FILE - Dudleya caespitosa is a succulent plant known by several common names, including sea lettuce.

A man was sentenced to two years in federal prison last week for attempting to export at least $150,000 worth of wild succulents that he poached from native habitats in Northern California state parks, the United States Justice Department said.

On Oct. 11, 2018, Byungsu Kim, 46, and co-defendants Youngin Back, 47, and Bong Jun Kim, 46, traveled by car from Los Angeles International Airport to Crescent City, Calif., with plans to harvest wild plants and smuggle them to South Korea, the department said in a statement Jan. 20. Throughout October 2018, they pulled plants from the ground at DeMartin State Beach in Klamath, Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park in Crescent City and Russian Gulch State Park in Mendocino County, the department said. The Dudleya plants — a type of succulent with a pretty rose shape that grows along coastal cliffs — were then brought to a nursery operated by Kim in Vista, a town near San Diego.

Because growing Dudleyas in nurseries takes years, smugglers are known to harvest wild, living plants from the ground in Northern California and export them overseas where they are sold on the black market.

Byungsu Kim scheduled an inspection with a county agriculture official at the Vista nursery and "falsely told her the government-issued certificate necessary for the plants’ exportation should list 1,397 Dudleya plants for export to South Korea and that the 'place of origin' of the plants was San Diego County," the department said.

The thieves then transported the plants to a commercial exporter in Compton to smuggle their haul to South Korea, but the effort was stopped by local law enforcement who obtained a search warrant and found 3,715 poached Dudleya plants in boxes that were labeled “rush” and “live plants,” the department said.

The department said the history of internet searches on Kim's phone — including an indication that he read a press release on the arrest and convictions of three other Dudleya poachers — showed that he knew taking the plants was illegal. 

All three defendants were arrested. California officials confiscated Byungsu Kim's South Korea passport after his arrest, but he later obtained a new passport in January 2019 "by falsely claiming to the South Korean Consulate in Los Angeles that he had lost his passport," the department said.

Byungsu Kim and Back reportedly fled to Mexico on foot in May 2019 through the Tijuana-San Ysidro border crossing after learning of pending federal charges against them. With his fraudulent passport, Kim flew with Back from Mexico to China, and ultimately to South Korea, the department said.

Kim surfaced in South Africa in October 2019, where he was arrested for illegally collecting plants from protected areas for export to South Korea. After pleading guilty to the criminal charges in South Africa and spending a year in custody, he was extradited to the United States in October 2020, where he has been in federal custody since.

Kim was sentenced Jan. 20 by U.S. District Judge George H. Wu. He was ordered to pay $3,985 to the state of California to cover the cost of replanting the stolen Dudleyas after his arrest, the department said. He pleaded guilty in September 2021 to one count of attempting to illegally export plants. Bong Jun Kim pleaded guilty in July 2019 for the same crime and served four months in federal custody. Back remains a fugitive, the department said.

“[Byungsu Kim’s] willful criminal conduct in October 2019 was not an isolated event: he had carried out the same scheme repeatedly in California,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum, the department said. “[Kim] had traveled to the United States more than 50 times since 2009. Customs records show that he was travelling for succulent-related purposes and often with tens of thousands of dollars in cash (sometimes declared, sometime not) and fake phytosanitary certificates.”

Amy Graff is the news editor for SFGATE. She was born and raised in the Bay Area and got her start in news at the Daily Californian newspaper at UC Berkeley where she majored in English literature. She has been with SFGATE for more than 10 years. You can email her at agraff@sfgate.com.