The Fight Against Crime: Notes From The Front : Game Warden Battles Sale of Bear Parts

Marty Wall is one kind of lone ranger.

He’s the only state game warden assigned to a 480-square-mile area encompassing the Santa Clarita Valley. Although his job is to protect wildlife, he says it’s a tossup whether he spends more time “saving the people from the wildlife or the wildlife from the people.”

That’s why he was so angered early this year when he learned about the dead bear alongside San Francisquito Canyon Road. It was unclear how the bear died--perhaps killed by a car--but someone had chopped off the paws, apparently for sale on the burgeoning black market in animal parts.

Wall called in a state undercover unit that specializes in the illegal traffic in animal parts. On Oct. 30, Frank Popovich, 33, owner of an arts and crafts store in Canyon Country that sells reproductions of bear claws, was arrested after allegedly buying bear paws from an undercover warden and booked on suspicion of two counts of illegal purchase of bear parts, felonies that carry a penalty of one year in jail and a fine of $5,000.

But Popovich says he was entrapped by undercover officers who kept trying to push the sale even though he expressed an interest only in borrowing a claw so he could take a cast of it to use in making reproductions for his jewelry.

“I told them . . . I don’t want to buy them, I just want to borrow them,” he said. Popovich said he finds the illegal sale of bear parts “despicable.”

“The bear,” he said, “is a sacred animal.”

The case is symptomatic of a problem that is exploding while the state’s resources to combat it are shrinking. It is not illegal in California to hunt bear, with the proper license. But it is illegal to sell or trade wildlife parts.

Game wardens say trafficking in bear parts--prized in Asian folk medicine--has become so lucrative that it is second in value only to illegal drug trafficking and money laundering. “It’s big, big business,” says Lt. Eddie Watkins, the only permanent covert investigator in the state’s Fish and Game Department.

Watkins’ expertise is in the contraband bear parts trade, particularly gallbladders. But even as the street value of a bear’s gallbladder soars to $60,000 in South Korea, officials in California have slashed the ranks of those assigned to nab the traffickers.

Worse still, says Dana Lauren West of the World Wildlife Fund, as the bears of Asia dwindle, the demand for parts of North America’s bears is expected to soar.

West said the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group has received anecdotal reports from Singapore and Hong Kong of tourists being offered excursions to North America “to bag your own bear and get your own gallbladder.” Organizations such as West’s are trying to persuade traditional Asian medicine practitioners to substitute other substances, such as pig gallbladders, in medicines.

The state has eliminated the staff of 14 undercover investigators that Watkins supervised in the early 1990s, leaving him to do the job alone, although he can sometimes borrow other wardens for temporary duty.

And those visible in the field, such as Wall, have to sandwich in the enforcement in those free moments: The times when he isn’t trapping bears that have wandered onto the median strip on the Golden State Freeway or checking mountain lion sightings near elementary schools.

But his disgust with the illegal traffic spurs him on.

“It seems like a terrible waste,” he said. “for something like that to happen for the sake of money.”