Gibson plant raided

[Ray Minich]

Probably a federal enforcement agency that needed something to do to justify their existence.

I read an article recently that posited that the reason hemp is outlawed is because it would make better paper that treewood. Article stated William Randolph Hearst had a hand in crafting the law to keep paper raw materials sourced from his many forest holdings...


Dontja just love politics...

[Les Anderson]

Alvin, my typo screw up. The piece of rosewood plank that I have is 2" X 6" X "6 feet long". When I bought it my original intention was to make a coffee table to match our Rosewood dinning room set. I just never got around to it but I kept the piece of wood and it is still in very good condition.

[Brint Hannay]

Les, I have no idea if the authorities would give you a hard time about that board ( is "board" less demeaning than "plank"?). I don't think they should. If someone had a substantial shipment of rosewood, perhaps it would be worth the authorities investigating its provenance.

You appear to have knowledge--which I stated up front I didn't have--about the state of local behavior vis-a-vis rosewood in Brazil, at least. If you're correct ( I have no reason to doubt it), that sounds like good news.

Some discussion has suggested that the current regime in Madagascar is being irresponsible about hardwood harvesting. I haven't vetted that information, either.

[Brint Hannay]

Les, After re-reading your previous post, I have edited mine.

I would assume that Brazil's restriction of trade in rosewood, together with replanting, contributed to the recovering situation there. But if other producing nations, e.g. Madagascar, don't pursue similar measures, acting from the consumer side of the transaction would seem to be the next option. (I don't mean the end consumer, such as a guitar buyer, but the wholesale buyer of raw wood.)

[Pete Honychurch]

Last year we bought a different house to move into and started renovating it. We re-did the floors and were looking at many different beautiful woods from around the world. And then we started thinking about the impact our purchase was going to make, and finally opted for a highly figured Birch which grows all over Canada and grows quickly too. I couldn't handle the guilt of having a beautiful exotic floor that was the product of decimating a rainforest somewhere else in the world.

There is a lot more wood going into peoples floors than guitars....

[Larry Miller]

Issue has been resolved
http://science.time.com/2012/08/07/gibs ... violation/

[Larry Miller]

I wonder what will become of the $262,000 worth of exotic wood? Will it be auctioned off? Will it be sold? Will it be burned?...???

[Richard Sinkler]

I wonder what will become of the $262,000 worth of exotic wood? Will it be auctioned off? Will it be sold? Will it be burned?...???

New cabinets and desks for the FBI HQ?

[Bill Hatcher]

probably be put in a warehouse and kept as some kind of trophy to the diligent work of misguided feds...

sad when it costs you more to fight a case with your own gov than to just give up and plead guilty even when there is a legit question as to whether you are or not. your tax dollars at work.

[Joachim Kettner]

If the laws including their enforcements aren't unified world wide it doesn't help to stop deforestation. If a factory like Gibson in the US is not allowed to buy the ilegally cut wood, than another one in another country will.

[David Mason]

There's a process of "laundering" illegally-farmed lumber that's quite similar to money laundering. Just buy it/sell it/buy it/sell it/buy it again, just keep the money moving so fast that ownership of it gets difficult to determine. At one point in the second seizure I read that Luthier's Mercantile International was listed as having brokered or transported or held it or something? Anyway, they didn't get caught doing something willfully illegal.

I have some lawyer friends for whom these kinds of things are like a ball game or circus. And there's a paper trail of all the warnings Gibson had ignored - the usual course of it is to warn a company, and PRS, Taylor and others had obeyed the law after a warning. However, after the first raid but before the second, CEO Henry Juszkiewicz was already lambasting and carrying on, even mocking the law enforcement agents - remember Gary Hart? Catch me if you can...



There's a method to Juszkiewicz's madness - it's called "nudging the bell curve." But Henry reminds me of nothing more than the kids who get arrested for some reefer and all of a sudden they're the loudest & most annoying "legalize it" crusader you'll ever hear. And PRS is specifically calling their best woods as being from Paul Smith's "personal stock."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anCGvfsBoFY

[Alvin Blaine]

I wonder what will become of the $262,000 worth of exotic wood? Will it be auctioned off? Will it be sold? Will it be burned?...???

Here is the DOJ settlement
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2012/Augu ... d-976.html

The Madagascar Ebony is going to remain the property of the DOJ, and the Indian Ebony & Rosewood will go back to Gibson.

It's a very wild settlement in that neither side actually takes responsibility for anything. Gibson had to promise they won't break any laws, in the future, and "acknowledged that it failed to act on information that the Madagascar ebony it was purchasing may have violated laws intended to limit overharvesting and conserve valuable wood species from Madagascar"
I highlighted the "MAY" on the quote for the DOJ

Basically the DOJ isn't going to prosecute for any crimes, and they are giving back sized property from the second raid. Gibson pays a "community service" fine to the Fish & Game & Wildlife fund.

This settlement is crazier than the rest of the case, and doesn't look like it resolves anything. It just says Gibson purchased wood that "MAY" have violated laws.

[Nick Powers]

i Never did it.
and i'll Never do it again.

[Richard Sinkler]

And Nick, don't ever do it again.

[Kirk Eipper]

Wow, what a righteous waste of time and resources.

[Niels Andrews]

When carbon fiber is outlawed, only outlaws will have carbon fiber.

[Matthew Walton]

I have been watching this story since it first came up, and as a woodworker as well, I feel like there should be some clarification.
To start things off, it should be noted that the wood was for the fretboards (This will matter later).
The legality (or lack thereof), stems from the fact that the wood was required to be "finished" so to speak; that is to say that it couldn't be wood fresh from the tree, it had to be turned into fretboards there. This is where the complication arose: in one country, they definition of a "finished" board was that it had to be the thickness and (maybe) shape of a fretboard. In the other country, it had to not only have the correct thickness and shape, but also have the slots for the frets cut into it. IIRC, the US required the latter option. So when it comes down to it, it really just turns out to be a problem in the paperwork.
I'm sure that there is more to the story than we know, but I felt that this clarification was needed.

On a barely related note: the Gibson guitar factory tour in Memphis is kind of a letdown.

[Alan Brookes]

Gibson's use of wood pales by comparison to the number of trees cut down to create chopsticks and toothpicks, which are thrown away after use.

And then there's paper...

[Jerry Gleason]

This talk by Bob Taylor of Taylor guitars on the future of Ebony is interesting. It seems he now controls 75% of the remaining Ebony that can be legally cut in Cameroon, which is the last remaining place where it can be harvested.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anCGvfsB ... r_embedded

[Gene Jones]

Exotic wood endangered?

I thought that's why plastic was invented!

[Carl Mesrobian]

I wonder what will become of the $262,000 worth of exotic wood? Will it be auctioned off? Will it be sold? Will it be burned?...???

Here is the DOJ settlement
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2012/Augu ... d-976.html

The Madagascar Ebony is going to remain the property of the DOJ, and the Indian Ebony & Rosewood will go back to Gibson.

It's a very wild settlement in that neither side actually takes responsibility for anything. Gibson had to promise they won't break any laws, in the future, and "acknowledged that it failed to act on information that the Madagascar ebony it was purchasing may have violated laws intended to limit overharvesting and conserve valuable wood species from Madagascar"
I highlighted the "MAY" on the quote for the DOJ

Basically the DOJ isn't going to prosecute for any crimes, and they are giving back sized property from the second raid. Gibson pays a "community service" fine to the Fish & Game & Wildlife fund.

This settlement is crazier than the rest of the case, and doesn't look like it resolves anything. It just says Gibson purchased wood that "MAY" have violated laws.

Depending on the dimensions of the stock, perhaps DOJ can set up a clarinet or piano factory thus wasting more tax dollars - storing it is too cheap (do you sense sarcasm from me? never!) and I can see Henry saying he'll be a good boy - Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. In lieu of the fine to Fish and Game his community service can be to clean up dog parks, and give free Les Paul Historic Reissues and lessons to inner city kids

And if I take my '49 ES-125 into Canada, I'll get busted 'cause of the fingerboard and bridge?? C'Mon, Man! Wonder what lurks in my MIM Telecaster - maybe some obscure woodboring beetles?

[Alan Brookes]

Storing the wood isn't going to make it grow back into trees, all it does is make a scarce resource even scarcer.

[chris ivey]

when was toilet paper invented?

[Alan Brookes]

When was toilet paper invented?

In China in the 1700s, but it wasn't generally available in the west until the middle of the 19th century.
When I was a kid, shortly after WW2, toilet paper was in short supply all over Europe and considered something of a luxury. We used torn-up newspapers for years. But it encouraged long stays, because I used to read the papers left there. An alternative was a railway timetable, which was very thick and would last for months. They reckon 80% of Sears-Robuck catalogs ended up in the outhouse. Before that people used old books which they tore pages out of.
Going back to Roman times, they used a stick with a sponge on the end, which they kept immersed in salt water until needed.

[Carl Mesrobian]

Geez, as a builder, I'll probably have to fill out chain of custody forms when I build a guitar and state whether the elephants that hauled the logs were Indian or African elephants