Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (9 page)

The South Africans’ sensitivity can be traced to an event that occurred four months before Lukman’s arrest. On 14 July 1988, an American environmentalist, Craig van Note, presented a written statement to a US congressional committee. South Africa, he claimed, had become ‘one of the largest wildlife outlaws in the world’.

‘According to reliable sources in Africa, a massive smuggling ring has been operating for years, with the complicity of South African officials at the highest level of government and military, to funnel ivory and other contraband out of Africa.

‘Jonas Savimbi and his UNITA rebel forces in Angola, largely supplied by South Africa, have ruthlessly liquidated perhaps 100 000 elephants to help finance the war. Most of the tusks have been carried out on South African air transports or trucks … the South African staging post at Rundu in the Caprivi Strip warehouses the contraband. Tractor-trailers then transport the ivory across South West Africa to South Africa … The South African military has cynically aided the virtual annihilation of the once-great elephant herds of Angola.’ The rhino population had also been targeted, Van Note said.

South Africa demanded Van Note identify his sources and turn over evidence backing his claims. He refused. But the barrage of publicity unleashed by his revelations had done damage. Brigadier Ben de Wet Roos, who had commanded South African troops during the invasion of Angola in 1976, was hauled out of retirement to head a military board of inquiry. Its terms of reference are restricted to allegations of illegal trade in ivory. The hearings are held in secret and the final report classified and buried.

On a chilly November day, a federal grand jury indicts eight people implicated in the ‘Wiseguy’ sting. Lukman, the ringleader, will be arraigned on seventeen charges, including counts of conspiracy to smuggle endangered species and AK-47s. He faces up to seventy-seven years in the slammer if convicted, the press tell their readers. He’s out on a $227 000 bond, which was posted by his father. Russell Beveridge, thirty-three, the friend who was entrusted with the horn Lukman had fetched from Chicago, faces a twenty-one-year sentence. Mary Ann McAllister, also thirty-three, Lukman’s girlfriend, is looking at eleven years in prison. Isaac Saada, fifty-two, the guy from New Jersey who had bought the stuffed leopard from Lukman in February, could go down for seven. Martin Sher, forty-three, is accused of conspiring to import and sell a leopard-skin rug. He’s a bit-player. Six years.

And then there are the South Africans: Marius and Pat Meiring, and Sergeant Major Waldemar Schutte. For now, they’re safe in South Africa. But, if they are ever extradited, the Meirings will face ten counts each and a possible fifty years in jail, along with $2.5 million in fines. Schutte is indicted on two
counts, which carry a maximum ten-year jail term. In December, prosecutors charge two more people with aiding the conspiracy: Kenneth R. Hussey, fifty-one, and Joseph F. Riley, forty-one. Both had helped Lukman raise funds for his South West African adventure.

While the Americans gather their evidence in preparation for the case against Lukman, the SADF is hard at work covering its tracks. On 7 December 1988, a few weeks after the inquiry was announced, the public relations department issues a turgid press release. It is a whitewash. The Roos board of inquiry ‘found there was no evidence to prove that the defence force was responsible for, or involved in, the killing of elephants … The board also found that the figures given for the elephant population in Angola in Mr van Note’s report could not be substantiated.’

It quotes ‘leading conservationists’, who place the elephant population at ‘no more than 12 400’.

‘We take exception to being regarded as the outlaws of the wildlife world, which indicates [Van Note’s] obvious lack of knowledge regarding wildlife matters in South Africa.’

9 February 1989

Hussey is the first to take a plea, admitting his guilt and confessing to investing $25 000 in Lukman’s scheme. He is later fined $2 500. Then Lukman falls on his sword. On 23 February 1989, he pleads guilty to four counts, including the sale of the stuffed leopard to Saada, the importation of an AK-47 and the smuggling of two rhino horns. As part of a plea deal, prosecutors ditch thirteen other charges. His girlfriend, McAllister, follows suit, admitting to her role in the shipment of a leopard skin. Two charges against her are dropped.

Then news breaks that South African authorities are willing to co-operate. Twardy is quoted as saying that they recently determined ‘this is an extraditable
case’. On 20 April, Lukman’s attorney turns over a package to the ATF that had been posted in South West Africa. Inside are sixteen AK-47 magazines and two Soviet F-1 grenades.

It takes another four months before Lukman is sentenced. With barely concealed contempt, the judge describes Lukman as having been part of an ‘international netherworld of marginal characters who deal in guns, join foreign armies and associate with mercenaries’. Lukman is sentenced to twenty-seven months in prison, fined $20 000 and ordered to spend three years under supervision by federal authorities after his release. Not quite seventy-seven years. The other accused are fined between $100 and $10 000 and released on probation. Mary Ann McAllister gets a year’s probation and a $250 fine.

It is more than a year before the South Africans make a move on Meiring. By then he’s left the SADF. On 19 March 1990, he and Pat are picked up by members of the police’s fugitive tracing unit in Berea in central Johannesburg. Initial reports are scant on details. The Afrikaans daily newspaper,
Beeld
, states simply that the couple appeared briefly in the Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court and describes the charges for which they are being sought in the US as ‘related to ivory smuggling’. There is little information about the mysterious Sergeant Major Meiring.

Meiring, it later emerges, cut his teeth in combat with the Rhodesian African Rifles (RAR) in the 1970s as Ian Smith’s regime fought an increasingly futile war against black liberation fighters. When black rule became inevitable, Meiring – like many other disgruntled members of his unit – crossed over to South Africa and joined the SADF.

There, according to military historian Peter Stiff, he assumed control of fifty former members of the RAR. The black soldiers were stationed at Gumbu Mine, a makeshift forward-operating base near the Zimbabwean
border, seven kilometres north-east of Messina (later Musina), as it was known then. In August 1982, ironically on Friday the thirteenth, an assault force with men from Meiring’s group crossed into Zimbabwe on a mission to destroy forty diesel locomotives that Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF government had recently purchased. To ensure deniability for the South Africans, they were clad in old Rhodesian camouflage and carrying AK-47s, RPK machine guns, 60-mm mortars, RPG-7 rocket launchers, landmines, TNT and unmarked rat packs.

The mission was a disaster. Three ex-Rhodesian soldiers were killed in a contact with Zimbabwean National Army troops. The fifteen survivors cut and ran for the South African border, abandoning their kit and materiel. Mugabe said the incident was evidence of ‘South Africa’s programme of destabilisation’. SADF chief General Constand Viljoen denied any South African involvement, saying there were ‘no operations authorised in Zimbabwe’.

Meiring was later absorbed into the SADF. Some US reports around the time of his arrest erroneously suggested that he had joined 32 Battalion, the notorious ‘Buffalo Soldiers’, and had risen through the ranks to become the ‘second-highest ranking’ 32 Battalion officer stationed in Namibia. There are no records of Meiring ever having served in 32 Battalion. The unit’s founder, Colonel Jan Breytenbach, says he believes Meiring may have worked for Military Intelligence. It would have been ‘impossible for him, as a major, to be the second-most senior guy. A general has a shithouse full of colonels under him, and that’s before you even start getting to the majors.’