Shark-finning gangsters assault celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay: “If you’ve ever watched shows like Hell’s Kitchen or Kitchen Nightmares, you’d know not to cross incendiary celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. Well, maybe his shows don’t air in Taiwan, because a crew of Taiwanese shark-fin smugglers wasn’t too impressed by Ramsay’s reputation, holding the TV host at gunpoint and pouring gasoline over him during the taping of a documentary in Costa Rica.
Ramsay was in Central America to film segments of a program dedicated to shark finning, the cruel and deadly practice responsible for endangering shark populations around the world that the U.S. finally outlawed a couple of weeks ago. Shark fins are highly prized in Asia for their use in shark fin soup, and overfishing for their fins has driven many shark populations down 95 percent or more in recent years.
The gasoline-dousing and gun-pointing were actually two separate incidents. Ramsay told The Telegraph that shark-finning gangs ‘operate from places that are like forts, with barbed-wire perimeters and gun towers.’ Ramsay was trying to film one of these sites, but was being kept away.
I managed to shake off the people who were keeping us away, ran up some stairs to a rooftop, and looked down to see thousands and thousands of fins, drying on rooftops as far as the eye could see. When I got back downstairs they tipped a barrel of petrol over me. Then these cars with blacked-out windows suddenly appeared from nowhere, trying to block us in. We dived into the car and peeled off.