African Spiny Lobster
Former Hout Bay Fishing Industries company owner Arnold Bengis, his son David, and US business partner Jeffrey Noll are described in current US Appeal Court papers as “key players in a sprawling, trans-Atlantic criminal scheme to illegally harvest massive quantities of South African rock lobster and Patagonian toothfish - marketed in the US as Chilean sea bass - and then to sell that illegally harvested fish in the US for a significant profit”. Fishermen working for, or paid off by, Bengis, caught huge quantities of both West Coast and South Coast rock lobsters in South African waters, way in excess of local legal quotas. To escape detection, the three men and their co-conspirators offloaded poached lobsters at night, under-reported to fisheries authorities, and bribed South African fisheries inspectors. Once the lobsters were ready for export to the US, false documents were submitted to the South African authorities. In the US, they kept two sets of books: one for legal amounts of rock lobster, within South Africa’s quota, and the other - “Sheet B” - for the poached animals. Between 1999 and 2001, 93 percent of all the lobsters processed at Bengis’s Hout Bay factory were poached, according to one of the co-conspirators who turned state witness against him. Between the 1987/8 and 2000/1 seasons, the amount of only South Coast rock lobster - the smaller of the two lobster resources poached was estimated at about 776 550kg. After the initial container was seized by the authorities, the men and their co-conspirators “engaged in a series of elaborate deceptions designed to avoid detection and perpetuate the scheme”, including removing wage documents from the Hout Bay premises and shredding financial documents in the US. When US authorities - including the FBI - were investigating their activities they moved rock lobster from a storage warehouse to other premises, and diverted an illegal shipment of Patagonian toothfish from New York to Hong Kong. Bengis even hired a private eye to follow the federal agents, to locate a container of illegally poached seafood that the US authorities had seized.