Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (48 page)

In South Africa, increasing numbers of Vietnamese couriers and middlemen were appearing in court on charges of smuggling rhino horn. Most of them were either unable or unwilling to speak English and, as a result, the courts were heavily reliant on the Vietnamese embassy for referrals to qualified interpreters. Tommy’s brother – as it so happened – was one these ‘preferred’ translators.

It wasn’t long before police investigators found evidence directly implicating some of the interpreters in the illicit trade. In one instance, police at the Kempton Park Organised Crime Unit obtained a photograph of a man posing next to the carcass of a rhino, a rifle in hand. A detective instantly recognised him as one of the interpreters in the trial of a courier who had been arrested at OR Tambo International Airport with rhino horn stuffed in his bag.

Two days after Tommy’s arrest, police receive a letter from Dung. He wants his car back. He has an explanation. ‘On 23rd April 2008, Mr. Nguyen Thien Tuan, aquaintance [
sic
] of my relative Nguyen Anh Bao, dropped in my residence and said that his car was out of order, and asked Mr. Bao to borrow the car. Then he took my car and went away until yesterday, 24th April when I was informed that my car was catched [
sic
] by police in Kemberley [
sic
]. I assure hereby that I know nothing about Mr. Tuan’s doing neither the borrowing of the car and would like to get my car back for use as soon as possible.’ The Department of Foreign Affairs leans on the cops. Four days later, Nguyen Anh Bao, armed with a letter from Dung, collects the Honda in Kimberley.

But Dung’s stated ignorance will be challenged seven months later. On 17 November 2008, the environmental television programme
50/50
airs grainy surveillance footage of a Vietnamese embassy official receiving a number of rhino horns from a known trafficker. The horns are transferred from the boot of a car that has stopped in the street outside the embassy. Dung’s Honda is parked nearby. The recipient of the horns is later identified as Vu Moc Anh, the embassy’s first secretary.

This time, the embassy reacts. The ambassador, Tran Duy Thi, tells Vietnam’s
Tuôi Tre
newspaper that ‘so far Ms. Moc Anh is insisting she was just helping people’. She denies any involvement in rhino horn smuggling and claims she only ‘helped transfer’ the horns. ‘Ms. Moc Anh said she had received a call at noon offering to sell her rhino horns, but she declined,’ the ambassador tells the journalist. ‘Some time later she received calls from two Vietnamese asking her to help by “having a look at the horns”.’ According to the ambassador, Anh told him she ‘came out [of the embassy] to have a look and help handle the horns for them’.

The newspaper also tracks down Dung and asks him about his car, which, unusually, was parked in the street outside the embassy during the transaction. Normally it would be parked inside the embassy walls. ‘The car is registered under my name,’ he admits, ‘but I was not the one to use it on that day.’

In the days that follow, Ambassador Thi condemns the incident. ‘This is a highly reprehensible act … stemming from pure greed. This is not just a private act; it is one that has a repercussion on the embassy and the image of Vietnam itself.’ He claims that staff at the embassy had been ‘repeatedly cautioned not to engage in such activity’. On 20 November, Vietnam’s foreign ministry announces that Anh has been recalled to ‘clarify the affair’. Some time later, Dung also leaves South Africa.

The South African government says nothing, opting to sit on the fence and engage in ‘quiet diplomacy’. A senior official in the Department of Environmental Affairs, Magdel Boshoff, is given the uncomfortable task of relaying the message.

‘At this stage we will not request … an investigation. We don’t want to prejudice diplomatic relations with Vietnam,’ she tells
50/50
.

The story soon fades from the newspapers. But questions remain about Anh. There are unconfirmed reports that she has been posted to another African country, possibly Mozambique. In March 2012, in response to questions from the Wildlife Conservation Society, Vietnam’s foreign affairs ministry says there is ‘no evidence of Moc Anh’s involvement in rhino horn dealing in both Vietnam and South Africa’. It says it accepts Anh’s version that she was filmed while ‘helping a rhino horn dealer review his papers’ and ‘was not involved in the deal’.

Tommy is released on bail. His case drags on for nearly two years. In February 2009, the then Minister of Environmental Affairs, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, announces a moratorium on the trade in rhino horns and products within South Africa. Two months later, according to TRAFFIC, Tommy is seen making ‘several trips’ to game ranches near Vryburg in North West province. Later, local residents find him alongside a road claiming to have been the victim of an attempted car hijacking and the theft of ‘large sums of money’. He hurriedly leaves the scene a short while afterwards and never files a report with the police. It is widely believed that Tommy may have got himself caught up in a rhino horn deal ‘gone wrong’. In May 2009, Tommy and his wife, Tran Thu Hien, obtain permits to hunt two white rhinos in KwaZulu-Natal. In January the following year, the couple obtains two more permits, to hunt rhinos in the Free State. The address they provide in their applications is on a main thoroughfare in Hanoi, not Port Elizabeth.

Eventually Tommy is found guilty of illegal possession of rhino horn. In March 2010, he is fined R200 000 or two years’ imprisonment. The magistrate suspends a portion of the sentence for a period of five years on provision that Tommy not be convicted of a similar offence. The cash from the hotel room is forfeited to the State. Tommy opts to pay the fine. Not long afterwards, he returns to Vietnam. His wife remains behind in South Africa.

In January 2011, she and a twenty-two-year-old man, Phuong Huynh Phat, are arrested at Wonderboom Airport near Pretoria. Four rhino horns worth about R400 000 are found in their possession. Police had been tipped off ahead of their arrival and were waiting when they landed in a private helicopter. The chopper belongs to Dawie Groenewald, the notorious game farmer and safari operator from Limpopo.

Both Hien and Phat are adamant that they participated in legal hunts on Groenewald’s farm, but later Phat pleads guilty to illegally possessing and conveying two horns. He is fined R100 000 and given a suspended sentence of four years’ imprisonment. The horns and a piece of rhino skin are forfeited to the State. Interestingly, Phat may have hunted another rhino in Limpopo a year before his arrest. In January 2010, records show that a
hunting permit had been issued to a ‘Huynphat Phuong’ by Limpopo provincial authorities. At the time of writing, Hien continues to fight the case and maintains her innocence.

In September 2011, a court order is granted giving the State the power to seize Tommy’s assets as proceeds of crime. These include a Mercedes-Benz E500, a Toyota Hilux and a R1.8-million house he bought in a quiet suburban street in Port Elizabeth in 2009.

30 June 2010

Xuan Hoang cuts a pathetic figure in the dock of the Kempton Park Regional Court. His eyes are dark smudges, his shoulders bent. Grubby clothes hang on a painfully thin frame. Somewhere below him a cell door slams shut and the sound reverberates up the stairs from the holding cells to the dock. He winces. Around him, there is a babble of conversation. Fragments of Afrikaans, Sotho and English – none of which he understands. To his right sits the Vietnamese interpreter. He’s bored, fiddling with his Blackberry.

Hoang is twenty-nine and married with two children. He works as a security guard in Hanoi and earns about $100 a month – easy cannon fodder for a syndicate willing to pay him ten times that amount to collect a package in South Africa.

On 29 March 2010, Hoang jetted into OR Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg – the first time he had ever flown on an aeroplane. He had been told that someone would be waiting for him with a suitcase. His instructions were to collect the bag and take the next flight out. He did as he had been told.

As Hoang cleared immigration on his way to board the outward flight, he was stopped by customs agents and taken aside for his luggage to be searched. Packed in the suitcase were seven rhino horns weighing just over sixteen kilograms. Hoang was arrested. He told his interrogators that he never opened the bag and had no idea what was inside it.

In court, Hoang pleads guilty to charges of fraud and illegal possession of rhino horn. Mario Scholtz, a veteran wildlife investigator, formerly with the police’s Endangered Species Protection Unit and now with Environmental

Crime Investigations at SANParks, is called to testify in aggravation of sentence. So far in 2010, Scholtz tells the court, South Africa has lost rhinos worth R40.6 million. Horn is being bought in South Africa at R55 000 a kilo and sold on the black market in Vietnam for nearly three times that. An example should be set.

Hoang’s lawyer asks the court for mercy. His client was only a courier, he says, a poor man with a family that depends on him. The presiding magistrate, a man with the suitably regal name of Prince Manyathi, is unmoved. His court catches the bulk of the smuggling cases detected at OR Tambo, a few minutes’ drive away. There has been a dramatic growth in the numbers of rhino horns being intercepted. But the syndicates keep learning and adapting. They’re an inventive lot. Horns are cut up to mask their shapes, after which they are sometimes divided up into different suitcases. Others are hidden inside moulds and plaster statues. In some cases, real horns are concealed inside fake ones.

But with each seizure the customs officials are growing more adept at finding the contraband. They now know what to look for on the X-ray-machine monitors. And the EWT, with the help of police and prosecutors, has conducted extensive training sessions on species identification, legislation, crime-scene management and court proceedings. If they’re still unsure, there’s always the old ten-rand test that they were shown in the days when specialist training wasn’t available. ‘If you don’t know what you’re looking at,’ one instructor taught them, ‘take a ten-rand note out of your wallet and look at the picture of the rhino on the front. That’s the shape of the horn. That is what you should be seeing.’

They’re aided by newly trained sniffer dogs that have been imprinted to smell out rhino horns. (Customs officers prefer to refer to their animals as detector dogs. ‘It’s not like they have a cold or a runny nose,’ one told me indignantly.) The syndicates go to extraordinary lengths to hide the stench of decay. Horns are wrapped in foil or cling wrap. Toothpaste or shampoo is smeared inside the suitcases. Even naphthalene balls have been used. It may fool humans, but it doesn’t fool the dogs.

Manyathi clears his throat. The fact that Hoang may only have been a courier is not an extenuating factor, he says. ‘Fines are clearly not a deterrent … You
travelled to South Africa knowing that you were going to do something illegal. The purpose was self-enrichment, without any consideration for what the damage would be.’ He sentences Hoang to ten years’ imprisonment, without the option of a fine.

The severity of the sentence is unprecedented. For years, stiff fines and suspended prison terms have been the norm. To the syndicates they’re little more than a costly inconvenience; an added business expense that can be recouped on later shipments.