The Falcon Thief

by Joshua Hammer

  Lendrum, as it turned out, did still have friends—one of whom put him in touch with an acquaintance named Charles Graham, an entrepreneur who owned four go-kart tracks in southern England. Graham agreed to take on the parolee as a rehabilitation project, and got him a job greeting customers, giving safety demonstrations, helping with catering, and serving as a “race marshal” on the nine-hundred-meter track at his Daytona Sandown Park. Soon Lendrum, his girlfriend, and her toddler daughter, Paul Mullin’s child, moved into a wing of Graham’s house on the North Downs, a ridge of chalk hills running west from the White Cliffs of Dover. The three settled into a comfortable life in limbo—making ample use of Graham’s swimming pool and hot tub all summer long. “He had no bills to pay, he had food on the table every night,” says Graham. Lendrum entertained employees at the track with stories about his nine months in prison and even bragged about his jailhouse nickname, the Birdman. “Jeff had this South African bonhomie,” remembers Graham. “He was a swashbuckling adventurer.” Over beers in the hot tub with Graham, Lendrum dropped his guard and admitted that he had stolen the falcon eggs for the money, estimating that the last operation in Wales could have brought a sum “in the high five figures” if he hadn’t been caught at Birmingham Airport. Yet he assured other friends that he had put that phase of his life behind him. “He told me he was finished with it,” says Craig Hunt, the boyhood mate who owned the Southern Comfort Lodge in Bulawayo. “He would never do it again.”

  * * *

  At the end of 2011, his parole over, Lendrum returned to South Africa and moved in with his younger sister, Paula, and her husband in Johannesburg. Lendrum’s brother, Richard—who’d had little contact with his brother during his months in prison—decided to join in helping his wayward sibling get back on his feet. As the publisher and editor in chief of African Hunting Gazette, a glossy quarterly with a print run of sixteen thousand, Richard hired his brother to replace a departing staff member who worked on Visited & Verified, an online customer guide to lodges, camps, and safari outfitters in Southern Africa. Jeffrey Lendrum “is excited to travel and meet prospective clients and friends in the hunting fraternity,” the magazine’s website declared in early 2012, introducing the new employee to readers of African Hunting Gazette, which mostly combined reviews of the latest weaponry and ammo with personal accounts of big game shooting safaris. “He’s a wildlife enthusiast with an immense love for Africa’s flora and fauna and has spent many of his fifty years in the bush. His interest and knowledge is diverse, from the Big Five” game animals—lions, leopards, rhinos, elephants, and Cape buffalo—“to birds and insects.”

  For the second time since leaving prison, Lendrum had been offered a fresh start—and he seemed grateful for the opportunity to turn his life around. He traveled the hunting circuit, meeting safari lodge owners, touring their properties, authenticating their claims about the big game and terrain they offered hunters, and then passing on the information to the editorial staff. He was earning a decent salary, staying out of trouble, and spending his time in the environments where he had always been most content: the mopane woodlands, riverine bush, and thornveld savanna of Southern Africa.

  One day McWilliam got a call from Johannesburg. “Hey, Andy, it’s Jeffrey,” the caller said. It took McWilliam a moment to register that the falcon thief was on the line. McWilliam hadn’t expected to hear from him again, but Lendrum laid on an odd request: he needed help resolving a dispute about a parking ticket that he’d received before leaving England. “I wasn’t even driving the bloody car,” he told McWilliam.

  “I thought to myself, This is strange. If he’s in Johannesburg, what the hell does it matter?” McWilliam recalled. “Whether it was just an excuse to ring me up, I don’t know.” McWilliam told him there was nothing he could do.

  Soon Lendrum was calling him every two or three weeks. He talked enthusiastially about the wildlife he’d seen and how grateful he was for this second chance. He shared his views on wildlife conservation, criticizing a program being introduced in Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa to remove the horns from live rhinos to discourage poaching. “People will still follow the trail and shoot the animal. How are they going to know?” he said, dismissing the idea as ridiculous. He blamed the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species in part for the rhino poaching epidemic, arguing that it had forced the rhino-horn trade underground, driven up prices, and created a black market. “If there was total transparency, rhino, as well as any endangered species, could be farmed like cattle,” he said. McWilliam found Lendrum knowledgable and thoughtful, and he had to admit that much of what he said sounded reasonable. Eventually Lendrum came around to discussing raptors; the laws made no sense, he maintained. Lendrum tried to get McWilliam to agree that CITES should recategorize the peregrine falcon as a less endangered species and allow a certain amount of harvesting and exporting of wild birds of prey. “Whatever,” McWilliam replied. His job was to enforce the law; he was happy to let the scientists and politicians make policy.

  On another call, Lendrum surprised McWilliam with an invitation to come to South Africa for a safari. “You can stay with me,” he even said. He’d moved out of his sister’s and was renting his own place. McWilliam declined, knowing that fraternizing with a convicted wildlife criminal, even a reformed one, was hardly appropriate for a wildlife crime investigator. But he was touched—if a little puzzled—that Lendrum was intent on maintaining a relationship with him. Lendrum would extend the offer to McWilliam several more times.

  * * *

  While Lendrum was roving the bush for African Hunting Gazette, McWilliam was becoming enmeshed in office politics. In early 2010, a new boss had taken command of the National Wildife Crime Unit. A former homicide detective with no wildlife experience, the man came across to some of his employees as a remote and clueless self-promoter. He disappeared from headquarters for days at a time, attending conferences in far-flung locations like China and India, burning through the unit’s limited budget, and rarely explaining his absences. The staff took to calling him “the Walking Eagle” behind his back, because, McWilliam explained, “He’s filled with so much shit that he can’t get off the ground.”

  In February 2012, the Scottish Sun ran a puff piece about the crime unit boss called “Cop’s Work on the Wild Side.” The article compared him to the hero of a popular Hollywood comedy. “Unlike Jim Carrey’s wacky character in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, he is deadly serious about his role,” the profile began. He bragged about the achievements of the unit since he had taken over, including “his greatest collar … an infamous smuggler who stole rare bird eggs to order.” McWilliam couldn’t believe that the man was taking credit for bagging Jeffrey Lendrum. McWilliam hadn’t even informed him until after the arrest had gone down.

  But the most insulting part of the profile was the chief’s characterization of the NWCU. “Before I took over, the unit was seen as ‘fluffy bunny,’ ” he told the reporter, “but things have changed since then.” McWilliam was infuriated by the insinuation that he and the other seasoned investigators were sentimental animal huggers. He fired off several angry emails, accusing him of denigrating and demoralizing the staff. The chief claimed that the Scottish Sun reporter had made up the quote; McWilliam contacted the journalist, who stood by his reporting. When the chief found out, he berated McWilliam for speaking to the press without permission, and threatened to discipline him. “Bring it on,” McWilliam dared. For weeks, it was unclear whether McWilliam would be fired from the unit. The dispute eventually subsided, but McWilliam and his superior never spoke to each other again.

  * * *

  In the spring of 2013, Jeffrey Lendrum passed his first anniversary working for his brother’s magazine. He had, his brother, Richard, believed, finally put his days as an egg thief behind him. Then, that April, Jerome Philippe, a hunting concessionaire in Namibia and the founder of a popular website called AfricanHunting.com, posted an alert on the members’ forum. “Jeffrey Lendr
um of African Hunting Gazette: convicted wildlife smuggler,” it declared, going on to inform the forum’s twenty-thousand participants of his three convictions over twenty-six years.

  Angry comments appeared on the AfricanHunting.com forum within hours. “Is African Hunting Gazette letting [safari camp owners] know that a convicted criminal is being sent to stay at their house with their family for the purpose of ‘verifying’ their outfits?” wrote one longtime subscriber. “If I was an outfitter knowing what I know now, I would not let this guy anywhere near my property!” Some readers canceled their subscriptions. Advertisers began to pull out.

  Richard Lendrum had feared this day would come. Since putting out his first issue of African Hunting Gazette (originally called African Sporting Gazette) in 2000, Lendrum had successfully positioned the quarterly as a pro-conservation magazine, arguing that trophy hunting benefits wildlife by providing revenue for game management, anti-poaching patrols, and national park operations. Many big game hunters who subscribed to the Gazette liked to see themselves as wildlife conservationists at heart, and the revelation that a convicted thief and smuggler held a prominent position on the magazine’s staff was, Lendrum understood, unlikely to go down well. “I knew I was running a risk having [Jeffrey’s] association with my business,” Richard would later admit, “but … he had served his time … His range of services for a division of the magazine was very restricted and limited, and to be honest, very useful. And he was my brother.”

  Jeffrey Lendrum begged for forgiveness. “What I did was stupid and believe me I paid for it,” he posted on AfricaHunting.com, “or do I have to keep paying?” He profusely apologized, writing later in his post, “I am sincerely sorry … I did my time and am commited to my job.” As the irate comments continued to pour in, he posted his cell number, his Skype address, and his email address, urging those who condemned him to make contact. “Please call me and after we have spoken and I have explained myself, we will be friends,” he wrote. These awkward pleas for understanding failed to win over many hunters.

  In early 2014, with Jeffrey Lendrum’s presence at the magazine still eliciting threats of boycotts from advertisers and subscribers, Richard Lendrum informed his brother that he would have to let him go. It was a “horrific” moment for both of them, he would later acknowledge. Jeffrey felt abandoned, Richard mortified and angry that he had been given no choice but to cut his brother loose. But the survival of his business had to come first. Months later, still trying to put the controversy to rest, Richard Lendrum posted on AfricaHunting.com to reassure his readers that his generosity toward his sibling by no means implied sympathy for his crimes: Jeffrey Lendrum was a “wildlife trafficker,” he acknowledged, and a “smuggler of falcon eggs.” He insisted that he had nothing to do with his behavior and did not “support it in any way.”

  Losing his job at African Hunting Gazette was devastating for Jeffrey Lendrum. He sought steady employment, but his younger brother says that few opportunities were available in post-apartheid South Africa for a middle-aged white man, especially one with a felony conviction. For a while he tried a variation of his old hustle from before the days of AfricaXtreme. Reaching out to dealers in the United States and Europe, he procured spare parts for four-seat Cessna 172 Skyhawks and other single-engine planes and distributed them to aircraft-maintenance companies in South Africa. But the work was irregular, and provided him only a meager living. On an affidavit that he would later file with the police, he reported a monthly income of between $1,000 and $2,000, $500 of which went toward rent.

  Bleak as things were, he found ways of keeping his connection to the natural world. He managed, somehow, to obtain an Honorary Ranger Certificate from South Africa’s department of national parks, allowing him to participate in a volunteer program to place identification rings on owls, hawks, and other wild birds to study their life cycles, habits, and movements.

  Richard Lendrum says that he lost track of his brother soon after his forced departure from African Hunting Gazette. Jeffrey Lendrum’s calls to Andy McWilliam stopped, too. And so Richard Lendrum, Andy McWilliam, and everyone else in Jeffrey Lendrum’s orbit were surprised some months later by the news reports from the other side of the world. Lendrum, it seemed, was in trouble again.

  SIXTEEN PATAGONIA

  Early one morning in October 2015, at the start of spring in the southern hemisphere, a rented four-by-four departed the Chilean outpost of Punta Arenas and headed north across the bleak, windswept prairie known as the Patagonian Steppe. The vehicle followed La Ruta del Fin del Mundo, the Highway at the End of the World, a two-lane asphalt strip bordered to the west by fenced cattle and sheep ranches, and to the east by the icy blue waters of the Strait of Magellan. It passed the ghostly remains of an estancia abandoned a century ago, and a rusting freighter that had run aground in the 1930s. Lesser rheas—gray, flightless birds resembling ostriches—scurried away amid clouds of dust. Guanacos—alpaca-like wild grazers with brown fur and pale bellies—placidly munched the hardy yellow grass known as coirón. After two hours the asphalt ran out, and a gravel track wound through bush-covered hills. Then, just south of Chile’s border with Argentina, Jeffrey Lendrum arrived at his destination: Pali Aike National Park, marked by a solitary green ranger hut with a sign welcoming visitors.

  The indigenous Tehuelche tribe, hunter-gatherers who migrated to southern Patagonia after the glaciers receded ten thousand years ago, called Pali Aike both “the desolate place of bad spirits” and “the devil’s country.” The terrain is studded with volcanoes formed during the Jurassic era 100 million years ago by the collision of the Chile Rise and the Peru-Chile oceanic trench. A series of eruptions—the first taking place 3.8 million years ago, the most recent 15,000 years ago—covered the steppe with spills of black lava and parapets of basalt, which glow yellow, red, and greenish gray in the harsh desert sunlight. Half a dozen collapsed craters loom over the yellow plain like broken teeth.

  Despite the otherworldly bleakness, the thirty-one-square-mile reserve teems with wildlife: hares, armadillos, gray foxes, pumas, guanacos, skunks, mole-like rodents known as tuco-tucos, and birds unique to Patagonia. Chilean flamingos, splashes of pink and orange in a charred landscape, gather in the park’s salt lagoons. Colonies of buff-necked ibises, large rodent eaters with cream-and-russet throats and long, curving gray bills, build nests high in trees or inside the extinct volcanoes—sharing the ledges with peregrine falcons, in a relationship of mutual coexistence rare among birds of prey.

  The raptors were what Lendrum had come for. After the loss of his job at the African Hunting Gazette eighteen months before, Lendrum had tried his hand at selling airplane parts. It had not worked out as he’d hoped, and now he had returned to the enterprise that he knew best. He had arrived in Chile at the height of the southern hemisphere’s breeding season in pursuit of the eggs of one of the world’s rarest birds of prey: the pallid peregrine, a snowy-white-breasted raptor found only in the wilds of the Patagonian mainland, the Falkland Islands, and Tierra del Fuego, an archipelago of hundreds of islands, many covered with volcanoes, mountains, and glaciers, at the southernmost tip of South America. Scientists had not even set eyes on the bird until 1925, when a pallido captured by Patagonian otter hunters near the Strait of Magellan ended up in a zoo in Münster, Germany. Otto Kleinschmidt, Germany’s best-known ornithologist, triumphantly proclaimed that he had identified a hitherto unknown species, and gave it the scientific name Falco kreyenborgi, after Hermann Kreyenborg, the falconer who had first brought it to his attention. But field researchers in Patagonia later found the white-breasted raptors sharing nests with southern peregrine falcons, most of which have black-barred, light gray breast feathers. In 1981, scientists confirmed that the pallid falcon was a genetic fluke—a rare pale morph of the southern peregrine, the Falco peregrinus cassini.

  * * *

  As Lendrum slipped back into a life of crime, he had no idea that someone was watching him. Two weeks before Lendrum’s arrival at t
he southern tip of Patagonia, the night watchman at the Hotel Plaza in Punta Arenas, Chile’s southernmost city and a gateway to the Antarctic, had approached Nicolas Fernández, a young mountaineer and wilderness guide who was working part-time at the reception desk. A large black backpack had been gathering dust for a year in the storage room of the hotel, a 1920s French-neoclassical mansion built by a cattle ranching baron and overlooking the leafy Plaza de Armas. Nobody had claimed the luggage, and the guard wondered whether they could see if anything inside was worth taking. Fernández agreed that the pack had been abandoned, and said he thought that it would be fine to open it.

  On their hands and knees in the storage room, the two hotel employees searched through the contents with growing curiosity: a pair of cargo pants, a pair of jeans, a six-hundred-foot-long coiled climbing rope, a two-pronged steel hook for grasping tree branches, and a black-and-yellow, shoe-box-sized device with a transparent door and an electrical cord, manufactured by Brinsea in the United Kingdom. After bringing the rope home with him to use on his next glacier expedition, Fernández searched the Internet and discovered that the piece of equipment from Brinsea was an incubator. The owner, Fernández surmised, must have come to Patagonia the previous year to steal the eggs of wild birds. But who was he? The backpack had no identification tag, and nobody in the Hotel Plaza could remember the owner’s name.

  Two days later, a man called from South Africa to make a reservation.

  He needed a room for eight nights, he told Fernández, who was again working behind the reception desk. Then the man informed the clerk that he had left a black backpack behind during the week that he had stayed at the hotel in October 2014, with the expectation of retrieving it on his next visit.