A man prosecutors call “one of New York’s finch-smuggling kingpins” got a year and a day behind bars for his last bird-trafficking bust.
Insaf Ali, 62, isn’t a simple bird courier, he’s the boss, federal prosecutors said, and he refused to change his ways, despite being nabbed at Kennedy Airport in 2018, and the 2021 arrest of one of his minions.
But the Bronx resident contended that his lifetime of bird smuggling isn’t about the money — it’s about his enduring love for finches, or towa towa, and the role they play in Guyanese culture.
“His need to have these specific birds to train, sing with, and to keep him company satisfied an emotional longing and need,” his lawyer, Christine Delince wrote, in a Jan. 26 letter to the court that quotes Emily Dickinson and Maya Angelou.
“This emotional connection to the towa towa began when Insaf Ali was a small boy and stayed with him as he navigated life in America,” she wrote.
Ali’s defense lawyer played a 23-minute video for Judge Margo Brodie at his sentencing in Brooklyn Federal Court Thursday, hoping to sway her to grant him leniency. In the video, Ali describes growing up in Guyana, while several New Yorkers talk about the importance of minding birds in Guyanese culture.
“When I was like nine years old, my grandfather gave me a bird,” he says in the video, “And from there on I started to like birds. And I used to walk it before I go to school in the morning. It’s like when you walk a dog.”
The video also shows footage of a so-called “bird race,” where two finches face off and the one to chirp 50 times wins the competition.
A winning bird can sell for $10,000 a piece to interested buyers, according to federal prosecutors, though more typically they’re sold in the U.S. for $1,000 to $2,000, authorities said.
Prosecutors said that his love of the songbirds, which he sells to make a living, means he’ll continue to break the law and keep running his smuggling operation.
“The defendant is not a courier; he is the boss. He is infamous in his community as one of New York’s finch-smuggling kingpins, and by his own admission he has been involved in this activity for decades,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Laura Zuckerwise wrote in a Jan. 31 filing.
He was busted in December 2018, when he was caught at JFK airport with live finches hidden in hair curlers and stuffed in his socks, prosecutors said.
Despite getting probation, he kept plotting to bring more birds to the U.S., and in April 2021, he had a tailor make a custom suit for one of his couriers, in a failed attempt to sneak 35 birds through customs, the feds said. Five of the birds didn’t survive the trip.
Although court documents don’t identify the courier, the photos included in prosecutors’ sentencing papers are the same ones released when Kevin Andre McKenzie, 36, was arrested in April 2021.
“That could have been a wake-up call for the defendant, but it was not,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Laura Zuckerwise wrote of the courier’s arrest in a Jan. 31 filing. “On the contrary, in January 2022, the defendant was arrested at JFK Airport with hair curlers in his luggage, ready to undertake yet another smuggling trip.”
Wildlife importers need a permit to bring animals into the U.S., and commercial birds need to be quarantined for 30 days to prevent the spread of disease.
“Birdsong competitions among the large Guyanese expatriate community in Queens, New York have helped create an ‘unsustainable demand’ for finches supplied illegally from Guyana. The birds have been trapped almost to the point of extinction,” Zuckerwise wrote, referring to a report by TRAFFIC, a wildlife conservation group.
