June 28, 2018 — Tommy Zhou said he’d buy black market eels as long as nobody developed a “big mouth”—and if anyone did double-cross him, he’d pay $200,000 to have him killed, according to undercover agents who arrested Zhou. Zhou, a 42-year-old Brooklyn seafood dealer, was buying and selling eels caught illegally in Virginia. He was among more than 20 other people—ranging from small fishermen to powerful businessmen—recently snagged in a multi-state wildlife trafficking investigation named “Operation Broken Glass.”
“The dealers were laundering eels—buying them illegally, then mixing them with legal ones and actively smuggling them using false labels,” said U.S. Fish and Wildlife special agent Eric Holmes, who posed as a poacher selling to Zhou. Poaching all along the East Coast was very sophisticated, he said. “They used night vision and rental vehicles, and they could drop a crew in the middle of the night without making any noise. As long as these poachers had the opportunity to sell to a dealer willing to buy illegal eels, they were unstoppable.”
The run on American eels, Anguilla rostrata, was sparked by a sushi crisis that began in 2010. Wild baby eels, also known as glass eels or elvers, acquired to seed giant aquaculture farms in China and elsewhere were becoming scarce—putting supplies of unagi, eel grilled with soy sauce and served at sushi joints around the world, in danger.
Asia’s eels had already been largely depleted when the European Union announced that it was putting a ban on exports of European eel species to stem a precipitous population decline.