The Falcon Thief

by Joshua Hammer

  * * *

  Lendrum knew what he had to do. He prepared a backpack, checked out of the hotel, and traveled hundreds of miles south to the edge of the country, near Iguaçu Falls. “I knew that I was going to die in that prison,” he would later explain, “so I got resourceful.” Carrying a GPS and a day’s supply of food and water, he slipped past border police and walked “a couple of kilometers through the jungle” into Argentina. The journey, he said, took him “most of a day.” That, anyway, is Lendrum’s version of how he eluded Brazilian justice. Tomei says that Lendrum was too weak to escape on foot, and theorizes that the egg thief might have taken advantage of lax immigration controls between the two economically integrated neighbors, and crossed the official border without presenting a passport. “Nobody was looking for him, so there was no need for him to sneak anywhere,” Tomei said. “He could have just taken a bus.”

  Once safely in Argentina, Lendrum traveled 780 miles south to Buenos Aires. In the Argentine capital he appeared at the Embassy of Ireland, claiming that he had lost his passport, and was issued a new one. (He had obtained Irish citizenship some years earlier through his great-grandfather.) Then, from Ministro Pistarini Airport, Lendrum flew home to Johannesburg.

  Half a year after Lendrum’s disappearance, Tomei received a WhatsApp message from his missing client. “Hey Rodrigo, I’m in South Africa seeing my doctor,” Lendrum announced. “My wound is slowly getting better. How’s the appeal going?” Tomei replied that he still hadn’t gotten an answer.

  On October 24, 2016, the Brazilian Superior Tribunal rejected the appeal and ordered Lendrum to surrender immediately. “There’s nothing else we can do,” Tomei messaged Lendrum. But Lendrum didn’t return. Brazilian authorities soon announced that Lendrum had jumped bail, and the British media picked up the news. “Ex-SAS Rare Egg Thief Who Tried to Smuggle Birds Through Birmingham Airport on the Run,” the Birmingham Mail declared, still buying into the fiction about Lendrum’s elite Rhodesian army career. “Britain’s Most Protected Bird Under Threat From SAS-Trained Wildlife Hunter,” proclaimed the Daily Mirror.

  If he tried to return to Brazil, Tomei told him, he would be arrested the moment he stepped off the plane. Lendrum decided to lie low.

  SEVENTEEN GAUTENG

  In May 2017, shortly after my trip to Wales, I reached out to Paul Mullin for help tracking Jeffrey Lendrum down. Friends had told him that Lendrum was holed up at a rented home in the Johannesburg area. Rumors were circulating that Brazilian authorities had requested that Interpol, the international organization that links the police forces of 190 countries, issue a Red Notice requesting his extradition. That would place Lendrum in a select club of fugitives including Roman Polanski, Julian Assange, and Vorayuth “Boss” Yoovidhya, the thirty-two-year-old heir to the Red Bull fortune who is on the run from Thai authorities after fatally running over a Bangkok policeman with his Ferrari. But South Africa has no extradition treaty with Brazil for wildlife smuggling, and nobody appeared to be hunting for Lendrum. Mullin gave me a cell phone number, and I reached Lendrum on the first try.

  I introduced myself as a journalist who had just spent a day with Andy McWilliam in the Rhondda Valley. I had hoped that dropping the investigator’s name would make him more receptive to my intrusion, but whatever affection Lendrum once had for the wildlife cop had curdled into resentment. “Andy McWilliam is telling people that I was selling birds for a fortune, and that I had become a multimillionaire,” he told me. “The whole press has portrayed me as the Pablo Escobar of the falcon egg trade. Everybody writes absolute rubbish about me.”

  McWilliam had blown the case out of proportion, he insisted, to exaggerate the importance of the National Wildlife Crime Unit. In their meeting at Hewell Prison, Lendrum claimed, McWilliam had offered his condolences for his father’s death—and then confessed that Lendrum’s arrest and conviction had been like “manna from heaven” for the unit. (McWilliam would call Lendrum’s accusation “complete and utter rubbish.”) Lendrum brought up Michael Upson, a Suffolk constable convicted in 2012 of amassing 649 rare birds’ eggs and given a fourteen-week suspended sentence and 150 hours of community service. “I got two and a half years in prison. How unfair is that?” he said. McWilliam had apparently become a scapegoat for all of the disastrous turns his life had taken since his arrest at Birmingham Airport in May 2010.

  I asked Lendrum if I could visit him, and he told me that he would consider it. But when I called him back a few days later, he told me that he had just been diagnosed with prostate cancer and was about to begin radiation treatment. He didn’t feel up for talking further.

  Seven months later, I flew to Southern Africa, with a plan to retrace Lendrum’s footsteps and make one more attempt to talk to him face-to-face. I wanted to understand the roots of his obsession with birds of prey and see whether the falcon thief would finally take responsibility for what he had done. I wanted to ask him about the appeal of the outlaw life, and why he kept raiding nests around the world despite his growing profile and the increasing likelihood that he would be caught. And, yes, I hoped to persuade him to talk about the Arab connection.

  My first stop on the journey was Bulawayo, Lendrum’s hometown. Most of the white community had fled the lush, now-down-at-the-heels city, driven out by Robert Mugabe’s destructive policies—the forceful seizures of white-owned farms by war veterans and ruling party cronies in the early 2000s, the collapse of agriculture and then the whole economy, the rampant corruption, the uncontrolled printing of money that in 2008 sent inflation soaring to 80 billion percent in a single month, wiping out the value of pensions … But Peggy Lendrum was still there, living in a retirement village not far from the house in Hillside where Jeffrey had grown up. She was mortified, I was told, by her son’s crimes and global notoriety. “She is very stressed, brought on by Jeffrey’s lack of transparency, not to mention his lifestyle,” Julia Dupree, a family friend, emailed me before my arrival, informing me that Peggy had cautiously agreed to, then turned down, my request to meet with her. “How she remains sane I have no idea.”

  Lendrum had been through months earlier, Dupree told me, weakened by his treatments for prostate cancer and professing remorse. He’d announced his intention to build a memorial to Val Gargett for all the trouble he’d caused her. Yet during the same visit he had tried, without success, to obtain a list of nest locations from the curator of the bird egg collections at Bulawayo’s Natural History Museum, and had asked to join a raptor survey in Matobo National Park—a request the ornithological society had rejected. “What f****** audacity!” Pat Lorber emailed me when I told her about Lendrum’s entreaty. “Doesn’t he realize how discredited he is?”

  The African Black Eagle Survey was still going, nearly sixty years after the study’s start, though its participants had dwindled to a handful of elderly volunteers. John Brebner, the current head of the project, agreed to take me on a search for nests inside Matobo. Beforehand, he had me sign an agreement pledging not to give away the locations of the black eagle aeries. “You’re sworn to secrecy,” said Brebner, a genial onetime cattle rancher turned pesticide salesman. The precaution was the most obvious legacy of the Lendrums’ betrayals.

  Early one morning in December, the height of the warm, dry season, we set off with Brebner’s wife, Jen, in his four-by-four and headed down a potholed tarmac highway through the bush. The Zimbabwe Defence Forces had driven Mugabe from office two weeks earlier following months of escalating tensions between the ninety-three-year-old president’s power-hungry wife, Grace, and the vice president, Emmerson Mnangagwa. Now Mugabe was sidelined with his wife at his villa in Harare, and some of the indignities of life under an increasingly incompetent dictator were already being addressed. For the last two years of Mugabe’s rule, police checkpoints had lined this road—manned by hungry cops owed back wages who cited drivers for fake violations and extorted small fees. The day after Mugabe’s forced resignation, the new president, Mnangagwa, had ordered all such roadblocks in
the country removed.

  John and Jen Brebner and I entered Matobo through the main gate, and bounced over a rough dirt track. Scanning a fissure-ridden cliff one hundred feet high, my guide pointed to a huge spherical bundle of twigs and branches inside a horizontal crevice seventy feet up. “That’s a fairly new black eagle nest, only six or seven years old,” Brebner told me. “There’s one in the park that’s been here for thirty-eight years.” I tried to imagine young Jeffrey Lendrum rappelling down to a rock fissure like this one, disappearing into the giant stick nest, and fishing out the precious eagle eggs, excited by the adventure, the strangeness, the illicitness, and the secrecy of it all. Brebner pointed to a regal creature nearby, perched at eye level on the branch of a thorn tree. Its sharply hooked black beak, orange body, barred plumage, ruffled reddish crown, massive black-feathered legs, and fearsome talons identified it as a crowned eagle, one of the rarest raptors in the park. “They hunt in the canopy and they will take anything—black vervet monkeys, dassies, even a baby klippie [antelope],” he said. I wondered how many crowned-eagle eggs snatched by Lendrum here had ended up in the hands of birds-of-prey enthusiasts in Europe and the Middle East—and how many more eagles might have populated the park had it not been for him.

  * * *

  Through friends of Lendrum’s family, I learned that the falcon thief’s life had continued to disintegrate. He had broken up with his longtime girlfriend (Mullin’s ex-partner) several years earlier, had no job, and was living in a rented bungalow near Pretoria, an hour north of Johannesburg. His treatments for his cancer had weakened him, and in mid-2017 someone had broadsided his vehicle at an intersection after dark, leaving him badly injured. Whatever money he had made from his falcon smuggling—and Mullin and others insist that it wasn’t much—had apparently been spent long ago. Lendrum had gone from being a swaggering outlaw to suffering as the victim of a self-destructive obsession. “He’s got a very tough life,” Richard Lendrum told me when I met him at a coffee shop in an affluent neighborhood in northern Johannesburg. “Nothing great at all.”

  I asked the younger Lendrum, a trim man in his early fifties with chiseled features and fine lines around his eyes, to speculate about what had driven his brother into a life of crime. “We both love wildlife, it’s just that he’s gone down a slightly different path,” he said with a pained smile. “It’s a high adventure, high adrenaline way of eking out a living. It’s just gone a little wrong.” Richard had learned much over the years about his brother’s egg-thieving business, but he was parsimonious with the details. “Obviously, there are breeders that … get intermediaries to do their dirty work for them. That’s the reality. They will do anything to get birds around the world,” he told me. When I prodded him, he named Howard Waller and Arab royals as his brother’s clients, and warned me about approaching them: “What would you think if your world was going to be exposed and it may affect you, your family, your livelihood, and your potential future earnings?”

  Richard said that he was trying to provide some direction to his brother’s life and wean him off his criminal behavior. Jeffrey Lendrum was part owner of an old Cessna single-engine airplane, and had been attempting, so far unsuccessfully, to raise enough money to repair the plane and hire it out for charter flights. “I try to help him out, offering guidance and a brotherly perspective,” Richard said. “But the main thing is that he’s trying to come back from his cancer, and that’s the focus, getting healthy.”Lendrum doubted his brother would talk to me. He had ambitions to write a memoir and he didn’t want to give away trade secrets. And, Richard said, his brother knew that if he revealed anything about his Middle Eastern royal partners, he could be endangering himself. “He’s not going to go and squeal,” he told me. “He’s aware of how powerful these people are.”

  “And you think that Jeff is afraid of them?” I asked.

  “I know that he is,” he said.

  * * *

  Two hours after meeting Richard Lendrum, I reached Jeffrey Lendrum on the phone. I was flying out of South Africa that evening, I told him. This would be my last opportunity to hear his side of the story. Could he meet me for an hour?

  Lendrum hesitated, and then, to my surprise, he said yes. He directed me to meet him at the Featherbrooke Shopping Centre in Roodepoort, a city a bit north of Johannesburg in Gauteng, formerly known as Transvaal, the smallest, richest, and most densely populated province in South Africa. I should look for an Ocean Basket seafood restaurant, next to an indoor ice-skating rink. (Lendrum had a particular fondness for the seafood chain: it was in another Ocean Basket in the late 1990s that he had proposed to Mullin that they go into business together selling African handicrafts.) He would be waiting for me at the entrance.

  An Uber driver picked me up at my guesthouse in Johannesburg and took me across the parched plains and low rolling hills of the Highveld, past farms, tin-roofed shacks, and bus stops. It was a hazy summer day, and the temperature had climbed into the high eighties. He dropped me off outside a sprawling commercial complex, and I found an Ocean Basket. But I saw no sign of a skating rink—or of Lendrum.

  Lendrum was apologetic when I called him minutes later. He had sent me to the wrong shopping mall. “My short-term memory is failing,” he said. He blamed the mistake on the side effects of his cancer treatment—and, indirectly, on South Africa’s growing middle class. “They’re putting up so many of these malls all over Gauteng, with ‘feathers’ and ‘brooks’ and ‘meadows’ in the names. I can’t keep them all straight,” he told me. He had meant to send me to the Forest Hill City Mall in Centurion, a town formerly known as Verwoerdburg, after Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid. I called for another Uber. The driver headed north for forty more minutes and let me out at the entrance to a massive structure near a highway interchange. Just inside I caught sight of the skating rink—and beside it, an Ocean Basket.

  Lendrum walked up to me and stuck out his hand. “You probably recognized me from my photos,” he said. His receding hairline, black-framed glasses, and orange-white-and-blue striped button-down shirt hanging loosely over a pair of khaki shorts made him look more like a clerk in a sporting-goods store than a daredevil adventurer. But after months of fighting prostate cancer, he was tanner and healthier-looking than I’d expected. “I haven’t been doing anything, just trying to get better,” he told me, sliding into a coffee-shop booth. “I haven’t been well at all.”

  Lendrum took me through his exploits in Zimbabwe, Canada, Great Britain, Chile, and Brazil. When I pressed him to explain his crimes, he presented each egg heist as a well-meaning if overzealous rescue mission or a scientific expedition gone wrong. He told me his story persuasively, looking me in the eye. If I weren’t already familiar with his pattern of falsehoods—if I hadn’t seen Mullin’s video from Canada and watched Lendrum tell lie after lie before a judge in his videotaped testimony in Brazil—I might have believed parts of it. Lendrum had ready explanations for all of his misfortunes, a long story of bad luck, miscarriages of justice, and victimhood. But so much still didn’t add up. And one thing was clear: Lendrum had gotten sloppier. His last mission in South America had been almost comically inept: deliberately leaving a backpack filled with incriminating evidence for a year at his hotel, allowing the receptionist to see the ropes and incubators in his room, sharing his flight itinerary, and doing nothing to mask his identity. “He seems to be successful at stealing the birds’ eggs, but not very successful in smuggling them out,” Bob Elliot, head of investigations for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, had told the BBC following Lendrum’s flight from Brazil. Lendrum himself admitted his planning had sometimes been less than meticulous. “The devil is in the details,” he said with a shrug, when I asked him about the twenty minutes that he had stayed in the Emirates Lounge shower room in Birmingham without bothering to turn on the water, and the red-dyed egg he had discarded in the diaper bin.

  But then again, there could be dozens of egg trafficking trips he’d made over
the years that have gone undetected. Lendrum had traveled to Patagonia six times “as a tourist,” he told me, in the decade before his South American misadventure, drawn, he said, by the region’s majestic landscapes and the most bountiful and varied bird life on the planet. How many eggs might he have smuggled out with him?

  “Weren’t you taking a big risk by stealing eggs again?” I asked.

  “I never thought that the hotel clerk in Chile would rummage through my stuff or that he’d Google me.” It was, I thought, a remarkable display of cluelessness.

  “And the prospect of jail didn’t make you hesitate?”

  “I honestly didn’t think that there would be a problem if I were caught,” he said, “maybe just a fine.” That seemed disingenuous, or delusional, considering his recent imprisonment.

  The discussion shifted to the memoir he wanted to write. I asked whether he planned to expose the wild falcon trade in the Middle East. “I can write about it,” he said—acknowledging, for the first time, that the black market exists—“but I’d end up in a tunnel somewhere—killed.”

  I asked if he really believed his former clients were that dangerous.

  “Things happen,” he said darkly. “I don’t know the ramifications, I could say this and they could take out my sister.” He also didn’t trust that Britain’s National Wildlife Crime Unit or Middle Eastern governments would do anything with the information. “What do I gain out of it by besmirching a royal figure?” he asked. “All I will do is get my fifteen minutes of fame, and it will be forgotten about.” Nothing significant, he was certain, would come from his naming names.

  I wondered whether Lendrum was deliberately exaggerating the threat he faced in order to pump up the drama of his life, but Andy McWilliam wouldn’t dismiss the danger out of hand. Lendrum had never shared such fears with McWilliam, the investigator told me, “but there could be something in what he says.”