A fashion icon who designed accessories worn by celebrities as well as characters on the TV series “Sex and the City” faces 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to smuggling crocodile handbags into the United States from Colombia.
Nancy Gonzalez was sentenced Monday in Miami federal court. Gonzalez was arrested in Cali, Colombia in 2022, and then extradited to the United States for violating American wildlife laws.
Prosecutors said she recruited couriers to carry her expensive handbags on commercial flights, smuggling products worth an estimated $2 million into the United States.
The designer bags were made from the skins of captive-bred caimans and pythons, but Gonzalez sometimes failed to obtain the required import permits from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
U.S. Attorney Thomas Watts-Fitzgerald likened Gonzalez’s behavior to that of drug traffickers, saying she was motivated by money.
Gonzalez’s lawyers had asked for leniency, writing in a memo that the single parent was determined to become financially independent.
The judge who sentenced Gonzalez called her behavior particularly “egregious,” given that U.S. authorities had warned her in 2016 and 2017 about violating agency rules.
“From the bottom of my heart, I apologize to the United States of America. It was never my intention to offend a country to which I owe immense gratitude,” Gonzalez told the court, holding back tears. “Under pressure, I made bad decisions.”
Grub5
