Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (29 page)

I had seen Johnny Olivier before, but only in photographs. In the dry scrub of a North West farm, under the shade of a tree, two men wearing Steyl Game Safaris T-shirts are cutting the horns off a dead rhinoceros. Olivier is in the background, next to a North West Parks official. His face is impassive. In another image he holds a rifle in his right hand and poses next to the hulking carcass. He doesn’t smile.

I cross the square. A busload of Korean tourists grin manically as they pose for pictures in front of a bronze statue of Nelson Mandela. ‘I want to
make things right,’ Olivier says to me in Afrikaans after we shake hands. I’d angered him by describing him in an article as a ‘rhino horn dealer’. He wants to ‘put the record straight’, he says. He’s not alone today. A government minder watches our every move. There is talk of him entering a witness-protection programme.

We wend our way through the crowds, all tarted up and gorging themselves on designer decadence. ‘This isn’t the kind of place I normally go to,’ Olivier says as we walk. ‘
Jissus
, there’s nothing here I can afford.’ We pass a shop window displaying R250 000 Breitling watches, the kind favoured by disgraced ANC Youth League (ANCYL) leader Julius Malema. ‘I love watches,’ Olivier confides. ‘I try and collect them. But not these, they’re way out of my price range. All I’ve got is a Seiko and a Rolex I bought in Thailand.’

A meeting place has been arranged in one of the open business lounges that overlooks the Michelangelo Hotel foyer. This isn’t Johnny’s world. He’s blue collar, as
plat
as they come. He’s got the air of a used-car salesman who’s landed on hard times. The kitsch finery and feigned elegance of the place makes him uncomfortable. A young woman in a designer suit swans past, nose in the air, hair tossed back.

‘
Ja, nee
, I wonder how much a room here costs a night?’ Johnny muses aloud as we walk from the steel and glass lift, our feet sinking into the thick carpets. We order tea and scones lathered in cream. ‘High tea,’ we joke, even though it’s only midday.

I switch on my recorder.

Johnny’s unravelling began three years ago. On 30 September 2008 he drove to Delmas, a small farming town east of Johannesburg. In the car with him were four Thais: Punpitak Chunchom, Kritsada Jangjumrus, Tool Sriton and Sukana Naudea. South Africans are notoriously bad at pronouncing Thai names correctly, so many Thais living in the country simply adopt English names. Punpitak was ‘Peter’, and Kritsada called himself ‘Jacky’. Johnny, who had mastered some broken Thai during a stint diving off the beaches of Phuket, was their fixer and had set up the meeting.

He parked the car, a white Mazda Etude, at
Die Boskroeg
(The Bush Bar), a popular local watering hole outside the town. In the car was $60 000 in cash. The Thais had brought a scale with them. Johnny had been asked to find a seller, and he had been surprisingly lucky. One day, as he was driving from Polokwane to Johannesburg, he saw a man transporting stuffed trophy animals on the back of a bakkie. Johnny flashed his headlights at the man to draw his attention, then waved at him to pull over. He wanted to know where he could get rhino horn and how it all worked.

He asked the man – who turned out to be a professional hunter – if he had any rhino horn for sale. The hunter took Johnny’s number and said a friend of his would call him to make arrangements.

In due course the prospective seller contacted Johnny. He was a game farmer in Musina, he said. He would SMS Johnny a photo of the goods. When the image arrived, it showed a few horns propped up against a brick wall. The Thais were excited, Johnny less so. There was something about that wall that reminded him of a government building.

At
Die Boskroeg
, Olivier and Jangjumrus got out of the car and went into the bar. The man who met them was stocky, barely cracked a smile and had a handshake like wrought iron. There was a black man with him, but he said little. Yes, he had the horns with him, the man said. ‘Where’s the money?’ They went outside to the car. Jangjumrus – they called him Jacky or Jap – took the scale out of the boot and weighed the horns. Satisfied, he bent down and pulled a thick roll of US dollar bills out of one of his socks. The money changed hands. The horns were loaded into the boot and Johnny and the Thais took off.

On the gravel road leading from the pub, things happened fast. Cars cut them off, and rough men with police ID pulled them out of the Etude and cuffed them with cable ties. ‘I didn’t know what went wrong or what we had done wrong,’ Johnny tells me. ‘I knew they were buying horns, but I didn’t know how it worked or that you needed permits. Suddenly I’m sitting in a cage at Delmas police station.’

The seller was also in the police station. But he wasn’t behind bars. Johnny called out to him. ‘That’s not my name,’ the man snapped and walked away. He was a cop. Johnny had been stung.

The bust was the first time investigators had heard of the Xaysavang Export-Import Company. It was a nugget of information that would not be forgotten. Johnny and Jacky were separated from the others and taken to the Middelburg police station holding cells. Jacky, Johnny says, smoked dagga in his cell, which he bought from the bored policemen on duty.

On 9 October 2008, Olivier and Jangjumrus were found guilty. Olivier was fined R120 000 or four years’ imprisonment, and Jangjumrus R80 000 or four years in ‘tjoekie’. It wasn’t long before they were out. They had a benefactor with access to seemingly unlimited amounts of cash.

Johnny takes a sip of tea but declines a scone. He sits on a couch, his head cocked to one side. He’s deaf in his left ear, the result, he tells me, of a landmine explosion in Angola when was a young
troepie
in the mid-1970s. ‘I was in a truck that got hit. I only have about 15 per cent hearing. That’s why I talk so loudly. Because I can’t hear you properly, I think you can’t hear me.’

For years, he says, he has been fascinated by Thailand. He spent some time there, met a Thai
girltjie
, did some diving and a bit of ‘piece work’. It was a place where he could escape the drudgery of life in South Africa. He still yearns for it. He’s bought himself a computer program that purports to ‘make you between 10 per cent and 20 per cent fluent in Thai in 120 hours’.

Lone men of a certain age, like Johnny – he’s fifty-four – flock to Southeast Asia. For many of these
farangs
, Thailand offers a certain, illicit allure. The impermissible easily becomes permissible and anything – absolutely anything – can be bought for a few hundred dollars, sometimes less. Some find solace in girls. For others, it’s boys or girls-who-are-boys or that little taste of brown sugar or hash or whatever the corner touts are pushing on that particular day.

Driven by a midlife crisis, a desperate bid to escape a desultory existence elsewhere, a desire to revisit a misspent youth or a myriad other reasons, for them, Thailand can be a seductively fickle mistress. Thousands flock each year to the seedy clubs in Bangkok’s Patpong Road and their earthly delights or the beaches and bar girls of Phuket and Pattaya.

The place gets under your skin and never really lets go. But easy dreams of hedonism all too easily turn into nightmares. AIDS is widespread. Drugs are readily available. You can see the living dead on the streets with their unkempt hair, skin burnished by the sun and booze, and ragged eyes that have seen too much. Invariably they’re clutching at some young thing with no future.

Back in South Africa, Johnny, always something of an outsider, found an acceptance in Johannesburg’s tiny Thai expat community. They’re a motley lot, numbering only a few thousand. The husbands are often white, middle-aged men; the women young. Some have made it in business or the restaurant trade or the airline industry. Far more are on the fringes: the strippers, hookers and masseuses. Used up in Thailand, they’ve been trafficked to South Africa to work in strip joints and massage parlours. Many are indentured to pimps and traffickers, who cover their passage to South Africa with a ‘loan’. The interest rates are extortionate and designed to keep them in hock.

‘She’ll have to fuck a hundred guys to get anywhere near paying her way out,’ a gangster I once knew leered, gesturing at a Thai woman waiting for clients in a strip club. He was wrong. It would have to be a lot more. ‘When Thai women come to South Africa and they stay for a long time, they’re not here on holiday. They work in certain places,’ Johnny says coyly.

For Johnny, the trouble started with ‘K.K.’ and a lost passport. One day in 2007, or early 2008 – he can’t remember exactly when – he gave a Thai woman a lift to the airport. Her flight was due in two hours. He was on his way home when ‘K.K.’ called. He explained that he was a Thai Airways manager. The woman Johnny had dropped off had lost her passport. Could Johnny look around in his car? Johnny searched everywhere but found nothing. The woman was booked into a hotel at the airport, and K.K. contacted the Thai embassy on her behalf. The following day, Johnny chanced on the passport. He called K.K., who told him the woman had received temporary travel documents and had already boarded the next flight.

‘You sound like a nice guy,’ K.K. said. ‘Next time you’re in Johannesburg, let’s get together. I play golf. Join me.’ When they did finally meet, it was K.K. who broached the subject of ‘business’. He had some friends who spoke little English and didn’t know their way around but needed local help. ‘I don’t know anything about business, but I can help with the talking,’ Johnny offered. K.K. had a house in Kempton Park, not far from the airport, and the Thais were staying there.

‘These guys were buying lion bones, known as “sets”, which they were exporting to Laos. I understood that the bones would be used for making some sort of
muti
… for use in their culture.’

That’s how Johnny first met ‘Jacky’ and the others.

The clear leader of the group was a man they all called ‘Chai’. His real name was Chumlong Lemtongthai. ‘He seemed to me to be a powerful individual … He spent most of his time in Bangkok and visited South Africa for stretches of two to three months at a time.’ Chai’s boss, Johnny discovered later, was someone called Vixay Keosavang. He was based in Laos and had never travelled to South Africa. Chai often had long video chats with him. One day he called Johnny over to say hello. Johnny saw a ‘middle-aged Asian man’ on the computer screen. The man greeted him, then resumed his conversation with Chai. They spoke rapidly in Thai and Johnny couldn’t follow what they were saying.

Johnny did his bit to help the Thais. ‘I assisted with certain aspects of seeking lion sets and would be paid an amount of about US$100 per set that I found and they purchased. This would be paid to me in cash, in rand. Chai would pay for these sets in cash and would only pay [the seller] once the sets had left South Africa, with all the relevant documentation. He would go to the casino near the airport … and draw the cash from a machine there. Sometimes he would draw hundreds of thousands of rand from the machine.’

They were doing a roaring trade. But they wanted more. And they wanted something far more elusive; something they called ‘bamboo’.