Southern Tree Rustlers Coming Out of Woodwork

LUFKIN, Texas Skulking into the piney forest in the dead ofnight, they pick off their prey and cart it to market. These arethieves, reminiscent of the cattle rustlers once well-known in Texas.

But now the prey are trees.

Timber has become a valuable commodity in Southern states,including Texas. Where once only cotton was king, 58 percent of allthe timber produced each year in the U.S. now comes from the South,according to the U.S. Forest Service.

Southerners who own lands graced by forests and smelling of pineneedles are facing losses of $75 million each year from stolenhardwoods and Tall Southern yellow pine, said Bruce Miles, directorof the Texas Forest Service.

The practice has become so rampant that the joke in this part ofeastern Texas is that it's gotten hard to see the forest for thethieves.

Rip-off artists trespass or ignore neighboring property lines tocut down trees because the price of logs has about doubled during thepast two years and the number of absentee landowners has increased,said Alan Matecko, spokesman for the National Forests and Grasslandsin Texas.

"Where sawlogs were bringing $30 a ton, they're now bringing $60a ton," said state Rep. Billy Clemons, who lost about $5,000 whenunscrupulous loggers harvested more than 50 pines, some hardwoods anda few small pulp wood trees from his land.

Many landowners are easy targets for the crooks because, unlikelivestock, trees aren't easily identifiable.

Unethical loggers have been known to clear-cut withoutpermission, and falsify sales bills and scale readings. And justinvade someone else's land.

Shelby County timber farmer W.I. Davis, who has been in thebusiness for 50 years, said he lost about $3,000 worth of his besttrees last year when a logger claimed he didn't know the boundary.

Miles tells a story of a case in Cass County, where a thiefstole the trees from a 160-acre tract but left a stand of pines alongthe perimeter. That way the owner wouldn't know when she drove pasther land.

No one is safe. In November, a Louisiana timber buyer confessedto stealing timber from the Sisters of Providence in Indiana. Thenuns lost around $100,000 when about three-fourths of their 104 acreswas cut and sold, according to Harrison County Sheriff's Deputy MikeAlexander.

A hanging used to be the justice served up for rustlers inTexas. Today, landowners have trouble even getting a conviction fortree thievery.

"If you have good documentation of what happened it's not hard,but a lot of times people just go in in the dead of night and cutdown timber without a trace," said Assistant District Attorney ArtBauereiss, who successfully prosecuted Clemons' case.

So, posses have been forming. Law enforcement, landowners andforestry officials have combined efforts to go after the treerustlers. That's resulted in numerous lawsuits and convictionsacross the country.

Even the federal government has been hit: Three U.S. ForestService workers were found guilty of stealing timber from the SabineNational Forest.