Boise Cascade has pleaded guilty to a Lacey Act violation and been sentenced to a $6.38 million fine for purchasing Chinese plywood from a Florida supplier that smuggled the wood through Malaysia to evade US import duties, making the NYSE-traded distributor the third to be convicted in the multi-year federal probe.
That is according to Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson of the US Department of Justice’s Environment and Natural Resources Division (ENRD), who said in announcing the plea on Monday that the scheme defrauded American taxpayers through the import and resale of between $25 million and $65 million worth of plywood products before federal investigators executed a search warrant on the supplier’s South Florida warehouse in January 2021.
“Boise Cascade either knew about or was willfully blind to the illegal importation of the plywood they were purchasing from Horizon Plywood,” Gustafson said, with the company’s $6,382,000 fine set at twice the gross profits it derived from the illegal wood and accompanied by a court-ordered compliance plan.
The case ties back to Horizon Plywood’s principals, Noel and Kelsy Quintana, the Miami husband and wife sentenced in February 2024 to 57-month prison terms after pleading guilty to conspiracy and Lacey Act violations, as Wood Central reported at the time, with their scheme estimated to have evaded more than $42 million in countervailing and antidumping duties. Horizon employee Marta Angelbello was also sentenced after pleading guilty to making a false statement on a Lacey Act import declaration.
According to court filings, Boise Cascade’s distribution centre in Pompano, Florida, purchased more than $30 million of hardwood plywood from Horizon between 2018 and 2021, with the company buying and reselling plywood from approximately 2019 onwards, knowing or wilfully blind to the fact that the wood had been illegally imported from China.
Horizon’s transhipment route ran the plywood from China to Malaysia, where the wood was unloaded and moved into a second set of containers before being shipped on to the United States, a container-switching practice that has now been documented across multiple Lacey Act prosecutions and that Wood Central has previously linked to the planned expansion of Malaysia’s Port Klang into one of Southeast Asia’s largest transhipment hubs.
Boise Cascade was aware that US authorities executed a search warrant at Horizon’s South Florida warehouse in January 2021 and that Horizon was under federal investigation, yet placed at least 10 new orders for birch plywood from the supplier in the two weeks immediately following the raid, according to the DOJ’s statement of facts.
“Trade fraud is not a paperwork violation. It is theft from the American taxpayer and an attack on lawful American commerce,” US Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones for the Southern District of Florida said, adding that companies turning a blind eye to fraud in pursuit of profit will be held accountable.
The Boise Cascade plea comes as Chinese hardwood plywood faces compounding US trade pressure on multiple fronts, with the US International Trade Commission siding with domestic producers in its preliminary determination that imports from China, Indonesia and Vietnam are materially injuring the US hardwood plywood industry, and with combined antidumping and countervailing duties on Chinese product running as high as 474 per cent, as Wood Central reported earlier this year.
Boise Cascade’s $6,382,000 fine, set at exactly twice the gross profits the company derived from the illegal Chinese plywood, marks the third conviction from a probe that has now identified more than $42 million in evaded duties on the Quintana scheme alone, drawing one of North America’s largest engineered wood and building materials distributors into a case that ran from 2019 through to Horizon’s federal raid in early 2021.
