The Documentary Podcast · BBC World Service

Billion dollar babies

·52 min·4 clips

A plane crashes in Haiti, scattering hundreds of live baby eels and revealing a multi-billion dollar trafficking operation.

Reporter Rob Wilson begins with a plane crash in a Haitian forest in October 2024 that scattered hundreds of live baby eels across the wreckage, illustrating the lengths to which traders go to move the creatures alive. European glass eels hatch in the Sargasso Sea near the Caribbean, drift on the Gulf Stream to Europe, and spend up to 30 years in rivers before returning to reproduce and die. Because eels cannot be bred in captivity, every farmed eel must begin life as a wild glass eel, and demand from Chinese fish farms producing 280,000 tonnes per year is enormous. The EU banned eel exports in 2010 as stocks had declined by 95 percent, immediately creating a lucrative illegal trade. German researcher Florian Stein estimates up to 100 tonnes are smuggled out of Europe annually, with couriers carrying bags of live eels through airports like drug mules, roughly 1,000 such mules caught over the past decade. UK Glass Eels CEO Peter Wood began exporting to Russian conservation projects after Brexit cut off his EU markets, shipping via his private plane registered G-EELS. Polish investigative journalist Pavel Zastrozinski followed one of Wood's deliveries to a location near the Kaliningrad border and watched boxes of eels being sold from a van to private buyers, not released into a conservation lagoon. Pavel then obtained a company computer from a man in a remote house, recovering 40 gigabytes of documents linking a Polish eel farm to a professor who also worked for Russian company Goodfish, and to apparent smuggling in tobacco and forged documents. Russian journalist Ilya Shumanov analysed Goodfish bank records and found at least 1.7 million dollars in payments to Peter Wood, with transfer dates coinciding with flights to Poland and Lithuania rather than Russia, suggesting the Polish deliveries were funded from Kaliningrad. In the Dominican Republic and Haiti, a parallel boom in American eel fishing has followed the European crackdown, with beach gangs controlling catches, fishermen protesting low prices, and the UN warning that Haitian criminal networks are exploiting the trade to further destabilize the country. A Hong Kong triad middleman described earning up to 150,000 US dollars per operation, justifying the illegality by comparing it favorably to drugs and gambling. Peter Wood told producers all payments complied with UK regulations and Polish deliveries were paid for separately by Polish customers.

As heard by us

A plane crash in Haiti opens into an investigation of live baby eel trafficking.

BBC World Service's Billion Dollar Babies starts with a plane crash in a Haitian forest and opens into a much larger story: a multi-billion dollar trade in live baby eels.

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Follow a baby-eel crash in Haiti as it opens into a multi-billion dollar global trade.

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