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Workers at the Seabreeze Environmental Landfill in Angleton ripped open 300 55-gallon drums of contaminated Chinese honey with excavators last year and stirred the contents with layers of regular old American garbage.
The 100 tons of honey tainted with illegal antibiotics was the last vestige of the lucrative career of Jun Yang of Houston, a Chinese-born entrepreneur who went to prison last year after pleading guilty to smuggling charges.
Yang’s comeuppance is a rarity in the shadowy world of illegal trade. Foreign companies and their partners on US soil routinely flout trade laws, evading penalties designed to protect American industries.
In January, US Customs and Homeland Security investigators reported that since October, they had seized an additional 660 drums of honey from China, the world’s leading honey producer, that had been smuggled into Texas from Latvia.
Honey is just one example of widespread importing fraud.
Court records, shipping documents and interviews combine to tell a story of elaborate fraud schemes that damage American industries and deprive the U.S. Treasury of billions of dollars.
Even before the latest seizures, federal agents had disrupted a criminal network of honey importers who had evaded $180 million in anti-dumping duties — penalties imposed on suspiciously low-priced imports that threaten domestic industries.
Yang, a central player in the fraud schemes, evaded as much as $38 million in duties himself by brokering loads of Chinese honey falsely labeled as Malaysian or Indian, according to the government’s case against him.
In an unpublished report to Congress last year, CBP, part of the Homeland Security Department, estimated $1.83 billion remains uncollected from some 36,000 duty bills issued after imports — more outstanding bills than the year before.
Roughly 90 percent of the unpaid duty stems from Chinese imports, including $538 million on garlic, $403 million on wooden bedroom furniture, $395 million on crawfish, $179 million on honey and $131 million on canned mushrooms, the report said. The true amount of money lost to taxpayers, likely in the billions, is impossible to calculate because of the clandestine nature of fraud. And the shifting cast of international fraudsters and disappearing importers make the schemes difficult to crack.
Latvia would seem an unlikely pathway. The tiny northern European country (25,000 square miles) produces so little honey that it exported none to other European nations in 2013 and just over 1,000 pounds to the US, shipping records show.
So suspicions were aroused when shipping containers from Latvia laden with thousands of pounds of honey began arriving at the Port of Houston: 448,156 pounds, all told.
“Those are pretty good clues as far as what was going on,” said Richard Halverson, assistant special agent in charge of Homeland Security’s Houston investigations.
Halverson said his agents worked with counterparts in Germany to conclude the honey had originated in China, which seldom ships because of the high duties.
