My husband is an orchid grower. I spend a few minutes being worried about it, maybe every other month.
Once in a while, though, the fit hits the ... and the SWAT teams show up. (Not here, yet.)
Posted on 10/05/2009 6:26:18 PM PDT by ellery
So as it turns out, even the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has its own SWAT team.
You don’t need to know. You can’t know.” That’s what Kathy Norris, a 60-year-old grandmother of eight, was told when she tried to ask court officials why, the day before, federal agents had subjected her home to a furious search.
The agents who spent half a day ransacking Mrs. Norris’ longtime home in Spring, Texas, answered no questions while they emptied file cabinets, pulled books off shelves, rifled through drawers and closets, and threw the contents on the floor.
The six agents, wearing SWAT gear and carrying weapons, were with – get this- the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Kathy and George Norris lived under the specter of a covert government investigation for almost six months before the government unsealed a secret indictment and revealed why the Fish and Wildlife Service had treated their family home as if it were a training base for suspected terrorists. Orchids.
That’s right. Orchids.
By March 2004, federal prosecutors were well on their way to turning 66-year-old retiree George Norris into an inmate in a federal penitentiary – based on his home-based business of cultivating, importing and selling orchids..
Mr. Norris ended up spending almost two years in prison because he didn’t have the proper paperwork for some of the many orchids he imported. The orchids were all legal – but Mr. Norris and the overseas shippers who had packaged the flowers had failed to properly navigate the many, often irrational, paperwork requirements the U.S. imposed when it implemented an arcane international treaty’s new restrictions on trade in flowers and other flora.
The judge who sentenced Mr. Norris had some advice for him and his wife: “Life sometimes presents us with lemons.” Their job was, yes, to “turn lemons into lemonade.”
Or just wait for the inevitable SWAT team to come and smash them for you.
ping.
If he had a Meth lab, he would have gotten 4 months.
My husband is an orchid grower. I spend a few minutes being worried about it, maybe every other month.
Once in a while, though, the fit hits the ... and the SWAT teams show up. (Not here, yet.)
233 years was a long time to be free.
TX Ping.
“Kathy and George Norris...”
Good thing for the SWAT Team it wasn’t *Chuck* Norris.
If a SWAT team comes in and messes your house up and finds that they were wrong, they should, at the very least, be required to clean up the mess they made or compensate you for you time in the clean-up
Now if I understand this correctly, in order to ship orchids from another country, one has to file paperwork equivalent to unbelievable amounts of red tape with restrictions, but yet they were able to do so without filing for this unbelievable amount of restrictions and red tape, because they didn't know about them?
Whoa! Someone dropped the ball bigtime on this business venture....
I can’t find, right now, the guy (Red Devil), who does the gardening ping list, but this should be a thread.
Heck, Home Depot, Lowes, etc., sells orchids. What is this about? I have tried to grow them and they need so much tender loving care I failed. Anyway, this is not an article from a publication — don’t know what to make of it.
Calpernia, you still on FR?
BTW, must brag — fellow gardeners. My new greenhouse is built (not quite finished). I have been away from home most of the summer, but came home and lit a fire under the butts of my hubby and brother, and got it built. When I get some time I will take pics of it and try to post them on FR.
Did the dipsticks “Tiptoe thru the Tulips”?I’d laugh my ass off all the way to jail and court.Insane,pure insane.And we pay for this crap.
I mean, seriously, the victim's life is trashed, so what does he have to lose?
Better living through chemistry.
/johnny
LOL. Yea.
What orchids?
What guns?
This reminds me of the ravaging of 436 young children over a total hoax telephone call by the Texas gestapo when THEY KNEW IT WAS A HOAX!! It was proven to be illegal kidnapping by the state !!! The Judges ruling was thrown out but guess what? She still gets up every day and goes to work like Heinrick Hemler did in the third Reich!! God, what ever happened to FREEEEEDOOOOM?
Why do they have to destroy things to search? That’s just maliciousness.
Funny that, and yet we reserve the right to be outraged if some unknown importer imports some unknown insect, virus, bacteria, or other agent on his undisclosed orchids.
Let all with international businesses be warned: the Federales play like thugs for very little reason.
I believe I heard of this or a similar incident a few months back, but it sounded then as though the problem had to do with sending the flowers to other countries rather than with obtaining them. If the Norrises had had the flowers drop shipped from a foreign wholesaler that would be still another ball of wax. I don’t know why this didn’t result in a mere probation, unless it’s the Bush philosophy (stomp on your friends).
The "Agitator"?
*shakes head*
I’m assuming the raid had something to do with the “endangered” status of a number of varieties of orchids in Africa (no, I’m not making that up).
It’s fine to look into these things, but an armed SWAT team? Ransacking someone’s home instead of just asking them to produce the required documents? Dragging them into court instead of fining them for the paperwork errors? Good lord, people, get some perspective!
Even the lefty libertarians get some things right.
You can easily smuggle heroin embedded into honeycombs inside jars of honey from anywhere.
These guys got somehow erroneously caught up, and I hope they sue and get massive damages, but that’s the nature of the biz, it seems.
Somebody was packing H or something into orchids somewhere......and this couple got cross-able-dangered.
Now you see one consequence for peasants of doing their own free trade. Free trade is only for the established business-education-government families.
Why in God’s name does the Fish & Wildlife Service have a ‘SWAT team’? Why do we have a federal Fish & Wildlife Service?
“The “Agitator”?”
that was my thought, too, until I googled some...
The judge who sentenced Mr. Norris had some advice for him and his wife: “Life sometimes presents us with lemons.” Their job was, yes, to “turn lemons into lemonade.”
The judge apparently failed to appreciate how difficult it is to run a successful lemonade stand when you’re an elderly diabetic with coronary complications, arthritis and Parkinson’s disease serving time in a federal penitentiary. If only Mr. Norris had been a Libyan terrorist, maybe some European official at least would have weighed in on his behalf to secure a health-based mercy release. snip
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/oct/05/criminalizing-everyone/
Think “service” as in what a bull does to a cow.
Perhaps the Norris family decided to wave the red-tape thinking it was a minor thing, took a short cut and ending up paying...a price of monumental proportions.
Government is run by idiots. Even the lawyers and bureaucrats don’t know the law.
This SWAT team were amateurs. No dead pets?
As someone that has a processed a search warrant on many an occasion, I have gone out of my way not to make a mess. I could search a house from top to bottom and put things back as they were and still do my job.
SWAT, great idea, saved my butt on more than one occasion. But, they can be overzealous sometimes.
Most jackboots aren’t that courteous.
They would cease to be endangered of they became commodities, maybe thats they are fighting it so hard?
Ping
Like to see someone kick the judge's balls through the top of his head and then tell him the same thing
Hey girl!
Kudos on the greenhouse!
I’ll ping Red.
Thanks for the head’s up!
Well, then you’re probably one of the good ones. Ever shot a harmless puppy dog or stomped a kitten?
*JUST KIDDING!*
Should have been jury nullification......
If you don’t like the law, you feel it’s unjust, improperly constructed or applied and you are on a jury, just vote not guilty.
Tough sh*t to the judge and prosecutor....
Almost everyone on FR always complains about jury duty and how to get out of it.....what better way for a citizen to express dissatifaction with unjust laws and thumb their nose at the government....
Imagine a US where the IRS could almost never get a conviction.....Or cases like this result in a hung jury.....
Shut these jerks down through the courts......Just one of us on each jury can do this.....
Never a member of SWAT, as for the puppy dog or stomped kitten … no comment! LOL!
The wisdom of George Washington is once again shown to be prescient.
In his farewell address he warned the people against engaging in entangling foreign treaties.
Here we see that we ignore that advice at our own peril.
IMO, the Agitator has been one of the best lately at reporting on federal government overreach and SWAT team abuse. I believe it’s run by one of the guys at Reason.
I absolutely agree. I never get called, though.
I worked with a complete slacker who used to get called for jury duty all the time—she told me that she had a friend in whatever office it was that oversees jury selection, and that all she had to do was call and she could get on the list. I have no idea whether that’s true, of course...
To prevent the serfs from poaching the king’s deer.
The Overcriminalization of Conduct: Consequences for One American Family
I didn’t say that the homeowners could or would interfere. That kind of unprofessional behavior should NOT be tolerated. And, yes, I know that none of them will pay for
their misconduct.
Because they are evil. Most law enforcement officers see themselves as a separate ruling class, and they see the non-cops as being there for sport.
All it takes is for the exporter to make one mistake on his export paperwork and then you the importer are liable. No mistake of your own. Still liable for thousands and jail time. That is why I do not import or export. Letting a bunch of government knuckle draggers getting involved with business can only lead to trouble.
Thank goodness that this was just a story.
There are similar speculations on how a small amount of plutonium, a few pounds, dispersed appropriately (not involved in any nuclear reaction) would suffice to kill all humans on earth from radiation induced cancer. The devil, as always, is in the details. The dispersion would have to be uniform and micro-fine into every person’s lungs, not affected by weather, not wasted or diluted in any manner. Any plutonium that escapes into the environment from things like nuclear reactors or bombs would not come anywhere close to fulfilling those conditions.
You should see the recent National Geographic article on ‘sexy’ deceptive orchids. Or your husband should. There are orchids out there that mimic female bees, others that mimic rotting flesh, some that just plant a big pollen sac on ya and send ya on yer way. Sneaky things, orchids.
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