MIAMI
-- To boost the caviar business in Florida, Mark Zaslavsky
is sleeping with the fishes.
Last
week, at the Lufthansa terminal at Miami International Airport,
the Zaslavsky-owned Marky's Caviar became the first U.S. company
to transport five live beluga sturgeon into the country.
And
they're all headed for Orlando.
The
imported beluga, weighing between 8 and 10 pounds each, will
serve as the brood-stock for Sturgeon Aquafarms, an aquaculture
facility to be built near Orlando.
"We
are the only one," says Zaslavsky. In fact, there are only
six beluga sturgeon in the United States -- Zaslavsky's five
and one male at the University of Florida.
To
ensure their safe arrival, Zaslavsky literally slept with
the fishes, baby-sitting the sturgeon on the plane ride overseas.
Fine
food, tough times
The
domestic breeding of Caspian sturgeon is a response to the
twin problems of a poor economy and a rash of fish smuggling.
A
shaky economy, a crackdown on illicit imports and a dwindling
supply of black eggs from endangered sturgeon have decimated
the already thin ranks of Florida's caviar firms. Caviarteria,
a national caviar restaurant and retail chain with locations
in Boca Raton and Palm Beach, closed its doors in Miami Beach;
New York; Beverly Hills, Calif.; and Las Vegas.
Other
local caviar establishments are listed as inactive in Florida,
according to state records, and those in business face a tough
road ahead, says Zaslavsky: "The economy is not very good."
Mobbed
up
At
the same time, sturgeon fisheries in Russia, widely reported
to be controlled by the Russian mob, have shrunk dramatically,
leading to poaching and an increase in organized crime. "The
caviar trade is rife with corruption," says Tom Sansonetti,
assistant attorney general of the Justice Department's Environment
and Natural Resources division.
Couriers
began smuggling suitcases filled with caviar into the United
States after new international restrictions were announced
in 1998 to protect sturgeon.
Other
fish that provide caviar include salmon, paddlefish and whitefish.
However, the unusual flavor intensity of the sturgeon roe
is both prized -- and increasingly rare.
Sturgeon
can live up to 100 years. Because the time necessary to reach
egg-bearing age can be up to 20 years -- and the fish is killed
in the process of obtaining the roe that is salted to make
caviar -- sturgeon are especially vulnerable.
Caspian
Sea sturgeon may have been around since the age of dinosaurs,
says Sansonetti, but "the appetite of smugglers for profit
has the potential to extinguish them from the Earth."
For
example, Viktor Tsimbal, president of Beluga Caviar in North
Miami Beach, pled guilty to smuggling more beluga caviar from
Russia into the United States in 1999 than the entire Russian
export quota for the year.
Smugglers were paid approximately $500 for each trip and were
provided airline tickets, pre-packed luggage filled with black
market caviar, and apartment and hotel rooms in Europe and
Miami.
A
federal jury also convicted Mikhail Ivanovich Kovtun of illegally
importing and transporting 98.2 pounds -- at $1,000 a pound
-- of Russian-origin caviar into Miami.
It
was the eighth conviction in Miami involving caviar smuggling
between November 2000 and November 2002.
'Still
eating'
Not surprisingly, the brisk trade in black market caviar smuggled
from Russia and other Caspian Sea nations comes as the Caspian's
beluga sturgeon population has dropped.
This
decline has prompted companies like Marky's Caviar to take
steps toward relieving the pressure on the world population
of sturgeon, supplementing the wild catch with farmed caviar.
Marky's,
which imports Russian caviar from the Black and Caspian seas,
says it hopes to develop a domestic stock of Caspian beluga
sturgeon by setting up its own Central Florida fish farm.
Until
now, American aquafarms have mostly produced paddlefish roe
or California white sturgeon varieties of caviar, which have
their own distinct flavor.
Cindy
Ferrer, a U.S. Wildlife Service inspector on hand for the
Orlando-bound delivery of sturgeon, says the import of sturgeon
is rare -- Zaslavsky's fish mark the first time in her three
years in Miami that she's encountered imported sturgeon destined
to be farm-raised domestically.
Rare
enough for Zaslavsky to continue baby-sitting. "I called
today to see how they are," says the retailer. "The
fish are eating."
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