“Is it still there?”
“Yes, we’re holding it for you,” Fernández replied, astonished by the timing of the call. After the caller hung up, Fernández typed his name, “Jeffrey Lendrum,” into Google.
Fernández’s first hit was a YouTube video of Lendrum toying with an Egyptian cobra in the bush. Next came Lendrum dangling from a helicopter in Quebec. What kind of guy is this? he wondered. Fernández typed in “Jeffrey Lendrum egg smuggler” and came up with five thousand hits. His concern mounting, the clerk read about the arrest at Birmingham Airport, the conviction and jail sentence, the gyrfalcon-egg-stealing escapade in Canada, and the 1984 trial for theft in Zimbabwe. The Internet had destroyed whatever anonymity Lendrum had once enjoyed on his egg-plundering capers. There on the first page of hits was Andy McWilliam of Britain’s National Wildlife Crime Unit calling his quarry an international wildlife smuggler who worked “at the highest global level of wildlife crime.” Guy Shorrock of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds had told the BBC that Lendrum was “the highest level of wildlife criminal.” Half a dozen newspapers, Fernández noted with alarm, had described the Irish national and South African resident as a “former member of the Rhodesian SAS.”
Lendrum’s reservation at the hotel began on October 13, one week away. Unsure what to do, Fernández returned the climbing rope to Lendrum’s black backpack and consulted a longtime friend and former policeman, who urged him to reach out to Chile’s Agriculture and Livestock Service (SAG), the government agency responsible for protecting the country’s wildlife. The hotel clerk explained what he had uncovered to SAG representatives in Punta Arenas and Santiago. He mentioned that Lendrum appeared to have an elite military background. “I’m uneasy about this and hope that you could be discreet in your actions,” he wrote in an email, concerned for his own safety. His contacts at the Agriculture and Livestock Service and, later, the police, advised him to watch Lendrum, remain calm, and avoid revealing to the egg thief what he knew. Maybe they could catch him in the act.
* * *
At the entrance to Pali Aike National Park, Lendrum paid the gatekeeper three thousand Chilean pesos (about $4.50), drove on for a couple of miles, and parked at the trailhead leading to an extinct volcano called Morada del Diablo, “the Devil’s Dwelling.” Carrying a backpack filled with rope, spikes, a harness, and carabiners, he set out on foot on a dirt trail that cut through a fifteen-thousand-year-old field of congealed black lava. The collapsed crater, otherwise known as a caldera, loomed directly ahead of him. Small black lizards covered with white speckles skittered over the rocks; when I retraced Lendrum’s steps three years later, the skeletal remains of guanacos killed by pumas baked beneath the morning sun. He passed nobody—hardly surprising, considering that the park attracts an average of only eight visitors a day.
After a mile’s hike he began a steep climb over loose gray stones, and emerged at the top of the caldera. Perched behind a guardrail at the edge of the drop-off, with pillars of basaltic lava behind him, Lendrum looked across the maw of the dead volcano. A curving wall of basaltic rock—tinted green, splattered with whitewash, and riven with fissures—formed the remnant of the volcano’s lip. Steep slopes of gray scree and soil laden with red-tinted hematite fell away into the abyss, and the cries of buff-necked ibises echoed off the wall. Moments after I made the same climb, a peregrine rose, plummeted into the crater, circled back up, and disappeared inside a crevice.
Lendrum spotted an aerie, fastened a rope, and rappelled down the wall. He worked his way toward the nest, his excitement rising. But as he landed on the ledge, Lendrum identified the raptor as an ordinary cassini, not the rare pallid morph that he was seeking. He left the Morada del Diablo, one of most spectacular places he had ever climbed, exhilarated but empty-handed.
Even so, there were many more places for aeries in the rugged Patagonian landscape. He followed a dirt road through the pampas to a line of sixty-foot cliffs overlooking Posession Bay, an inlet between the mainland and the Isla Grande, the largest island of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago. The gray-sand beach below was deserted, except for a few plywood shanties inhabited by fishermen. (When I visited the area in 2018, one informed me that he had often seen a pair of the legendary peregrino pallido nesting on the rock face.) Lendrum hiked along a beach strewn with mussel shells, scanning the sky and the cliffs—some of them bare, some blanketed in scrub and dwarf pine. “Basically you’ve got to know what you’re looking for, or you won’t see them, because there are so many sea birds there,” Lendrum would later say. “Someone who’s never seen a peregrine could find a couple of nests in a day or two in the Rhondda Valley. Here it was a lot harder.” A 2002 study by the Raptor Research Foundation noted that the pallid peregrines are especially difficult to spot, “being less conspicuous and gull-like when seen beneath gray, overcast skies.”
Waves lapped gently over the shoal just offshore, and the sky abounded with southern giant petrels, oystercatchers, southern lapwings, cinnamon-bellied ground tyrants, austral negritos, and upland geese. It seemed like a proverbial needle-in-a-haystack search, but Lendrum soon spotted a pair of pallidos and they led him to what he was looking for: their clutch of four mottled brown eggs, nestled on a ledge halfway up the rock face. He carefully wrapped the prizes and carried them back to the Hotel Plaza in Punta Arenas, a two-hour drive south.
* * *
From behind the desk in the wood-paneled hotel lobby, up a steep flight of stairs from the street, Nicolas Fernández quietly observed Lendrum’s comings and goings. He watched Lendrum leave with his large black backpack in the early mornings and return in the evenings, his clothing soiled and sweaty. He’d helped him move into a spacious room on the top floor of the hotel, hauling a second piece of luggage, a duffel bag, up two flights of stairs and feeling the hard, square edges of what he was certain was another incubator inside. Because Fernández spoke fluent English, Lendrum approached him regularly for advice. What restaurants would he recommend? Where in Punta Arenas could he get a down jacket repaired? Where could he hire a helicopter and fly to Rio Grande on the Isla Grande, in the far south of Argentina? “He was a nice, friendly guy, always wandering around the hotel,” Fernández would later say. Yet despite his easygoing demeanor, the staff was on edge, having been informed of Lendrum’s history by Fernández. “Every employee knew that he was up to no good, but we didn’t want to say anything,” Fernández recalled. “We were scared.”
After a few days, Lendrum was relaxed enough to invite Fernández into his room, a sunlit chamber with French windows overlooking a Renaissance-style cathedral. Ropes and incubators lay strewn across the floor. Fernández pretended not to notice. Later, Lendrum emailed Fernández his travel itinerary and asked him to print out a hard copy. Fernández did so—and immediately forwarded the itinerary to SAG headquarters in Santiago, and the police.
SAG Director Rafael Asenjo saw that the convicted wildlife criminal was planning to fly on LATAM Airlines from Punta Arenas to Santiago in the early morning of October 21. In Santiago he would connect to São Paulo, Brazil, arriving at five-thirty p.m. From there he would continue on to Dubai. Detaining Lendrum in Santiago, Asenjo knew, would be problematic: SAG agents had no experience arresting smugglers of wild bird eggs. At worst, their actions could tip off Lendrum and give him time to dispose of his contraband—or the officers might inadvertently manhandle and kill the unhatched chicks. So Asenjo came up with another solution.
On the morning of Lendrum’s departure, Asenjo contacted the Management Authority of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species in Brasília, the Brazilian capital. “We received the following communication about a probable case of wild egg trafficking on the part of a foreigner who is about to enter your country,” he wrote in the email. “I’m sending you the accusation so that you can take all the necessary actions.” Asenjo attached Nicolas Fernández’s original message and Lendrum’s itinerary. The authority passed the alert to the Brazilian Institute of the
Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA), the wildlife protection police. IBAMA dispatched two experienced officers to Guarulhos International Airport to await Lendrum’s arrival.
Lendrum, completely unaware of the trap being set for him, checked out of the Hotel Plaza at dawn on October 21 and caught the flight to Santiago. He carried the four eggs in socks tied off with cords and concealed in the pockets of his fleece. In Santiago, Lendrum walked through the metal detector at the security checkpoint separating the domestic arrivals wing and international departures without setting off an alarm. He boarded the flight to São Paulo, landed at Guarulhos in the early evening, and entered the Emirates Lounge to await his flight to Dubai. Inside the shower room, Lendrum transferred the eggs, still wrapped in socks, to a battery-powered yellow Brinsea incubator that he kept in a carry-on bag. Then, around 8:30, as he prepared to board his flight, he hit a snag: security agents diverted him before the gate and ran his bags through an X-ray scanner. The four eggs were clearly visible. Two green-uniformed wildlife policemen descended on him. The IBAMA agents examined the incubator and removed the four mottled brown eggs from their socks.
“They’re chicken eggs,” Lendrum insisted. The wildlife officers summoned the federal police, who placed Lendrum under arrest.
Then, for the first time in his entanglements with authorities around the world, the falcon thief lost his composure. Almost as soon as he arrived in his airport holding cell, he complained of heart palpitations. Perhaps the realization of the criminal proceedings that lay ahead had had a physiological effect. Rushed to a nearby hospital, Lendrum was given an electrocardiogram, an examination by a heart specialist, and medication for chest pains. Then he was turned back over to police custody.
Experts would positively identify the eggs and transport them to a birds-of-prey center outside São Paulo. From there they would be hand-carried back to Patagonia and reintroduced to the wild, where only one would survive.
Meanwhile, a federal court judge in Guarulhos confiscated Lendrum’s passport, set a trial date for late November, and released the multiple offender on eight thousand reais ($2,100) bail.
* * *
As he stepped into the crowded streets of Guarulhos in the tropical heat, Lendrum found himself in a predicament. Alone and unable to speak a word of Portuguese, he was stranded in Brazil’s thirteenth-largest city, an unlovely sprawl of highway overpasses, shantytown favelas, factories, and traffic-choked boulevards. He was a multiple offender with the threat of a long incarceration in a foreign prison hanging over him. After all the ups and downs of Lendrum’s last few years, nothing had prepared him for this.
He took a room at the Hotel Sables—a seven-story, $80-a-night hotel on the Avenida Salgado Filho, a busy thoroughfare—to wait out the month until his trial. The Guarulhos Federal Court had offered Lendrum a public defender, but the attorney spoke only Portuguese, so Lendrum had declined his services. As luck would have it, the young receptionist at the Sables mentioned that his father had a law practice a few blocks away, and spoke English. Lendrum went to see him that afternoon.
Rodrigo Tomei was a friendly, bearded attorney in his early forties with an easygoing manner and a command of idiomatic English. In 1990 Tomei’s father, an airline pilot and union activist, had moved his family to Calgary, Alberta, to escape persecution by Brazil’s military dictatorship. Tomei, who was then seventeen, had stayed in Canada for seven years—including a two-year stint in the army—before returning to Brazil after the end of military rule.
“They caught me with chicken eggs,” Lendrum told the attorney.
“Look, man,” replied Tomei, who had read the arrest report. “If I’m going to represent you I need to know the truth.”
At their third meeting, Lendrum admitted that he’d been smuggling peregrine eggs, but refused to answer Tomei’s questions about their intended recipients in the Middle East. When Tomei pressed him about his 2010 arrest at Birmingham Airport, Lendrum fell back on his standard explanation: “I wasn’t trafficking the birds, I was rescuing them.” The falcon eggs he had taken in southern Wales had been “dying because of pesticides,” he said. “But the British authorities didn’t believe me.”
“The Brazilians are not going to believe you, either,” Tomei replied. Plead guilty, he advised his client, and take a shorter sentence.
But Lendrum was certain, recalls Tomei, that “he could convince the judge that he was innocent.” Under oath in a courtroom in Guarulhos, Lendrum insisted, through an interpreter, that he was just a bird-watcher. He claimed that he had taken the four eggs to save them after finding the corpse of their mother lying near the nest, and explained that the three incubators seized from his luggage by the police belonged to an American photographer friend who had used them to keep his cameras warm in the frosty Patagonian climate. He swore that he had visited Dubai just once in his life—a sightseeing trip to the Burj Khalifa skyscraper, the world’s tallest building. Judge Paulo Marcos Rodrigues de Almeida called his testimony “laughable” and handed down the harshest possible sentence for violating Brazil’s Environmental Crimes Act: four years and six months in prison. The defendant could remain free on bail pending his appeal, but he would have to appear before the court secretary every two months to register his address and account for his activities. He was also ordered to pay a fine of forty thousand reais, or $10,500.
* * *
Tomei received the twenty-six-page judgment in December via an alert sent to the online mailbox he maintained as a member of the Brazilian Order of Attorneys. (Under Brazilian law, neither a defendant nor his counsel is required to be present for the verdict or the sentencing.) The lawyer informed Lendrum on WhatsApp that he had “some news” about his case. “Let’s have coffee and talk about it,” he suggested.
When Tomei translated the court decision, Lendrum blinked a few times and seemed about to cry.
“Look, we knew you would get convicted. It was a question of how much jail time you would get,” Tomei said. The next step, he told Lendrum, trying to give him some hope, was filing an appeal. “We’re not going to reverse the verdict, but we can try to reduce the sentence.”
Where would he serve his time? Lendrum asked.
The Penitenciária Cabo PM Marcelo Pires da Silva, Tomei replied, in the remote town of Itaí, about 190 miles west of São Paulo. Nicknamed the “Tower of Babel,” Marcelo Pires da Silva had opened in 2000 exclusively for foreigners, after disgruntled Brazilian prisoners in other jails had threatened to kill international inmates in an effort to embarrass the government. A total of 1,443 detainees of eighty-nine nationalities were incarcerated there by 2011, according to the Brazilian magazine Veja. “During [downtime] in Itaí, it is possible to see kipa-wearing Jews conversing in Hebrew,” Veja reported, “Lithuanian and Dutch doing sit-ups, Peruvians playing dominoes surrounded by other Latinos and a Muslim kneeling toward Mecca to do one of his five daily prayers.” Eighty percent of the inmates were reportedly doing time for drug trafficking. Marcelo Pires da Silva was not the worst prison in Brazil’s notoriously violent and overcrowded penal system, but it was hardly an easy place. “Sometimes not even a mattress is available to you … You should also be aware that the conditions of toilets and showers are extremely poor,” the British Consular Network in Brazil wrote in an information pack for British prisoners. Serious illnesses often went untreated: “The system is relatively overwhelmed [so] people can wait up to 12 months for a doctor’s appointment.”
Lendrum told Tomei that he was considering fleeing the country.
“If you’re going to do something like that, I don’t want to know about it,” Tomei says he told him.
* * *
And then, just when it seemed that things could not possibly get any worse for Jeffrey Lendrum, they did.
One morning in January, shortly after learning the verdict, Lendrum awoke in the Sables Hotel in excruciating pain. A gaping wound the size of an eight ball had appeared overnight on his thigh. Alarmed, a hotel e
mployee rushed Lendrum to a public hospital in Guarulhos. Finding nobody who spoke English, Lendrum handed Tomei’s business card to a hospital social worker, and she summoned the attorney to serve as an interpreter. Physicians determined that the wound was probably the bite of a poisonous spider that had crept into his bed and attacked him while he slept.
Doctors and nurses administered painkillers and a powerful antibiotic intravenously, and advised Lendrum to remain at the hospital under supervision for one week. “There was a danger that the toxin would infect his nervous system,” said Tomei, who stayed by his bedside. “He was having heart failure. He almost died.” But Lendrum ignored the doctors’ advice. After three days, he hobbled back to the hotel, and started self-medicating with antibiotic tablets from a pharmacy. Still, the infection was so severe that he remained weak and in frequent pain, and his wound would not heal.
“I had nothing but shit in Brazil,” Lendrum would later say.
When Michelle Conway, a longtime friend from the United Kingdom, reached out to ask where Lendrum had been for so many months, he said only that a sightseeing trip in Brazil had gone awry. A rare tropical spider had bitten him, he explained, and the airline, fearing that the infection was “contagious,” had refused to allow him to board a plane home to Johannesburg. Howard Waller, who had broken off contact with Lendrum after his arrest at Birmingham Airport, received an email from him around this time, asking if he could borrow $20,000. “Then I saw an article on the Internet about this guy who had been caught with eggs in Brazil,” he said, “and then I thought, ‘You’re asking me for money?’ ”
Soon afterward, Lendrum disappeared again.
The Falcon Thief Page 22