Looking at these Florida wildlife officials bust a gator poaching ring, one thing becomes crystal clear.
These weren’t seasoned hunters making an honest mistake about hunting season dates.
And a Florida man learned one hard lesson about posting felonies on social media that will haunt him for years.
Florida man’s Snapchat videos lead to his downfall
The 21-year-old Edgewater man thought he was being clever when he and his crew illegally harvested at least 14 alligators from the St. Johns River near Hatbill Park in Brevard County back in April and May.
What Latreille didn’t count on was one of his buddies posting videos of their illegal activities all over Snapchat.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission got tipped off on May 22 when someone reported Snapchat videos showing Luke David Michael Landry, 25, of Titusville cleaning alligators in his garage.
One video showed Landry with a live 5-foot alligator that had black electrical tape wrapped around its snout – stored right there in his garage like some kind of trophy.
FWC officers executed a search warrant at Landry’s home on May 27 and found evidence connecting the operation back to Latreille, who owned the airboat they used for their midnight gator runs.
The investigation revealed these guys were grabbing alligators by hand from a moving airboat – most of them juveniles they called "eating size" – before shooting them with pistols or killing them with treble hooks.
Between April 19 and May 11, they illegally captured and killed at least 14 alligators, and for good measure, one of them also illegally shot a whitetail deer.
Professional poachers operating like amateurs
Here’s what makes this whole operation so brazen.
Latreille had no hunting license, wasn’t a permitted alligator agent, didn’t have the required CITE tags to harvest alligators, and wasn’t an authorized nuisance alligator trapper.
In other words, he had zero legal authority to be touching these animals.
But that didn’t stop him from running what amounts to a commercial operation, taking the meat and hides to Georgia while paying his crew in gator steaks.
When FWC investigators interviewed Landry, he admitted that his "fee" for helping clean the alligators was getting to eat some of the meat.
"He made dinner with some of the meat. That was sort of his fee for helping clean the alligators," FWC officers wrote in their report.¹
The cellphone videos they recovered show Latreille operating his airboat throughout the night, steering toward alligators and giving verbal instructions to his crew on how to capture them.
One particularly disturbing video shows Landry pointing a handgun at a juvenile alligator – because apparently terrorizing protected wildlife makes for good social media content.
The system works when idiots document their crimes
Wildlife biologist Chris Gillette from Bellowing Acres sanctuary put it perfectly: "These animals are keystone species. They’re an apex predator. They’re incredibly important for a healthy regulating ecosystem."²
Removing apex predators from their natural habitat isn’t just illegal – it disrupts the entire ecosystem these waterways depend on.
The FWC takes this seriously because illegally harvesting wildlife poses risks to both the animals and public safety.
But here’s the beautiful irony: if these knuckleheads had just kept their mouths shut and stayed off social media, they might have gotten away with it.
Instead, their need to document every moment of their criminal enterprise handed investigators all the evidence they needed on a silver platter.
Latreille now faces 13 felony counts of illegally killing, possessing, or capturing alligators – each one a third-degree felony that could land him in prison.
Warrants are out for his three accomplices: Landry, Robert Gage Martin, 28, and Wyatt Scott Lowe, 24, all from the Mims and Titusville area.
The FWC investigation uncovered a 42-page report detailing four suspects and at least seven witnesses, with photos and videos showing the group posing with dead alligators and skinning carcasses.
You want to know what real justice looks like?
It’s when criminals are so proud of breaking the law that they create their own evidence file and post it online for investigators to find.
These guys turned what should have been a difficult wildlife crime investigation into an open-and-shut case, complete with video confessions and GPS locations.
That’s not criminal masterminds – that’s Florida Man logic at its finest.
¹ Patricio G. Balona, "Edgewater man arrested for killing 13 ‘eating size’ alligators in Brevard County," Daytona Beach News-Journal, September 23, 2025.
² Sierra Rains, "Florida alligator poachers busted after posting photos, videos on Snapchat: FWC," WFLA, September 25, 2025.
