Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (33 page)

As the bakkie, with Izak behind the wheel, jolts along the dirt road to Steyl’s farm, Klipplaatfontein, Johnny catches a glimpse of the lions pacing in their enclosures. Back and forth they prowl. Back and forth. Back and forth. Their movements are slow and lethargic, dulled by months or years of captivity. Two lion carcasses, freshly skinned, hang nearby in a container.

Johnny takes an instant dislike to Steyl. He’s an ‘arrogant, domineering little
bliksem
’, ‘
windgat
’ and brashly self-important. Inside a barn, Steyl shows them the lion bones, spread out haphazardly on the floor. The bacterial stench of decay chokes the air.

Punpitak has an eye for this sort of thing. He sifts through the bones, arranging them into sets. After a while, the skeletons begin to take shape. There are twelve sets in all, but there are bones missing and those that are there are small. A thousand rand a kilogram is the going rate. If the skull and feet are still intact, an additional R5 000 is added to the purchase price. The men pay Steyl R60 000, bag the bones and heft them onto the back of the bakkie.

It will be months before they hear from Steyl again. When they do, he has a new business proposition for them to consider.

Johnny takes the call. It’s Steyl. ‘I’ve got a bunch of rhinos. Do you want to hunt them?’ he asks. Steyl says he recently bought a game farm in North West province. It is called the Aurora Private Nature Reserve. The previous owner’s brother-in-law, Harry Claassens, is a registered professional hunter in the province. They have become firm friends.

Johnny is uncertain: ‘We don’t really do rhinos, we do lion bones. But I’ll ask Chai if he’s interested.’ Chai is more than interested. He can barely contain his excitement. ‘Yes,’ he yammers. ‘Trophies, trophies, trophies!’

The deal is struck. Steyl will supply the rhinos and organise the hunting permits. It shouldn’t be too hard. The North West provincial authorities dish out permits like business cards. And they don’t ask too many hard questions. Now Steyl needs hunters, and Punpitak knows where to find them.

Green strobe lights cut through the darkness. A mirrorball turns slowly, shards of light illuminating the shadows huddled around the stage. Lady Gaga blares from the speakers. A tattooed dancer gyrates around a steel pole in a gynaecological display of feigned eroticism.

It’s 3 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon in Church Street, Pretoria. The bar is starting to fill up with regulars clutching shot glasses, beers and
polisiekoffie
: stiff double brandies and Coke.

Flamingo’s is one of Pretoria’s more notorious dens of iniquity. In a prev ious incarnation it was the stomping ground of an infamous Pretoria biker gang. And in 2010, after a torrid night’s drinking at the club, Blue Bulls and Super 14 rugby star, Bees Roux, beat a Metro policeman to death. Roux claimed during his trial that the policeman had tried to rob him after stopping him for drunk driving and that he had defended himself. He received a suspended sentence in a plea deal that included paying R750 000 in compensation to the dead man’s family.

In August 2011, the club’s one-time silent partner, a disgraced safari-company owner, Hugo Ras, was arrested in a police raid on his three-storey home in Magalieskruin in northern Pretoria. During a search, investigators found an unlicensed firearm and large quantities of M99, a powerful anaesthetic that is widely used in game capture and also to dart rhinos. The drug – which is 3 000 times more potent than morphine – is fatal to humans, and its distribution is meant to be strictly controlled.

Police had obtained a warrant on the basis that they wanted to question Ras about the murder of a Russian stripper, Lana Muratava. She had disappeared from Flamingo’s late one night in November 2010 and was last seen alive with a man in a white Land Cruiser. Her corpse was discovered days later in a ditch next to a road in Hammanskraal. There were claims that she had been killed with M99, but early tabloid press reports suggested that the back of her skull had been repeatedly bashed in. Other rumours alleged she had been strangled.

Ras was charged, but not for the murder. He and seven others, including three veterinarians, faced provisional charges of contravening the Medicines and Related Substances Control Act over the illegal distribution of M99. One of the men in the dock alongside Ras was Dr Douw Grobler, a veterinarian
and former head of game capture at the Kruger National Park. Grobler had made an international name for himself in the 1990s at Kruger, where he was involved in the large-scale relocation of animals, including elephant and rhino. He was fired by the park in 2001 for the unauthorised sale of animals from the park’s buffalo-breeding project.

I met Ras outside the Pretoria North Magistrate’s Court in April 2012. He was in a chatty mood. The case had been postponed again and charges against five of his co-accused had been dropped. He believed the case was crumbling. He denied any knowledge of Muratava’s death. ‘The girl was an interpreter for me when I had Russian clients on my farm.’ The clients, he says, invariably ‘wanted an interpreter and also a girl to fuck. I decided to make a plan and get a girl who interprets and screws. She makes more money and there is one less person in the Land Cruiser when we go out hunting. That is the only fucking connection I had with her. I never touched her. The stories that people think up are like
Isidingo
,
The Wild
,
Sewende Laan
and
Binnelanders
[local television soap operas] all rolled into one.’

It wasn’t the first time that Ras had fallen foul of the law. In 2000 and 2001, he was arrested for various contraventions of nature conservation and customs regulations and fined. In 2004, the
Mail & Guardian
newspaper revealed that a bull elephant Ras had purchased from the Kruger National Park had been hunted by a Texan oil magnate within hours of its arrival on a game farm near Rustenburg in North West. Gavin Hulett, a park warden, told the paper that four bull elephants had been sold to Ras on condition that they would not be hunted. Ras claimed the bull was shot after it broke out of camp.

A year later he was back in the news, this time charged with murder after a contractor working on his farm was attacked and killed by a lion. The charge was eventually dropped. The same year, Ras was fined for assault. The day I spoke to him outside court, he boasted about his numerous run-ins with police and the courts, saying the charges rarely stuck.

A group of young Thai women is clustered in a corner of the club, tarted up in short black dresses, lashings of make-up and stiletto heels. They’re on
display, like so many cattle. A girl called Tanya slugs back a shot of tequila, sneers at the Thais and launches into a racist tirade. ‘I don’t fucking know where they come from,’ she says in Afrikaans. ‘They must fuck off. They’re irritating, just irritating. They speak loud and they’re like fucking kaffirs, man,’ she says, using a crude racist slur for black Africans.

She’s twenty-six, but her face is hard and old, her eyes like cut glass. She’s worked here, in Flamingo’s, on-and-off for years. ‘Are you a dancer?’ I ask.

‘No’, she says. ‘I’m into fucking.’

The Thais are Tanya’s competition. Her overtures unsuccessful, Tanya moves on to another table and another potential client. Her place is quickly taken by a twenty-eight-year-old Thai woman with an infectious laugh. She’s been in South Africa for three years, she tells me. Her family is poor, from a rural town somewhere. Her father worked in a factory until he couldn’t work any more. He’s seventy now. Her mother is sixty.

‘In my country, people get paid very little. That’s why I came here.’ A friend had invited her over with promises of money to be made.

‘I can do any job,’ she says. ‘Cooking, cleaning, washing, whatever.’

For a year she worked for a Chinese boss in a factory shop in Nelspruit. The hours were brutal. ‘We sold blankets, TVs, T-shirts, anything. I was crying a lot then. When I came to this country, I can say “sorry”, nothing else. So I learn English.’

She eventually moved to Johannesburg, and another ‘friend’ found her a job in a strip club. ‘The first time I worked, I didn’t want to take my clothes off. I was scared. Someone wrapped a skirt around me and then they pushed me out onto stage. Go make money, go, go, go, they said. A guy gives me R100 or R200 and I say, “Why you give me money?” I didn’t understand.’

Now she charges R500 for a lap dance. Just yesterday she made R2 800. She is worried about AIDS and doesn’t have sex with clients. ‘Only jacuzzi dancing,’ she says. ‘I only six months working here. When I get enough money, I look for other business. Sometimes the people are like animals. The other day, I dancing back there,’ she says, gesturing in the direction of a private room near the bar. ‘This crazy guy, he opens his pants and takes it out. I could not believe it … Another guy wants me to sucky-sucky, no condom. It’s not safe.’

I leave the table and head for the men’s room on my way out. A sign on the wall reads: ‘Viagra for sale at reception.’

The Thai women who ply their trade at Flamingo’s and other strip clubs and massage parlours scattered around Gauteng are ideal for Punpitak’s plan. They’re outsiders: isolated and on the fringes of the expatriate community. Most barely speak a word of English. And most have families to support back home. A few thousand rand can go a long way and, for Punpitak, it’s a lot cheaper than flying in hunters from Thailand and Vietnam.

He trawls the clubs for candidates, chatting up the women with assurances of money, paid holidays at safari lodges and vague promises of work in tourism. He purports to be a successful businessman and ostentatiously flaunts the trappings of his wealth – thick wads of cash, a giant silver bling-ring on his left hand and, of course, the Hummer.

Johnny Olivier says Punpitak, whom he most frequently refers to by his
farang
name, Peter, is ‘the biggest bullshitter I’ve ever met’.

‘Peter went to clubs in Midrand, Rosebank in Johannesburg and Pomona Road. He held a carrot out to the girls: “Do you want to make a quick R5 000? You get to go on holiday, you get R5 000 and all we need is your passport.” Any Thai citizen living here trying to make a buck would take an offer like that in the blink of an eye … Peter would disappear for a night, and the following morning he’d pitch up with copies of two or three Thai girls’ passports.’