One of the few cases of caviar fraud to be  successfully prosecuted, whose details Vadim was personally familiar with,  involved the poaching, between l985 and l990, of some 2000 white sturgeons from the Columbia River in Washington and the passing off  of more than 3300 pounds of their salted roe as imported beluga or ossetra by Arnold Hansen-Sturm, the fifth-generation owner of the   Bergen, New Jersey-based Hansen Caviar Company. Hansen is one of the most venerable importers in America. “Only Romanoff has been in business longer, which makes it even sadder,” Vadim told me.    In l993 Hansen-Sturm   was sentenced  to 18 months in federal prison for obstruction of justice and conspiring to violate the Lacey Act, which deals with illegal traffic across state borders. The white sturgeon ranges along the Pacific Coast  from the Gulf of Alaska to Baja California.  It was fished to commercial extinction by the turn of the century, like the sturgeons of the Hudson, to supply Europe, particularly Germany, with caviar, the Atlantic sturgeon having disappeared from the Rhine and other German rivers.  There are only three sizeable populations of white sturgeon left. One is in the Columbia River, and it was in no position to lose two thousand of its adults. It takes something like fifteen  years for a white sturgeon to reach reproductive maturity..

          The two poachers had been operating out of a cheap hotel room in Vancouver, Washington, when they were accidentally stumbled on in November, l990. They had given the manager $900 in cash— a month’s rent in advance— and told her they didn’t want the maid or anybody else coming into the room.  The manager suspected they were making amphetamines, but they what they were doing was whipping up caviar from roe of white sturgeon they had caught themselves or bought from sportsfishermen along the Columbia. When a batch was ready, they would send it  by Federal Express to Sturm-Hansen in Bergen. By the time they were arrested, they had made 67 shipments for which Hansen, according to the company’s books, paid them $247, 176 under the table.  But unfortunately for them, two bank robbers had also paid cash for another room in the same motel. They held up the bank in nearby  Dollars Corners, but the package of cash they made off with contained an exploding dye pack, which went off, and when they deposited some of the red-stained bills in a bank in a nearby town, the teller notified the FBI, which traced the money  through the deposit slip to the motel. The manager told the FBI about the suspicious behavior of the poachers, and the FBI, thinking they were the bank robbers, put them under surveillance from a nearby motel room.  After a few days the FBI realized what they were doing and  turned the matter over to the Washington Department of Fisheries and the National Marine Fisheries Services, two agencies that look into resource-related crimes, and after a two-year investigation, the poachers and Sturm-Hansen were arrested. Sturm-Hansen had been paying them $100 a pound for their caviar and selling it for many times more to such clients as the Rainbow Room, the Waldorf Astoria, and Pan American Airlines. Beluga retails for up to $600 a pound, so the scam netted him potentially over a million and a half dollars.

        After Vadim and Robert de Salle developed their molecular method  for identifying sturgeons from their roe, in l996, they mail-ordered some of Hansen’s “beluga”  caviar, tested it, and determined that it wasn’t beluga. Sturm-Hansen was on probation for his white-sturgeon caper, and he still hadn’t cleaned up his act. Vadim and de Salle tested two batches of Hansen caviar, and both were mislabeled. “The tests were part of a survey we were conducting to see how the method worked,” Vadim explained. “All together, we tested twenty-three samples of caviar, most from gourmet stores  in Manhattan, and found that five were mislabeled.” Particularly distressing was a lot labeled “malossol,” or lightly salted, beluga, which “more profound DNA examination led us to initially conclude  was Siberian sturgeon, a species that is being wiped out by poachers.   The illegal catch of Siberian sturgeon on the Ob River alone in l994 was 250-300 tonnes [metric tons], about the annual take for all of Siberia in previous years.” But now Vadim wasn’t sure of his and de Salle’s identification. “Later, more intensive tests reveal that we cannot yet discriminate between Siberian, Italian, and Persian,” he explained. “There is so much overlap in the region we sequenced.”  Even more distressing was a lot represented as Caspian ossetra by its Russian supplier that turned to be ship sturgeon, a species already extinct in the Aral Sea and down to the wire in the Caspian. 

        Vadim at this point was chairman of the Sturgeon Specialists Group of the IUCN— the World Conservation Union— and was spearheading the campaign to get the entire order  red-listed. He knew in grim detail the  status of each of the 27 species. That the European Atlantic (aka Baltic) sturgeon was down to a tiny population in the Gironde River, near Bordeaux (plus the one in the Black Sea). That no catch had been reported in 25 years of any of the three shovelnose sturgeons of Central Asia (none of them get to be a meter long, but they are thought to be closest, evolutionarily speaking, to the ancestral sturgeon). He knew that  the Persian sturgeon was up against the wall, as were  the Adriatic sturgeon, the Amur, kaluga (one of the big ones, it gets up to four meters), Yangtze, Sakhalin, green,  pallid (it swims in the Mississippi and is loaded with PCB’s), and Alabama (of the Mobil River basin). Vadim had been attracted to sturgeons for purely scientific reasons. The basic biogeographical questions that scientists have been puzzling over for the last two hundred years— how they dispersed and the relationship between the Old World and New World species— are still unanswered. As the introduction to Sturgeon Conservation and Biodiversity, a collection of technical articles  co-edited by Vadim, explains, the Acipenseriformes are  “the most speciose group of living fossil fish.” Unlike other ancient, primitive fish like the coelacanth of the Comoros Islands or the pirararucu of the the Amazon basin, there are 27 versions  to look at and compare. But very quickly Vadim realized (as is common  in the natural sciences these days) that the first order of business was the fishes’ survival. . He and de Salle had developed their method as a tool in their evolutionary research. But now it was proving to have an unexpected forensic application, to be providential for the conservation effort.   

        That June, l997, three months before we met, thanks to no small degree to Vadim’s efforts, at the   tenth meeting of the  parties, in Harare, Zimbabwe, the IUCN listed  the entire order on its  CITES Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. It wasn’t an Apppendix 1 listing, which would have imposed a total ban on international  traffic in caviar and other sturgeon parts, but an Appendix 2 one— controlled trade.   Vadim reasoned that a total ban would have spawned only more black market activity and more poaching, as had happened with ivory, leading to more accelerated extermination of the fish.  The method  that Vadim and de Salle had just developed played a crucial role in the listing. As Vadim explained,  “We realized the number of sturgeon species is not clear, that there is a crisis in modern systematics. To save the animals, we first need to define what to save. The variation of appearance within species is unbelievable. For example, Persian sturgeon, which lives mainly in the southern Caspian. A few years ago a guy published a paper that Persian sturgeon are also in Black Sea. But latest data suggest these may be separate species.”  At one point in its deliberations a member of the Sturgeon Specialists Commission had asked, “How are we going to identify the caviar ?” and Vadim stood up and said, “We have the method. Here it is,” and with that the commission had voted to go ahead with the listing.  

        Stories about how these two scientists were going around DNA-testing caviar from Manhattan boutiques and dealers finding that 30% of it wasn’t what they said it was ran in the Talk of the Town, the Wall Street Journal,  the Village Voice.  The American Museum basked in the publicity. At that point, Vadim seemed to be the enemy of the caviar dealers, the scourge of an industry that promoted poaching, smuggling, consumer fraud, and the disappearance these extraordinary, hundred-million-year-old bottomfeeders.  But within a year he had become the dealers’ ally, as they battled with the overzealous U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which had been put in charge implementing the CITES treaty. 

***

        To understand how Vadim could have jumped through this rather difficult ideological hoop, you have to know about his equally passionate commitment to human rights, the investigations into the abuses of the Sovet penal system that he has been quietly conducting for years,   his intense loathing of the arbitrary and hearthless use of power by state bureaucracies, inculcated during the forty-seven years he lived in Soviet Russia.  I didn’t learn about this dimension of Vadim until he and his wife Kathy and his daughter Irisha (affectionate dimunitive of Irina), who was visiting from Moscow, came up for the weekend at our home in the Adirondacks the January after our Black Sea cruise. At Sunday breakfast, as we looked out at a  Russian fairyland of white birches and snow-bent firs, he told me, “I am member of Moscow intelligentsia. My family lived for last three generations in Moscow. This is unusual for Jews. According to Russian law, decreed by Catherine the Great, Jews could only live in Pale [the Pale of Settement, in what is now Poland and western Ukraine] with two exceptions : those with high education—  university diplomas—  or highest level of merchants. The universities had quotas for Jews— only 6% in late czarist period. My grandfather, Avady Davidovich Birstein, was  among those. He came from Vietebsk, the native town of Marc Chagal, in Belorussia, and graduated from Moscow University at the end of the century with a degree in medicine. Jews could only graduate from medical or law school. But if they converted— Jewish intellectuals usually converted to Protestantism— no problem. Leo Semyonovich Berg, famous scientist, my hero, who started systematic sturgeon work, became biologist only because he converted. 

     “My grandather,” continued Vadim, “pioneered stomach surgery in Russia. My grandmother was also  doctor.  During First World War they worked for progressive  Institute of Traumatology, operating on wounded. It was  huge building with  hospital and spacious apartments for staff in downtown Moscow. After Revolution the institute moved somewhere else, and the hospital rooms were  turned into more apartments. Grandfather died in l922, but our family stayed in apartment until l963. I grew up in former Institute of Traumatology. We shared  apartment with four other families.  Law under communism was one room per family.”

        Vadim’s father, Yacov Avedivitch Birstein, was a zoologist who specialized in crustaceans. (Conversion was no longer necessary in communist times, not that Yacov Avadevich went to synagogue any more than his parents had. The Birsteins were, Vadim explained, “Democratic liberals who didn’t care about religion.”)  “Before Second World War he went on scientific expedition  to Caspian Sea and got involved with introduction of long burrowing sand worm from  Black Sea that was beneficial to sturgeons. So as a boy I already knew about these very interesting fish. Then another group of scientists decided to destroy this group of scientists. The genetics and evolutionary biology for which Moscow University was famous were exchanged for voodoo. Stalin proclaimed Trafim Lysenko  chief state scientist. Lysenko was an agronomist who was completely ignorant of genetics and biology He rejected whole notion of competition within species. Like  good communist, he believed that new members of  same species are created to help each other out. Father and his colleagues were declared enemies of the people. I spent my childhood waiting every night for KGB to come and arrest him. They never did, but he lost his appointment at the university, and my grandmother lost her right to practice medicine  in anti-Jewish campaign of 47, when there was widespread propaganda that Jewish doctors were poisoning people.” 

          Vadim graduated from the University of Moscow in l966, then did postgraduate work in classic genetics on Drysophila fruit flies. After a brief stint as a forensic analyst of old icons for the Institute of Restoration of Works of Art, he was hired by  Koltsov Institute of Developmental Biology. He married a Moscow chemist in l970, they had Irisha, and divorced 78. Then he married a biologist, also from Moscow, who had two children.. “In early seventies I became involved in human rights movement,” he reminisced. “I was mainly involved in activities of Moscow group of Amnesty International. With friends I created system of how to answer during KGB interrrogation and organized lectures on this topic, which was very important because it saved many people from being arrested.  We also created system of  sending food parcels to orphanages in Poland when martial law was declared in l981. I hid political cartoonist friend underground for four years. All my friends were dissidents and refuseniks. Some were in labor camps, and I helped their families, which was dangerous. Two artist friends had an exhibition of anticommunists in Venice and one of them had made a portrait that was recognizably me. This was not the type of academican the KGB appreciated. I was in KGB term neudobnyi chelovek, an ‘inconvenient person,’ a troublemaker.  I was brought in twelve times for questioning. In l975 my book on amphibian genetics was at publishing house, being prepared for publications. . But when I went to see my editor she said there is no manuscript. It disappeared. The organs took it. My second book, on evolution of DNA and chromosomes of vertebrates from sharks to mammals, almost followed same fate. This time KGB took all clearance documents needed to publish, not actual manuscript. Only after 3-year fight was it finally published. By then it was almost Gorbachev’s time— l987.”

          Vadim was getting ahead of himself, so he backtracked. “In l984 my contract at  Koltsov Institute of Deveopmental Biology was not renewed. I tried to find job at other institutes, at Academy of Sciences, at Moscow University.” But he was turned down everywhere, black-listed by the KGB even though “according to Soviet constitution everybody must be provided with job if at high professional level. The only job I could get was as a janitor, but if I had taken it I would never have been hired again by any institution. And if you didn’t have job, KGB could arrest you as a parasite. That is how it made all dissidents outlaws.”
 

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