A celebrity handbag designer who pleaded guilty to illegally importing bags made from the skins of protected crocodiles and snakes was sentenced to 18 months in prison, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of Florida said.
Prosecutors accused Nancy Teresa Gonzalez de Barberi, founder of the luxury handbag company Gzuniga Ltd., and several associates of a multiyear conspiracy to circumvent U.S. and Colombian law around the protection of endangered species by importing handbags into the United States without proper permits from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Her sentencing Monday is the latest chapter in a long-running legal saga involving the celebrity designer, whose handbags appeared in “Sex and the City,” and were worn by celebrities such as Britney Spears, Salma Hayek and Victoria Beckham.
According to prosecutors, the bags were transported from Gonzalez’s native Colombia to the United States by couriers on commercial flights, and then ferried to Gonzalez’s showroom in New York to be shown and sold to high-end clients, including around events such as New York Fashion Week.
Prosecutors said the scheme continued even after Gonzalez, 71, received warnings from U.S. authorities in 2016 and 2017.
Gonzalez was arrested in Colombia in July 2022, and served over a year in prison there while awaiting extradition to the United States. She pleaded guilty in November 2023 to one count of conspiracy and two counts of smuggling. She will serve a shorter sentence in prison in the United States because of the time she served in Colombia.
In an email to The Washington Post, Sam Rabin, an attorney for Gonzalez, accused prosecutors of unfairly targeting his client.
“While most major purse designers rush samples to fashion shows, sometimes without the proper paperwork, only she was chosen to be prosecuted by the department of justice,” Rabin wrote, arguing that “her case should had been handled administratively instead of by arrest and prosecution.”
Prosecutors said that between February 2016 and April 2019, Gonzalez and her associates recruited couriers — including friends, relatives and employees of Gonzalez’s company — to fly from Colombia to the United States with handbags made with caiman or python skin — and instructed the couriers to claim to U.S. authorities if questioned that the bags were intended as gifts for friends.
The Justice Department said the caiman and python species used to make the bags were protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, an international treaty signed by the United States and Colombia.
Gonzalez’s lawyers accepted that the designer shipped some merchandise without proper permits, but argued that only “a very small percentage” was imported illegally, and said those products were typically shipped under tight deadlines for events that were “essential to the survival of her business.”
Markenzy Lapointe, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, said in a news release announcing Gonzalez’s sentencing, “The press of business, production deadlines or other economic factors are not justification for anyone to knowingly flout the system and attempt to write their own exceptions to wildlife trafficking laws.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Watts-Fitzgerald argued that Gonzalez’s actions were “driven by the money,” adding that the designer “tried to rewrite the law for herself, to do it her way,” according to the Associated Press.
Before she was sentenced, a visibly emotional Gonzalez apologized to the court for her actions, the AP reported. “From the bottom of my heart, I apologize to the United States of America. I never intended to offend a country to which I owe immense gratitude,” she said. “Under pressure, I made poor decisions.”
In a memo written before her sentencing hearing, Gonzalez’s lawyers painted a picture of the designer’s unlikely rise to business success and tragic personal circumstances, and said she was a “universally well-respected, hardworking, and charitable” person who made mistakes.
According to the memo, Gonzalez lost her father when she was 9 years old and was raised by her mother. Gonzalez launched her business in the 1980s, after what her lawyers described as a “difficult and heartbreaking divorce from the father of her children.” She started by selling belts that she made at home with her sewing machine to friends and family. This venture was successful, and she opened a store in Cali, Colombia. In 1998, she sold her first collection in the United States, at the luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman.
As Gonzalez’s brand recognition grew, so did her company: According to her lawyers, at one time before the pandemic, she employed more than 300 people in Colombia.
In March 2017, Gonzalez lost her son to suicide. Her lawyers argued in their memo that her son’s death was relevant to Gonzalez’s “state of mind” during part of the period that U.S. authorities say she led the criminal import conspiracy.
In federal court on Monday, Judge Robert Scola sentenced Gonzalez to a year and a half in prison, followed by three years of supervised release. He put her company, Gzuniga, on a three-year probation and banned it from engaging in wildlife merchandise trade for three years. Gonzalez’s main associate, Mauricio Giraldo, was sentenced to about 22 months in prison, and a third associate has yet to be sentenced.
In handing down his sentence, Judge Scola said it was especially “egregious” that Gonzalez continued to illegally import her bags for years after receiving warnings from authorities, according to the AP. Her sentence was lower than what prosecutors initially sought. Rabin in his email said Gonzalez does not intend to appeal.
