3 Arrests Cap Probe of Poached Mushrooms

Chanterelle -- the very name of the prized mushroom smacks of elegance, the hush of fine dining, the discreet sigh of the discerning gourmet.

But in Lompoc these days, it has another image: felony fungus.

Santa Barbara County sheriff’s deputies Thursday showed off a haul of chanterelles -- the booty, they said, of high-tech mushroom thieves from the Pacific Northwest who have allegedly plagued local ranchers for a decade or longer.

Last week, deputies arrested three men -- all of Eastern European origin -- who allegedly used global positioning satellite units to plot the location of chanterelle colonies, communicated by walkie-talkie and kept meticulous records of back-door sales at gourmet restaurants.

“They’re cagey,” said Deputy John McCarthy, the officer with the Sheriff Department’s rural crime unit who is credited with bringing down the ring like a bad souffle. “They are really good at what they do.”

McCarthy said he had chased mushroom thieves in the Lompoc area on and off for five or six years.

Chanterelles, which taste like a sort of earthy apricot, grow in forest environments and around the oaks that speckle the region’s rolling hills. Large-scale cultivation of the delicacies has not been notably successful, so mushroom aficionados look forward to the harvest of the wild ones every year.

McCarthy said exasperated ranchers, who harvest the chanterelles themselves as a lucrative sideline, call every year with the same glum report: “The Czechs are back.”

“I ask them: Well, what are they driving?”

And, he said, they reply: “I don’t know. Some beat-up old car.”

“And where are they staying?”

“Probably some motel.”

For all the elusiveness of a group that is said to work mainly at night on remote ranches, the alleged mushroom poachers were the subject of an all-out hunt involving police dogs, a helicopter, patrol cars and deputies on foot a few years ago, McCarthy said.

The suspects were not caught, however, until last Friday, when McCarthy spotted a Volvo station wagon with Washington plates on rural Miguelito Canyon Road. It was registered to a man local ranchers had been warned about by mushroom wholesalers.

McCarthy arrested Josef Vychodil, 52, of Seattle with 28 to 30 pounds of chanterelles in the car. He was booked into Santa Barbara County Jail on suspicion of trespassing and grand theft. Although the street value of the mushrooms was about $300, any theft of produce worth more than $100 is a felony in California.

Later, police arrested Lucas Vrana, 29, of Seattle and Maxim Mikhailytchev, 24, of Vancouver, Canada, in a Lompoc motel room with what officials described as “several thousand dollars worth” of mushrooms. They were arrested on the same charges as Vychodil.

In a kind of mushroom appetizer earlier in the week, McCarthy arrested Eugene Anthony Segura, 42, and Kasey Elaine Amick, 40, with only enough mushrooms to seek charges of petty theft. An allegedly stolen gun also was found in their car, police said.

That bust was made the day after deputies met with local ranchers who gave them a quick seminar on how to spot chanterelles, their habitat and their stalkers.

A rancher, who asked for anonymity, spoke of the “professional” skills of longtime mushroom poachers, who remove caps with surgical precision and know which chanterelles are a bit too long in the tooth for use at the finer tables.

“That’s what we have around here,” the rancher said. “It’s not cowboys and Indians -- it’s cowboys and mushroom poachers.”