Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (47 page)

Tommy is a relative newcomer to the trade, one of a growing number of Vietnamese smugglers who are aggressively pursuing a share of the burgeoning market for rhino horn. The Vietnamese community in South Africa is small. Only about seventy Vietnamese nationals are said to have been given permanent residency status in the country, and a number of them have been linked to the illegal trade in rhino horn. According to the wildlife trade-monitoring network TRAFFIC, several Vietnamese students who had registered for courses at South African universities have been arrested in recent years trying to smuggle rhino horn out of the country. But there are others operating on the fringes, remnants of the ‘old school’ that dominated smuggling networks – particularly of ivory and abalone – in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Charles Lee, as he calls himself, is one of them. I have been told that Lee was shopping around for horn. Someone had given me his name, number and an introduction, so I called him up to arrange a meeting. As far as he is concerned, I am the middleman in a transaction that can potentially net him a small fortune. We agree to meet at the News Cafe in Bedfordview, ironically the same place as I had waited with Paul O’Sullivan for police to make a move on Radovan Krejcir.

Lee arrives late, sweating and bustling with apologies and good humour. He takes a seat and calls out to the waitress: ‘Hello, my girlfriend. Cappuccino!’ Then he produces a box of cigarettes and lights the first of many smokes.

He tells me he is originally from Taiwan, but studied in the US in the late 1980s, then found work as a translator on a luxury cruise liner. He was twenty-five when he arrived in Cape Town in 1990. He had a contract with the cruise company, but was soon augmenting his rather paltry income with a black-market currency racket. His English came in handy too.

‘I would do people favours. That’s how I made my money. I helped one Chinese business set up a company. There were lots of jobs for me. I helped people with port control, customs, the police, even the mafia businessmen. I had a good time in Cape Town. There were good women – not just one woman – and nice seafood.’

Lee’s activities gradually expanded. By 1993 and 1994, he says, he was ‘exporting tons of shark fins’ from South Africa. According to Peter Gastrow, a special advisor to the Ministry of Safety and Security in the mid-1990s, Chinese criminal gangs and triad societies were heavily involved at the time in exporting large quantities of dried shark fins from Cape Town via Johannesburg to Hong Kong and ‘other destinations in Southeast Asia’.

In a research paper, published in 2001 by the Institute for Security Studies, Gastrow wrote that police investigations in 1992 and 1993 ‘confirmed for the first time that individuals linked to at least three different triad societies were actively involved and that their illegal activities were much broader than the trade in shark fins … With the assistance of the Hong Kong Police, with whom informal contacts had been established, police established that individuals operating from Cape Town were members of the Hong Kong– based 14K triad, and the Wo Shing Wo triad. The Taiwanese-linked criminal
group active in Cape Town was referred to as the “Table Mountain Gang” at that stage. Police soon discovered that members of these triad societies were also operating in the Johannesburg/Pretoria area, as well as in every harbour city in South Africa.’

I ask Lee about the triads. ‘I don’t get involved with this mafia thing,’ he claims. ‘Sometimes the mafia comes to me to ask for help as a translator. I do a lot of interpreting in the courts, so I get a lot of knowledge by helping people here and there. These Chinese [gangsters] cannot speak proper English when they come to South Africa. We just do business with them. We don’t want to get involved in that violent stuff. We have our own businesses and our own lives.

‘We are not afraid of those kinds of rubbish. They’re small-time. The real leader won’t bother to come here. I met one of the big shots once, but you cannot tell he is one of the mafia leaders. He’s a businessman. You don’t see him shouting and turning over tables like Michael Corleone in the movies. He just gives orders.’

Lee says he enjoyed the coast for a time, but soon found that ‘living in Cape Town is like being in the Stone Age’.

‘To make business, you need to be in Johannesburg. But living in Joburg, you feel like you are living in a jungle. It is totally overwhelming. All my friends have been robbed or hijacked. If you drive a nice car, be careful. That’s why I use a taxi. My car is in a garage in Polokwane. I leave it there. I’m low profile.’

If it isn’t the criminals robbing you, it is the police, he says. ‘People get arrested without a warrant. When the cops see a Chinese, they see an ATM. All the police want are bribes. Every month from the 25th to the 5th, they go for the Chinese.’

‘Except here,’ he adds, nodding in the direction of the police station across the road from our table. ‘The police here get good salaries and if you make a donation to them, they are happy.’

The conversation drifts back to business. Lee – who tells me he is there on behalf of ‘a friend’ – wants to know the price I can offer him. ‘Eighty-five thousand a kilo,’ I thumb-suck. I know I am pushing my luck. But I want to test him. The going rate from pseudo-hunts is about R65 000 a kilo.

‘Eighty-five is too high,’ he says. ‘My friend knows the value. I don’t want to waste your time. Perhaps 60 000 …?’

I tell him I’ll think it over. But first I want to know more about his ‘friend’. Who am I in ‘business’ with exactly?

‘You don’t have to think twice,’ Lee replies. ‘We are simply business people. We plan well. We start with a few pieces, maybe 100 pieces or fifty pieces. Money is not an issue.’

His friend has a wide range of ‘commodity’ interests in South Africa, Mozambique and Ghana. ‘My friend is one of the biggest buyers. He wants tons of horn. But if the connection isn’t secure, he doesn’t want to get involved. My friend has traded horn before in another country, not here. The shipment will go through two or three different countries before it is moved out. That way everything is clean. There is no trace. You can feel secure. You are dealing with professionals.’

I tell Lee that the man I ‘represent’ has access to a relatively large stockpile of horn. But it is illegal to sell it and illegal to buy it. How can we pull off the deal?

‘Look, your friend is sitting on a cash mountain, a gold mountain. But he is crying for money. The solution is simple. We arrange a place for the pickup, we collect the goods and your friend announces that it was stolen. Nobody will blame him and he’ll get his money.’

I ask Lee about the uses of rhino horn. ‘The number-one use is for blood circulation. There are also rumours that it helps a person who has contracted cancer to live longer. But it doesn’t really cure the disease. It just helps the rich people to extend their life, enough time to write the will.’ He laughs.

We finish our coffees. Before we part company, Lee warns me not to mention the ‘product’ by name over the phone. ‘Call it something else. Let’s call it “lady head”. And when you’re ready, let us know. You can take us to the place, we can make sure there is no GPS [tracker] in the shipment and we can take it from there. If you are happy, we can do more business.’

23 April 2008

Tommy arrives in Kimberley after dark and hours late for the meeting with the seller. He goes straight to the Road Lodge and checks into a room. He isn’t alone. He’s brought along a friend to look after the money and act as the
bagman during the deal. Tommy calls the seller and asks him to come to the hotel. The man agrees. He asks Tommy if he’ll mind if the owner of the horn comes along too. Tommy doesn’t. They meet in the parking lot. Tommy tells the men he has brought R1.4 million in cash, but he doesn’t have it with him. He insists on doing the transaction at the Road Lodge and not at another hotel, as originally planned. He doesn’t know the town well and doesn’t want to drive around. He confides that he is scared to go anywhere else, because it could be a ‘police trap’. The men relent. To avoid any misunderstandings about the legality of the deal, they warn Tommy that they don’t have permits for the horns. It won’t be necessary, he says.

An hour later, they are back. One of the men carries a heavy duffel bag over his shoulder. Tommy is waiting for them in the lobby and guides them up the stairs to his room on the first floor. They lock the door, shut the windows and close the curtains. There is an electronic scale on a table. Tommy switches it on and begins weighing the horns. On the bed, an ashtray slowly smoulders, filling up with cigarette butts, blackened and burnt to the quick. Tommy jots down the weights in red ink on a scrap of paper. Some of the horns still have ragged pieces of nasal cartilage attached to the bases. The final tally is 20.559 kilograms. Tommy subtracts 200 grams to factor in the unwanted cartilage. At R63 000 a kilo, it comes to a total of R1 282 617. They round the figure off to R1 280 million.

Tommy places a call on his cellphone. A few minutes later, someone raps on the door. Knock. Pause. Knock-knock. Pause. Knock. Satisfied, Tommy unlocks it. A pair of white takkies flashes into view and disappears. Tommy reaches into the corridor, picks up a black carry-bag and returns to the room. He locks the door, then heaves the bag onto the bed and begins unpacking the cash. He is so absorbed in his task that he doesn’t notice one of the men press the green dial button on his cellphone. Somewhere outside, another cellphone rings briefly and then stops.

There’s a hard knock at the door. Tommy goes to see who it is. But the seller is already in front of him, pulling on the handle, and then another man
pushes his way into the room. He’s saying something. About being a policeman. Tommy freezes. Then the disbelief and shock kick in.

Tommy’s wrists are cuffed. The money on the bed is photographed, packed into two large plastic evidence bags, and numbered. Someone finds the pistol, six rounds of 6.35mm ammo and a single 9mm round. Once the room has been searched, Tommy is taken away. The bagman has vanished.

In the hotel parking lot, police find and impound the Honda. Earlier in the day, everyone involved in the operation had been briefed to keep an eye out for it. Under no circumstances, they were told, should Tommy be allowed to transfer the horns to the car. The vehicle’s registration number is D BBB 127D: ‘D’ for ‘diplomatic’. The registered owner is Pham Cong Dung, the political counsellor at the Vietnamese embassy. Next to the ambassador, he is the most senior Vietnamese diplomat in South Africa.

For some time now, the embassy in Brooklyn, Pretoria, has been a thorn in the flesh of the cops investigating the illegal rhino horn trade. Two years before Tommy Tuan’s arrest, police had uncovered evidence that the embassy’s economic attaché, Nguyen Khanh Toan, was using his diplomatic immunity and the diplomatic bag to smuggle rhino horns out of South Africa. There was little they could do about it other than complain. South Africa’s Department of Foreign Affairs wrote a nasty letter to their Vietnamese counterparts and Nguyen was recalled to Vietnam.

That same year, in Hanoi, a corruption scandal involving a senior Vietnamese bureaucrat, Nguyen Van Lam, led to further damaging revelations of high-level involvement in the rhino horn trade. Lam – the deputy head of the Vietnamese ‘Government Office’ – had reportedly ‘admitted shortcomings’ in accepting ‘cash gifts’ from state agencies three years earlier. He was forced to resign. The bribes had come to light years earlier after Lam forgot a suitcase at Hanoi Airport in 2003. Security staff opened the case and found ten envelopes inside it, stuffed with cash. Lam’s explanation was startling. He said most of the cash was from ‘friends and colleagues’ who wanted him to buy ‘rhino horns’ for them.