Jail Time for Shark seller

(01-23) 15:44 PST SAN LEANDRO -- A San Leandro pastor has been sentenced to a year and a day in prison for illegally catching thousands of undersized California leopard sharks in San Francisco Bay and selling them to aquarium dealers, authorities said today.

Kevin Thompson, 49, pastor at the Bay Area Family Church and the co-owner of at least one fishing boat, was also ordered Monday to pay $100,000 in restitution for his role in a conspiracy in which five others have been implicated, according to federal prosecutors.

He is scheduled to surrender March 19 to begin serving his sentence on one count of conspiracy.

An indictment handed down by a federal grand jury last year accused the defendants of conspiring to harvest young sharks from the bay and sell them to distributors in the pet trade. About 465 of the sharks were sold to companies in Miami, Chicago, Houston, Romulus, Mich., Milford, Conn., the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, prosecutors said.

The sharks are found in coastal waters from Baja California to Oregon. The species is protected by a 1994 state law that prohibits commercial catches of juvenile leopard sharks shorter than 36 inches, in order to let them live in the wild long enough to reproduce and maintain healthy stocks. Selling wildlife with the knowledge that it was captured illegally is a federal crime.

The John G. Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and the Monterey Bay Aquarium assisted authorities in the two-year investigation and helped transport and tend to 19 baby leopard sharks that had been confiscated.

Nine of those sharks were returned to the wild in Monterey Bay in summer 2004. Three remain on exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium; seven died.

The other defendants, all of whom have pleaded guilty in the case, are Vincent Ng, 44, of Oakland, owner of Amazon Aquarium in Alameda; Ira Gass, 54, a marine aquarium dealer from Azusa (Los Angeles County); John Newberry, 35, of Hayward, a church member and employee at Pan Ocean Aquarium; Hiroshi Ishikawa, 37, of San Leandro, a church member and a fisherman; and Sion Lim, 40, of San Leandro, owner of Bayside Aquatics in Oakland.

Ishikawa was sentenced in October to three years of probation and was ordered to pay $40,000 in restitution. Lim was sentenced in June to a year of probation and was ordered to pay $20,000 in restitution.

U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken in Oakland is set to sentence Newberry on Feb. 2, Gass on Feb. 5 and Ng on Feb. 9.

Its nice to hear that poachers are sentenced to fines AND jail time, I'll stop there before my soap box becomes covered in froth...  I'm feeling like a rabid conservationist (if there is such a thing)...

A pastor doing that kind of crap.  Shame.... shame....

A pastor? I guess it depends on how you defined the Moonies. I heard he was their former leader.

Jeff

Ra Ra Ra, Gooooo Sharks!

Here's more on the subject... silly Moonies.

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/Issues/2006-07-12/news/feature.html