Game laws are racist
US officials hook caviar poaching operation
By Catherine Elsworth in Los Angeles
18 May 2005
Immigrants from Russia and the Ukraine have imported a worrying criminal trend into California: the poaching of freshwater sturgeon for caviar.
Local officials, in their third such operation, smashed a caviar poaching ring responsible for stealing rare white sturgeon from local rivers and selling the roe for up to £140 a pound to immigrant communities where demand for the delicacy is high.
Nine men were arrested and six charged with conspiracy after state game wardens raided a Russian delicatessen in San Francisco and several Ukrainian workshops.
The alleged ringleader, Nikolay Krasnodemskiy, 34, is said to have poached the fish and prepared and packaged the caviar in two car body shops in an industrial suburb north of Sacramento.
A community of 75,000 to 100,000 recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union lives in the area.
Officials from the Department of Fish and Game tracked five shipments Krasnodemskiy made to San Francisco involving 120lb of Sacramento River Delta caviar valued at £8,700. It was sold out of homes and at a Russian delicatessen. The shop’s owner was arrested and charged.
Three other men were arrested, accused of approaching undercover game agents posing as fishermen and asking to buy the sturgeon they had caught.
Experts fear that the theft of Sacramento River sturgeon could threaten the species.