system to do the
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job that it's meant to do right but but just to make sure i'm clear in other countries you're allowed
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to claim that it either prevents or helps cure many diseases such as cancer i won't answer that question in the
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united states but here's the butt uh we can say any damn thing we choose in freer countries of which there are many
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chances are you've never heard of carnivora but as richard ostrow tells it the company is doing just fine in fact
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the last couple of years they've been in the market for more fly traps a lot more
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the growth in the us has been astronomical in the last five years what kind of growth are we talking about
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can i ask how many customers give or take well how how do i show the growth here
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the best way to find out is we're in the midst of hiring a pr firm because we're
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launching our pet division and they're going to put the word out there in the united states
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like never before [Music] do you import or rather buy fly traps from north carolina then
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no no we don't touch north carolina they couldn't possibly supply us the amount of venus fly traps that we would
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need ostro says carnivora buys fly traps by the kilogram not the plant and they're
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not just buying wild grown plants they're also buying something called tissue culture
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tissue culture is essentially cloned fly traps giant labs mainly in the netherlands and china have taken flytrap
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tissue and used it to make a massive number of genetically identical fly traps yes even an indigenous american
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carnivorous plant is now made in china astro says carnivora is a mix of wild grown and tissue cultured fly traps and
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he says the company hasn't gone near north carolina traps in eight or nine years
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the demand is higher than north carolina can handle he says but he won't go any further
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can i ask maybe from what state or country or you're able to help meet those demands
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i can't get into that either the reason i won't get into that is because i'm not tipping off
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anybody who can use it against us at every step of the way it's harder to know who's telling the truth the
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poachers could be lying about who they sell to the nurseries could be lying about who they buy from and if the
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fast-growing alternative medicine market isn't driving the poaching it's unclear
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what is so what do you do back in brunswick county the sheriff's office has charged someone with a
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robbery at flytrap farm a local man he's 23 years old charged with two felony counts of breaking and entering and two
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counts of felony larceny in a lot of ways it's one of the more serious penalties ever levied against
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someone for fly trap theft which sounds great but frankly it'll probably just make poachers more cautious and keep
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them out of nurseries and in the swamps where the penalties are negligible brandon dean the thing about it is it's
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so hard to catch them when you do catch them they pretty much laugh at you and they tell you they're making too much
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money because they only get caught once a year once every three years and they're doing it you know pretty much
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every day they can so they're making out like a bandit yeah so even if they got charged 150 bucks in fines or whatever
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that's one night's worth of fly traps that that's correct that's correct and you know that's that's the problem we
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have until there's a stiffer penalty put in place they're going to continue to to
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come out here and rape their resources so to speak there's always going to be a criminal
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element if you if there's money to be made and a lot of it they're gonna steal the fly traps regardless angie carl at
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the nature conservancy disagrees with officer dean she thinks going after the poachers won't have much effect at all
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she thinks going after the middlemen the nurseries who are buying the poached plants is the best way to stop the
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market cut the snake off at the head sort of thing there are efforts at the state level to
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make flytrap poaching a felony but it's unclear how much weight there is behind the idea
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so there's a possibility the plants will become even rarer and as silly as it may
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seem anytime a species disappears there's one thought that comes to mind i mean what if it is a cure for cancer you
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know and we've now just decimated all of our populations even if that's overstating it the other
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alternative is simply that we lose an important part of american biodiversity the reality that if you want to see a
00:19:42
venus fly trap a plant endemic to the american south you'll have to buy a clone from a lab in
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china so for now angie carl and the nature conservancy are doing the only thing they can think
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of they're trying to learn more about the market they need more details in order to
00:20:01
pressure lawmakers to help protect the plan and they're going the route of any other
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organization with limited resources they've hired a summer intern to look into it
00:20:10
she started this month [Music] eric menno criminal is produced by eric lauren spore and me julian alexander
00:20:32
does our episode art if you like the show you can subscribe in itunes our website is thisiscriminal.org we're also
00:20:40
on facebook and twitter at criminal show i'm phoebe judge this is criminal [Music]