Parrot Smuggler Pleads Guilty
Submitted by Real Macaw Member, Beth Shery
William A. Keefer, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida and Kevin Adams, Special Agent in Charge, United States Fish & Wildlife Service, announced that Adolph "Buzz" Pare, 63, of Miami, Florida, 
doing business as Gators of Miami, Inc., pled guilty in April to two counts of an indictment charging him with conspiring to illegally smuggle African Grey parrots into the United States and to defraud the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service by filing false importation documents on twelve different shipments of parrots, in violation of the Lacey Act, 16 U.S.C. Sec. 3372(d); and the smuggling statute, 18 U.S.C. Sec. 545. The defendant also pled guilty to one count of making and submitting a false record for a shipment of 600 parrots in violation of the Lacey Act, 16 U.S.C. Sec. 3372(d)(1). In a plea agreement, Pare agreed to pay fines and restitution totaling $300,000-- the largest sum ever in a federal wildlife smuggling case in the United States. The defendant faces a maximum penalty of up to five years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines on each of the two counts when sentenced in July.
According to the indictment and public documents, Gators of Miami, Inc. was the nation's largest importer of African Grey parrots during 1988, 1989 and 1990, having imported approximately 24- of all such birds. Between February 1988 and August 1991, the defendant, doing business as Gators of Miami, Inc., conspired to smuggle into Miami approximately fourteen shipments of over 4,000 Congo African Grey parrots which had been illegally taken from their wild habitat in Zaire, where the commercial trade in grey parrots had been completely banned. The African Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus erithacus) is listed as a protected species in Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). These particular parrots were smuggled from Zaire to the laundering country of Senegal, and then exported using false CITES export documents to the United States. The CITES export documents falsely stated that the parrots originated in Guinea or the Ivory Coast, countries where the Congo African Grey parrot does not occur in the wild. African Grey parrots are highly desired birds within the pet trade and a large Congo African Grey parrot will commonly command a retail price of approximately $600 to $1,000 per bird in the United States.
As reported in "The Miami Herald" on July 15, Adolph Pare was sentenced to one year in prison and fined $300,000 -- the most in a wildlife smuggling case -- for conspiring to smuggle more than 4,000 African gray parrots. In April, six days before trial, Pare pleaded guilty to smuggling conspiracy charges. "This was one of the most significant prosecutions of wildlife smuggling that the U.S. attorney's office (in South Florida) has handled, because of the volume alone," said Chris McAliley, who handled the case as head of the office's environmental crimes section in the early 1990s. "Wildlife experts think the amount of smuggling had a detrimental impact on that species," said McAliley, who is now in private practice. From 1988 to 1991, Pare's company smuggled more than 4,000 parrots into the Miami area, investigators said. They described Gators of Miami as the nation's largest importer of the gray parrot.
Prosecutors said Pare paid about $85 for each bird and sold them in the United States, mainly to wholesalers, for $600 to $1,000. About 240 parrots were confiscated during the case. About 140 survived and many were sold at private auction. The birds could not be returned to the wild because they had been in captivity too long.
The Pare conviction was one of 38 resulting from Operation Renegade, an unusual undercover operation by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Federal agents ran their own "private" quarantine station in Los Angeles as a way of breaking up wildlife smuggling rings. "We had to work from the inside, to get information on smuggling," said Rick Leach, a special agent for the Wildlife Service. Pare could have received up to five years in prison and fines of $500,000. "It's a fair sentence," said Roy Black, Pare's attorney. Pare is now retired.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Lauren Priegues, who prosecuted the case, said that tightening of federal law in recent years has slowed the smuggling of African gray parrots and other endangered birds.
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