Handbag designer Nancy Gonzalez sentenced to 18 months in prison for smuggling exotic skins

Nancy Gonzalez, whose clients included Britney Spears and Sofia Vergara, smuggled handbags from her native Colombia to the United States using couriers. She will serve an 18-month sentence.

Handbag designer Nancy Gonzalez has built a cult following among South American celebrities and super-rich through its use of brilliantly dyed precious skins. Once one of the world's largest purveyors of crocodile skin accessories, his eponymous brand sold lime green alligator and lavender python totes and clutches for thousands of dollars, often through major retailers. retailers like Saks and Bergdorf Goodman.

Now Ms. Gonzalez, 71, faces considerable punishment in a bright orange jumpsuit.

On Monday, she was sentenced to 18 years. months in prison after pleading guilty in Miami federal court to smuggling hundreds of handbags made from protected wildlife skins into the United States from her native Colombia.

Mrs. Gonzalez, whose full name is Nancy Tereza Gonzalez de Barberi and whose business was incorporated into a luxury handbag company called Gzuniga Limited, was arrested in 2022 in Cali, Colombia, and later extradited to the United States. United last August. She admitted to recruiting up to 40 couriers to transport up to four products at a time on commercial flights for use at New York Fashion Week and industry events or to sell in the showroom from Gzuniga between February 2016 and April 2019.

Prosecutors said the handbags and purses, made from the skins of caiman alligators and raised pythons in captivity, were worth up to $2 million. The designer's lawyers said the pieces were mostly samples and cost about $140 each, and only about 1 percent did not have the proper authorization to be imported into the United States.

< p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Trade in caimans and pythons is not prohibited but is strictly regulated by the rules of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, of which the United States and Colombia are signatories. According to prosecutors, Ms. Gonzalez never obtained the necessary import permits from the US Fish and Wildlife Service required by regulators.

"It's all driven by "money," Thomas Watts-Fitzgerald of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Miami said Monday. "If you want to deter this behavior, you want the cocaine kingpin, not the person on the ground."

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