Last August, we watched some jackass in a Prius pull over to the side of the street in Highland Park to jack a large succulent from the Los Angeles Police Museum. Today, we learned of a more sophisticated plot seeking to devoid our landscape of these thick gray-green beauties.
A South Korean national named Byungsu Kim has just been sentenced to two years of federal after getting busted in 2019 with more than $150,000 worth of succulents ripped out of Northern California’s state parks. He’ll also need to pay nearly $4,000 to pay for their replanting.
According to a California Justice Department breakdown, Kim was caught with two co-conspirators, Youngin Back and Bong Jun Kim, fellow Korean nationals in their 40s. The trio landed at LAX in October 2018, and drove to NorCal to go on a tear, pulling dudleya plants from Klamath’s Demartin State Beach and Redwoods State Park, even though internet searches on his phone make it clear he knew this was illegal.
After leaving their booty at a Vista nursery, their crime spree continued in Russian Gulch State Park in Mendocino, where they used walkie-talkies and backpacks to snatch even more dudleya, a valuable plant on South Korea’s black market.
After pulling some shenanigans with a county inspector back at the Vista nursery, the three drove the plants back to Compton with their fraudulent certificates. Before they could get them shipped, local police appeared and found the 3,715 succulents Kim and crew had pulled from the ground.