Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (31 page)

‘Peter. Stop! I don’t believe you,’ Johnny said to him. Punpitak lashed out. ‘I thought you were my friend,’ he whined, and drunkenly grabbed Johnny by the shirt. There was a scuffle. ‘I did a bit of Thai boxing when I was younger,’ Johnny says. ‘I’m old now, so I knew I must
moer
[him] within three minutes because I can’t hold out longer than that. I aimed nicely and headbutted him and there he lay. I don’t know if I broke his nose, but there was a lot of blood.

‘Another one of them just stood there like Chuck Norris, looking at me. He didn’t know a
boertjie
could
bliksem
that hard. I just wanted to show him that we aren’t guys who fuck around. We kept the English going for a long
time during the Boer War and we’ll keep you Thai guys going just as long.’ Chai was angry that ‘one of his family’ had been injured. ‘To hell with them,’ Johnny thought.

Johnny talked too much. He liked to impress. That’s how he got chatting to Jim. It is not his real name. Johnny didn’t know it at the time, but Jim is one of Paul O’Sullivan’s informants. He’s good at sniffing out information. Jim listened attentively to Johnny’s ramblings. He didn’t like him and thought he was a bit of a whiner, but Jim was good at keeping up appearances. Johnny told him they were buying rhinos. Jim was intrigued.

O’Sullivan, meanwhile, had offered his services to Ed Hern, a former stockbroker who had founded the Krugersdorp Lion and Rhino Nature Reserve in the mid-1980s. Hern had lost rhinos to poachers and was desperate. So desperate, in fact, that he and his daughter, together with a vet, had developed a procedure to ‘infuse’ the horns of their rhinos with a pink neon dye and a pesticide as a ‘deterrent’ to poachers. O’Sullivan put out some feelers, but was quickly distracted by the Krejcir case.

After the fall-out with Punpitak, Johnny grew steadily more embittered, and, he claims, increasingly concerned about the legality of the transactions. ‘I thought about going to the police, but Chai always said that in South Africa you can do what you want if you have money.’

One of the Thais had been caught by the cops on previous occasions, first for speeding and then for drunk driving. ‘He bribed them with seven or eight thousand rand and they let him go. If I went to the cops, they could just pay them off.’

Instead, Johnny approached Jim, who had, by now, told him about his connection to O’Sullivan. Johnny gave him sixteen pages of documents, containing a list of five names, farm addresses, identity numbers, and permit after permit for lion carcasses and lion bones. Jim handed everything over to O’Sullivan.

O’Sullivan poked around, but he had his ‘hands full with other matters of a transnational criminal-syndicate nature’. It would be months before he took another look at Johnny’s file, but the abortive raid on Krejcir’s house
provided the impetus. O’Sullivan dusted off the documents and asked Jim if he could ‘get any further data about the foreign links to lion bone activities’.

Weeks later, Jim called him. He was excited. Johnny wanted to talk.

11 May 2011

Securitas’s offices are situated in Wynberg, a bleak industrial zone in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs. Surrounded by car dealerships, tow-trucking companies and scrapyards, the area borders on the poverty of Alexandra Township on the one side, and the leafy riches of Sandton on the other.

In a boardroom, Johnny is spilling his guts as O’Sullivan takes notes, his grey-green eyes hard, his questions blunt. Johnny is a gold seam.

His tale is a remarkable one, told quickly with barely a pause for breath. Over the course of two hours, Johnny gives up names, places and dates. He tells O’Sullivan about the lion bones, the rhino horn deals and the pseudo-hunts that gave them access to a steady supply of rhino horn. But his most astonishing claim is that the syndicate used prostitutes – most of them young women trafficked from Thailand to South Africa – as fronts to obtain rhino hunting permits.

Over the next six days, O’Sullivan pulls together 220 pages of documents, including hunting and export permits, email correspondence and invoices from safari operators for rhino ‘hunts’. It is all there on a platter. Particularly damaging is an order for fifty sets of white rhino horns: 100 horns in total. The price is R65 000 a kilogram. Fifteen rhinos can be shot a month. The document is addressed to Marnus Steyl, a lion breeder and game farmer in the Free State. There are three email addresses and a cellphone number for Chumlong Lemtongthai.

An image of a cheetah has been used as the backdrop for a crude cutand-paste letterhead bearing the name: ‘Xaysavang Trading Export-Import. Co, Ltd’ [
sic
]. The company’s address is in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, or Laos as it is more commonly known. ‘Purchasing foreign in South Africa,’ it proclaims in broken English.

NEW ORDER PRODUCTS MONTH
15-05-2011,
TO
20-08-2011

IMPORT THAILAND I HAVE CITES PERMIT IMPORT THAILAND

1,
WHITE RHINO
50
SET
, 1
MONTH CAN SHOOT
15
RHINO
YOU DO CITES PERMIT EXPORT OF SOUTH-AFRICA
1,
KG X
65,000
R CITES PERMIT IMPORT THAI,

2,
LION BONES
300
SET
, 1
SET
10,000
R FOR
10
KG IP.ONLY,
CITES PERMIT IMPORT LAOS PDR

In the Michelangelo Hotel, Johnny puts down his cup. His voice is hushed. In the background a man is fiddling with the lounge’s TV set. There is a rugby game on.

By mid-2010, the Thais were actively refocusing their efforts on the acquisition of ‘bamboo’, the term they use to refer to rhino horn. And, they believed, they had found a loophole in the hunting laws that would give them access to an unlimited supply.

The regulations are clear: a hunter can hunt only one rhino a year. But there is no national or centralised permitting system. Efforts to centralise this data has resulted in little more than an Excel spreadsheet, rife with spelling mistakes and errors. Part of the problem is that each province approves and issues its own permits in accordance with provincial wildlife ordinances, which can differ widely from province to province. Where there is a will, there is way, and the permitting officials who vet the hunters and check their credentials prove all too easy to manipulate and corrupt.

Chai is ‘very clever’, Johnny says. ‘He told me that he’s been in the wild-life trade for twenty-two years and has done everything from horn to ivory and bones. He is brilliant. If he looks at the horns on a living rhino, he can estimate their weight exactly. For instance, let’s say he’d estimate it at about 5.3 kilograms. When the rhino is later shot and the horns taken off, he’ll only have been about point five of a kilogram out. He’s that accurate.’

Johnny put out feelers and found a hunting outfitter. Juan Pace is the owner of Shangwari Safaris, a business established in 1996. Its website boasts that it operates in six African countries and ‘specializes only in dangerous game hunting’. Pace is also a member of PHASA. The Thais said they had
heard that Thai citizens could not legally hunt rhinos. Pace said he’d check. The word came back to them: ‘It doesn’t matter what country you’re from, you can shoot.’

Either in August or September 2010, Pace secured the first rhinos to be slaughtered. Chai paid over R1 million in cash for them. As before, the money was drawn from ATM machines at Emperors Palace. Chai felt safe there. By Johnny’s reckoning, it would have taken more than 500 withdrawals of R2 000 each – the withdrawal limit of the machines – to get the cash together.

Chai made sure there was a record of the transaction. ‘While we were paying Juan,’ Johnny said in his statement to O’Sullivan, ‘Chai was busy taking pictures with his camera. I know that Chai carries a Sony laptop around with him. If this computer was obtained, I believe investigators would have everything.’

The photographs show Pace and his wife grinning stupidly over a heap of cash piled up on a pink tablecloth in their home. Their two young sons look on.

Johnny said the rhinos were taken to the Leeuwbosch Game Lodge near Stella in North West province, where they were promptly dispatched in a hunt. Hunting records show that Punpitak and Tool Sriton, another of the Thais arrested alongside Johnny in the 2008 buy-bust, shot two rhinos at Leeuwbosch on 10 September 2010.

This is what Johnny told O’Sullivan:

Then the horns were sent to a taxidermist by the name of Savuti Taxidermy, and he specialises in mounting the horns onto a shield, thereby turning it into a hunting ‘trophy’. This was an important part of the process, as Savuti would then be able to get a CITES permit for the trophy and it would be shipped to Laos and the whole thing would be legal … [T]he ‘trophy’ is just a cover for getting the horn out of South Africa and into Asia.

Once in Asia, it obviously would enter the black market as rhino horn for ‘medicinal’ purposes. The person allegedly ‘hunting’ the rhino would never see the animal, or its horn, again, after the ‘hunt’.

I do know that the horn eventually goes to a guy by the name of Xaysavang … From this I would draw the conclusion that Xaysavang is the ‘big boss’ of the whole operation.

I interviewed the owner of the farm, Dr Deon Engelbrecht, in July 2011. He denied any wrongdoing. ‘You can’t do canned hunting here, because here you have to go out and look for the rhino. I know they came and hunted a rhino, and then I stopped it. I didn’t supply rhinos to them. It was their rhino that they brought here. I had nothing to do with the transaction.’

An invoice, dated 14 November 2010, and sent to Chai by Leeuwbosch Game Lodge and Safaris, records the sale of one ‘white rhino bull with 2 horns’ at a ‘unit price’ of R65 000 a kilogram. The horns weighed 7.12 kilograms. Another invoice shows that the syndicate bought twelve female lion carcasses and thirty-two male lion carcasses from Leeuwbosch for R318 000.

Engelbrecht said he no longer owned rhinos because of the ‘high risk’ of poaching. He lost a rhino to poachers in early 2010 and ‘then got rid of the things’. Some time in January or February 2011, permits were issued for a further two rhinos to be hunted on his farm. Both hunters were Vietnamese.

The Thais had had their taste. ‘Bamboo’ was where the real money lay. Late in 2010, some of the men, including Johnny and Punpitak, travelled to Winburg in the Free State to examine a stash of lion bones.

A sign at the entrance to a farm outside the town promised: ‘For all your wildlife needs … Steyl Brothers – We do it in “Steyl”’.

16 January 2011

In the shade of a tree on a game farm in North West Province, a white rhino bull has taken shelter from the stupefying heat. It dozes, ears twitching, its massive chest rising and falling in slow rhythm. It is a magnificent beast with long, curved horns.

There’s a sharp crack and a puff of rust-red dust erupts from the animal’s hide as the first bullet tears into it. A terrible, almost indescribable keening cuts the air, like a baby crying out or a pig being slaughtered. It is a sound you don’t easily forget.

The GoPro camera strapped to Marnus Steyl’s head records the rhino’s desperate struggle to escape. It rolls onto its side, feet thrashing wildly as it battles to stand. A rifle barrel, distorted by the lens, snakes into view. A second shot hits the animal as it staggers forward and away from the source of its pain, kicking up a cloud of dust. Steyl reloads. The rhino – confused, unable to see or smell its killers – turns full circle. A few seconds later, a third shot rings out. The animal charges behind a bush. Five seconds elapse. Harry Claassens, the PH who regularly accompanies Steyl’s clients, raises his rifle and fires. The rhino runs a few paces and collapses under the tree. Mewling in agony, it tries to rise up on its haunches, then topples over.