On Aug. 24, federal agents descended on three factories and the Nashville corporate headquarters of the Gibson Guitar Corp. Accompanied by armored SWAT teams with automatic weapons, agents from the Fish and Wildlife Service swarmed the factories, threatening bewildered luthiers, or guitar craftsman, and other frightened employees. A smaller horde invaded the office of CEO Henry Juszkiewicz, pawing through it all day while an armed man stood in the door to block his way.

“I was pretty upset,” Mr. Juszkiewicz says now, sitting outside that same office. “But you can only do so much when there’s a gun in your face and it’s the federal government.” When the chaos subsided, the feds (with a warrant issued under a conservation law called the Lacey Act) had stripped Gibson of almost all of its imported Indian rosewood and some other materials crucial to guitar making… . “If you study other Lacey [Act] cases, you know there is not a lot of good history of Lacey prosecutions. And you know people went to jail.” Perhaps he thinks of the 2000 felony case in which four people were sentenced to up to eight years in federal prison for importing lobster tails without the cardboard container specified in a Honduran law—a law that Honduran officials testified was defunct. “They played the game and they got nailed. There was no compassion. There was total aggressive kill.”

The Weekend Interview with Henry Juszkiewicz: The Government and the Guitar Man - WSJ.com

Source: The Wall Street Journal

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