COLUMN ONE : Fancying Forbidden Flowers : Collectors’ obsessions are pushing orchid smugglers to plunder rain forests. Some dealers say erratic environmental laws also endanger rare species.

Like Van Gogh art or Ferrari sports cars, rare orchids are exotic, expensive and appreciated not only for their vibrant colors and compelling lines, but also for a certain mystique.

No other flower so powerfully conveys a hint of distant lands and forbidden beauty. Fanatical hobbyists--those who tend teeming back-yard greenhouses, who jet off to international orchid shows or trek through the jungles on guided orchid safaris--are willing to shell out big money for the best: upward of $1,000 for a single orchid, if sufficiently unusual and pleasing to the eye.

“When I would go down to Brazil . . . I’d look for the strange, mutated ones, the ones that nobody had,” said dealer Bill Bergstrom, who sells a variety of costly species out of four crowded greenhouses in Thousand Oaks. “It is an extremely important thing, if you’re an orchid person, to own some of the very, very finest. And if you can get a plant that nobody in the world has but you, you have done something that has put you way above everybody else.”

Therein lies much of the trouble. Rare orchids are vanishing rapidly from the wild--just how fast, no one is sure. Orchid hunters, who for a century have plundered the jungles and rain forests, are one target of blame. Dealers acknowledge the sins of the past while attributing much of today’s losses to harsh trade restrictions: Global laws aimed at preservation are dooming thousands of species, they say, by blocking their removal from rain forests that are being razed anyway.

Against the backdrop of that controversy, orchid smuggling is experiencing a boom. Illegal traffickers are combing the lush hinterlands of Brazil, Guatemala, Madagascar, Thailand and other tropical nations. Flouting the trade laws, smugglers are shipping orchids in untold volumes to buyers throughout the world, according to federal officials.

One pending case involves $150,000 worth of rare Asian “lady slipper” orchids bound for Los Angeles. Some of them, transported through customs wrapped in newspapers inside suitcases, were intercepted last summer by federal agents, who learned that 1,500 orchids had been imported illegally in a scheme dating back to 1992, said Assistant U.S. Atty. Nathan J. Hochman.

Arrested in a sting in Redondo Beach was a 28-year-old Indonesian named Harto Kolopaking, the scion of an internationally known orchid-trading family for whom one lady slipper species-- Paphiopedilum kolopakingii --is named. Kolopaking has pleaded guilty and is to be sentenced this month; the charges carry up to 10 years in prison, Hochman said.

“The problem of illegal importation of endangered plant and animal wildlife has been . . . steadily growing over the last decade,” he said. “What we’re hoping is that orchid smugglers will learn a lesson . . . that if they choose to engage in that illegal profession, they face the distinct possibility of going to jail.”

Although the case marks the first effort by the U.S. Justice Department to crack down on illegal orchid trafficking, it is by no means the first such scandal internationally. Smuggling the plants is a profitable and fairly common practice that has resulted in a number of high-profile arrests in recent years, industry experts said. Smugglers are known to transport orchids in suitcases, car trunks, or in packing crates accompanied by fraudulent paperwork.

Intercepting them is often difficult because they are shipped as bulbs impossible for anyone but an expert to identify, federal agents said. In some countries, graft is thought to ease the way across national boundaries. Belize and Taiwan, in particular, are reputed among dealers to be good places to fence the flowers because those nations are not parties to the worldwide treaty governing endangered species.

“There always seems to be a marketplace” for smuggled orchids, even though many thousands of legal flowers tend to be heartier and more beautiful than many pulled from natural habitats, said Carlo A. Balistrieri, an attorney for the American Orchid Society. “There are people who are kind of romanced by the idea that a thing’s been smuggled in . . . who want to get it no matter what.”

Discoveries tend to spur on the illegal traffickers, who do substantial environmental damage even while representing a small percentage of traders worldwide, authorities said. In the 1980s, new access to China enabled traders to reach remote regions holding huge numbers of orchids virtually unknown in the West.

From villagers and herb gatherers who were happy to sell them for perhaps 10 cents apiece, traders bought and shipped them in astounding numbers--”hundreds of thousands, if not millions”--to Europe, Japan and the United States before authorities staunched the illegal trade, said Ned Nash, a member of the American Orchid Society’s conservation committee.

More recently, he said, international dealers have seen other notable cases: busts in Great Britain, where a prominent dealer was found with rare specimens in a suitcase, and in Brazil, where a trader was stripped of his export license. To the frustration of regulators, dealers are often aware of the smugglers, who are tacitly tolerated, or even embraced.

“It’s just like dope smuggling,” Nash said. “We all talk about it, certainly. . . . (Dealers say,) ‘So-and-so got another load.’ Every two or three years a case will come down the pipe where they’ll actually catch somebody red-handed.”

Kolopaking’s arrest occurred only six months after another major smuggling scandal--one of the biggest ever--rocked the orchid industry when police moved in to make an arrest at the world’s largest show, the Japan Grand Prix International in Tokyo.

That show, held each February, draws more than 400,000 aficionados to displays and cash competitions.

The incident involved a rare type of lady slipper native to northern Vietnam, said Don Herman, past president of the American Orchid Society. That species was discovered in the wild early in the century. At the time, at least two living plants were shipped--legally then--to Europe. From one of those, many thousands were grown, even as experts came to believe that the flower had become extinct in the wild.

Its rediscovery in the jungles in recent years offered the surprising promise of more spectacular specimens of a species nearly devoid of genetic variation. Simultaneously, it offered an opportunity to traffickers, who virtually cleaned out the flower’s habitat, Herman said.

Smugglers shipped thousands of the orchids to Hong Kong and Taiwan, Herman said. From Taiwan, some were sent to the show in Tokyo. Upon their discovery there, police arrested the seller. In the furor that followed, two high-ranking Japanese orchid officials resigned in disgrace, said James Rose, a Santa Barbara dealer who was there.

“The feeling was, ‘Oh gosh, this is horrible--how could anybody do that?’ ” Rose said. “It really got hot and heavy with the police coming in and things like that. It really became this diplomatic blowout.”

But Rose and some other dealers are far less outraged by smuggling than by stiff trade restrictions. “Would the world be any different if (the smuggler) did take them all?” Rose asked. “They wouldn’t be there in North Vietnam, but we can’t go there anyway. And (the orchids) are out in the trade now, so every orchid guy can have one. So actually, we’re better off, probably.”

That argument--heresy to environmentalists--is at the center of an emotional battle over how to preserve plants worth more than their weight in gold.

“I guess you can argue that alive in the greenhouse is better than extinct in the wild,” said Bruce Weissgold, an intelligence specialist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. But Weissgold contends that “pristine forests are being picked clean of every orchid plant within reach. There have been some species that have been wiped out--they’re now considered extinct--due to collection. This is simply baldfaced greed.”

The debate is complicated by a dearth of real knowledge about jungle habitats and strong arguments in favor of allowing commercial growers to breed more of the endangered species to protect their numbers. No one fully understands the environmental stakes because no one has compiled an accurate inventory of the world’s orchid stock--nor is one likely to emerge.

Orchids, a family of perennial plants characterized by three-petaled flowers and a single fertile stamen, are immensely varied and abundant, growing from the tropics to the Arctic Circle, some on trees, some in the ground, some the size of footballs, some just pinpoints so tiny they are best viewed through a magnifying glass. Some, of course, are rarer than others. There are close to 30,000 known species and, by some estimates, perhaps as many others still undiscovered. That does not even count the hybrids--about 60,000 types, with more being bred all the time.

Some hobbyists specialize, acquiring only miniatures, or orchids with variegated leaves, or those that reproduce by mimicking the shape of insects. Some fanciers get so caught up that their marriages falter. They may wait 10 years for a single plant to bloom, and yet they may call a nursery on a moment’s whim and insist that they have to buy an orchid that very afternoon, said Bergstrom, the Thousand Oaks dealer.

“Some people will even pay--in fact, demand--that the plants be shipped overnight,” Bergstrom said. “That’s how fast they have to get that fix.”

Regulating such zeal becomes a daunting proposition. A century ago, when orchid growing became the fancy of the British aristocracy, there were no controls at all. Dealers such as Frederick Sander, the “Orchid King,” dispatched collectors worldwide. Rivalries led to instances of surreal jungle espionage, in which hunters “would often spend days or weeks tracking each other,” Arthur Swinson wrote in Sander’s biography.

Jungle habitats were often stripped clean. Two consignments returned to England in 1878 contained a staggering 2 million orchids, Swinson said. The director of botanical gardens in Zurich was moved to comment: “This is no longer collecting. It is wanton robbery, and I wonder that public opinion is not stronger against it.”

It took almost 100 years before the outcry was heard. Nations influenced by 1960s environmental consciousness began to look into their own wild lands--and were shocked by what they did not see.

“The Philippines is a good example,” said U.S. Fish and Wildlife agent George Phocas, who took part in the Kolopaking sting. “They said, ‘Wait a minute. People have been shipping our orchids out for years. We don’t even see them anymore. They’re gone.’ ”

Orchid trading was regulated worldwide when more than 120 nations signed a 1973 treaty known as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES. It applies to hundreds of rare creatures, from whales and tigers to orchids of every type. Those classified under the treaty as seriously threatened cannot be commercially traded at all. More-common orchids require trade permits from nations that now tightly control exports.

Although environmentalists considered the treaty long overdue, orchid dealers insist the rules are too strict, written more for animals than flowers. Unlike the rhinoceros, the orchid--most varieties, anyway--can be bred to produce thousands, either from seed or by cloning, a relatively new technique that has transformed the industry. To clone an extraordinary orchid leaves nothing to genetic chance.

“You could make 10,000 exactly like the mother plant,” said Herman, whose father, former Brooklyn Dodgers great Babe Herman, was an orchid man too--the breeder of an award-winning red hybrid known as Rajah’s Ruby ‘Babe’s Baby.’

Artificially bred orchids encased in sterile flasks can be traded freely. The difficulty is getting them. The time and effort needed to raise a new plant in a flask translates to added expense. Too often, in too many countries, no one is doing the work. It is much easier to pluck mature wild orchids and ship them illegally.

Commercial dealers, acknowledging the need for conservation, are clamoring for a compromise: a slight loosening of the rules to give at least some rare wild orchids a legal path to the domestic marketplace. The dealers, who are able to sell to hobbyists at relatively high prices, would have the profit motive to breed great numbers of the rare orchids. But as it stands, dealers argue, too many rare species are condemned by legal technicalities to rain forests where they literally are going up in smoke.

Herman recalled a plane flight to Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1981: “Looking out the window, I counted 60 fires,” he said. “What they were doing was burning jungle, burning forests, and in every one of those forests they were killing all the orchids that were in there.”

Rose, who said he travels 100,000 miles a year looking for unusual orchids, spoke with exasperation: “If I can’t get it, I can’t grow it . . . and, man, in probably five more years it’ll be gone anyway.” He said he fears the situation is getting worse; more nations are taking inventory of dwindling orchid reserves and tightening restrictions.

“Borneo has a lot of good orchids, but you can’t get an orchid out of there,” Rose said, striding through his 50,000 square feet of greenhouses at Cal-Orchid Inc., where he sells orchids from 25 countries. “New Guinea, you can’t get an orchid out of there. Costa Rica’s closed.”

Global politics is sure to play a role in how the debate unfolds, experts say. Every two years, all the CITES countries gather, like a “mini-United Nations,” to fine-tune the treaty, said Balistrieri, who attended the last one in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.

That convention was, in Balistrieri’s description, the usual study in international tensions: Developed nations versus the Third World, Japan versus the United States, the United States versus Europe. There were vigorous debates about the need to regulate nurseries, conspiracy theories about who controls world markets, and the inevitable concerns over smuggling.

Ultimately, though, no clear answers were found, and delegates were left to pin their hopes on the next such gathering, two years from now in Zimbabwe.