The Falcon Thief

by Joshua Hammer

  Still, Mullin’s brush with the authorities chastened him. He legally changed his name and received a fresh passport under his new identity. He had occasional business in Canada and took Tremblay’s warning seriously; the last thing he wanted was to find himself turned back at the Canadian border. And he vowed never to accompany Lendrum on another egg stealing mission. It had been fun, but he should have known there would be consequences. Lendrum was too much of a risk-taker.

  Lendrum, too, seemed spooked by the arrest. “That was it,” he told Mullin when they returned to England. “The show’s over.” He would scale down his global wanderings for a while, mostly staying put in England with his French-Algerian girlfriend, and focus on running AfricaXtreme. But Lendrum was not a person who could sit still for long—especially when so many wild falcons were nesting just a short drive away.

  THIRTEEN THE UNIT

  By 2002, the year Jeffrey Lendrum was arrested in northern Canada for stealing wild gyrfalcon eggs, British lawmakers were starting to become serious about fighting wildlife crime. Just fifteen years earlier, the only institutions investigating such offenses were private animal-welfare charities like the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Guy Shorrock at the RSPB had even mounted private criminal prosecutions against falcon poisoners and other animal abusers—applying for summonses, taking evidence, and hiring attorneys—because no law enforcement agency seemed willing to take them on. Only a few police forces had a dedicated wildlife officer, and the stiffest penalty one could receive for poaching, smuggling, or harming animals was a small fine.

  Now about half of the forty-three police forces in England and Wales employed full-time wildlife cops. Some had two. The 2000 Countryside and Rights of Way Act had imposed jail sentences for wildlife offenses, including two years for the taking, sale, or killing of protected birds. (In 2005 Parliament would raise the maximum penalty to five years.) And Richard Brunstrom, the chief constable of North Wales and one of Britain’s most high-profile law enforcement figures, had proposed creating an intelligence team dedicated to tracking down wildlife criminals.

  Brunstrom, a longtime colleague of Andy McWilliam’s—they had met at a conference when Brunstrom was the national police “lead,” or specialist in a chiefs’ committee, on wildlife crime—took an aggressive and often controversial approach to police work. He had once cracked down on public urination by having officers haul buckets and mops on patrol and order offenders to clean up their messes or face arrest. In his zeal to stop speeders, he’d proposed tripling roadside cameras and hiding traffic cops behind billboards and bushes, leading British tabloids to dub him the “Mad Mullah of the Traffic Taliban.” He filmed himself being stunned by a fifty-thousand-volt taser to prove that it wasn’t lethal. (Footage on the department’s website showed him crying out as his legs buckled.) He climbed scaffolding and broke into his own office late one night to expose security lapses within the police department.

  Brunstrom was also a conservationist with a degree in zoology from Bangor University in North Wales; he’d advanced halfway through a Ph.D. in the subject before joining the police. So he grasped the growing threat of wildlife crime and the sophistication of some of its perpetrators. The trade went far beyond the familiar smuggling of elephant ivory and rhino horn from African game parks to the Far East. It involved hundreds of protected species, global networks, and often-violent perpetrators. It extended from East Java, where smugglers were wiping out the island’s population of yellow-crested cockatoos; to the Brazilian Amazon, where a British pet shop owner would be caught with one thousand rare spiders (including tarantulas) hidden in his suitcases; to Guyana, where traffickers sedated chestnut-bellied seed finches with rum, stuffed them inside hair curlers, and shipped them illegally to New York City, where local impresarios staged contests pitting caged finches against each other to see which one could reach fifty whistles the fastest.

  The National Wildlife Crime Intelligence Unit, as the National Wildlife Crime Unit’s precursor was called, started operations in London in 2002. The Independent reported that the new unit would “use investigative tactics similar to those deployed against drug barons, such as undercover operations and bugging suspects,” to combat what was estimated as a “£5 billion a year illegal business.” But Brunstrom’s vision was ahead of its time: the unit had a minuscule budget and just three detectives, whom local forces largely ignored. By McWilliam’s estimate, the unit sent out 250 requests for action in three years; police responded to just 30. McWilliam, who was still specializing in wildlife crime for the Merseyside Police Force, was involved in a handful, including a case that concerned Liverpool shops that sold Chinese “health tonics” manufactured from the bones of leopards, tigers, and other endangered mammals. But he was the exception. “Most officers would say, ‘We’ve got drugs, we’ve got serious crimes, what are they going on about?’ ” McWilliam says. In 2005, the unit’s parent organization, the National Criminal Intelligence Service, merged with a new group, the Serious Organised Crime Agency, and the National Wildlife Crime Intelligence Unit, never seen as particularly effective, was phased out of existence.

  * * *

  McWilliam often felt like he was fighting for a cause few cared about, but occasionally he received a reminder that some people were taking notice. In 2004 the BBC came to Merseyside to capture a day in the life of Great Britain’s most prominent wildlife cop. McWilliam warned the producer that his daily routine was often uneventful, and suggested they restage some of his more dramatic arrests. While riding in a bus with his wife a few weeks before, McWilliam had witnessed a youth kicking to death a small songbird called a mistle thrush, as the bird tried to protect her young. McWilliam had leapt off the bus and arrested the killer, carried the corpse to a vet to verify the cause of death, and then stashed the thrush in a freezer at the police station to use as evidence.

  Minutes before the BBC crew arrived to stage the reenactment, McWilliam remembered that he had forgotten to remove the bird from the freezer the night before. He quietly carried the rock-solid corpse upstairs to the deserted canteen, placed it on a plate, slid it into the microwave, and turned the setting to defrost.

  Midway through the seven-minute thawing, a policewoman entered the kitchen to heat a bowl of oatmeal. McWilliam stood beside her, nervously making small talk. When the microwave pinged, McWilliam reached in and removed the plate. The policewoman stared at the dead thrush.

  “Don’t knock it until you’ve tried one,” he told her. “Have you seen the salt and pepper?”

  After that, McWilliam recalled, the colleague gave him a wide berth.

  * * *

  The failure of the National Wildlife Crime Intelligence Unit to find support from local police only hardened Richard Brunstrom’s resolve to create an effective environmental crime force. In 2005 he lobbied the Home Office—the British equivalent of some combination of the US Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, responsible for immigration, domestic security, and law and order—to fund a more hands-on outfit comprised of specialists who would roam the country, providing guidance and support to local forces. As Brunstrom envisioned it, the new National Wildlife Crime Unit (“Intelligence” had been dropped from the name) would have a staff of seven: two field investigators, a senior intelligence officer, two analysts, an administrator, and the unit’s head. To avoid ruffling the feathers of turf-conscious police, all field investigators would be retired wildlife officers and would have no authority to make arrests. In 2006, the Home Office and the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs allocated £450,000 for the NWCU’s first year of operations.

  McWilliam got a phone call from Chris Kerr, the first head of unit, that summer. Kerr was a longtime wildlife cop whom McWilliam had come to know through the National Conference of Wildlife Enforcers, an annual gathering of police investigators and conservation groups where he’d also encountered Brunstrom.

  “Have you thought about applying?” Kerr asked him.

  McWillia
m hadn’t, but after thirty-one years with the police he was again ready for a change. The Merseyside force was in the middle of reorganization. McWilliam had been reassigned against his wishes from the Crosby Police Station, where he had worked for the past three decades, to a new station filled with officers he didn’t know. He cringed at the posters emblazoned with soaring eagles and motivational slogans that papered the station’s sterile walls. McWilliam had nurtured friendships with many people in and around Crosby, passing out his phone number to hundreds and becoming a real member of the community. “Suddenly I was moved to a station with senior officers who didn’t have a clue,” he would say. “All the experience that people had built up, they didn’t seem to give a toss about.”

  McWilliam had some reservations about the new position. He was not especially fond of traveling, and working for the National Wildlife Crime Unit would require being on the road for three, sometimes four days a week. The unit’s very existence was precarious, dependent on a renewal of its funding every year. But his wife, Lin, was encouraging. “Give it a go,” she said. McWilliam had a pro forma interview, and Kerr offered him the job. In July 2006, he retired from the police force and a month later signed a twelve-month contract as a field investigator.

  On October 5, Biodiversity Minister Barry Gardiner inaugurated the National Wildlife Crime Unit at Dynamic Earth, an environmental education-and-entertainment center in Edinburgh. Gardiner railed against “people who think it is acceptable to kill endangered animals because their fur is a fashion statement, or steal a rare bird’s egg because it’s one that they don’t yet have in their collection.” He declared, as McWilliam looked on, “We are talking about something on a par with drug trafficking and people trafficking, with the same nasty people involved.”

  * * *

  The National Wildlife Crime Unit commenced operations from a backwater: North Berwick, a picturesque Scottish fishing village of four thousand people on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth. The hamlet was perhaps best known for having the world’s largest colony of northern gannets, white seabirds related to boobies. The deputy constable of the local Lothian and Borders Police Force had donated for the squad the top floor of a small police station. “The [Home Office] didn’t want the unit to be London-centric,” explained Alan Roberts, a retired detective and bird expert from East Anglia who had worked on Operation Easter and joined the NWCU as an investigative support officer at the same time as McWilliam. “There was always that suggestion that if it’s based in London that’s all they care about.”

  Soon the NWCU relocated to a more convenient headquarters in two large adjoining rooms on the third floor of a police station in Stirling, just outside Edinburgh, where the unit head, his administrators, and his intelligence team based themselves. McWilliam and Roberts worked from home but traveled throughout the country, joining cops on investigations and sharing their expertise in complex wildlife legislation. Both men had studied the Control of Trade in Endangered Species (Enforcement) Regulations of 1997, for example, legislation enacted by the European Union that categorized thirty-six thousand species according to three levels of protection and gave the police the power to take punitive action against wildlife smugglers and traders. The regulations covered everything from the proper labeling of crocodile skins and caviar containers to the eight species of pangolins (spiny anteaters found in Africa and Southeast Asia) and nine species of howler and spider monkeys that could not be traded for any purpose but scientific research. The regulations were essential tools for the wildlife cop, telling him what activities were worth investigating, what permits were required for which animal, and what crimes, if any, had been committed. McWilliam took the north of Britain, Roberts the south, though they sometimes overlapped. The unit soon added two more investigators responsible for policing Wales and Scotland.

  It wasn’t long before raw intelligence came flowing in—300 to 350 reports a month from local police departments, wildlife protection agencies, and concerned citizens. McWilliam chased poaching gangs that roamed the countryside in four-by-fours, armed with guns, crossbows, night-vision goggles, dogs, snares, and poisons, killing deer, hares, and other mammals for thrill or for profit. He investigated raptor persecutions: the shooting, poisoning, and trapping of peregrine falcons and other protected birds of prey by disgruntled farmers or by gamekeepers on hunting estates in Scotland and northern England. “Those killing birds of prey are typically serial offenders, just like egg thieves,” wrote Guy Shorrock in his blog for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. “We have received detailed reports of gamekeepers that have apparently killed hundreds of raptors during their career” to prevent the birds from eating their pheasants and grouse and so threatening their livelihood. McWilliam helped put several of the more prolific falcon killers behind bars.

  Occasionally he was drawn into more esoteric offenses. One of Richard Brunstrom’s signature initiatives had been Operation Bat, launched in 2004 to protect the nocturnal mammals from lumberjacks and developers. Following Brunstrom’s lead, McWilliam arrested a commercial builder who had deliberately destroyed the roosts of a brown long-eared bat (Plecotus auritus), which often secretes itself in roof spaces and chimneys, and is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. And he busted a farmer who had dredged up a riverbed filled with freshwater pearl mussels—another high-priority endangered species.

  McWilliam did some of his most important work sitting in front of his home computer. After a stuffed orangutan sold on the British black market for £16,000 in 1993, prices for taxidermied rare animals—Philippine eagles, Siberian tigers, stuffed Palawan peacock-pheasants, blue-naped parrots, ring-tailed lemurs, golden lion tamarins—had soared. McWilliam scoured eBay, Alibaba, Birdtrader, Preloved, and other e-commerce websites that allowed users to trade live and stuffed animals and animal parts. He identified suspicious sales, obtained court orders forcing the websites to turn over trading records, and then, armed with a search warrant, joined the police in arresting suspected traffickers and buyers.

  There was the curio dealer selling “antique ivory carvings” on eBay, which carbon dating proved had been made from an elephant killed illegally in the 1980s. This was a decade after the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species banned the trafficking of ivory taken from Asian elephants after 1975 and from African elephants after 1976. There was the collector with a degenerative eye disease who had created a bucket list of wildlife trophies to acquire before he lost his sight. First on the list: the skull of a mountain gorilla from central Africa, one of the most endangered animals in the world. The man contacted a Cameroonian trader through Alibaba, obtained a photo of an ape’s newly severed head, and was sent the trophy in the mail. When police searched the man’s garage, they discovered the skull, still covered with bits of flesh. “It still smelled bad,” remembers McWilliam’s colleague Alan Roberts. The Cameroon dealer had pulled a bait and switch, delivering a chimpanzee head instead, but the species is also listed as Appendix I, accorded the highest level of protection, and the buyer was arrested for CITES violations.

  The National Wildlife Crime Unit followed the activities of a dodgy couple who ran a pet shop in West Yorkshire, buying and selling exotic animal skulls from Indonesia, South Africa, and other countries on the side. One of the couple’s major buyers was a man named Alan Dudley, a father of three who inspected Jaguar Land Rovers for a living. When the investigators entered Dudley’s storage room in his house in Coventry, they found two thousand skulls—including that of a howler monkey from Ecuador, a penguin, a loggerhead turtle, a chimpanzee, a giraffe, a hippo, a Goeldi’s marmoset from Bolivia, and even a Great Dane. In addition to buying the grisly mementos online, some of them illegally, Dudley made use of contracts he had with zoos and academic institutions to “clean up” the carcasses of dead animals and return the skeletons for research and display. (He evidently held back some of the skulls for his personal collection.) Convicted of seven counts of violating CITES regulations,
Dudley was given a fifty-week suspended sentence, a three-month dusk-to-dawn curfew, and a £1,000 fine, on top of £3,000 in court costs. The judge spoke of an “academic zeal” that had “crossed the line into unlawful obsession.”

  Soon the evidence room at the Stirling headquarters spilled over with ocelot and leopard skins, monkey skulls, elephant tusks, rare butterflies, stuffed badgers, taxidermied birds of prey, and other contraband. McWilliam dubbed the odoriferous chamber the Room of Death. But the animals that crossed his path in the line of duty weren’t all deceased. Wildlife charities across the United Kingdom began writing to McWilliam with requests for assistance in keeping at-risk species alive. Froglife UK sought his help protecting Britain’s endangered amphibians and reptiles. Buglife wanted support for the Ladybird Spider Project, the Narrow-Headed Ant Project, the Shrill Carder Bee Project, and other campaigns to bring threatened insects “back from the brink” by introducing new populations into carefully managed habitats. Plantlife UK sought to save from extinction the pasqueflower, the sand lizard, the Duke of Burgundy butterfly, and other fragile flora and fauna. McWilliam was a sympathetic listener, but he could offer little concrete assistance since such problems lay well outside his portfolio. “There’s not a lot of bug crime or frog crime,” he said dryly.

  * * *

  In 1984, Alec Jeffreys, a geneticist at Great Britain’s Leicester University, produced the world’s first DNA profile, revolutionizing crime scene analysis. Jeffreys extracted DNA from cells, used an enzyme to slice up the strands, mounted the fragments in gel, and then introduced radioactive “tracers” that attached to specific sequences of proteins and other genetic material. When Jeffreys exposed the irradiated DNA fragments to X-ray film, the exposure produced a unique pattern of more than thirty stripes, resembling a universal bar code. Two years later, DNA collected from semen stains on the bodies of two teenagers who had been raped and murdered in a small village in Leicestershire secured the first conviction using genetic profiling, and exonerated an innocent man implicated in the killings. Soon the RSPB’s Guy Shorrock began promoting it as a tool to combat falcon laundering.