Top: Police officers at the Temple of Justice in Monrovia. The DayLight/James Harding Giahyue
By O’Neill Philips
Two Korean nationals suspected of illegal logging activities and their Liberian partners are yet to be indicted
Prosecutors drafted an indictment for the men but have not signed it.
A related case against an ex-police commander was dismissed because prosecutors failed to appear in court.
The men will walk away free if the Liberian government does not indict them in the next term of court
MONROVIA – Prosecutors are yet to indict members of a syndicate of the Liberian National Police charged with various crimes over an illegal logging operation in Gbarpolu County, nearly six months after they were arrested.
Korean duo Beomjin Lee and Jun Jeon Sik, and their Liberian partners were charged with economic sabotage, theft, criminal conspiracy, and criminal facilitation to forgery and bribery.
Their partners include Varney Marshall, Dawoda Sesay, Isaac Richmond Anderson, Jr., Edward Jallah, Isaac Railey, Peter Kpadeh, David Tawah and Prince Kwesi Wallace. The men deny any wrongdoing.
The Monrovia City Court jailed and then released the men back in January after the police forwarded the suspects there, following five months of investigation, court documents show.
Since their writ of arrest was issued by the court on November 10 last year, the matter has long lingered on.
Prosecutors have drafted an indictment but did not sign the document, seen by The DayLight.
Sources familiar with the matter told The DayLight Acting Montserrado County Attorney Boakai Harvey did not sign it because he is related to at least one of the suspects.
When contacted at his Temple of Justice office, Harvey admitted that he recused himself from the matter but did not provide any reason. It was not clear why another prosecutor did not sign the draft indictment, as is the procedure in such instances.
The government has the next term of court to indict the men, as the current term is about to close. If not, the court will dismiss the charges entirely in line with the Criminal Procedure Law of Liberia.
Case with Ex-policeman Dismissed
The Monrovia City Court, however, heard a case between the government and one of the accused men, Dawoda Sesay. That case was dismissed last month because the FDA did not appear in court. Legally, magisterial courts can hear a case without an indictment and dismiss it after a particular timeframe.
One of the trucks of illegal logs in Sawmill, Gbarpolu County. The truck has been allowed to leave, with the logs kept in at the FDA sub-office. The DayLight/James Harding Giahyue
Before the court dismissed the case, Sesay’s lawyer argued that the state was reluctant to prosecute him in violation of his right to a fair and speedy trial, according to court filings.
Prosecutors said they did not appear because they did not have the means to get witnesses from Gbarpolu and Bomi to Monrovia to testify in court.
They could still try Sesay during the next term of court in August, even in a circuit court, our judicial correspondent said.
Beomjin Lee and Jun Sik are accused of working with Isaac Richmond Anderson and Sesay and building a syndicate to smuggle logs to South Korea.
They went to Gbarpolu County and allegedly harvested an expensive species of woods over a month to be shipped to Busan, South Korea. The timber was valued at over US$60,000, according to court records.
Beomjin, Sesay and Anderson contacted Peter Kpadeh, an employee of the Ministry of Commerce, Kpadeh allegedly contacted Isaac Railey, the head of the FDA law enforcement department. They are suspected of conniving with Prince Kwesi Wallace and David Taweh, two custom brokers, according to court documents.
Sesay and Anderson then made arrangements for four trucks to transport the log from Gbarpolu to the Freeport of Monrovia. But two of the trucks were arrested at Klay in Bomi and impounded at the FDA sub-offices in Tubmanburg and Sawmill.
Rangers Edward Jallah and Varney Marshall had taken a US$600 bribe from Anderson and Sesay and allowed one of the trucks to pass the checkpoint, according to court documents.
The DayLight broke the story in a two-part series in August last year. The online environmental newspaper provided the police with evidence.
This story was a production of the Community of Forest and Environmental Journalists of Liberia (CoFEJ).
Top: A graphic showing members of an illegal logging syndicate busted by the Liberian National Police and charged. Above left to right: former police commander Dawoda Sesay, customs officer Peter Kpadeh and Isaac Richmond Anderson, Jr. Below left to right: former FDA rangers Edward Jallah, Varney Marshall, Isaac Railey. And the Edwin Wesley of Echo Group of Companies. The DayLight/Rebazar D. Forte
By Esau J. Farr
MONROVIA – In January the Liberia National Police (LNP) charged several men, including two Korean nationals, in connection with an illegal logging operation in Gbarpolu County.
The men included Varney Marshall, Dawoda Sesay, Isaac Richmond Anderson, Jr., Edward Jallah, Isaac Railey, Peter Kpadeh, David Tawah and Prince Kwesi Wallace. The two Koreans were Beomjin Lee and Jun Jeon Sik, according to the police charge sheet.
Their charges range from economic sabotage, theft, criminal conspiracy, and criminal facilitation to forgery and bribery, according to an arrest warrant by the Monrovia City Court.
“These people will go in the bushes, fell the trees, cut the logs and use bogus documents in order to evade taxes, and will use those documents to ship the containers of logs out of Liberia,” said the Inspector General of the Liberia National Police Patrick Sudue at a news conference.
That might have been the beginning of the men’s case but the end of a timber-trafficking network, first exposed in an investigation by The DayLight in August last year. This investigation further sheds light on the organization of the Korean-connected syndicate and illegal logging in Liberia.
A Phone Call from South Korea
It all started with a phone call Isaac Richmond Anderson, Jr. received a call from South Korea in June last year. A friend asked Anderson, a former official of the Liberian Consulate in Seoul, to help two Koreans export first-class logs to the Asian country, according to Anderson.
One of the trucks with the illegal logs in it at Sawmill in Gbarpolu County. The truck has been allowed to leave and the logs are being kept at the FDA checkpoint there. The DayLight/James Harding Giahyue
Anderson then met Korvah Jallah from Gbarpolu County, one of the most forested regions in Liberia. They needed to strike a deal with people in the Weimu village in Bopolu District to get the trees and then assemble a team of chainsaw operators. They would then get container trucks and transport the logs to the Freeport of Monrovia.
“They (Koreans) want to carry the wood as a sample and then pay later,” Anderson told The DayLight back in August.
Jobless and broke to pre-finance, Anderson turned to a long-term friend, Dawoda Sesay, who bought the idea. Anderson introduced Sesay to the Koreans, according to the police affidavit. Sesay, himself a police commander in the Paynesville area, arranged for the trucks, contacting truckers at the Freeport of Monrovia to transport the wood. He had provided an initial US$1,200 for the harvest.
In Weimu, they harvested a number of ekki logs, according to Anderson’s record of the harvest, obtained by The DayLight. Durable and water-resistant, ekki timber is used in shipbuilding and outdoor constructions.
In total Sesay hired five trucks to transport the timber, valued at over US$60,000, according to the police. The deal with the truckers would expose the role of the trucking industry in illegal logging and start a conversation between drivers and the Forestry Development Authority (FDA).
‘You killed [us]’
While on their way to Monrovia, rangers at the checkpoint at Klay, Bomi County, arrested two of the trucks loaded with the logs. The drivers did not show a permit for the transport, known in forestry as a waybill. That was a red flag, a violation of the National Forestry Reform Law and the Regulation on the Establishment of a Chain of Custody System.
“The FDA sees the actions of Mr. Sesay and the owners of the truck as a gross violation of the National Forestry Reform Law,” Cllr. Yanquoi Dolo, the head of the FDA’s legal department, told The DayLight in an email after the arrest of the trucks.
“The Managing Director of the FDA, Hon. C. Mike Doryen has frowned on this gross illegality and has requested that sternest of action against the violators consistent with the laws governing the forestry sector,” Dolo added.
In an interview with The DayLight, Sesay admitted hiring the trucks to transport the illegal logs but at the same time denied any wrongdoing.
“As police officers, we have our inalienable rights: the right to live, the right to survive. So, if my brother came to me and said, ‘Look, I need this assistance,’ then… I made the arrangement…, is that something prohibited?” Sesay asked rhetorically at his Mount Barclay residence.
“Even if I knew what they (truckers) were going to get, that is none of my business. If the transaction was illegal, I was not there to know that it was illegal,” Sesay added.
The FDA held two of the trucks at its substation in Tubmanburg, while it impounded another at the agency’s checkpoint at Sawmill, Gbarpolu County. The one in Tubmanburg is no longer at its location, while the one at Sawmill remains there.
The FDA also filed two petitions to confiscate and auction the vehicles and the logs in them at the circuit courts in Tubmanburg and Bopolu, according to the court records.
News of the arrest of the containers reached the board of directors of the FDA, which asked the Liberia National Police to investigate. Following more than four months of the inquest, the police finally charged Anderson, Sesay, Beomjin, Jun, Jallah and Marshall. The Monrovia City Court then issued an arrest warrant for them.
Jallah and Marshall were the two rangers who arrested the trucks. However, they collected a US$600 bribe from Prince Kwesie Wallace and allowed one of the trucks to leave, according to the police. Wallace and David Tawah, both customs brokers, were contacted by Peter Kpadeh, a monitor for export at the Ministry of Commerce and Industry at the Freeport of Monrovia, according to the police.
Upon receiving the US$600, Jallah escorted the container truck to the Freeport of Monrovia, the police said. However, it was a disagreement over the bribe for the other trucks that exposed the syndicate. The DayLight received a tipoff and broke the news of the containers with illegally harvested logs.
Records Anderson kept of the illegal logging operation. They show the license plates of two vehicles, the volume of logs, the markings on each log and the containers smuggling them.
Police and FDA authorities traced the runaway truck and container, but from all indications, the logs had been exported. The Liberia National Police disrobed Sesay. Similarly, the FDA dismissed Jallah and Marshall and suspended Railey. Efforts to speak with Railey and Jallah did not materialize. We will update the story once we get comments from both men.
In a WhatsApp chat, Marshall reproached Anderson for exposing him and the other rangers. “Brother, why you killed [us]?” We [have] been friends for long. Remember we are all young people. And this is Liberia,” Marshall said, according to a screenshot of their conversation The DayLight obtained from Anderson.
Anderson fired back at Marshall, accusing him of hypocrisy. “It is how our people are proceeding. We are Liberia but they [failed] to understand and posting our names and photos almost everywhere in the public,” Anderson wrote. What so much have we done! And Jallah was there saying the money is small…”
Turns out Marshall was involved with at least another illegal logging operation. Leaked video and pictures published by The DayLight had also unearthed his illegal logging business. The videos show a furious Marshall fuming at an accomplice for tricking him. The pictures provided more details of his operations, including him posing before a man milling timber with a chainsaw.
A leaked picture shows Varney Marshall, then an FDA ranger, posing at an illegal logging site believed to be in Gbarpolu. He was dismissed by the agency and charged in connection with an illegal logging operation in the same county by the Liberia National Police in January.
Marshall had pitched the videos and pictures to Anderson so that they could work on an operation together, based on a WhatsApp chat between the two men. Marshall has not faced any trial for it. Marshall did not grant The DayLight an interview and also did not respond to WhatsApp messages.
‘Future embarrassment’
The police also charged Edwin Kpadeh, Wallace and Tawah for their role in the deal.
Anderson and the Koreans had first engaged Wesley for the operation but he charged them US$12,000. Echo charged the Beomjin and Jun US$2,500 to transport apparently one of the containers to the Freeport of Monrovia plus US$59 for insurance, according to a document dated June 30, 2022, obtained by The DayLight. The Koreans could not afford it, so the deal collapsed, according to the police charge sheet. The police did not charge Wesley because their “investigation could not establish evidence.”
Echo is an illegal shipping line, as its shareholders are unnamed, according to its legal documents. The Business Association Law of Liberia prohibits undisclosed owners of companies. A 2020 change in the 1977 law was a move by Liberia to fight global terrorism, tax evasion and other crimes.
Having failed to seal the deal with Echo, Anderson and co then turned to Kpadeh, according to the police charge sheet. This time they sealed a deal. Sesay gave Kpadeh US$1,200 Sesay through Isaac Railey, the head of the FDA law enforcement department, the police said.
It is not clear how Railey entered the picture. However, Railey helped Kpadeh forge a permit belonging to Conveiyallah Enterprise Incorporated to export the stolen logs, the police said. Kpadeh got help from Wallace and Tawah in the process, according to the police. The permit, a copy The DayLight obtained, had been issued to Coveiyallah, which operates in the Korninga A Community Forest also in Gbarpolu County in May of that year.
The DayLight attained an email thread with Kpadeh, Anderson and D. Prime Group of Company Inc., a company owned by Dawoda Sesay (80 percent) and Mamanue Sesay, a resident of Gbarnga, Bong County (20 percent), according to the company’s article of incorporation at the Liberia Business Registry. A woman named Roseline Kamara of D. Prime forwarded the email to Kpadeh at about 2:49 pm on Tuesday, August 9 last year. Kpadeh then forwarded it to Anderson two minutes later.
Attached to the email is an invoice to a Korean man named Jin Lee of the MI Jun Co. Ltd in Busan, South Korea. It bears the bank details of the D. Prime company for the shipment of five 20-foot containers of ekki wood. The markings of the containers on the invoice match the ones the FDA seized. Kpadeh did not respond to WhatsApp messages for comments.
Less than a week after the email exchanges, Sesay arranged the transport of the illegal timber with Shakia Kamara and Layee Sheriff, truckers at the Freeport of Monrovia. Sesay agreed to pay the men either US$900 or US$1,000 per truck, Dawoda Sesay and the truckers told The DayLight.
Putting transporting and exporting logs in containers has offered illegal loggers an opportunity to smuggle timber out of Liberia. The DayLight/James Harding Giahyue
Containerized timber and corrupt officials make it easier for smugglers to operate. Earlier this year, an investigation by The DayLight revealed that in 2020, Assistant Minister of Trade Peter Somah issued an illegal permit to a Turkish company to smuggle timber to India for US$19,800. The FDA has instructed rangers at various checkpoints and the Freeport of Monrovia to open all containers and verify their legality.
The FDA also sued Shakia Kamara, who owns one of the Klay trucks, and Sheriff, the owner of the one at Sawmill, in separate lawsuits in Tubmanburg and Bopolu, according to court filings. The agency is seeking a US$25,000 fine, a 12-month prison term for the men, and forfeiture of the vehicles, all maximum penalties.
Those cases have not been heard ever since. Two of the trucks are no longer parked at the FDA sub-office in Tubmanburg. It is the same with the one at Sawmill, Gbarpolu, with the logs in it now at the FDA checkpoint there.
The National Truckers Association of Liberia said it would take steps to prevent timber smuggling. “We want to have a memorandum of understanding [with the FDA] because we want to avoid future embarrassment,” Yahaya Kemokai, the secretary general of the association, told The DayLight in August last year. “We know that there are a lot of clandestine activities going on with the transportation of woods.”
CORRECTION: This version of the story corrects the previous version, which said the police charged Edwin Wesley of Echo Group of Companies. Wesley was named in the police investigation but wasn’t charged.
We also corrected the spellings of Beomjin Lee and Peter Kpadeh. The previous version of the story had them as “Beonjin” and “Kpateh.”
UPDATES:
[Henry Gboluma in Bopolu, Gbarpolu County, contributed to this report]
The story was a production of the Community of Forest and Environmental Journalists of Liberia (CoFEJ).
Top: A pair of elephants traveled from Guinea through towns and villages in Nimba County then to Grand Gedeh County, Cote d`Ivoire, and back to Guinea in 2022. The DayLight/Harry Browne
By Mark B. Newa
Editor’s Note: This is the first of a series of stories on the human-elephant conflict in Liberia.
ZUIE, Gbarpolu – Villagers around the Proposed Foya Park first spotted elephants in the area around 2018. Some five years on, the elephants are destroying farms and posing a threat to the villagers’ existence.
“The elephants always come to our farm and eat the things that we are planting,” says Sam Jah, a farmer in Tardee village in the Zuie Chiefdom of Gbarpolu County. Jah had met a herd of the towering mammals while on his way to his farm on one morning last month. He fled for his life. When he returned the following day, the herds had eaten 30 of his palm trees.
“I am afraid for the remaining palm trees on the farm,” the 60-year-old father of five children tells The DayLight. Elephants eat grass, small plants, fruits, roots, bushes, branches and tree bark. The animals eat up to 169 kilograms (375 pounds) of vegetation daily. They used their tusks to carve into the trunk and tear off pieces of bark. Elephants spend nearly the entire day feeding on fruits and roots. Tree barks are their favorite food.
Jah’s neighbor Vannason Momo Vuyah lost plantain, rice, cassava and palm. “I am feeling bad, Vuyah says.
“They drink all of our water. “We are [compelled] to go far areas to draw water.”
Damaged crops and remnants of tree branches adorn Vuyah’s farm and other villagers’ farms. Plantain, rice and pineapple and shrubs lay bare, indicating the size of the herd of elephants. several palm fruits the elephants had chewed are visible. Cassava leaves and roots are scattered everywhere. From a hill overlooking one villager’s farm, a dozen elephant footprints line up the swamp around Bomagonjo Creek. Villagers say the creek never ran dry until the elephants, which drink between an estimated 26 and 55 gallons of water in less than five minutes, arrived.
Six villages have been affected in the crisis, extending beyond Yanwayeh, a neighboring clan near the Liberian-Sierra Leonean border, villagers say. The elephants are threatening this year’s farming season, which starts in December and ends in May. With the elephant situation and two months to the close of planting, farmers fear a bad harvest.
A herd of two elephants in Grand Gedeh County in 2022. The DayLight/Harry Browne
“When I pay the koo to work on my farm, the elephants will disturb the workers and all of them will run back to town,” says Varney Sheriff, a farmer with four children from Gongodee village. “No one wants to be attacked by the elephants.” A koo is a cooperative of farmers. A number of farmers can form a koo or hire one.
Hawa Jah, a mother of six children and five grandchildren from Senkpen village, is worried. “Let the government people help us with food. The elephants are not giving us chance to make our farm to support our families.”
“We are not making farms as we used to do. We can only go there to do small work and come to the village. People in this town have refused to go on my farm to work because of the elephant’s business,” said Varney Sheriff.
Sheriff and others have tried different methods to drive away the herd. They clang pots, hit hollow sticks on tree roots and blow horns. They even burn peppers to scare away the elephants. But none has worked.
Elephants’ dung in a pineapple farm in Mafala, Grand Cape Mount County. The DayLight/James Harding GiahyueA mount of elephants’ dung in a casava patch in Norman Village, Grand Cape Mount County. The DayLight/James Harding Giahyue
The situation has changed the way of farming in the area, the main source of livelihood for villagers. Due to the elephants, people are not producing sufficient food, negatively impacting the villagers’ lives in many ways. It is expensive to transport foodstuff and other commodities from Monrovia to Kongbor. Twenty-five kilogram of rice sells for LS$4,000, nearly twice the price of the commodity in Monrovia.
McGill Washington, who works in the Office of the District Commissioner, says local authorities and Forestry Development Authority (FDA) are aware of the situation but they are yet to respond. “We are asking the government and other people to come and build a fence for the elephants, they know how to control them… to put them in the park,” Washington tells The DayLight.
Root causes
Zuie is close to the proposed Foya Park, which covers 164,000 hectares of forestland between Gbarpolu and Lofa. The population of elephants in the northwestern region is approximately 350 to 450, according to a German nongovernmental organization based in Liberia, Elephant Research and Conservation (ELRECO). The figure is about a quarter of the country’s elephant population. Villagers hunt, farm and mine on the fringes of the rainforest. Years of poaching for ivory, and loss of habitat, have left the African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) critically endangered.
In Kongbor, where people in Zuie conduct their businesses, a local radio announcer makes an announcement. “No one should attack the elephants,” it goes, repeated in Gola, Belleh and Mende, the languages spoken in the region. “The animals are protected by law,” it adds. It is a reference to Liberia’s wildlife law, which imposes a prison term between two and four years or a US$5,000 to US$10,000 fine.
The farmers believe that a ban on hunting elephants has swelled their population, leaving them in search of food everywhere. Experts, however, blame people for the situation, known as the human-elephant conflict.
A villager stands under an abandoned farmstead in Zuie, Gbarpolu County. The DayLight/Mark B. Newa
“When the villagers are making farms on the elephants’ tracks, we will see them appearing,” says Raymond Kpoto, a field supervisor of the Society for the Conservation of Nature Liberia (SCNL). “When the elephants passed in a place after more than 10 to 15 minutes… and their tracks are destroyed, they roam the forest to identify their tracks.”
Facts back Kpoto’s comments. Gbarpolu accounts for 111,000 hectares of tree cover loss between 2001 and 2021, according to the Global Forest Watch. It is the fifth county in Liberia with the largest tree cover loss. Tree cover loss takes place when human and natural causes, including fire, destroy the forest.
Saah David, National Coordinator, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation within the FDA, agrees with Kpoto. He says the elephants were reclaiming their territory.
“The area is their own terrain and when they move about, farms will be affected and even humans will be affected,” David adds.
David says the Liberian government will support affected villagers.
“When these animals become a risk to the survival of our people who live on the fringes of the forest, then, we must find a way to avoid animal-human conflict,” David tells The DayLight.
[This story has been corrected to credit Elephant Research and Conservation (ELRECO) for the estimated elephant population in northwestern Liberia, and not Save the Elephants]
Varney Marshall (right) poses for a picture while a chainsaw miller works at Marshall’s illegal logging site in Gbarpolu County. Picture credit: WhatsApp/Varney Marshall
By James Harding Giahyue
KLAY, Bomi County – A leaked video of a ranger of the Forestry Development Authority (FDA) shot by himself and photographs probably taken by his accomplices have revealed his illegal logging operations.
Varney Marshall, who is assigned at the Klay checkpoint in Bomi County, can be heard ranting in the one-minute-58-second video furious that one of his accomplices was trying to cheat him.
“Look at the woods Abe called 600 pieces. Look at the woods he [has] now hauled. I will wait for him until he comes here,” he can be heard saying at the beginning of the film.
He then turns his mobile phone around an open field of more than a thousand timbers.
“You see it, you see the woods? I am doing this video to send it to my woman straight. You see it, you see the wood?
“He’s here doing Gobachop. That’s here his dismissal will come from. You see the distances the woods [are]? Is that 600 pieces here?” “Gobachop” means black market in Liberian parlance. It was coined in reference to the late Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev, whose leadership led to the demise of the former Soviet Union.
“You want to steal from me?” Marshall says in the recording.
The leaked video exposed Varnery Marshall, the FDA ranger who runs illegal logging operations.
The video and pictures are believed to be taken at different locations in the forest in Gbarpolu County. Some reveal a sea of timbers scattered on an open field. Some show wood parked in containers. Others reveal Marshall’s accomplices, sitting on top of a mountain of woods, standing near a gigantic tree and posing for a photo with their new chainsaws and gear. Several of the pictures featured Marshall himself modeling next to a chainsaw operator as he saw a huge log.
Marshall had sent the recordings and pictures to a source as a pitch for both men to partner in an illegal logging business. “We need to talk, brother,” Marshall tells the source in the WhatsApp message on August 16 at 8 p.m. His message does not get a reply. The source said he shared the message with The DayLight to prove he was also a victim, not just an actor of the unlawful activity.
The leak comes barely a week after the FDA said it has observed that several illegal timber products are being exported without a trace. It said smugglers were hiding wood in containers. “FDA checkpoint and Free Port of Monrovia staff members are instructed to open all sealed containers from forested areas to verify content and ensure that the FDA duly issued conveying permit documents,” the statement said.
The agency suspended Marshall and Edward Kollie Jallah, another ranger assigned at the Klay checkpoint, over the leaked video and their alleged roles in the transport of illegal woods that involved a police commander and other individuals, according to Cllr. Yanquoi Dolo, the head of the FDA legal team.
“Both Marshall and Jallah are suspended with directives that they report to Monrovia for investigation. They are expected to report to headquarters tomorrow. Their supervisor has been notified,” Dolo told The DayLight.
Marshall and Jallah did not answer phone calls placed to them. They did not reply to WhatsApp messages well.
A container is being uploaded at an illegal logging site run by FDA ranger Varney Marshall. WhatsApp/Varney MarshallWoods loaded in a container that Varney Marshall harvested in a forest believed to be in Gbarpolu. WhatsApp/Varney MarshallA pile of woods Varney Marshall, an FDA ranger, illegally harvested in a forest believed to be in Gbarpolu County. WhatsApp/Varney MarshallA pile of woods Varney Marshall, an FDA ranger, illegally harvested in a forest believed to be in Gbarpolu County. WhatsApp/Varney MarshallSome of Varney Marshall’s accomplices pose with new chainsaws and gears. WhatsApp/Varney MarshallWoods Varney Marshall illegally harvestedTwo illegal loggers who work with Varney Marshall. WhatsApp/Varney MarshallWoods Varney Marshall harvested illegally. WhatsApp/Varney Marshall A mountain of timbers Varney Marshall, an FDA ranger, illegally harvested. WhatsApp/Varney Marshall
CORRECTIONS: This version of the story deleted the repeated phrase “means black market.” It also corrects “woods” for wood in the fifth paragraph.
