The Daily BS • Bo Snerdley Cuts Through It!
The Daily BS • Bo Snerdley Cuts Through It!

Get my Daily BS twice-a-day news stack directly to your email.


Customs opens man’s suitcase and finds 22 pairs of socks stuffed with 199 living creatures

by

BS BULLETIN

  • Tokyo authorities arrested a 23-year-old Mexican man after finding roughly 200 lizards crammed into 22 pairs of socks.
  • Police reportedly had an anonymous tip before he landed at Haneda Airport.
  • Nine were protected Mexican alligator lizards that can fetch about $630 apiece in Japan.

There are things you expect customs agents to find when they open somebody’s suitcase.

Too much liquor. Undeclared cash. Maybe a suspicious amount of cheese. Then there are 200 lizards stuffed into 22 pairs of socks.

Japanese authorities say that’s what they discovered in the luggage of a 23-year-old Mexican national who arrived at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport from South Korea on Aug. 8, according to Japanese and international reports. The suspect has been identified as Daniel Isaac Velasco Baltazar. According to The Japan Times, he admitted to the allegations after his arrest. And this apparently wasn’t just a customs officer noticing that somebody’s socks seemed unusually… lively.

Police reportedly received an anonymous tip in late July that a Mexican national was planning to bring lizards into Japan ahead of a reptile exhibition and sale. Authorities were therefore watching for the suspected shipment when Baltazar arrived.

When officials inspected his luggage, they found approximately 200 reptiles packed inside 22 pairs of socks. Local reporting says the socks had been tied shut, wrapped in T-shirts and placed inside the suitcase. One of the lizards was already dead when authorities discovered them.

Among the haul were nine Mexican alligator lizards, also known as arboreal alligator lizards — striking green reptiles native to Mexico whose international trade is restricted under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES.

That’s where this story goes from merely bizarre to potentially very lucrative. Baltazar reportedly told investigators that he bought the lizards in Mexico for roughly $3 to $5 each.

In Japan? Some can reportedly command approximately 100,000 yen — around $630 apiece — in the exotic-pet market.

Now the socks are beginning to make a little more financial sense. Certainly not I’d-like-to-get-through-customs-without-being-arrested sense. But financial sense.

The suspect is accused of violating Japan’s Customs Act by attempting to import protected reptiles without declaring them or obtaining required government authorization.

The case also highlights the darker side of the international exotic-pet business.

Wildlife trafficking can be extraordinarily profitable because rare animals may be acquired cheaply in their native countries and command dramatically higher prices overseas. Smugglers have repeatedly resorted to luggage, clothing and even socks to transport reptiles across borders.

And Japan has seen this movie before. In 2019, Australian authorities arrested a Japanese woman at Melbourne Airport after finding 17 shingleback lizards and two blue-tongued lizards in her luggage as she prepared to fly to Tokyo. Other Japanese nationals had been arrested in similar Australian reptile-smuggling cases.

In 2023, Australian authorities also intercepted packages headed to Japan containing dozens of lizards and a turtle concealed in socks. So apparently, in the international reptile-smuggling community, the sock is not merely footwear. It’s luggage.

Fox News spoke with Keith Jeffries, a former federal security director at Los Angeles International Airport, who summed up the motivation rather neatly: “If there’s a market for it, people will attempt to smuggle it.”

“We’ve seen this before many times,” Jeffries added. “It happens more frequently than any of us would like.”

DBS WIRE SOURCES:

today’s hot news