KRUGER NATIONAL PARK, South Africa — They definitely did not look like
ordinary big-game hunters, the stream of slender young Thai women who
showed up on the veld wearing tight bluejeans and sneakers.
Articles in this series explore how the surge in poaching in Africa both feeds off and fuels instability on the continent.
Joao Silva/The New York Times
But the rhinoceros carcasses kept piling up around them, and it was only
after dozens of these hulking, relatively rare animals were dead and
their precious horns sawed off that an extravagant scheme came to light.
The Thai women, it ends up, were not hunters at all. Many never even
squeezed off a shot. Instead, they were prostitutes hired by a criminal
syndicate based 6,000 miles away in Laos
to exploit loopholes in big-game hunting rules and get its hands on as
many rhino horns as possible — horns that are now worth more than gold.
“These girls had no idea what they were doing,” said Paul O’Sullivan, a
private investigator in Johannesburg who helped crack the case. “They
thought they were going on safari.”
The rhino horn rush has gotten so out of control that it has exploded
into a worldwide criminal enterprise, drawing in a surreal cast of
characters — not just Thai prostitutes, but also Irish gangsters,
Vietnamese diplomats, Chinese scientists, veterinarians, copter pilots,
antiques dealers and recently an American rodeo star looking for a quick
buck who used Facebook to find some horns.
Driven by a common belief in Asia that ground-up rhino horns can cure
cancer and other ills, the trade has also been embraced by criminal
syndicates that normally traffic drugs and guns, but have branched into
the underground animal parts business because it is seen as “low risk,
high profit,” American officials say.
“Get caught smuggling a kilo of cocaine, you will receive a very
significant prison sentence,” said Ed Grace, a deputy chief with the
United States Fish and Wildlife Service. But with a kilogram of rhino
horn, he added, “you may only get a fine.”
The typical rhino horn is about two feet long and 10 pounds, much of it
formed from the same substance as fingernails. Yet it can fetch nearly
$30,000 a pound, more than crack cocaine, and conservationists worry
that this “ridiculous price,” as one wildlife manager put it, could
drive rhinos into extinction.
Gangs are so desperate for new sources of horn that criminals have even
smashed into dozens of glass museum cases all across Europe to snatch
them from exhibits.
“Astonishment and rage, that’s what we felt,” said Paolo Agnelli, a
manager at the Florence Museum of Natural History, after three rhino
horns were stolen last year, including a very rare one from 1824.
American federal agents recently staged a cross-country undercover rhino
horn sting operation, called Operation Crash, “crash” being the term
for a herd of rhinos.
Among the 12 people arrested: Wade Steffen, a champion steer wrestler
from Texas, who pleaded guilty in May to trafficking dozens of horns
that he found through hunters, estate sales and Facebook; and two
members of an Irish gang — the same gang suspected of breaking into the
museums in Europe.
In an e-mail to an undercover agent, an Irish gangster bragged: “Believe
me WE NEVER LOSES A HORN TO CUSTOMS, we have so many contacts and
people payed off now we can bring anything we want out of nearly any
country into Europe.”
Corruption is a huge element, just like in the illegal ivory trade, in
which rebel groups, government armies and threadbare hunters have been
wiping out tens of thousands of elephants throughout Africa, selling the
tusks to sophisticated criminal networks that move them across the
globe with the help of corrupt officials.
Here in South Africa, home to the majority of the world’s last surviving
28,000 rhinos or so, the country is throwing just about everything it
has to stop the slaughter — thousands of rangers, the national army, a
new spy plane, even drones — but it is losing.
The number of rhinos poached in South Africa has soared in the past five
years, from 13 killed in 2007 to more than 630 in 2012. The
prehistoric, battleship-gray animals are often found on their knees,
bleeding to death from a gaping stump on their face.
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