Things started to go bad for Antonio Suárez in the spring of 1979. In California Charles Clark, a Marine Fisheries Service agent, came across a shipment of freezer packages labeled "chunked Tabasco River Turtle." Clark examined the meat. It was not light-colored, like freshwater turtle. It was dark, beef-red, fibrous: more like sea turtle. Clark notified Charles Fuss, the special agent in charge of law enforce­ment for the National Marine Fisheries Service in St. Petersburg, Florida. Fuss had been getting similar reports about sea-turtle meat for sale in Florida. But as a result of the federal action taken the previous July, all six species of sea turtle found in the Western Hemisphere had been declared endangered or threatened. Fuss geared up an investigation.

There were 12 agents on Fuss's inves­tigative team, and it was a rare case of near total cooperation between govern­ment agencies: There were people from the Fish and Wildlife Service, from the U.S. Customs Service, from the National Marine Fisheries Service, and from the Wildlife and Marine Resources section of the Justice Department.

The interagency team talked with turtle experts. It was perfectly legal to import Tabasco River turtle (that has since changed), but according to José Toro, a special attorney for the Justice De­partment, the investigators were look­ing at nearly 190,000 pounds of it. And there were not enough Tabasco River turtles in all of Mexico to account for that much meat.

One element of the investigative team, working with customs declarations, followed a paper trail to a seafood exporter in Mexico. The man had no knowledge of the shipments pouring into Miami International Airport. Investiga­tors determined that export papers had been stolen from the company's office, that signatures had been forged in what appeared to be a criminal conspiracy of some proportion.

Meanwhile, Sylvia Braddon, a re­search chemist with the National Marine Fisheries Service, was working to identify the meat in those packages of "Tabasco River Turtle." The technique she used is called isoelectric focusing. It involves passing a strong charge of electricity through a small sample of meat for several hours. Eventually the protein "focuses," forming a microscopic pattern of blue lines, distinct for each species.