Not an actual photo of Xu, obviously (Picture: Getty/Metro)

A man caught with 51 turtles strapped to his legs was sentenced to nearly five years in prison for smuggling.

Kai Xu, of Canadia, repeatedly entered Michigan to buy and ship thousands of turtles to his native China.

‘Masturbation is a direct path to Satan’, claims authorHe has already been locked up for 19 months since his arrest and had hoped to be released.

The 27-year-old expressed remorse to a judge and thanked agents ‘for stopping the darkness of my greed and ignorance’.


Ahead of the hearing, Xu wrote a letter to U.S. District Judge John Corbett O’Meara, saying he sold turtles partly to make money for college.



He said he was a semester short of an engineering degree.

The government said Xu shipped turtles to China from Canada and the U.S., or hired people to fly with turtles in their luggage to China, where they are coveted as pets.

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One of the smuggled turtles (Picture: AP)

When he was apprehended, Xu had 51 turtles on his legs at the Ontario, Canada, border in 2014.

It’s not illegal to buy turtles from breeders in the U.S., but Xu’s crime was shipping them overseas without an official permit.

Xu was not a ‘sophisticated international dealer’, defense attorney Matthew Borgula told the judge, adding that hiding turtles under his pants was ‘not a good way to get them across the border’.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Sara Woodward felt that Xu’s remorse was genuine, but described his smuggling scheme as one of the largest in recent years.

Woodward recommended a five year prison sentence, near the low end of the sentencing guidelines.

The judge could have gone lower than the guidelines, but settled on 57 months. He also praised Xu for becoming fluent in Spanish while in prison and helping Hispanic inmates.

‘We don’t have a whole lot of cases exactly like this every day,’ the judge said.

Guidelines are dictated by the value of the reptiles as estimated by the government, Xu’s shipments intercepted at airports were worth more than $1 million (Over £70,000).

Xu is planning to appeal the sentence.

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