Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (28 page)

In August 2010, he sold him a further nineteen carcasses. In all, it came to eleven tons of meat. But no permits had been issued in 2008 for rhinos to be hunted on Prachtig. When Johnson began refusing to buy more carcasses, Groenewald allegedly had them buried or burnt.

After Groenewald’s arrest, a Kruger National Park veterinarian, Dr Markus Hofmeyr, who helped dart twenty-nine rhino on the farm, assisted police in collecting blood and tissue samples for DNA analysis.

‘All the rhino we darted,’ he wrote in a statement, ‘had had their horns removed previously and some right down to the growing point. The horns on some rhino were clearly cut off with a chainsaw or the like, and other[s] had the horns removed at the growing point. The method of removal is not clear, but [I] suspect it was done by inserting a knife and separating the attachment area of the horn from the base of the skull or applying a large force and tearing the horn from the base.

‘We also observed burnt rhino carcasses [and] … other skulls at the pit where the burnt rhino carcasses were seen, highlighting the extent of the rhino killing that took place there.’

The last time I interviewed Groenewald – several months before police and prosecutors obtained an asset-forfeiture order seizing control of R55 million in assets belonging to him and his co-accused – he seemed confident about the case.

‘The two main witnesses are people who worked here. The one is a drunkard, the other a liar. They won’t last five minutes in the box. Let me tell you, they [the prosecutors] will eventually come and say there has been a mistake on a permit here, or something wrong there, let’s sort it all out. Let’s make arrangements for a fine.’

Tielman Erasmus – always the joker – cut in. ‘[One of our lawyers] says that if someone is lying, it takes him five minutes on the stand to show that he’s a liar. If he isn’t lying, it takes him fifteen minutes to show that he is lying.’

That afternoon, I joined Groenewald, Tielman, Sariette, two American hunters and their wives for lunch at the lodge. The Americans had spent the morning poring over a price list, trying to decide what to kill.

‘John has to decide what he wants to hunt,’ one of the wives said to me, referring to her husband. ‘I’m still trying to talk him into a zebra. A zebra rug is really nice. But I don’t want to watch [the hunt]. I don’t want to see it.’

That next day, John gets his zebra. It moved when he fired the shot and the bullet hit it a little further back than he had planned. The animal ran a short distance along a dirt road that leads through the farm before collapsing. ‘Tomorrow, wildebeest or sable,’ one of the women said over dinner as John showed off his trophy pictures of the zebra.

Tielman chimed in: ‘If it’s brown, it’s down; if it flies, it dies; if it’s red, it’s dead.’

‘Did you know,’ he asked the Americans, ‘that a rhino’s sexual organs are under his right foot?’

‘No,’ was the chorused reply.

‘
Ja
, because if he puts his foot on you, you’re fucked.’

The Groenewald case focused international attention on what animal activists would eventually dub the South African ‘game-industry white guys’ – a group of ‘unscrupulous individuals hiding behind the cloak of conservation [who] are ferociously plundering South Africa’s rhinos’.

They included vets, game farmers, helicopter pilots, game-capture specialists and professional hunters. In 2012, a US-based activist and writer, Sarah Pappin, raised concerns that of the twenty-nine ‘white guys’ arrested for rhino crimes since 2006, only two had been given prison sentences.

One was Jacques Els, a game-capture expert and farmer from Limpopo, who was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment and fined R1 million in March 2012. He had been arrested in October 2010 after buying thirty rhino horns from Tommy Fourie, the manager of the Maremani game farm near Musina. Both he and Fourie were arrested. A month later, Fourie climbed a hill behind his house, carrying a hunting rifle, and shot himself in the head.

That same year, Els’s business partner in the game-capture business, Mark Tout, was accused of being linked to rhino poaching. The investigative tele visionprogramme,
Carte Blanche
, broadcast a documentary identifying Tout as the pilot of a helicopter that had flown low over a game farm with its registration numbers taped over. At the time there were frequent reports in South African newspapers of helicopters being used to poach rhinos. Tout denied the allegations and was never charged, although it later emerged that he had been indemnified as a State witness. The helicopter raids largely ceased.

The other jailbird was a father of six named Deon van Deventer. In prison, they called him ‘Rhino’.

I met Van Deventer in May 2012 in the town of Lephalale – previously known as Ellisras – near the South African border with Botswana. He was accompanied by his new girlfriend, a haggard, money-grubbing woman in her late forties, who did most of the talking. I was hoping to interview Van Deventer for this book and he had agreed to a meeting to discuss the possibility. She wanted to discuss the terms.

Van Deventer had done a number of jailhouse interviews in recent years, despite claiming that he feared for his life if he spoke out against the men he had implicated in a rhino horn syndicate. By his own admission, he had killed twenty-two rhinos between 2005 and 2006.

In 2011, shortly before his release from prison, he boasted to a
National Geographic
journalist that he had used a penknife to remove the horns of the rhinos he’d shot. ‘You don’t need a saw. It’s quick, and the entire horn comes off clean, just like a bottle cap,’ he told the writer, Peter Gwin.

He also claimed to have built a home-made silencer – using a metal pipe with washers soldered inside it – which he fitted to the barrel of a .30-06 hunting rifle. ‘I shot a male [rhino], and a female standing two metres away didn’t flinch before I shot her too.’

Van Deventer and his girlfriend had arranged to meet me at the Spur steakhouse in town. The place was busy and they decided against going there, and directed me to follow them to a coffee shop across town. At a corner table, Van Deventer spoke of remorse.

‘What I did was a
moerse
ugly thing, and I don’t know how I could have involved myself in something like that. I’m a good hunter. I hunted for many years professionally. The rhinos that I shot were shot clean. It was a shot to the brain every time and they fell to their knees and not on their sides. They didn’t suffer. I took off the horns in the right way with a knife.
Woep-wap
, and the horn is off. That is how I operate.’

He says he is sorry, a claim he repeats in statements given to police after his arrest. But it is a lie. Van Deventer revelled in the killing. In letters he apparently wrote to his family, which I found while perusing court papers about the case, he boasted about stalking a rhino.

In one he described looking out of the bars of his prison cell. ‘[T]here was this cat that was stalking a dove ... It was very enjoyable for me. It took
my thoughts back to the rhinos that I stalked. Damn, I really enjoyed it. Although I’m now sitting here because of that, nobody can take that experience away from me.’ The letter was signed ‘Rhino’.

Deon and his brother Nicolaas killed rhinos in game reserves and game farms across South Africa, including the Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Game Reserve and a number in the Kruger National Park. In several instances, cows and calves were killed with hunting bows and rifles.

In statements given to investigators as part of a plea agreement, Van Deventer claimed he was paid R12 000 a kilo by the syndicate bosses. He also claimed that the syndicate was led by Clayton Fletcher, a Free State game farmer, hunting outfitter and businessman, and alleged that Gert Saaiman, a Pretoria-based pilot and owner of Saaiman Hunting Safaris and the Saaiman Game Ranch, was the ‘middleman’ in the syndicate.

The case of the ‘Fletcher gang’ was hailed as a major breakthrough in rhino poaching when it went to trial in October 2010. A day later, the case collapsed spectacularly when Van Deventer refused to testify, claiming that he had been intimidated in prison by private investigators who had threatened his children. He also claimed that his wife had been attacked in their home.

The truth of his claims remains murky, and there are suggestions that Van Deventer concocted details about the syndicate to get a reduced sentence. If so, he succeeded.

Once Van Deventer pulled out, the charges against all the accused were dropped, although, at the time of writing, there were suggestions that charges might be reinstated against Fletcher. The National Prosecuting Authority notified Saaiman in a letter that they would not be proceeding against him, as Van Deventer was their only witness.

In a statement given to me by his lawyer, Saaiman said that Van Deventer had worked for him in his hunting operation for a short while. ‘Because he knew my business, daily routine, friends and family, it was easy for him to concoct a story implicating me in unlawful follies. It took me five years to prove my innocence.’

A few days after my meeting with Van Deventer, I received an email from a fly-by-night lawyer in Gaborone, Botswana, where Van Deventer and his girlfriend now live. Van Deventer – and probably more specifically, his girlfriend – wanted R250 000 for his story.

Clearly he was still after the money. I turned him down.

23 July 2011

The man in the pink golf shirt and cheap, knock-off jeans is on edge, itching for a cigarette he doesn’t have. He studies the faces in the crowd of Saturday shoppers thronging around him in the mall at Sandton’s Nelson Mandela Square, eyes flicking uncertainly from one person to the next.

Johnny Olivier has reason to be afraid. The phone calls started a few days ago. Late at night. Sometimes, he thinks, he can hear someone breathing. Then silence. The caller ID always shows up as ‘private number’. In the months that follow, there are more threats; messages sent to his Facebook account containing images of a cat, teeth bared in pain, being trampled to death by a woman in high heels, and a young girl lying dead in a bath with her head cut off.

They all know he’s the
impimpi
– the rat who pimped them out to save his own skin. He’s heard that they want him dead. Rats are vermin and should be exterminated. ‘Johnny is scum,’ a man who once had dealings with him tells me. ‘He’ll do anything for a quick buck. He’s just like the rest, but he’s fucking great at pretending he’s an innocent.’