A Nenana man judged to be a menace to wildlife will spend six months in jail and pay a fine of $6,500 after selling more than two dozen walrus tusks.
Chief U.S. District Court Judge Ralph Beistline on Friday sentenced Miles Martin after the 61-year-old Alaskan pleaded guilty to four of the 28 counts against him in an indictment.
"Significant wildlife violations require significant punishment," Stan Pruszenski of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Office of Law Enforcement said in a press release. "This sentence will serve to deter others similarly inclined."
Martin admitted to being involved with a long-term walrus ivory smuggling conspiracy, part of a worldwide operation illegally selling wildlife parts, including migratory bird parts.
According to U.S. Attorney Karen Loeffler, Martin admitted that he conspired with others to illegally purchase walrus tusks and other parts for 13 months, ending in March 2011. His two co-conspirators from Glennallen, Jesse Joseph Leboeuf and Loretta Sternbach, the former president of the Chitina Native Corp., traveled to Savoonga, a village of 700 on the Bering Sea island of St. Lawrence, and bought walrus tusks and other parts for Martin. The Marine Mammal Protection Act allows Alaska Natives to hunt walrus and polar bear. They can sell raw parts, such as bear hides or unworked ivory, to other Natives, such as Sternbach, but not to others.
26 walrus tusks weighing 275 pounds
In 2011, Leboeuf was sentenced to nine years in prison and Sternbach to 3½ years for felony violations of the Lacey Act after illegally selling walrus ivory and polar bear hides. They both also pleaded guilty to felony counts of illegally possessing a machine gun, too.
Loeffler said 26 walrus tusks weighing 275 pounds were purchased in Savoonga, a buying spree financed by Martin, who then sold the illegally obtained tusks on the Internet, according to Loeffler.
Martin's two co-conspirators provided him with bogus "gift" letters, intended to disguise the illegal purchase of the walrus ivory. They also attempted to dye the walrus tusks to make the tusks look like fossil ivory in an effort to conceal illegal purchases.
Martin's plea agreement also detailed the sale of a walrus head with tusks to a customer in Argentina, and the smuggling of the walrus head out of the United States without the proper customs permits. Other marine mammal parts that Martin admitted selling to an undercover agent included:
• 20 seal claws;
• One polar bear tooth;
• One tooth offered for sale as a whale tooth that was a tooth of a seal or sea lion;
• Polar bear teeth;
• Various migratory bird parts.
Martin further admitted that in August 2010, he sent walrus ivory from Alaska to a customer in Denmark, a violation of federal law, including the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species and the Endangered Species Act.
900 pounds of wildlife parts
In addition to the walrus ivory, Martin illegally sold at least 30 packages of wildlife parts including wolf, lion, lynx, and walrus parts to far-flung customers from Europe to South America to Australia, according to Loeffler. All together, there were 225 transactions totaling about $58,000.
As part of his sentence, Martin turned over some 900 pounds of wildlife parts from walrus, seals, bears, birds, and whales.
The investigation into the illegal buying of ivory on St. Lawrence Island ended with the arrest of Leboeuf and Sternbach in 2011. In addition to buying with cash, the couple sometimes traded snowmachines and drugs and, without having a license, cigarettes and guns as well.
St. Lawrence Island is an 1,800-square-mile chunk of land 750 miles west of Anchorage, Alaska's largest city. It has little in the way of an economy, so many people have turned to harvesting walrus tusks and carving or scrimshawing them into artwork.
The practice provides critical cash to buy bullets, gas, whale bombs and other items for hunting seals and walrus and harpooning bowheads. It's so important that some hunters travel 60 miles northeast of Savoonga to a group of islands where they don diving gear to recover fossilized ivory from the seafloor.
Such ivory is dark, and Lebouef didn't want that. He wanted fresh white ivory from recently dead walrus.
Alaska Dispatch reporters Alex DeMarban and Craig Medred contributed to this story.