Indian jeweller arrested in $2m ivory bust

Indian jeweller arrested in $2m ivory bust

Two jewellers, including an Indian-American, peddled reams of ivory bangles, beads, statues made from the tusks of endangered and threatened elephants, prosecutors said Thursday as the men admitted to a wildlife crime.

67-year-old Mukesh Gupta, the chairman of Raja Jewels Inc. and Johnson Jung-Chien Lu, 56, and their companies pleaded guilty to illegal commercialisation of wildlife, forfeited a combined total of more than $2 million in ivory and paid a total of $55,000 to aid the Wildlife Conservation Society’s efforts to help elephants.

The jewelers’ lawyers emphasized that the men admitted only to selling and offering ivory without a permit establishing it came from before the animals were protected in the 1970s.

But authorities said that much of the ivory was more recent and that stocking it in stores in Manhattan’s diamond district contributes to a worrisome boom in the illegal ivory trade. “Poachers should not have a market in Manhattan,” Attorney Cyrus R Vance Jr said.

New York environmental law bans selling or offering to sell ivory without a special permit. Getting the permit requires proving the ivory was harvested from before 1976 when elephants were listed as endangered.

As part of a plea deal that will spare him jail time, Gupta and the company surrendered about $2 million worth of ivory and paid $45,000 to the Wildlife Conservation Society.