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WASHINGTON — A Michigan man was sentenced to 12 months of intermittent prison time Monday after being found guilty for illegally transporting and selling lake trout and making false records about whitefish purchases, according to the Justice Department's Environment and Natural Resources Division and the Western District of Michigan.

John H. Cross III and his company, John Cross Fisheries, were each ordered to pay just over $1.03 million in restitution after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor count of violating the Lacey Act by knowingly attempting to sell interstate commerce lake trout illegally taken from relevant waters. The defendants also pleaded guilty to one felony count of knowingly making false records and account of whitefish intended to be sold and transported.

Cross was also ordered to five years probation in addition to his prison sentence and restitution payments, which will be ordered to the National Fish Hatcheries.

“Purchasing illegally caught fish for interstate sale and then covering up the source of those fish by falsifying records is cheating, plain and simple — and where discovered, the Justice Department will seek to punish such conduct,” Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department's Environment and Natural Resources Division Jeffrey Bossert Clark said in a statement. “For three years, Cross Fisheries harmed law-abiding competitors and the American taxpayers who fund the stocking of Lake Michigan with trout, but that conduct has now come to an end.”

Cross' sentencing is one of the final cases stinting from an undercover operation ran for the past two years intended to crackdown on the illegal harvest and sale of fish taken from the Great Lakes. According to the DOJ, the operation resulted in 21 convictions, seven in tribal court while the other 14 in federal court. Over $1.6 millions has been ordered in total restitution to the National Fish Hatcheries to date.

One more example of why all commercial exploitation of Great Lakes fish should be ended. Since whenever DNRs first started caring a whit about commercial harvest "excesses" numerous sting operations around the lakes have been conducted and in every one of them the vast majority of the commercial operations were found to be over-bagging, under reporting, mis reporting and various other offenses.
Sure the offenders are levied fines - in many cases they presume those to just be business expenses. The one thing never done is lifting their license or confiscation of their gear. Once a license is pulled, it should be discontinued forever.
This is one of the reasons I'm so against letting commercial netters at the presumed over-population of lake trout in Lake Michigan. They are greedy crooks and there is every bit as much corruption, kickbacks and graft in the tribes as there is with the white guys. We are probably lucky the government didn't send the Vietnamese refugees to the Great Lakes. Did I mention Canadian commercial netters? When's the last time you heard of anyone heading to Toronto to fish or Port Alma on Lake Erie?