SACRAMENTO — State game wardens raided a San Francisco deli and an auto body shop outside the state capital Thursday morning to break up a sturgeon poaching operation that sold caviar for as much as $255 a pound.

The caviar came not from Russia's Caspian Sea, but from the nearby Sacramento River Delta, where authorities say it was poached from rare white sturgeon, the largest freshwater fish in North America.

Trailed by a swarm of television and still cameras, wardens arrested Mark Golmyan, 54, owner of the Gastronom Russian deli on Geary Street, along with four other San Francisco residents accused of buying the caviar for up to $140 a pound and then selling it to Bay area residents for $15.99 an ounce.

Nikolay Krasnodemskiy, 34, was arrested at his home in Sacramento County. All of the suspects face felony charges of conspiring to poach sturgeon.

In the last month, Department of Fish and Game officials said they tracked Krasnodemskiy making five deliveries to the San Francisco residents — a total of 120 pounds of Delta caviar they valued at $16,000.

They said Krasnodemskiy prepared the caviar in two auto body shops in an industrial building north of Sacramento.

Then they say he shipped it to San Francisco, where it was sold out of the buyers' homes and at the Gastronom, a busy San Francisco delicatessen catering to Eastern European immigrants and city dwellers craving ethnic food. Customers snapped up the caviar for $15.99 an ounce.

Associated Press writer Justin M. Norton contributed to this story from San Francisco.