Canadian man who smuggled turtles in his pants gets 5 years in prison

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — A Canadian man who repeatedly entered Michigan to buy and ship thousands of turtles to his native China was sentenced to nearly five years in federal prison Tuesday for smuggling.

It was a tough punishment for Kai Xu, who has been locked up for 19 months since his arrest and had hoped to be released. The 27-year-old expressed remorse to a judge and thanked agents “for stopping the darkness of my greed and ignorance.”

Ahead of the hearing, Xu wrote a letter to U.S. District Judge John Corbett O’Meara, saying he sold turtles partly to make money for college. He said he was a semester short of an engineering degree from the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario. Read more…