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As a federal prosecutor, Andrew S. Boutros prosecuted the two
largest criminal customs and trade fraud cases in U.S. history. On
December 15, one of those cases was profiled in the cover story of
Bloomberg Businessweek. It is the second time that one of
Boutros's cases has been profiled as Bloomberg
Businessweek's cover story; the first occurred in 2013, which
Businessweek described as "the largest food fraud in U.S.
history."
Specifically, as an Assistant United States Attorney, Boutros
successfully prosecuted Texas-based food broker, Jun Yang, who
court documents described as "one of the largest and most
successful criminal transshippers ever prosecuted in U.S.
history."
From the article, "How Antibiotic-Tainted Seafood From
China Ends Up on Your Table":
Homeland Security Investigations, a part of U.S.
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, first knew him as a honey
broker. The agency arrested him in 2012 (then unarrested him so
that he could cooperate with the investigation, then arrested him
again) and charged him with making false claims about the honey he
was selling. It was harvested in China but was passed through
Malaysia, where it acquired Malaysian certificates of origin. This
illegal transshipping, as the maneuver is called, allowed him to
avoid paying almost $38 million in antidumping duties. The
investigators untangled a network of shell companies that seemed
designed solely to deceive U.S. regulators. In November 2013, Yang
was convicted and sentenced to three years in federal
prison.
The investigators also determined that Yang's main
business wasn't honey—it was seafood. His company
brokered shrimp for a Houston company called American Fisheries. At
the time of Yang's first arrest, some of the shipments were
still in cold-storage facilities. The feds required him, as part of
his cooperation, to send samples to a laboratory for analysis. Five
shipments tested positive for nitrofurans, a class of antibiotics
banned in the U.S. Those tainted shrimp were eventually destroyed.
All the tainted shipments had been labeled as products of
Malaysia.
Despite Yang's cooperation with the government in the
shrimp investigation, his information wasn't used to make a
case. But American Fisheries itself may have provided a way to
track the apparent transshipping scheme. In May 2013, American
Fisheries sued Yang, saying it had received only $6.1 million of
the $12.1 million Yang owed it for 74 shipments of shrimp, weighing
as much as 28,000 kilograms (62,000 pounds) each, from June 2011 to
January 2012. That case, still pending in Texas, as well as
Yang's countersuit against American Fisheries, has uncovered a
trove of documents that detail how a Shanghai-based company hatched
a plan to get its Chinese-farmed shrimp into America.
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