The Falcon Thief

by Joshua Hammer

  The road climbed higher, the pale green slopes covered in places by netting to prevent landslides, and darkened here and there by stands of pine recently planted by the British Forestry Commission to stop the erosion. Brecon Beacons National Park, a dramatic range of red sandstone peaks dotted with the burial cairns of Bronze Age tribes, rose a few miles to the north. A sign noting the distances to nearby villages—Abergwynfi, Blaengwynfi, Nantymoel—captured the linguistic oddity of this remote corner of the United Kingdom. The language derives from ancient Celtic, brought over to the British Isles from continental Europe more than 2,500 years ago. As late as 1800, the majority of Wales’ population spoke Welsh as their first language, but it fell out of the school curriculum in the late nineteenth century, and English soon came to dominate the region. Today, though something of a revival of Welsh is going on, barely one in five people in Wales can speak it.

  When I stepped out of the vehicle at the top of the escarpment, I was nearly blown off my feet by a gust of wind. Steadying myself, I followed the two officers across a meadow speckled with purple and yellow wildflowers and low-growing fruit shrubs called bilberry bushes. Bleating sheep, bells around their necks chiming, darted across our path through spongy tufts of grass. Bent against the gale, we arrived at the edge of the cliffs.

  The ground fell away sharply, exposing dozens of steplike gray-black ledges sheltered from the wind—perfect spots for peregrines to lay their eggs. “We’re at the end of the bloody world,” shouted Guildford.

  We walked around the edge of the cliffs to another lookout, this one providing a panoramic view of the escarpment. A smooth, curving ampitheater of black and tan sandstone, mottled with patches of grass, swept upward at a near-perpendicular angle from the Rhondda Valley floor. McWilliam and Guildford scanned the cloud-dappled sky with their binoculars, searching for peregrine falcons. They weren’t able to spot one.

  Lendrum had enjoyed much better luck. The egg thief waited patiently atop this escarpment, also peering through binoculars, looking for male falcons returning to their aeries with food for their incubating partners. At eight a.m. on Thursday, April 29, Lendrum laid a fixed rope at the top of the cliff and rappelled twenty feet down to a ledge, scooping up the clutch as the peregrine parents flew off in fright. He placed the four eggs in his thermal bag. He took a second clutch at four p.m., retired to the Heritage Park Hotel, and then returned the next morning at eight-thirty for two more rappels down the cliffs. That day, he seized seven more eggs—including one clutch at the abandoned quarry near Mike Thomas’s village of Blaengarw in the adjacent Garw Valley. Back in Towcester, he wrapped the eggs snugly in woolen socks to keep them warm and well cushioned, and placed them in a carton in his carry-on bag. With his unsuspecting girlfriend—Paul Mullin’s ex-partner, who was now sharing a life with Lendrum in South Africa—in the passenger seat beside him, he set out for Birmingham Airport.

  “I’ve got a lucky ability,” Lendrum would say years later when asked to explain his success at finding nests in the most remote and forbidding terrain. “I will always ask myself, ‘If I were a peregrine, what would I do? Where would I breed?’ I go to an area that looks good, I look carefully and I see them.”

  * * *

  On Monday afternoon, May 3, responding to a tip from the vigilant janitor in the Emirates Lounge, Counter Terrorism agents detained Lendrum and seized the fourteen peregrine eggs that he had snatched from cliffsides in and around the Rhondda Valley. Thirty hours after Lendrum’s arrest, on the early evening of Tuesday, May 4, Andy McWilliam and a colleague from the Counter Terrorism Unit (who cannot be named for reasons of security) sat in a borrowed office at the Solihull Police Headquarters, evaluating their notes from the afternoon’s interrogations. The commanding officer at Solihull had extended Lendrum’s detention period from twenty-four to thirty-six hours—a standard move in complicated cases. At the end of that period, the Crown Prosecution Service would assess the arrest report presented by the police and determine whether or not to file charges. If McWilliam and his partner failed to persuade prosecutors that Lendrum had committed a serious crime, the police would have no choice but to release him. Should Lendrum walk out of jail, McWilliam had no doubt that the suspect would “do a runner” and flee England as quickly as possible.

  McWilliam and his partner in the Counter Terrorism force spent the evening going over their notes and typing a case summary. Then, at nine p.m., four hours before the deadline, they faxed the document to CPS Direct, a national 24/7 hotline that connects a duty prosecutor with police seeking to charge a suspect with a crime. The Counter Terrorism man got on the phone with the assigned prosecutor.

  “We’ve got a man in custody who was attempting to smuggle fourteen peregrine falcon eggs out of the United Kingdom,” he said.

  The agent explained that the peregrine was an Appendix I bird, granted the highest level of protection by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Smuggling its eggs was a breach of the Customs and Excise Management Act of 1979, as well as the Control of Trade in Endangered Species Regulations of 1997. The suspect’s acts were also violations of many other pieces of legislation: the European Union Wildlife Trade Regulations of 1996, the Endangered Species Act of 1976, the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981, the Theft Act of 1968, the Birds Directive of 1979, and the EU Habitats Directive of 1992. The suspect had been caught with incubators, a satnav, and climbing equipment. The circumstances of the arrest pointed to a “sophisticated one-man operation.” What’s more, he was not a British citizen, had no fixed address in the United Kingdom, and was traveling on a foreign passport.

  “If we bail him,” he said, “the guy is going on his toes.”

  The prosecutor listened mostly without comment.

  “I just don’t know the legislation,” she said. “I think I need to do some research on this and get back to you.”

  McWilliam and his partner paced the halls, checking their watches for one hour, two, three … The minutes ticked by, and McWilliam’s frustration grew. At the front desk of the custody suites, the night clerk gathered Lendrum’s personal effects in preparation for his release. Finally, just before one a.m., with two minutes to go before the deadline, the duty inspector at the Solihull station, the highest-ranking officer in the building that night, stepped in to make an executive decision. (Though Crown prosecutors ordinarily have the final call on whether to charge a suspect, senior police officers can take on that role in emergencies.)

  “Charge him,” he said, overriding the usual procedure. He ordered Lendrum held overnight.

  Early the next morning, at the Solihull Magistrates Court, a judge denied Lendrum’s bail application, citing the gravity of his alleged offenses and the risk of flight. Court officers escorted Lendrum in handcuffs to pretrial detention in Hewell Prison, a twelve-hundred-bed maximum- and minimum-security facility on the grounds of a Victorian manor house in Worcestershire, southwest of Birmingham, to await a plea hearing in August—three months away.

  * * *

  As Lendrum remained locked up in a cellblock filled with prisoners who had likewise been denied bail, McWilliam began methodically to build the case against him. At this point, just two days after the egg thief’s arrest, McWilliam had only circumstantial evidence that he was dealing with an experienced criminal—until he sat down to watch an unmarked DVD the Counter Terrorism police had discovered in one of Lendrum’s carry-on bags. As the images rolled by—a Ray-Ban-wearing helicopter pilot smirking and announcing that he and Lendrum were “going on a tour,” Lendrum dangling from a line seven hundred feet above a frozen lake, a Bell JetRanger hovering inches from a cliff, gyrfalcons circling overhead—McWilliam stared in amazement. Here was a video of Lendrum’s pilot boasting about their being “fucking criminals,” and it had fallen into the hands of the police. While it was still technically possible that Lendrum had, as he claimed, stumbled upon the Welsh peregrine eggs by chance, it was clear from the video that the risks, costs, and planning invo
lved in this other operation must have been enormous.

  McWilliam would soon learn that Lendrum’s felonious missions had apparently extended to every corner of the globe—as free-ranging as the peregrine itself. On the suspect’s laptop computer (which wasn’t password protected), he pored through a Microsoft Word document that described a trip made to Sri Lanka in February 2010 to search for the aeries of the black shaheen falcon (Falco peregrinus peregrinator)—a powerful, nonmigratory peregrine subspecies that roosts on rock faces from Pakistan to northern Myanmar. Only forty breeding pairs are known to inhabit the island. “One [falcon] seen flying off rock … good site with large overhang, several places with droppings,” read an account of a scouting mission to the jungled cliffs near Wellawaya. A nearby site proved to be less promising. “Military guarding elephants in area and every time [you] step [from] the car, they come out of the trees to ask what you are doing. Hard access to rock and military make this a no-go.”

  Lendrum—or whoever had written the report—then visited Sigiriya, a massive, six-hundred-sixty-foot column of congealed magma from an extinct volcano, with a stone palace at the summit carved by the fifth-century King Kasyapa. Neither this archaeological masterpiece nor the delicate sixteen-hundred-year-old frescoes of the women of the royal harem were of interest to the writer. “Good rock face not able to observe due to sun coming right into lens in morning,” he wrote. “Mature male on rock face, very nice color with very small white bib.” The author of the document also cased the security at Bandaranaike International Airport in Colombo. “On drive into airport there is security check and they open boots and doors of many vehicles to check inside,” he noted. “A few meters inside doors to departure area there is a security checkpoint consisting of a row of standard baggage X-ray units, walk-through metal detector and just about everybody was patted down. The guy who patted me down was very good at it.”

  The notes left no doubt about where the author had flown to after leaving the jungled island. “Dubai customs were very iffy about the night vision glasses we had in our hand luggage,” he warned, leaving the “we” unidentified. Lendrum would deny writing the report and, when asked if he had ever visited Sri Lanka, began to ramble. “I don’t remember that, no,” he would say a few years later, before adding, “We went to go and look at peregrines there. I can’t remember when … I think it was probably just before Wales. They are beautiful birds. It’s just a different subspecies of the peregrine. But I wasn’t going out there to get them, no.”

  Days later, a key found in Lendrum’s carry-on luggage, along with a receipt for the rental of a storage facility, led McWilliam to a Lok’nStore in Northamptonshire. Amid suitcases, duffel bags, and Sainsbury’s shopping bags jammed inside a locker six feet high and five feet deep, he discovered more evidence of his quarry’s outlaw life: an incubator purchased on eBay days before his mission to southern Wales, police records and a Nunatsiaq News account of his arrest in Canada back in 2002, and a copy of a letter Lendrum had written to the reporter behind the Nunatsiaq News article, in which he claimed to have been on a research project to determine “the effects of global warming” on gyrfalcons and insisted that he had planned to return the eggs to the nests. Lendrum’s mischief went back decades, and, like some of the English egg collectors McWilliam had pursued, he had collected a trove of mementos documenting his bad behavior: there was correspondence from the early 1980s laying out a scheme apparently concocted by Jeffrey and Adrian Lendrum to smuggle African black eagle eggs and chicks to a breeder in Birmingham—just as Kit Hustler, the Zimbabwean ornithologist and prosecution witness at the Lendrums’ 1984 trial, had long suspected. The breeder they’d been in contact with, Philip Dugmore, had been convicted and fined two years later for illegally keeping six black eagles. The raptors “in all probability, came from the supply of eggs from this defendant to him,” Lendrum’s new prosecutor would soon declare in court.

  * * *

  Then McWilliam secured another compelling piece of evidence. Paul Mullin, now living in southern England, learned from news reports that summer that his former friend had been arrested with falcon eggs at Birmingham Airport. Still bearing a grudge against Lendrum—“Karma’s a bitch,” he would say—he phoned the airport police. “If you want to know anything about Jeffrey Lendrum, I can help,” he told the officer who answered the call. The policeman relayed the message to McWilliam, who called Mullin back within minutes. They met at a police station in Newbury, a market town south of Oxford, but the initial encounter didn’t go well. “I was with Lendrum when he was caught in Canada,” Mullin told McWilliam, as two Newbury officers hovered in the background. The constables interrupted the interview, and cautioned Mullin that anything he said could be used against him. “What I’m about to tell you is outside of your jurisdiction,” Mullin snapped. “If you’re not happy, I’m walking.” Mullin called an early end to the encounter.

  McWilliam arranged a second, private meeting at a highway rest stop in Oxfordshire. Wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses this time, and claiming to be worried that he was being followed, Mullin sat at a table across from the investigator and didn’t stop talking for an hour. He brought photographs, plane tickets, receipts, field notes, maps, the business cards of the arresting officers in Kuujjuaq, and other evidence of his escapades with Lendrum and the helicopter pilot. He recounted his falling-out with his former best friend after Lendrum had taken up with his girlfriend and then written a letter to a judge in support of her application for full custody of her and Mullin’s young daughter. He also showed McWilliam a photograph taken at Heathrow Airport of Lendrum and Howard Waller, whom Mullin maintained had sponsored the mission to Canada. McWilliam graded Mullin an “E41” according to police-intelligence lingo, meaning an “untested source”; there was no way to be certain that he was telling the truth. But McWilliam found him personable and credible, and the documents he presented supported his account. “I couldn’t see a motivation to lie,” he said.

  Soon after that, Pat Lorber, formerly of the Rhodesian Ornithological Society, reached out to McWilliam from King’s Lynn, in East Anglia, where she had settled after leaving Zimbabwe two decades earler. She, too, had read newspaper accounts of Lendrum’s arrest. Lorber filled in another critical part of Lendrum’s bizarre life story: the scandal and trial in Bulawayo in 1984.

  In the meantime, McWilliam had obtained persuasive evidence that Lendrum had not been acting alone in Wales. Colin Pirie, the National Wildlife Crime Unit’s chief of intelligence, tracked Lendrum’s vehicle through a police system that uses a countrywide network of license-plate recognition cameras. Pirie determined that Lendrum had been to the Rhondda Valley in early April, three weeks before robbing the nests. He’d exchanged two hundred phone calls and text messages with a local breeder, to pinpoint the exact locations of the aeries. “If you’ve got somebody local who’s keeping an eye on them, it makes the job easier,” McWilliam would later say.

  Police specialists traced the calls to a man named Robert Griffiths in the village of Ton Pentre at the upper end of the Rhondda Fawr, a few miles from Lendrum’s primary nest-robbing zone. Law enforcement officers knew him as a career raptor snatcher. Guildford had arrested him in Scotland in the 1980s for stealing peregrines, and again in the 1990s for laundering merlins—small, powerfully built falcons—at his breeding facility. He was still selling birds of dubious provenance, and was said to be familiar with every ledge and crag in the Rhondda and its adjacent glens. “He knows more about the wild birds than those out there protecting them,” Guildford said. “He knows their breeding habits, and he knows exactly where to look.” When Guildford confronted Griffith in Ton Pentre with evidence that he had provided grid points to Lendrum, the breeder denied knowing the egg thief. The National Wildlife Crime Unit decided not to pursue criminal charges against him, but the discovery of the phone messages provided insight into Lendrum’s modus operandi.

  There were aspects of the case that McWilliam never could figure out—like wh
y the janitor in the Emirates Lounge had found that one red-dyed egg in the diaper bin—but that Lendrum would later explain. Before arriving at the airport, he would say, he had placed the fourteen live peregrine eggs in a nine-egg carton and a six-egg carton, and he needed to fill the last slot with a similar-looking egg. He wanted it to look as if he had just bought ordinary farm-fresh eggs at the supermarket: “If [security] opened an egg box, they would just look like a whole bunch of spotted eggs. And I would say, ‘Okay, take them.’ ”

  Despite a few unanswered questions, McWilliam’s summerlong investigation had exposed the patterns of a master criminal: an adventurer, athlete, and logistician who had operated confidently for decades. He had conspired to pillage the environment with unnamed “senior members of UAE society” for “significant” financial gain, acccording to a PowerPoint display that McWilliam would put together that year for the media and fellow officers. McWilliam had a pretty good idea of who some of Lendrum’s clients were, but he couldn’t reveal so publicly until they had been formally charged with a crime: that would be a violation of Great Britain’s privacy laws.