Earning with the fishes

摘要

Some lawmen chase villains down mean streets. Others chase fraudsters across balance-sheets. In the stomach-churning stench of the Vetport at John F. Kennedy International Airport, yet others don surgical masks, goggles and rubber gloves, and peer with penlights into crates holding thousands of little birds. These inspectors with the Fish and Wildlife Service (fws) examine not just live animals entering America-such as the 45 outlaw jays they found lurking in a legal shipment of thousands of birds-but plants and animal products such as handbags and caviar. In 2011 fws agents raided Gibson Guitar facilities in Tennessee and seized wood worth hundreds of thousands of dollars that they suspected had been illegally imported from India and Madagascar.