A luxury handbag designer was sentenced to 18 months in prison Monday after pleading guilty to illegally importing merchandise that had been made using the pelts of protected wildlife.
Nancy Gonzalez, the 71-year-old founder of Gzuniga, was arrested in Cali, Colombia, in 2022 and later extradited to the U.S. Gonzalez and others had been charged with one count of conspiracy and two counts of smuggling for “illegally importing designer handbags made from caiman and python skin from February 2016 to April 2019,” the Justice Department said in a press release.
The DOJ previously said the average retail price for the bags was more than $2,000, alleging that Gonzalez and others would ask friends, relatives, and employees of her manufacturing business in her native Colombia to smuggle the bags into the U.S. by carrying them “on their person or in their luggage while traveling on passenger airlines.”
Once in the U.S., the products would then be sent to the Gzuniga showroom in New York City and sold to high-end retailers for resale in their own stores, according to the Justice Department.
Gonzalez’s handbags have been bought by the likes of Salma Hayek, Britney Spears, and Victoria Beckham, according to the Associated Press, though it’s unclear if they purchased any of the illegal products.
The news agency said the caiman and python hides all came from animals that were bred in captivity, but Gonzalez failed to obtain the necessary import authorizations for some of them from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Such permits are required by an international treaty moderating the trade for certain threatened or endangered wildlife species.
The designer’s lawyers argued prior to sentencing that Gonzalez had already paid for her crimes, with the Colombian business she’d built declaring bankruptcy and winding up its operations following her arrest. The company had once been the employer of 300 mostly female staff, they said.
The attorneys further argued that just 1 percent of the products she’d brought into the U.S. failed to have the correct authorization and were samples for events including New York Fashion Week.
“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,” Gonzalez told the court, according to the AP. “Under pressure, I made poor decisions.” She added that she regretted failing to adhere to U.S. laws and said she only wished to hug her 103-year-old mother one more time.
Prosecutors, who had been seeking a harsher sentence of between 30 and 37 months, argued that Gonzalez had led a lavish lifestyle in contrast to the people she recruited into the illegal smuggling scheme. They estimated the illicit merchandise sold for as much as $2 million in the U.S. Gonzalez’s lawyers disputed the figure and claimed each skin had only cost roughly $140.
Gonzalez, who has been free on a bond under confinement at her daughter’s house in Miami, will now have to surrender June 6 for the start of her sentence.
