Smuggler Who Hid 51 Turtles in Pants Sentenced to 57 Months

Enhanced penalties came into play because value of turtles confiscated at airports exceed $1 million, government says.

ANN ARBOR, MI – The notorious international turtle smuggler who stuffed more than 50 turtles in his pants in an attempt to sneak them across the U.S.-Canada border in 2014 — and shipped thousands more to China — received a nearly five-year prison sentence in federal court in Ann Arbor Tuesday.

A remorseful Kai Xu, 27, who already has been jailed for 19 months, told U.S. District Judge John Corbett O’Meara that he was grateful to border patrol agents “for stopping the darkness of my greed and ignorance," the Associated Press reports.

He claimed in a letter to the judge he got into the lucrative international turtle smuggling ring because he needed the money to pay the tuition for his final year of engineering school in Ontario, Canada.

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