Operation Atacama: The $1m cactus heist that led to a smuggler's downfall

After thousands of rare Chilean cacti were found in the house of an Italian collector, a years-long trial slowly unravelled how they got there – and is setting a precedent for dealing with crimes of this kind.

At first sight, orange and off-white shards of rocks surrounded by dust and dirt are all you can see for thousands of desolate kilometres in the Atacama Desert of Chile. This is one of the driest places on Earth. Looking around, it feels impossible that any speck of life could survive.

But reaching out of nooks in the cracked crust along the desert's coast, there lie thousands of Copiapoa cacti. A cactus group made up of more than 30 species, Copiapoa are found only in Chile. They grow a mere centimetre each year in scorching, breathtaking desert conditions by absorbing the local evening fog, known as camanchaca.

These rare, aubergine-shaped succulents exemplify life's ability to adapt to extremes – one of the traits that has made them highly sought after by plant collectors.

They've also just been at the heart of a landmark trial over an international cactus heist that might revolutionise how biodiversity crimes are dealt with the world over.

Ranging from dark grey to blueish-green, and from the size of a coin to that of a small car, Copiapoa have thick dark spines along their geometrical ridges. Their fluffy friars head flowers white, yellow and sometimes orange once a year.

While they might look unassuming at first, their beauty, resilience and rarity have certainly not been lost on Andrea Piombetti.

A well-known personality in the Italian plant world, Piombetti has been cactus collector and trader for decades and is said to take great pride in his unique knowledge of the realm. His Facebook profile picture is a rugged backpack sitting on top of a cluster of cacti in the field. His WhatsApp status reads: "The King of the Cactus Pirates". He's been spotted clad in a jacket with "The King of Chile" printed on its back.

When called on his mobile number for this story, though, he refused to comment and hung up without saying a word. His lawyers were also contacted, but refused to comment.

In 2013, customs at Milano Malpensa Airport intercepted an unusual shipment of 143 cactus plants with visibly suspicious forged phytosanitary documents directed straight to his house in Senigallia, Ancona. Upon further inspection, police found even more boxes of cacti at his home and the home of a friend in a town nearby.

The team's botany expert was able to rapidly identify the cacti were Copiapoa, many of older than Piombetti himself. Soil forensics soon found they had been illicitly extirpated from their natural habitat in Chile and had no business in this man's home. Police issued an internal police warning across Europe about the discovery and the Italian government initiated prosecution. The case's statute of limitations, however, expired before the case verdict.

The case was dropped, and Lt Col Simone Cecchini, chief of the trade of endangered species unit of the local police force, believed any illicit trading had ceased. But when Cecchini returned to Piombetti's home again in February 2020, after receiving a complaint the collector had allegedly snuck out a rare sapling from a local nursery owned by botanist Andrea Cattabriga, Piombetti was resistant to letting the police into his home. He barricaded himself for about 10 minutes, says Cecchini.

Police did not find the rare sapling there, but once they gained entry what they found started a "much more interesting" case, says Cecchini. More than 1,000 Copiapoa cacti sat on Piombetti's veranda and in another locked room that he initially told police he'd lost the key for, together with other rare cacti. "It was by chance," says Cecchini of the discovery.

Piombetti also said he'd lost his passport, but police soon found it had been slid on top of his wardrobe. "He'd maybe thrown it there in a rush," says Cecchini. The document confirmed he'd visited Chile five times between 2016 and 2019.

Records found on his laptop and mobile helped police identify a close local accomplice, Mattia Crescentini, as well as a network of 10 other illegal plant traders and 10 regular buyers. The plants were usually sold online through specialised auction websites and bought by people with private ornamental collections all over the world. Crescentini posted his cactus on an Instagram account called Cactus_Italy. A Japanese buyer who works in the fashion industry, for instance, had been sending Piombetti sums of €2,500 (£2,100/$2,600) each month. Piombetti was also buying plants himself for hundreds of dollars.

The stolen plants discovered on that day were valued by the police at higher than €1m (£800,000/$1.1m).

Pictures of the crime scene were sent for plant identification – including to Cattabriga, who is local cactus expert. "These were incredible plants, they were ancient plants, hundreds of years old," says Cattabriga. Piombetti is known for having a keen, selective eye for high-quality specimens and precise collective methods, Cattabriga says. "They were perfect."

Forensic botanists from the botanical garden of Milan ran soil analyses to confirm that about 1,000 Copiapoa plants had been illicitly extracted straight from the Atacama Desert, and several hundred smaller, juvenile plants had been grown and propagated from seeds collected during those extirpation stints. While seed collecting in the wild is not illegal in Chile, removing and exporting plants without proper documentation is. In Italy, importing plants into the country without documentation is illegal, while Copiapoa are also protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (Cites).

The cacti had been shipped from Chile to Greece and Romania, then to Italy. Another seizure in November 2020 found more illegally traded cacti from the United States, Mexico and Argentina.

The case was dubbed Operation Atacama and has become known as one of the largest illegal cactus operations to date in Europe. As a result, the Italian government initiated a new prosecution against Piombetti and his accomplice in 2020 for breaking the Cites convention. The ensuing five-year trial, which ended in January 2025, resulted in many firsts in the history of biodiversity crimes.

For one, after being seized by the police, about 840 of the stolen Copiapoa were sent back to Chile. "This is biodiversity patrimony, and it should go back to Chile. It wasn't even a question for me what should have been done with the plants," says Barbara Goettsch, co-chair of the IUCN SSC Cactus and Succulent Plants Specialist Group.

She helped design a protocol for the plants to be safely repatriated, quarantined and safeguarded. "I don't know of any other case where plants have been sent back to their country," says Goettsch. "I think it was definitely a success."

The cacti are now in an Atacama Desert greenhouse managed by the National Forest Corporation of Chile (Conaf), although some local reports suggest some of the plants may have gone missing. Conaf did not respond to a request for comment about their status, and said it could not grant the BBC access to the greenhouse until April 2025.

Despite their extreme resilience – having survived trips to the other side of the world and back – the confiscated plants will never truly return home. They cannot be reintroduced into the wild as there are no records of which areas they came from in the first place. They will likely be used for genetic and botanical research and propagation experiments. In the meantime, Goettsch's team has developed the nation's first Copiapoa conservation action plan to strategise future safeguarding efforts in the wild, set for official publication in March 2025.

After hours of walking in the Atacama Desert, it becomes almost difficult to breathe. Yet Mauricio Gonzalez and Rodrigo Castillo, two middle-aged men each with a slight limp in their walk, are climbing the huge desert hills questing for their beloved Copiapoa.

"This one is maybe 100 years old," Gonzalez says, pointing at a girthy cactus leaning crooked to the left, sprouting out of a crack in the chapped land.

Gonzalez and Castillo are part of the Caminantes del Desierto (desert walkers) a group of volunteer educators who spread awareness of desert flora and fauna in the Chilean region of Antofagasta.

Copiapoa is one of their favourite cacti to encounter. "They've evolved over years and years and years to adapt to this territory," says Gonzalez, the president of the group.

Piombetti is far from the only cactus connoisseur with an interest in these rare succulents. The Caminantes say many less-experienced locals get contracted online by international collectors and get sent to rob the Copiapoa in bulk. They can end up eradicating any and all plants they find along the way, often leaving some uprooted ones on the path behind them. At least three or four times a year, the Caminantes find some of their favourite trails have been wiped out completely. Whenever they post a picture from one of their walks, they field hundreds of ill-intentioned messages on social media.

"There are trends, this year Copiapoa atacamensis is the most fashionable," says Gonzalez, whose usual trail includes sightings of the species atacamensis, cineria and the rarer solaris. "We see it very clearly, once somebody has it, everybody else wants to have it too.

Sometimes the volunteers hide their favourite plants under rock slates to conceal them from potential poachers. Since the cacti tend to have highly localised endemisms with small populations found only in specific sites, poachers can wipe out a whole species with a couple of flicks of a chisel, they say.

An increase in road construction and irregular housing has allowed more and more people to access the harsh and secluded desert habitat where Copiapoa live. "You open the window for poaching," says Pablo Guerrero, a cactus researcher at the Universidad de Concepción in Chile. Social media has also made it easier for collectors to find each other, while regulation and enforcement are much slower to catch up.

"Most countries in the world are very naive in the face of this kind of poaching," says Guerrero. "They say, 'They're plants, who cares, they're cacti, they all look the same'."

Poaching is not the only threat facing Copiapoa. Most of the cacti we encounter on this daytime expedition are dying. They are shrivelling up, collapsing onto themselves and turning black like ash due to the desert's rising temperatures, fluctuations in rainfall patterns and rapid changes in moisture patterns along the coast. The camanchaca fog is changing trajectory, and Copiapoa is now becoming a legacy of millennia when the environment was different from today's. Changes in land use and the expansion of the local mining industry also pose a threat to the plants.

The Caminantes organise yearly cactus watering tours, but it's little in the face of the desert's extended droughts. "Yeah this one is dying," says Castillo, nudging a dark, deflated sack of spines. "This one too."

Research by the scientists Guerrero and Goettsch found that 76% of all Copiapoa species are endangered due to climate change and illegal trafficking.

"They are in very rapid decline," says Guerrero "Some will go extinct in the wild soon, it is very dramatic."

The raid and ensuing court case didn't stop Piombetti. In September 2024, while still pending judgement in Italy, he flew to Chile one more time. He was arrested at the airport upon landing in Santiago, as he was now also wanted for illegal wildlife trafficking in Chile. Cecchini says a Chilean prosecutor reached out to him personally on WhatsApp after hearing about the repatriation of the smuggled cacti in February 2024, and as a result he initiated a case against Piombetti. The collector underwent a fast-tracked trial in an Atacama court and Chilean authorities fined him 5,000,000 pesos (£4,200/$5,300) and banned him from entering the country for 10 years. Such ban from the country is likely the most effective deterrent from future smuggling, Cecchini says.

On 31 January 2025, the Italian court issued a first-instance decision, seen by the BBC, against Crescentini and Piombetti. It sentenced Piombetti to 18 months' imprisonment and a fine of €25,000 (£21,000/$26,000) and Crescentini to 12 months' imprisonment and a fine of €18,000 (£15,000/$19,000). The verdict was published on 14 February and the defendants now have 30 days to appeal.

For biodiversity experts, though, the court case also produced another ground-breaking outcome.

The court recognised that Piombetti's crime wasn't just against the law; it was against nature. The cactus conservation organisation Associazione per la Biodiversità e la sua Conservazione (ABC), founded by Cattabriga, was included in the case as an affected civil party. Piombetti and his accomplice now have to pay an additional €20,000 (£17,000/$21,000) in civil remedies to ABC as reparations for the damage done to their conservation work. The funds will be directly invested into cacti research, awareness and conservation, according to Cattabriga.

"We're giving to plants a right, a right to not be destroyed, because they are beings," says Cattabriga.

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Too often nature itself doesn't get any justice in crimes against biodiversity, says Jacob Phelps, a lecturer in tropical environmental change and policy at the University of Manchester and co-founder of the biodiversity law organisation Conservation-Litigation.org, which consulted on the case. The case outcome sets a precedent to create a system of retribution for the harm caused to the environment, he says.

Some similar verdicts have been reached in the past. For instance, in 2019 a French national park received compensation for ecological harm caused by fish poachers, and in 2021 an Indonesian environmental non-profit sued a local zoo for keeping protected species at its zoo without legal permission. "But they are rare," says Phelps.

There is an under-explored option to have biodiversity organisations "act like the Lorax and speak for the trees", says Phelps, who wrote a paper describing these legal frameworks in the journal Conservation Letters. "These types of legal provisions exist in loads of countries, but they've never been used, or if they've been used, they've been used erratically… This case is really important because it shows us that we can do this."

In an effort to replicate such success, Phelp's team already has similar cases under development at various stages in Uganda, the Philippines and Indonesia. "It's slow to convince the government to have the courage to use this," says Phelps. "But we think of this as a new wave of green litigation."

But Gonzalez and Castillo, as they patrol the desert as volunteer custodians of the Copiapoa, are hesitant about its future. "I don't believe in fairytales," says Gonzalez, lighting himself another cigarette halfway through the trek. "I tell it how it is."

While the volunteers hope the trial's outcome can help raise awareness of the dangers of wildlife poaching, they know the verdict is far from a silver bullet. During our afternoon trip in the desert, we only meet four other cars. Anybody could hop out of their vehicle and slice up millions of years of species evolution, adaptation and resilience. They'd go unnoticed.

And droughts will continue to shrink up the plants from their insides no matter how many times the Caminantes walk out into the open desert with their watering cans.

Still, there is excitement in their eyes as the sun starts to set and they reach their final destination of the day. In a dip between two hills of the coast, where the camanchaca fog is so thick above us it feels like the sky has dropped closer to the Earth, there are Copiapoa everywhere.

This whole Western slice of land is freckled with the rare succulents. Some have up to 20 thick, water-filled branches and others flaunt small baby ones just a couple of years old. Several have flowered in the past couple of days and others are on the brink of their next bloom.

"We've found one," says Castillo, pointing to a Copiapoa being pollinated by a small red ant, right as we peek inside its blossom.

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