Tree Thieves Often Chop With Impunity

Daniel Hughes loves stealing trees.

He loves the pungent mix of blue chain-saw exhaust and spicy fresh wood. He loves the loud, short snaps that resonate from an 800-year-old Western red cedar as it teeters. He loves slip-sliding on the forest floor in his spiked boots, hauling cedar down a slope to his waiting pickup truck in the Olympia National Forest.

He even loves the tension. Stealing trees is, after all, breaking the law.

The only thing Hughes doesn’t like about cutting down old growth is going to jail, which is where he is now. But that doesn’t happen often to tree thieves.

“I know the forest like the back of my hand, and there are a lot of trees out there,” said Hughes, 38. “It’s easy to get away with this.”

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Tree theft is a major problem in forests throughout the country, from the old-growth cedar of Washington’s Olympic Mountains to the maple and cherry hardwoods of New York’s Adirondacks.

The victims are lumber companies, private landowners and the public.

The thieves are mostly chronically unemployed men from logging towns seething with resentment over conservation measures that have sharply reduced cutting, forestry experts say. They generally feel entitled to what they take.

Hughes, who fits the profile, put it this way in an interview at Grays Harbor County Jail two hours southwest of Seattle:

“To me, it’s like, ‘This land is your land and this land is my land.’ I’m taking my share. I don’t really see this as stealing.”

Major lumber companies, whose woodlands account for about 35% of the country’s lumber production, say 3% of the trees cut on their property yearly are carted away by thieves. They estimate their losses at $350 million a year.

Private landowners, whose tree farms and woodlands make up 55% of U.S. lumber production, don’t track theft as a group; but the American Tree Farm System, which represents them, said their losses are extreme.

And U.S. Forest Service officials estimate that as many as one in every 10 trees cut in national forests is taken illegally.

A dozen forestry economists consulted by the Associated Press said that, based on the limited data available, thieves may be stealing trees worth at least $1 billion a year at the sawmill. That’s enough to produce the framing, siding and shingles for about 25,000 single-family homes. By comparison, the estimated value of auto theft was about $8 billion last year.

Nevertheless, arrests and prosecutions for tree theft are uncommon.

The U.S. Forest Service’s timber-theft unit was disbanded in an agency reorganization in the spring of 1995, and most state and federal investigators say they are too busy with other crimes to give the problem attention.

Three people were charged with stealing trees from U.S. property in 2001, down from 15 in 1996, according to Justice Department records obtained by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

“In general, law enforcement try to stay away from this,” said Tom Kazee, a timber theft consultant in Orange Park, Fla. “They’re not going to drop a murder case for a tree.”

Even when tree thieves are caught and convicted, penalties are usually light -- small fines or, in a few states, three or four months in jail.

For the tree thieves, this means low risk and solid profits.

Although the overall price of wood has decreased by about 10% in the last five years, prices for scarce woods such as old-growth cedar, birds-eye maple and Hawaiian koa have increased tenfold. One old-growth cedar now brings as much as $5,000 at the sawmill.

The typical timber thief, experts say, can reap $100,000 from a few hard days’ work in the woods.

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Michael Roy Pendleton, a former police officer who teaches about environmental crimes at the University of Washington, said tree-stealing has long been a part of the logging culture.

A generation or two ago in lumber towns from Oregon to South Carolina, timber company employees occasionally supplemented their incomes by taking a tree or two for themselves, he said.

“Back then, there was no notion that we could ever run out of trees,” Pendleton said. “It was an unlimited resource.”

Since then, everything has changed.

A recession in the 1980s caused timber prices to sink, throwing thousands of lumbermen out of work. By then, 98% of America’s original old-growth forests had been cut, prompting efforts to conserve what was left.

In the prosperous 1990s, the rich increasingly began buying up tracts of timberland for private estates, further reducing land available for cutting, according to forestry economists.

And in 1993, the federal government tightened restrictions on cutting old-growth trees on public land to save habitat for threatened spotted owls.

“The spotted owl?” Hughes said scornfully. “I don’t believe it exists.”

After all his time in the forests, didn’t he ever see one?

“Yeah, we saw one,” he said. “We tried to kill it.”

Hughes was 14 when he first went to work in the woods with his father. They specialized in “suicide sales,” buying federal permits to cut “widow-makers” -- dangerous trees that had been left behind by logging companies.

As he grew older, Hughes worked when he could at legitimate logging jobs, but eventually, he was unable to find work in the declining industry. About 45,000 lumbermen -- fallers, logging equipment operators, logging graders and scalers -- were employed in the United States in 2001, down from about 85,000 in 1989, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Wayne Sparling, who has spent his life in New York’s Catskills, was acquitted of timber theft in 1999. In a recent interview, he insisted that he doesn’t poach trees, but said he understands why people do.

“It’s hatred,” he said. “And poverty.”

“These city people are coming in here; they spend big bucks, rub it in your face. They’re buying up everything, and then they let the trees stand and rot. They won’t let a guy in to take a few trees. So what’s a guy to do? He’s going to go out and steal from [them].”

In New York, thieves prey on absentee landlords. “They find the property that has quality timber on it, watch for the owner to leave and then move in,” said Lt. Jim Masuicca of the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation Police.

In Hawaii, where authorities said tree theft is rampant, the main target is koa, a dark wood prized for making bowls, rocking chairs and musical instruments. One koa board, 5 feet long, 6 inches wide, an inch thick, is worth about $50. Police recently traced four container-loads of stolen koa, and a ring of timber poachers was indicted.

Despite the size of the problem, the Hawaii Division of Forestry and Wildlife averages four tree-theft prosecutions a year.

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U.S. Forest Service Special Agent Anne Minden screamed at the top of her lungs, sliding on her back, rolling, flipping in mid-air. She came to a slumped halt at the bottom of the 50-foot slope.

“Where’s my gun,” she gasped. Knocked from its holster during her fall, it was soon found, and Minden was back scrambling through the underbrush.

“Hey!” she shouted. “Up here!”

The crime scene: a tree stump as big as the floor of a small bedroom.

Timber thieves such as Hughes, whom she has arrested twice, irritate Minden.

“This is public land,” she said. “When he steals these trees, he steals them from all of us.”

But she has an impossible job.

When the U.S. Forest Service’s timber-theft unit was disbanded, it was replaced with a “fully integrated approach” that made timber-theft enforcement the responsibility of every Forest Service employee, said Ann Melle, assistant director of the Forest Service’s law enforcement unit.

However, the Forest Service has just 460 uniformed law enforcement officers and 120 special agents -- one for every 600 square miles of federal forest land -- and they have a lot more to do besides catch tree thieves. Their job also includes investigating arson, protecting archeological sites and searching for marijuana farms.

Forestry companies try to guard against thefts with their own security firms. But even when they or forest agents catch a tree thief, prosecutors often decline to prosecute. Federal and state prosecutors say it’s simply a matter of priorities -- other crimes take precedence.

“Prosecutors are much more concerned with the high-profile cases -- theft, murder and mayhem,” said Prof. Harry Haney at Virginia Tech’s Forestry Department. “It’s difficult getting evidence on the perpetrator, and there are no titles or required registration with trees.”

“This is a crime no one is interested in,” said Walt Adams, corporate security officer for Boise Cascade.

Except maybe in the state of Washington, where Minden has found a sympathetic state prosecutor in Deputy Dist. Atty. Jason Richards.

“Those trees that are being cut down were growing before Columbus came to America,” Richards said. “When thieves cut them down, that offends me not only as a prosecutor, but as a human being.”

Since 1988, he has sent a dozen people to jail on timber theft charges. One of them is Hughes.

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According to court records, Hughes has been caught stealing trees half a dozen times since the mid-1980s and also has a conviction for possession of amphetamines.

He scouts for cedars that are several centuries old because they have the best heartwood, he said. He usually strikes just before dawn, the chain saw cutting through the trunk like butter. He hacks off the bark and cuts the fallen tree into chunks the size of 27-inch television sets. Then he lugs the chunks to his truck for the drive to the sawmill, where they are sliced into shingles.

When he has been caught, he has usually been fined a few hundred dollars or given a short jail sentence. But last year, Richards persuaded a judge that several ancient cedars that Hughes and one of his friends had stolen and sold for $10,000 were irreplaceable treasures. That time, a judge ordered the two of them to pay $290,000 in restitution.

Hughes was unfazed.

He doesn’t have that kind of money, he said, so “to get them to leave me alone, I only have to pay it off at $25 a month.”

In September, according to authorities, Hughes was at it again, cutting down three cedars in Olympic National Forest. Police seized one truckload before it reached the sawmill. But a few days later, one of Hughes’ friends faked an official signature on a permit, picked up the impounded wood, drove it to the mill and sold it.

“I had nothing to do with that,” Hughes said, laughing.

He doesn’t have much to laugh about now. In April, he was found guilty of first-degree theft for the September crime and, this time, Richards is seeking a sentence of up to 10 years. The sentencing is scheduled May 23.

To Hughes, this is all wildly unfair. “I’m in here with murderers and rapists,” he said in a pretrial interview. “They ask me, ‘What’s your beef?’ and I tell them, ‘Well, I stole a tree,’ ”

And then, he said, “They laugh at me.”