Ed Newcomer
Appearances
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
And that made him happy. And he wasn't interested in marine supplies, so it didn't matter. If he asked me something, I'd start talking about bilge pumps, and he would lose interest very quickly. So that was kind of it. But we had the driver's license. I had the Costco card in my wallet. If he ever looked in my wallet... he would see Ted Nelson. We had an explanation for why I used a P.O.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
box instead of getting mail at my house. I mean, everything was, there was an explanation for everything that made sense if he asked.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
No, I did not get the sense that he trusted me at all. And the real proof of that came after our meeting at Starbucks. He walked me out to my car. He started to walk around my vehicle. He did a full 360 degree tour of the outside of my vehicle. And he looked in the grill and he peered in the windows. He looked at the license plate and, you know,
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
We looked it up in our system and learned that he'd been under investigation for quite some time. In the 90s, Kojima was running around the western U.S. illegally collecting insects from national parks, including Death Valley and the Grand Canyon National Park. And Kojima, he's a Japanese citizen, but he maintained a house in Los Angeles. and a home in Kyoto, Japan.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
It would have been very unnatural for me not to have been like, what the hell are you doing, right? If I had just stood there and let him walk around my car peering all over it, it would have been weird. So I said, Yoshi, what are you doing? And he goes, oh, I'm looking to see if you have red and blue lights in your grill. And I wanted to check to see if you have your police shotgun in the car.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
It was hard because this early 2000s, we actually did not have an undercover cell phone to use. We used an undercover hard line, which was located in a special room in the field office in Los Angeles. So an agent who was doing undercover work would actually have to go into that room and use the hard line to make undercover phone calls.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
And the phone was set up to do recordings and an answering machine that sounded like a business and all this stuff. But it was and that's not ideal because on a Saturday night or even a weeknight, you know, there's nobody there. Right. I'm not there. So Kojima would call sometimes because he's in Japan. So the time difference would screw us up, too.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
And he'd get pissed off because he'd keep getting my answering machine. He would get mad at me because I wasn't available when he wanted me to be available. And so he'd stop talking to me for a week or two, which was really infuriating.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
And I just decided, you know what, I'm going to reach out to every agent I know, and I'm going to ask them to go set up a covert eBay account and bid on my auctions.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
I did maybe 14 or 15 of them. They all came off perfectly. And I thought, okay, this is going to work. Kojima's going to come back. He's going to say, where are you getting these? I can supply you with better material. I thought we were working together, that kind of thing. Nope. He reacted as if I was intentionally competing with him.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
It's like watching a train wreck. I was watching this undercover relationship I had built slowly degrade. You know, I'm new and I'm the only one that's got a case that is slowly but surely on its way into a nosedive into the ground.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
So this game warden knew that I was investigating a butterfly guy, and he said, hey, I don't know if you know this Ted Nelson guy, but we got a tip that he's selling illegal butterflies on eBay. And I said, okay, thanks. Can you send me the recording? So he sent it to me, and my whole office listened to it in the conference room. It was obviously Kojima. And he had turned me in.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
And everybody in the room was like, oh, dude, your case is over. Because once you report somebody to the Fish and Wildlife Service, you have to assume that an agent's going to make contact with this Ted Nelson guy and presumably flip him or possibly flip him as an informant.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
So if after being reported, Ted Nelson continues to be out there on eBay selling or continues to be in communication with Kojima, Kojima is going to naturally assume that Ted Nelson is now an informant and he's not going to work with him. He's not going to tell him anything. So, you know, Kojima wasn't answering any phone calls. He wasn't writing to me. He wasn't calling me anymore.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
And what he would do is he would collect butterflies mostly, some insects or some beetles as well, but mostly butterflies from the US, take them back to Japan and sell them. And of course, by the time you're selling them, they're all dead and they're pinned like you might see in a museum.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
So I said, well, heck, we've got to give it one more try, right? We're going to give it our all.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
I had a big, beefy kind of biker mustache at the time and didn't wash my hair very often.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
And there was no way we were not going to run into each other. And, uh... Yeah, we did. And he looked surprised and scared, which really kind of struck me. I think he was afraid I knew he had turned me into the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
I was like open arms, like I was so happy to see him. And I said, hey, man, I owe you a huge, huge thank you. I said, look, back when you and I were meeting, you gave me advice about what to do if Fish and Wildlife ever came to my house, which he did. He did give me some advice about what to say or what to do if Fish and Wildlife ever reached out and asked me where I was getting these things.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
And some of these things, you know, depending on where you're selling them can sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars a piece.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
And I said, look, you're not going to believe this, Yossi, but some asshole turned me into Fish and Wildlife guys. And these officers came to my house and they asked me a lot of questions. And I did exactly what you told me to do. I didn't keep any material at my house. And I told them I don't know what they're talking about. And they left. And they left me alone.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
And his whole demeanor changed instantly. He was so thrilled that he had given me advice that helped me. And I think at that moment, too, he viewed me now as a criminal. He's like, okay, Ted Nelson is also a butterfly crook. And he said, well, are you still selling? And I said, oh, yeah.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
And he said, hey, let's go to lunch. So we went out to this Korean barbecue place somewhere in Koreatown in Los Angeles. In the course of that lunch, he said, look, I'm going to go back to Japan. He goes, have you ever heard of Skype? And this is like at the front end of video conference calling and stuff. So Skype was it. And I said, yeah, I've heard of Skype.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
So he goes, you need to sign up for Skype. We can talk in real time. I'll be in Japan. I can use Skype to show you what I've got in my inventory. And you can tell me if you want it. And probably about a week after he got back to Japan, the calls start in earnest.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
Phoebe, there is a market for everything in the wildlife world. You name it, somebody will buy it and be interested in it.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
so i'm working during the day i get home i'm married at the time i have dinner and then i pretty much wait for the kojima call i had to go in a separate room in the house uh my uh you know now ex-wife could not make any noise uh you know he didn't think i was married so he can't have her seen on the skype video in the background she can't come into that room she's off to bed i'm still talking to kojima on skype it was it was hard and um
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
Basically, sometime in there, during those calls, I realized Kojima's got some type of an attraction to me.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
It's a very awkward situation to be in when you're doing undercover work. I'd play it off.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
He has sold me every one of the most endangered butterflies in the world, including a $10,000 Ornithoptera alexandria. In total, he's offered to sell me $300,000 worth of butterflies. And every single one of those offers to sell is a violation of the Endangered Species Act.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
I think maybe 13 of those counts were straight-up smuggling, which carries, you know, a 20-year maximum sentence and a $250,000 maximum fine on each count. So we've got an indictment and an arrest warrant in hand. The only thing we need to do now is get our hands on Kojima, and he's in Japan.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
He was really excited to see me. And then he looked down, he saw the special agent badge attached to my belt right by my holster. He didn't say anything to me, but I basically escorted him through this long tunnel that goes from the Bureau of Prisons lockup over to the courthouse. And he says, have you been a Fish and Wildlife guy the whole time I've known you? And I was like, yep.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
He kind of put his head down. He didn't say anything else. He never asked me any questions about... How it all happened, it was weird. It was just like, we had this relationship, and then I arrested him, and the relationship was over.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
So he would change things up pretty regularly. So he was getting butterfly species from other parts of the world, including endangered butterflies, like highly endangered, that museums cannot even get for their scientific collections. And he would then sell those around the world using the Internet. He was an early adopter of eBay and different Internet sales sites, and he was making good money.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
If you're a foreign national and you're convicted of a felony and deported, you can never return to the United States. So he cannot come into the U.S., period, ever. And so, yeah, I've never seen him again. I've heard some stories. Last I heard, he was selling antiques. That's the last I heard.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
And I take him into an interview room, read him his rights, and I ask him if he wants to talk. He starts lying immediately about the whole situation. Out of nowhere, he goes, hey, have you heard of Yoshi Kojima? And I said, yeah, I've heard of Yoshi. And he goes, he's my mentor.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
I'm trying to think about this. I don't want to go into too much detail because I don't want to give a 101 lesson on smuggling for anybody who's thinking about smuggling butterflies. But basically what he would do is he'd hide them kind of in plain sight. When a butterfly is shipped between collectors or a buyer and a seller, its wings are not open. And there's a process that you can actually...
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
you can moisten a butterfly a dry one that's pinned and then fold its wings up you know as if it's its wings are together and then you put it you dry it again and you put it in an envelope and ship it well when these butterflies have their wings in the up position a lot of the colors and patterns that help us identify butterflies are not visible in order to look at them you'd have to break the wing or re-moisten it and spread the wing out so
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
What he would do is he'd ship them with the wings up, he'd put them in a little triangular envelope, and then he would put them in with other butterflies or moths that are common, not illegal, would not set off any alarm bells with a customs officer or a fish and wildlife inspector. And he would ship them that way, basically rolling the dice that if somebody does even look at this shipment,
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
They're not going to know what they're looking at, and they're just going to let it go. And that's a pretty good bet.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
Well, it varied. Yoshi sold to high-end collectors. So, you know, at the high end, if he was selling you an endangered butterfly, it'd go $10,000 plus for a pair of male-female pair. maybe even 10 grand for a single butterfly, was not uncommon. I mean, a standard price for him would have been somewhere between $700 and $800 per butterfly.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
So, you know, if you're taught, you can easily, easily transport or ship hundreds of these folded, enveloped butterflies at a time. You know, a single shipment could be more than 100 grand.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
There's a group of butterflies known as the birdwings. The scientific name is Ornithoptera. And they're big.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
That's the one he would charge 10 grand for. It's a hard one to get.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
He was another bug specialist who legally collected and sold insects all over the world. So he had his own company, and he was, you know, annoyed that Kojima was undercutting his prices. So we made a plan. We met the informant at a hotel a few days before the bug fair, taught him how to use our undercover recording equipment, gave him all the equipment he would need.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
We showed him how to attach it to his body, turn it on, turn it off, what to say when he turned it on. And then the plan was I was going to meet him at the fair and I was going to be basically keeping an eye on him.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
And then, you know, my only job really that day was to manage the informant and, you know, see if I could eyeball Yoshi Kojima and just verify that that's who, that it was in fact Yoshi Kojima. And we knew what he looked like because we, he had a California driver's license, so we were able to get his photograph and all of his details pretty easily.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
He had thinning gray hair and he always wore baggy, like cargo shorts, usually a Hawaiian shirt. And he always had a fanny pack around his waist positioned in the front. He was doing a brisk business and the informants actually had a table too. And his wasn't too far away, maybe 40 or 50 feet away. And yeah, I just waited and watched. I saw the informant go talk to Kojima a few times.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
But every time I would check in with the informant, he would say, yeah, he won't talk to me. He won't say anything. And the informant just got more and more jittery. And it wasn't going well. It definitely was not going well. So I just decided, you know, what the hell, I'm going to go talk to this guy. I just approached and was like, hey, I don't know anything about butterflies.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
And I started to point at different things that he was selling. And, you know, what's that? How much is that? How do you collect? You know, I just started asking a lot of really novice questions. And really my goal was just to get him to talk. I knew that nothing he was selling right there in front of the public was going to be illegal. But Kojima did reach under the table.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
I came into the service thinking, oh, I'm going to be protecting tiger cubs and, you know, we're going to be rescuing elephants and things like that.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
He pulled out this live beetle. And it was a Dynastes beetle, which are from South America. And they're huge. I mean, they're literally like six inches long.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
That's a pretty minor violation, but he did right there in front of me show me something that had to be a violation of U.S. Department of Agriculture rules.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
There were probably two or three times when I, you know, sauntered over to Kojima's table and chatted with him and joked and... At the end of the day, I was standing in a group of people overhearing their conversation. And I felt somebody tap me on the shoulder. And I turned around and there's Yoshi standing right in front of me.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
And it actually scared the crap out of me because I was not prepared for an impromptu meeting with Kojima that I hadn't arranged, you know. And he's got this little cardboard box in his hand, and he hands it to me. And as he's handing it to me, he opens it, and there's maybe, I don't know, a dozen kind of crappy butterflies pinned in that box. And he says, here, for your collection.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
And I'm like, well, you know, how much do you want for it? He's like, no, it's a gift. I'm going to help you start your collection. And, you know, I couldn't believe it, but what I really couldn't believe was that he had written his email address on the top of the box.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
The very first case that was kind of given to me myself to run was Yoshi Kojima, who was what he called himself the world's most wanted butterfly smuggler. I mean, this guy, he knew fish and wildlife were after him, and he loved it.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
He immediately wrote back and, you know, said, oh, thank you, you know, it's so great to meet you, but by the way, you got half of these wrong, so let me tell you what they are. So we kind of ended up with some, you know, Friendly dialogue, a few emails back and forth.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
But then unexpectedly, he very quickly said, hey, let's meet for coffee at a Starbucks in Los Angeles, right off of Venice Boulevard and Robertson, which is, you know, busy, busy part of town. Guy reaches out to you and says, hey, I want to meet for coffee. Things are going well, right? You're not trying to push the relationship he's pushing it. So we definitely are going to meet for coffee.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
But, you know, things were unfolding quickly, which made me nervous. But we made the plan and got all wired up.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, nervous. Not so much for personal safety because, you know, you cover agents there and Kojima was not known to be. He had no violent history. But nervous for sure because you don't want to screw it up, right? Every time. I don't care. When I did undercover work during my career, and later in my career I did a lot, I was always nervous. You're always nervous.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
You're nervous that you don't want to blow your cover. You don't want to scare them off. You don't want to ask a question that pisses them off. You got to just do this very delicate dance where you're hanging out with somebody you actually would not hang out with normally, and you don't approve of what they're doing.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
But you have to pretend to be their friend and open to whatever they suggest and not offended. So it's just this very delicate dance. You should be nervous about going in on these sort of things. And, yeah, of course I was sweating like crazy. Yeah. Also, you wonder, oh, my gosh, did I remember to turn on my recording device or did I accidentally turn it on and then off or did I bump it?
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
Just about everything. Talked about, you know, the bug fair, where I lived, what I did. He was pretty nosy. So, you know, he asked me a lot of questions about my background and where I lived, what I did for a living, why I was interested in insects. And luckily, we did have a very good backstory built for me in terms of I knew it well.
Criminal
The Butterfly Smuggler
My backstory was basically, I lived in Torrance, which is where our field office was. I told him that my dad had owned a marine supply company and had recently, you know, he'd given it to me and then I had sold it. So I didn't have to explain, you know, I didn't have to go to an office. I had had a business I sold and I had like money that I was kind of looking for something to do with the money.