Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (6 page)

Blondie Leathem is a veteran of the Bush War and fought with the Rhodesian Light Infantry, an elite airborne commando unit known as ‘The Saints’ or ‘The Incredibles’. He was badly wounded in combat, suffering a gunshot wound to the stomach and losing two fingers on his left hand. He spent a year recovering in hospital and then returned to the RLI. At the end of the war, when the unit was disbanded, he signed up with Zimparks, took a substantial cut in pay, and found himself in the middle of a new war.

By 1986, the number of incursions by armed poachers had risen to 150 a year. There were frantic efforts to move black rhinos out of the lower Zambezi Valley, the area closest to the border. Over the course of the next three years, 170 would be translocated to the relative safety of private lands in central and southern Zimbabawe.

In the Zambezi Valley, dozens of poachers were being killed. ‘The poachers were coming across the river in dugouts. A lot of [them] had AK-47s. The fire-fights were usually over quickly. If you didn’t get them down in the first couple of seconds, they were gone.’

‘It got really ugly,’ Leathem says. ‘We had
carte blanche
and we hammered them, but it didn’t help, of course. More guys just kept coming. We had one period where we killed ten guys in fourteen days. And then it went quiet. For three weeks there wasn’t a single incursion. But after three weeks, they came back with a vengeance. It turned out, from our informant, that these
okes
had gone back to the middleman and said: “It’s dangerous over there. We’re not going back.” The middleman then simply upped the price per kilogram from $300 to $800. Now, they had three times the number of guys prepared to come in and risk it.’

Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, was a key hub in the international rhino horn and ivory trade. The police were easily corrupted and turned a blind eye to the traders. Leathem and his men ran their own groups of informants, but were careful not to pay them in cash and risk violating currency regulations. The Zambians were so poor that the informers routinely did their work for a few cigarettes, cooking oil, maize, cakes of soap and cheap digital watches.

Norman English was a senior ranger at the time. ‘We got sorted properly there. I remember one day when I had six gangs in my area with an average
of four to six guys in a gang. When you have fourteen scouts to take them on, you’re not going to win. We lost 104 rhino in three years.’

In one incident in 1989, English’s scouts found a gang of six in the Chizarira National Park. Once described as the black rhino’s last Eden, it is a spectacularly beautiful landscape with deep gorges and panoramic views. A tour guide had taken a group of tourists up to a viewpoint overlooking a gorge. Three hundred metres below, he spotted a group of six men bathing in a river. On the bank were military backpacks and kit. He radioed English.

‘It was a group of poachers,’ English says. ‘They felt so secure that they were bathing there in the middle of the day. We killed five and caught the last bugger. In their camp we found heavy weapons and thirty-two rhino horns.’

As the killings in the Zambezi Valley mounted, so did criticism of the operation, both within the Zimbabwean government and from human rights organisations abroad. Relations between Zimbabwean police, Central Intelligence Organisation operatives and the Zimparks rangers grew increasingly strained.

‘It was a helluva thing being a white guy in charge of anti-poaching operations where you were shooting black
ouens
,’ Leathem says. ‘By the end of 1987, I had been locked up on three occasions by police. It was getting beyond a joke.’ He was arrested for murder after a suspected poacher – the son of a senior Zambian police official – drowned in the Zambezi River. Later, Leathem was accused of being a South African spy. Glenn Tatham was also arrested and accused of murdering a poacher on an undercover operation. The cases were all eventually dismissed. Of the shootings, Leathem told a
Time
magazine reporter at the time: ‘Trying to arrest a man with an AK-47 is like trying to grab a lion with your bare hands.’

By the end of the war in the Zambezi Valley in 1993, more than 170 poachers were dead. At least four Zimbabwe park rangers had lost their lives. And more than a thousand rhinos had been killed for their horns. The killing stopped, but only when there were no more rhinos left to kill.

By the mid-1990s, the surviving rhinos in Zimbabwe’s parks along the border with Zambia had all been translocated to the Lowveld. Driven by Raoul du Toit, a conservationist and rhino specialist, a number of conservancies had been created as safe havens for the animals. They were on land
that had previously been used for cattle ranching. But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a series of crippling droughts hit the Lowveld. Coupled with decades of exploitative cattle farming and overgrazing, the impact was devastating.

Clive Stockil, later chairman of the Savé Valley Conservancy, said at the time that the cattle ranches ‘were headed for an economic disaster, let alone an ecological disaster’.

‘We saw soil erosion. We saw overgrazing. We saw the loss of perennial grasses. And we were forced, by the end of the 1980s, to sit down and really think about what our future was.’ Encouraged by a feasibility study which concluded that conservancies, through tourism and hunting, could generate double the income of cattle ranching, many farmers began to embrace the idea.

Fences between farms were dropped and properties were linked into ever larger conservancies. Without them, Zimbabwe would have no black rhinos today.

‘Killing poachers doesn’t achieve anything,’ Leathem says. ‘There are so many poor guys out there and criminal elements that are prepared to take the risk to make quick bucks. No matter how many of them you shoot or arrest, you’ll never stop it. The only way is to cull the market. You have got to get to the guys at the top.’

The obituary buried in the pages of the
Hartford Courant
on 27 July 2007 ran to barely a dozen lines. A dry, characterless assessment of a life lived, it recorded the sudden passing of John C. Lukman Jnr in Costa Rica on 7 July 2007 at the age of fifty-three.

Lukman, also known as ‘Captain Jack’, was a resident of Newington, Connecticut, for most of his life before moving to Central America in 2001, the obituary noted. He was survived by his father, three daughters and two granddaughters. ‘He loved them dearly and will be missed by all.’ A small gathering of remembrance was planned.

The only hint at Lukman’s identity and life was included almost as an afterthought. ‘He loved to travel and did so extensively in Africa and Central America.’

A year later, someone started digging for information. Logs of requests made to the Central Intelligence Agency under the Freedom of Information Act show that on 4 September 2008, the CIA received a request for access to files on John Charles Lukman Jnr. The identity of the applicant is not listed and there is no indication whether the files – if they exist – were ever released.

2 June 1988

Special Agent Rich Moulton checks the microphone taped to the centre of his chest and buttons up his shirt. He is used to wearing a wire. ‘I have no chest hair left as a result,’ he likes to joke. He has worked undercover for much of
the fourteen years he has spent with the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). In law-enforcement circles, he and his colleagues are sometimes disparagingly referred to as ‘duck cops’. It is not something any of them pay much heed to.

Moulton has that rare, chameleon-like ability, so prized in undercover agents, of being able to become his cover story. It is a bit like being a method actor, only the stakes are far higher. Early in his career, Moulton hadn’t thought he could cut it as an undercover operative. ‘But the more comfortable you got, the more you realised that, hey, this is like being an actor. You just gotta remember the script.’

Once he posed as a wealthy collector to trap a New Yorker who was smuggling snow-leopard skins from Afghanistan and selling them for US$15 000 each. At the time there were fewer than 2 000 of the animals left in the world. Moulton swapped his jeans for suits and his wheels for a Corvette and an SUV. He pretended that another agent was his chauffeur.

Today, he’s Rick Moore, a businessman who buys exotic animal trophies and resells them to home decorators. Moulton has code-named the sting ‘Operation Wiseguy’, a name he borrowed from a popular TV show. Moulton is a fan. Every Thursday night, he and millions of other viewers tune in to the improbable exploits of undercover agent Vinnie Terranova as he takes on the Mob. It is fantasy stuff, complete with gunfights, car chases and vehicles that invariably explode on impact. Even the stakeouts are exciting. There will be none of that today.

The Berlin Diner is a nondescript little eatery in the small town of Berlin in Hartford County, Connecticut. It is a sleepy place with a population of around 16 000. In the street outside the diner, Bob Clifford, a special agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), is sitting in a parked car, fiddling with a radio receiver and a sandwich. He stifles a yawn and shifts uncomfortably in his seat. It could be a long afternoon.

Moulton’s sixth-floor office in downtown Hartford is run on a barebones budget and the kind of electronic surveillance equipment he needs for the sting isn’t readily available. So he’d turned to the ATF. Clifford was
assigned as back-up, and the suits approved access to the ATF’s repository of gadgets. It would be good to work with a buddy. Rich and Bob went back a long way.

Clifford had been briefed about the case. Four months ago, a guy in Hartford had put out word that he had a stuffed leopard mount for sale. A sports hunter could legally own a leopard trophy, provided he’d taken the trouble to get the requisite permits and paperwork filled out. Selling the trophy, however, was a federal crime, prosecutable under the Lacey Act, America’s oldest national wildlife statute, which made it illegal to import or export wildlife in violation of any federal, state, Indian or – significantly – foreign law.

Moulton had followed up the tip and called the seller. ‘Hi. My name’s Rick Moore,’ he’d introduced himself, before going on to explain that he had a small decorating business and was looking for trophies. ‘You the guy who’s got the leopard for sale?’

‘Yeah,’ said the voice on the other end of the line. ‘But I sold it.’ The buyer had been a guy in New Jersey. He did, however, have a mounted leopard head for about 500 bucks, if ‘Rick’ was interested.

‘I’ll think it over,’ Moulton said, and left his number. Later, the man called back and said he also had a leopard-skin rug for sale. ‘How much?’ Moulton asked.

‘One thousand two hundred dollars’

‘It’s a deal,’ Moulton said.

They met for the first time in a parking lot. Moulton was accompanied by another agent. Their target was a lean, bearded man in his mid-thirties with jet-black hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He was kitted out in a ‘jungle outfit’. Khaki seemed to be his colour of choice. Perched on his head was a safari hat with a zebra-stripe band. He clutched a black elephant-skin bag. There and then Moulton decided on a nickname. From now on he’d call him ‘Shaka’, after the nineteenth-century Zulu king and warrior.

‘I’m Rick,’ Moulton said. ‘This is my business associate,’ he added, pointing at the other agent. Moulton handed over $500 in cash for the head, which they stashed in the boot of his car. He gave the man a cheque for $1 200 for the rug, which would be delivered only once it had cleared. Warming to his
new client, Shaka boasted that he had contacts in South West Africa and Zimbabwe who could supply other trophies, including endangered species. Moulton decided to push him. ‘What about rhino horn? Can you get it?’ he asked.

‘No dice, that’s taboo,’ Shaka said tersely. Normally, Moulton would end the case right there with a bust-and-buy. But something told him to hold back and let this one play itself out.

Their next meeting took place in another lot, outside a movie theatre. Shaka pulled up in a Land Rover with a personalised Connecticut licence plate that read ‘ZAMBIA’. A bumper sticker proclaimed: ‘I love Africa’. With him was his girlfriend, Mary Ann McAllister. ‘Shaka’, it seemed, had begun to trust his new friend, ‘Rick’.