The Falcon Thief

by Joshua Hammer

  I felt sorry for Lendrum in some ways. Charming, energetic, resourceful, intelligent, and passionate about birds of prey, he could, as the Zimbabwean professor Peter Mundy had observed in the ornithological magazine Honeyguide, have probably made a noteworthy career in academics, field research, or wildlife conservation. But he was conflicted between his love for animals and his need to possess them. Driven by the thrill of the chase, by a juvenile need to break the rules, and by his ambition to be seen as a globe-trotting daredevil—and by financial incentives as well—he had followed a twisted path into this South African cul-de-sac. Now, despised by conservationists, fearful of his handlers, broke, and sick, he had lost almost everything.

  * * *

  “Do you imagine that there will be a time when you will get back to egg collecting?” I asked. We had been talking at the Forest Hill City Mall for nearly two hours, and Lendrum was growing restless. He had an appointment to speak to a friend about the charter airline company he was trying to get off the ground. I knew it was time to end the meeting.

  He said he doubted that he would return to the field. He was on the run from Brazil, had been banned from Dubai, wasn’t welcome in Canada, couldn’t travel to the United States (for reasons he never explained), and was under scrutiny in the United Kingdom. Besides, he wasn’t the formidable outdoorsman that he’d once been. “I’m getting too old for it,” he said. “Look at me.” Prostate cancer had depleted his energy, and the car wreck had damaged the nerves in his neck and limbs.

  We said our goodbyes. Lendrum shook my hand and moved slowly off. Then, before disappearing around the corner, he turned and hit me with a proposition. “Do you want to steal some eggs sometime?” he asked, grinning. “We’ll go into the Rhondda Valley and see how many peregrines we can get—right under Andy McWilliam’s nose. You do the climbing. We’ll make millions.”

  It was, I thought, all bluster and self-mockery. Lendrum’s egg snatching days were finally behind him. But I turned out to be wrong.

  EPILOGUE

  On June 21, 2018, I was sitting in a stifling auditorium, watching my oldest son’s graduation ceremony at the John F. Kennedy International School in Berlin, when my iPhone went off in my pocket. The caller’s ID had been blocked, and, over the valedictorian’s amplified speech I heard a muffled voice with a South African accent speaking my name. I didn’t register who it was. “I’m at my son’s graduation,” I told the caller. “I’ll have to call you back.”

  Only after hanging up did I realize that it must have been Lendrum, calling to chat, as he had done periodically in recent months, about peregrine falcons and pigeon fanciers, a proposed trip with me to Matobo National Park, my impending visit to South America, or some questions I had about his childhood. Minutes later I found a message in my in-box:

  “Call if you want. Cheers jeff.”

  “Sorry Jeff!” I typed back. “I just couldn’t make out who it was. Will call when I get home.” In spite of Lendrum’s long history of environmental pillaging, and his many attempts to bamboozle me, I, like McWilliam, had found it hard not to like him. He was cheerful, garrulous, and full of energy. His lying was so transparent that it made it easier to shrug off. His haplessness in recent years also made him seem less toxic: he was the thief who couldn’t steal straight. Talking to Lendrum at length had made me realize something else, too: he was always dancing on the edge of a confession, as if prevaricating so consistently for so long had worn him out.

  Distractions came up, and it wasn’t until four days later that I finally got around to ringing Lendrum’s cell.

  The phone was off.

  I tried the next day, and couldn’t get through. That was unusual: Lendrum hadn’t let his phone go unanswered for so long before. Three more attempts over the next several days went directly to voice mail.

  It didn’t take me long to discover where Lendrum was.

  On June 29, the British Home Office issued a press release: “Rare Bird Eggs Importation Prevented by Border Force at Heathrow.” Three days earlier a passenger from South Africa identified as a “56-year-old Irish national” had aroused the suspicion of Border Force agents. They had stopped him, searched him, and discovered seventeen eggs from endangered birds of prey—African fish eagles, black sparrow hawks, Cape vultures, and African hawk eagles, similar to crowned eagles but more common—as well as two fish eagle chicks that had hatched in transit, in a customized belt hidden beneath his clothing. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species lists the fish eagle as an Appendix I bird, threatened with extinction; the other three species are Appendix II. The suspect had no documentation for any of them. British law doesn’t allow a suspect to be identified until he is charged in court, but I had little doubt about who it was.

  Sure enough, in late July, British newspapers reported that Jeffrey Lendrum had been charged with four counts of fraudulently evading prohibition—i.e., importing protected wildlife—and that he had been packed off to the Dickensian-sounding Wormwood Scrubs Prison in London to await a plea hearing in August. The National Crime Agency, founded in 2013 to combat “serious and organized crime,” has a close relationship with Heathrow’s Border Force and had immediately taken control of the investigation, relegating McWilliam, who probably knew more about Lendrum than any other law enforcement officer in England, to the sidelines. The details from the court appearance were skimpy—Lendrum’s lawyer had argued that his client was on his way to declare the eggs and chicks before he was intercepted—and I had a wealth of questions that, for the moment, couldn’t be answered. How had he procured the eggs? Who was he delivering them to? Why had the Border Force stopped him? And, most of all, what the hell had he been thinking?

  I flew to London for Lendrum’s pretrial hearing on August 23. His solicitor, Keith Astbury, had told me that his client intended to plead not guilty. But risking a jury trial could result in a tougher jail sentence than a plea bargain would—up to the maximum penalty of seven years. Had Lendrum rejected his solicitor’s advice, as he had in Brazil? Astbury wouldn’t comment.

  At Isleworth Crown Court, in a drab London suburb directly beneath the flight path of jets landing at Heathrow Airport, I sat in the empty public gallery of a tiny second-floor courtroom, waiting for Lendrum to appear. I knew from Astbury that Lendrum had no interest in talking to me, but I hoped to make eye contact, at least. It wasn’t to be. Court officers escorted Lendrum from a holding cell to a bulletproof booth at the rear of the courtroom, out of sight of the gallery. I heard his disembodied voice—faint, downcast—say, “I’m not guilty.” When I stood in an attempt to get a look at him, a court officer motioned furiously for me to sit back down. Tony Bell, Lendrum’s in-court lawyer, or barrister, promised to provide the judge with records about his client’s ongoing cancer treatment to expedite a request for bail—a request that would be denied. Then his trial was set for January 7, 2019.

  * * *

  Four and a half months later, on a cold, drizzly morning, I traveled by tube to Snaresbrook Crown Court, a mid-nineteenth-century Gothic-revival manor house on eighteen acres of manicured grounds at the eastern edge of London. Barristers wearing white wigs and black robes walked along paths past stone turrets and arched entryways, looking like extras on a Georgian-era movie set. The third and climactic day of The Queen v. Jeffrey Lendrum was scheduled to unfold in Courtroom 15, a modern chamber with coral-colored upholstered chairs, blond-wood desks, gray carpeting, and soft track lighting on a white-paneled ceiling. I sat in the gallery a few feet from the glass-partitioned section reserved for defendants, and had a close-hand view of Lendrum as the bailiff escorted him into the courtroom. Dressed in sneakers, jeans, and a shapeless gray sweatshirt over a white cotton polo, he sat down, expressionless.

  Craig Hunt, Lendrum’s childhood friend who owned the Southern Comfort Lodge, would later speculate that Lendrum, floundering in the outside world, had deliberately engineered his own arrest at Heathrow, trading away his liberty for “free medical care, three m
eals a day, and a television set.” If so, Lendrum had badly miscalculated the conditions of his incarceration. Wormwood Scrubs had become notorious for filth, narcotics, and gang warfare. After half a year awaiting trial, working as an orderly, or trusted assistant to the staff, in the segregration unit, which was reserved for disruptive prisoners or for those who faced a threat from other inmates, Lendrum looked paler, thinner, and more disheveled than the last time I had seen him. Still, when he had caught my eye the first morning of the trial, he flashed a smile. I smiled back.

  At ten o’clock the usher rapped three times on the door separating the courtroom from the judge’s chambers and called the session to order for the trial’s third and penultimate day. All the attendees—Lendrum; his barrister, Tony Bell; the prosecutor, Sean Sullivan; four journalists; and Michelle Conway, a friend from his Rhodesian childhood who lived in England and had visited him frequently at Wormwood Scrubs (“Jeff is gentle as a lamb,” she would tell me)—rose for the judge’s entrance.

  “God save the Queen,” the usher intoned.

  Judge Neil Saunders, a silver-haired jurist in his sixties, swept in with a bow. The previous afternoon, during a discussion of procedural issues, Saunders had derailed Lendrum’s barrister’s plans to try the case before a jury, which was still waiting in another room to be empanelled. Lendrum was not acting criminally, Bell had planned to argue to the jury, because his intention all along had been to hand the eggs over to British authorities upon arrival. The judge had ruled that what mattered in establishing culpability was not the defendant’s alleged “intention,” but the simple act of bringing prohibited goods into the country and not immediately declaring them. (To my surprise, this issue hadn’t been dealt with before the proceedings began.) With his defense thrown out of court, Lendrum had been forced to plead guilty on the spot, uttering the plea to the judge from behind the glass barrier. The jury pool was dismissed without even setting foot in the courtroom. Now, on day three, the trial would head straight to the sentencing phase; prosecutor and barrister would each call witnesses and present their arguments for and against a lengthy incarceration directly to the judge.

  Birds-of-prey expert Jemima Parry-Jones, the first prosecution witness to be called, told the court that the birds Lendrum had stolen came from a wide range of South African habitats—cliffs, mountain peaks, old-growth forests, and riparian woodlands (forests near rivers or lakes)—indicating that his latest project had covered significant territory and had probably lasted days or even weeks, quite an achievement for a man who claimed to suffer from nerve damage in his arms and neck. Parry-Jones placed a street value on the eggs at between £80,000 and £100,000, or between $104,000 and $130,000.

  Lendrum had raised the suspicions of Heathrow’s Border Force the moment he stepped up to the immigration counter, a customs offical testified in an affidavit read aloud in court. He had worn a heavy winter coat during a brutal summer heat wave (better to conceal his belt filled with eggs), held a return ticket to Johannesburg for six o’clock that same evening, and offered a flimsy story about coming to purchase airplane parts in Luton, a London suburb. He may also have been on a watch list, though border officials would neither confirm nor deny this. Lendrum certainly thought so—although, troublingly, Lendrum claimed that this hadn’t stopped customs officials from letting him through in the past. “A couple of times coming into the UK, I joked with the guys, and they let me go,” Lendrum told the court when summoned to the stand in the afternoon. “ ‘I know what you’re here for,’ they said.”

  Lendrum again cast himself as a misunderstood animal savior. He had rescued the eggs from forests because “South Africa was cutting down all the trees,” he testified, “destroying their habitat.” He had told customs officers at Heathrow that his intention all along had been to turn the eggs over to them and to request that they deliver them to Parry-Jones’s birds-of-prey center in Gloucestershire, where they would be hatched under close supervision and protected. There were rumors, however, that the intended recipient was an unscrupulous Welsh breeder and longtime friend of Lendrum’s, who’d been waiting just outside Heathrow that morning, and who had fled when he realized that Lendrum had been arrested. Lendrum’s unpersuasive performance on the stand reminded me of the classic definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

  “You are a convicted smuggler of rare birds around the globe for profit, are you not?” Sullivan, a young, sandy-haired Oxford graduate, challenged Lendrum as the cross-examination phase got under way. “In Brazil you are convicted of those offenses, and you run. You flee jurisdiction, is that right?”

  “On—on the advice of my lawyer, yes,” Lendrum stammered.

  “You are an absconded smuggler of birds eggs, and that’s what you were when you arrived at Heathrow, weren’t you? You were on the run, as a convicted smuggler.”

  “I spoke to my lawyer and I thought I had won the appeal.”

  “It’s not the case, is it?”

  “Now I know.”

  When it came time to pronounce his sentence, at ten o’clock the following morning, Saunders, echoing several judges before him, called Lendrum’s testimony “completely implausible.” The judge asked him to rise. He had weighed the gravity of Lendrum’s offense, he said, against his age, precarious health, last-minute change of plea to guilty, and the character references submitted by Michelle Conway and Craig Hunt. Conway had compared Lendrum admiringly to “Crocodile Dundee,” while Hunt had described his gentle, fun-loving, but “impulsive” nature, ever since his school days.

  “The sentence I pass,” Saunders said, “is one of thirty-seven months’ imprisonment on each count, to run concurrently.” Lendrum would serve his sentence at Pentonville Prison in North London, a hulking, high-walled fortress erected during the early Victorian era, where the Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde had spent two months of his two-year sentence at hard labor for homosexuality. A 2018 report by the Independent Monitoring Board declared the penitentiary crumbling and “rife” with vermin and complained that inmates went weeks without getting exercise in fresh air.

  Lendrum rose without expression and left the courtroom, holding the best-selling nonfiction book that Conway had given him during her most recent jailhouse visit: Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. Lendrum’s own prospects offered little reason for optimism. With his five convictions on four continents, two terms in prison, a flight from a felony conviction in Brazil, and an Interpol Red Notice, it was hard to imagine that any prospective employer would be willing to give the hapless thief another chance once he got out. He faced the threat of extradition to Brazil, though the authorities had yet to file a request at the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, the clearinghouse for all such petitions. He was on immigration watch lists around the world, and his criminal record was all over the Internet. “There’s more hits on my name than the Yorkshire Ripper,” he had complained, near tears, once again the self-proclaimed victim, at one point in his testimony. Lendrum had made an attempt to cover his tracks, yet it demonstrated the same degree of ineptitude and half-heartedness as his latest egg smuggling escapade. In 2017, it had emerged in court that morning, the falcon thief had officially changed his name to “John Smith.” Lendrum was a man trapped in an endless loop of criminality, unable to outrun his past.

  * * *

  Andy McWilliam had followed the Lendrum proceedings from Liverpool, sidelined from the investigation by the National Crime Agency. For a brief time in the run-up to the trial, McWilliam had thought that the prosecutor might summon him to court to provide evidence of Lendrum’s “bad character.” But by autumn his hopes of playing a useful role had faded. The day after Lendrum’s sentencing, I caught a train from London Euston to Liverpool Lime Street to get his take on the trial.

  McWilliam was waiting for me at the end of the platform. I almost didn’t recognize him: He was thirty pounds lighter than the las
t time I had seen him, having embarked on an extreme bicycling regimen after a health scare. He was not surprised by Lendrum’s relatively modest punishment, which all but guaranteed that he would walk out of prison, on parole, in thirteen months. “The prisons are so damned bloody crowded,” he told me, as we ambled through the Victorian heart of Liverpool, a time capsule of the port’s glory days. “As long as you’re not considered a ‘threat to society’ the judge will grant you some leeway.” Unlike Craig Hunt, who believed that Lendrum had intended to get caught at Heathrow Airport that June morning, the investigator was convinced that Lendrum had made the smuggling journey from Johannesburg to London several times—until his luck had run out that June. This time, McWilliam didn’t offer any optimism that Lendrum would stay out of trouble after his release on parole in the winter of 2020. (In the late spring of 2019 Lendrum would be transferred from the grim purgatory of Pentonville to the category “D,” or minimum security, Ayelesbury Prison, in Buckinghamshire, north of London.)

  We walked past St. George’s Hall, a colonnaded concert venue built of sandstone. McWilliam had stood on its steps on December 9, 1980, keeping watch over the thousands of Liverpudlians grieving for John Lennon, who’d been murdered in New York City the night before. As McWilliam spoke, I wondered, not for the first time, whether intertwining his story so closely with Lendrum’s diminished his accomplishments. He’d been around long before Lendrum—and would keep investigating crimes now that his quarry was locked away.

  The National Wildlife Crime Unit was entering its thirteenth year, having survived a series of bruising funding battles. In the winter of 2014, only a last-minute plea by Head of Unit Nevin Hunter to the Home Ministry and the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) had saved the unit from dissolution and McWilliam and his colleagues from unemployment. Nearly the same scenario had occurred when funding lapsed two years later. This time the government had, in the final hours, committed to keeping the unit active until 2020.