By Ryan Dezember

Days after federal agents raided a South Florida wood importer's warehouse and seized stacks of Chinese-made birch plywood, an order for another load of the illegal panels arrived from a big building-products distributor.

The 2021 raid touched off a scramble from Miami to Qingdao, China, according to court records. The married couple who owned the importer, Horizon Plywood, fled the U.S. But word was slow to reach Boise Cascade's branch in Pompano Beach, Fla., where employees placed the latest of what federal prosecutors say were more than $30 million of orders for the blond panels used to make cabinets and kitchen islands.

The smuggling and ensuing investigation trapped Boise in a global web that spanned China, Florida, Panama and Montenegro.

And while Boise didn't make or import the plywood, prosecutors maintain the company must have known it had been smuggled into the U.S. given how cheap Horizon was selling it compared with competitors. They had to account for countervailing and antidumping duties on Chinese hardwood plywood of about 206% that were imposed in 2017 during President Trump's first administration.

Boise pleaded guilty Monday to a federal felony charge related to its role in the case and agreed to pay a fine of $6.4 million, or twice the profit it reaped selling the smuggled plywood into one of the nation's hottest construction markets.

Boise, which has roots in the Weyerhaeuser timber empire and once owned the OfficeMax retail chain, is one of the largest wood products manufacturers in North America and a wholesale distributor of a broader range of building materials. It was charged under the Lacey Act, a 126-year-old wildlife protection law that has been used this century to combat illegal wood imports.

The government's case against Boise, which was revealed in court filings earlier this month, stems from the Justice Department's prosecution of Horizon's owners, Noel and Kelsy Quintana. The Florida couple pleaded guilty in 2023 of evading tens of millions of dollars of customs duties in the course of smuggling hundreds of containers of Chinese plywood into South Florida's red-hot construction market.

"We bought the wood from them and that's how we fell under the government's gaze," said Eric Breslin, a lawyer representing Boise Cascade. "This is something that Boise, as a company, deeply regrets."

Only Boise's Pompano Beach branch sold the smuggled plywood, according to Breslin, who said the company has adopted new compliance measures.

The yearslong plywood smuggling saga shows the lengths to which some importers will go to skirt duties and tariffs -- and how lucrative doing so can be for even seemingly mundane products, like 4-foot-by-8-foot sheets of birch plywood. It also illustrates the risk to companies along the supply chain that must ensure that the products they distribute are compliant with frequently changing import taxes being levied as part of Trump's trade war.

"Boise Cascade either knew about or was willfully blind to the illegal importation of the plywood they were purchasing," said Adam Gustafson, principal deputy assistant attorney general of the Justice Department's Environment and Natural Resources Division. "This scheme defrauded taxpayers of import duties and undercut law-abiding competitors."

The Quintanas were each sentenced in February 2024 in Miami's federal court to serve 57 months in prison after pleading guilty to failing to make customs declarations and conspiring against the U.S. Noel Quintana pleaded guilty to a smuggling charge as well.

Both have been released after a judge gave them credit for a period of house arrest in Montenegro, the tiny Balkan country where federal investigators tracked them after the warehouse raid. Lawyers for the couple didn't respond to requests for comment.

The Quintanas were also ordered to repay more than $1.6 million that the government incurred storing plywood that the couple left dockside when they fled and to forfeit assets toward repaying the more than $42 million in duties that prosecutors say they dodged.

Before Trump's first-term trade war with China, the Quintanas imported nearly all of their plywood from there, according to court records.

Chinese white-birch plywood sandwiches sheets of white poplar wood between outer layers of birch veneer, which is peeled from logs that are typically harvested in Siberian forests.

The U.S. in late 2017 imposed countervailing duties on Chinese hardwood plywood to offset subsidies paid to producers there, as well as antidumping duties, meant to make up for the below-market prices the plywood was being sold for in the U.S.

The Quintanas' shipments were suddenly declared to be coming from other countries, or to be softwood plywood, to which the high tariffs didn't apply, according to court records. This was widespread behavior among importers of Chinese plywood when the tariffs were imposed.

Although they claimed in customs documents that the plywood was made in Russia, Vietnam, Chile and Malaysia, the Quintanas' shell companies -- incorporated in the names of friends and relatives -- were still importing hardwood plywood from Qingdao, according to court records.

After a shipment through Panama was stopped by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Quintanas started switching shipping containers in Malaysia to make wood look like it had come from there instead of China, they admitted in court documents.

In court records and the couples' sentencing hearing, prosecutors named Chinese brokers as well as a Malaysian shipper and wood trader as among the Quintanas' smuggling ring.

They documented frenzied communications between Noel Quintana and overseas contacts once investigators had raided their warehouse.

Among the evidence they gathered were purchase orders for birch plywood emailed from Boise's Pompano office, including some that arrived after investigators conducted their raid.

Write to Ryan Dezember at ryan.dezember@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 28, 2026 15:00 ET (19:00 GMT)

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