Workers at the Seabreeze Environmental Landfill in Angleton ripped open 300 55-gallon drums of contaminated Chinese honey with excavators last year and stirred the contents with layers of regular old American garbage.

Then they buried the sticky mess.

"When we're done with it, the bees don't even want it," said Brian Karp, district manager for the landfill operator.

The 100 tons of honey - tainted with illegal antibiotics - were the last vestige of the lucrative career of Jun Yang of Houston, a Chinese-born entrepreneur who went to prison last year after pleading guilty to smuggling charges. Yang's comeuppance is a rarity in the shadowy world of illegal trade, where foreign companies and their partners on U.S. soil routinely flout trade laws, evading penalties designed to protect American industries.

And Houston's commerce-rich port has emerged as a hub for such activity, continuing shipments show. In January, U.S. Customs and Homeland Security investigators in Houston reported that since October, they had seized an additional 660 drums of honey from China, the world's leading honey producer, that had been smuggled in through Latvia.

That brings to nearly $8 million the value of Chinese honey seized in Houston over the past two years - all of it destroyed or about to be.

"For whatever reason, Houston seems to be a focal point for this stuff coming in," said Richard Halverson, assistant special agent in charge of Homeland Security's Houston investigations unit. "As with anything else that's being brought into the U.S., one of our goals is to make sure people are playing by the rules."

Court records, shipping documents and interviews combine to tell a story of elaborate fraud schemes that damage American industries and deprive the U.S. Treasury of billions of dollars.

Even before the latest seizures, federal agents had disrupted a criminal network of honey importers who had evaded $180 million in antidumping duties - penalties imposed on suspiciously low-priced imports that threaten domestic industries. Yang, a central player in the fraud, evaded as much as $38 million in duties himself by brokering loads of Chinese honey falsely labeled as Malaysian or Indian, according to the government's case against him.

Yang, 41, pleaded guilty and last year began a three-year prison sentence. His is among 11 convictions thus far in a federal investigation known as Honeygate. He refused a request for a prison interview for this story.

Much slips through

The Houston honey seizures mark a success in keeping goods arriving fraudulently out of the market, but many other items slip through. The threat of penalties often does little good, in part because U.S. Customs and Border Protection often fails to collect antidumping duties or unravel importers' duty-evasion schemes, according to federal court records and government documents.

In an unpublished report to Congress last year, CBP, part of the Department of Homeland Security, estimated that $1.83 billion remains uncollected from some 36,000 duty bills issued after imports - more outstanding bills than the year before.

Roughly 90 percent of the unpaid duty stems from Chinese import, including $538 million on garlic; $403 million on wooden bedroom furniture; $395 million on crawfish; $179 million on honey; and $131 million on canned mushrooms, the report said.

The shifting cast of international fraudsters and disappearing importers makes the schemes difficult to crack. In 2013, Jun Yang, by then working with authorities, provided information that enabled government agents to stop earlier shipments of Chinese honey routed through Latvia in order to evade U.S. duties, according to court records.

Latvia would seem an unlikely pathway. The tiny northern European country produces so little honey that it exported none to other European nations in 2013 and just over 1,000 pounds to the United States, shipping records show.

So suspicions arose when shipping containers from Latvia laden with thousands of pounds of honey began arriving at the Port of Houston - 448,156 pounds, all told.

"Those are pretty good clues as far as what was going on," said Halverson, whose agents worked with counterparts in Germany to conclude that the honey had originated in China, which seldom ships because of the high duties.

A decade after arriving at Texas A&M from Shanghai in 1996, Jun Yang owned a $1 million-plus home in the Creek Wood subdivision in the prestigious Memorial area west of Houston.

The young entrepreneur became chairman of the board of the Chinese Civic Center and led the effort to bring a bronzed statue of Confucius to Houston's Hermann Park. The dedication in September 2009 drew more than 1,000 people.

As a community leader, he sat on former Mayor Bill White's advisory panel on international affairs. (A spokeswoman for White said the former mayor had no recollection of Yang.)

But by 2013, the government was calling for a stiff prison sentence for Yang and labeling him "one of the largest and most successful criminal trans-shippers ever prosecuted in U.S. history."

'Peel away layers'

Yang and his company, National Honey Inc., deployed at least four companies to manage imports of Chinese honey - imports that would be unfeasible under antidumping duties as high as 221 percent of the honey's value.

The transshipment scheme unraveled only after a government plant in the Baytown company Honey Solutions won Yang's trust.

"Because of the complexity of the case, the underlying facts and the proving up of these very complicated schemes, it required us to essentially put in an undercover agent who pretended to be a bad guy," said assistant U.S. attorney Andrew S. Boutros in Illinois' Northern District, the lead prosecutor in the government's string of successful honey cases.

"We had to peel away the layers," added an investigator in the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The case was prosecuted in U.S. District Court in Chicago as part of a wide-ranging investigation that began in 2008 and resulted initially with charges against executives of a German food conglomerate that based its U.S. honey importing business in Chicago.

According to court documents, the government plant began working at Honey Solutions as director of procurement in June 2011, shortly after Douglas Murphy, the company's director of sales, was released from prison. Murphy had served about half of a five-year sentence for bribing Haitian officials in connection with his rice export business.

In a deferred prosecution agreement in 2013, Honey Solutions agreed to pay a $1 million fine and said it "accepts and acknowledges responsibility for its conduct and that of its employees and agents."

The company also agreed to cooperate in the investigation.

In addition, Murphy was sentenced to six months in prison for distributing honey adulterated with an antibiotic.

Last week, Honey Solutions issued a news release noting the expiration of the deferred prosecution agreement with the government. But the company said it continues to assist an investigation into the honey industry.

The release asserted that neither the company nor its owner, officers or employees had been indicted or criminally charged with illegally transshipping, smuggling or importing Chinese honey into the U.S. The release did not mention company agents.

Caught in the act

Later, in 31/2 hours of recorded conversation in Chicago, the undercover agent asked Yang's advice on arranging imports of Chinese-made solar panels so as to avoid antidumping penalties.

Yang offered help. He described his own blueprint for illegal shipping via third countries and mentioned a potential contact in Malaysia. He advised traveling to Malaysia to "build up trust" with the people handling the transshipments.

"You don't just want to sit in your office and do some emails," Yang said, according to a transcript. "Then boom, the Customs just shows up at your door and say … is this your email? Yeah? Then come with us; we need to talk to you."

In the meeting, the government plant pulled out test results showing antibiotic contamination in Yang's honey - honey that later would be seized in Houston and destroyed. Shred the document, Yang advised.

"You want me to get rid of it for you?" Yang asked, stuffing the lab reports in his jacket.

A day later, Yang was arrested leaving his Chicago hotel.

He cooperated with the government, wearing a wire and sending hundreds of emails to potential targets. Information he provided underscored the scope of duty evasion.

In addition to the Latvian scheme, investigators received information from Yang about Chinese honey arriving through South Korea. He also laid out a potential case against the seafood industry and illegally shipped shrimp, offering to meet with what were described as "high-value" targets from China.

Michael Coursey, a lawyer in Washington who has represented U.S. industries, said the Jun Yang prosecution and the honey seizures in Houston "have been helpful in cleaning up a lot of people's behavior. But that doesn't mean the problem is gone."

Dane Schiller contributed to this report.