While most of us tend to size bighorn rams by the curl of their horns, some men end up in federal court over being fixated on something located considerably further south. Such is the story surrounding 66-year-old John Edward Lewton of Belgrade, Montana who got himself embroiled in a testicular selling scheme that reached into the nether regions of an illegal oversized hybrid sheep breeding operation.
The origins of this ballsy tale date all the way back to a legal hunt that took place in October of 2019. It was then that, with help from Lewton as a guide, a client downed a trophy-sized ram on Bureau of Land Management ground in the Missouri River Breaks. Afterward, Lewton collected the animal’s testicles and sold them the next day to a man by the name of Arthur “Jack” Schubarth, who just so happened to run an alternative livestock facility near Vaughn, for a tidy sum of $400.
John Lewton’s guiding service | montanaoutfitters.org
Prosecutors said this was not a one-off sale, believing that Lewton had supplied Schubarth with wild bighorn gonads on multiple earlier occasions, raking in at least $2,800. With the crown jewels in his possession, Schubarth then extracted the semen and sold it to buyers, primarily for high-fence trophy operations located out of state.
Lewton initially claimed the $400 was just reimbursement for gas, a creative accounting excuse that failed to dazzle Federal prosecutors and Montana law enforcement. Investigators had been looking at the arrangement for years but formal federal charges did not come until 2024, when prosecutors filed a single-count information against him just two days before Christmas. A signed plea agreement was filed the same day and after some procedural back-and-forth in early 2025, Lewton formally pleaded guilty on May 14th of this year.
And if the Schubarth name rings a bell, it’s for good reason. For years he quietly worked to produce oversized hybrid sheep for captive trophy hunts, an effort that included illegally imported Marco Polo argali genetics from Kyrgyzstan, a cloning laboratory, forged veterinary documents, and the creation of a purebred male argali he named “Montana Mountain King.”
The King himself | U.S. Department of Justice
The cojones Lewton supplied were simply one piece of the genetic pipeline. Schubarth was sentenced in 2024 on his own federal wildlife trafficking charges—originally to six months in prison plus financial penalties.
Unfortunately for Lewton, this is far from his first federally-investigated rodeo. In 2011 he was convicted of commercial filming on National Forest land without the required permit during an October 2008 guided ram hunt. Around the same period, an undercover FWP investigation involving a high-scoring ram in the Breaks produced state charges against him for alleged illegal outfitting and related offenses.
Lewton’s son also owns Montana Trophy Outfitters, a separate business that advertises guided sheep hunts in the Breaks and promotes John’s long experience, that includes more than 320 sheep hunts (and Lord knows how many sets of nads).
While his son remains innocent, the matriarch had his day in court late last month for sentencing. On October 20th, he was officially handed a $20,000 fine and one year’s worth of probation after entering a guilty plea on the Lacey Act trafficking charge. As part of the deal, he is barred for a year from commercial hunting, fishing, trapping, guiding, or outfitting—and from tagging along with anyone else doing those things, including his son.
