Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade

by Rademeyer, Julian

  By the end of the war in the Zambezi Valley in 1993, more than 170 poachers were dead. At least four Zimbabwe park rangers had lost their lives. And more than a thousand rhinos had been killed for their horns. The killing stopped, but only when there were no more rhinos left to kill.

  By the mid-1990s, the surviving rhinos in Zimbabwe’s parks along the border with Zambia had all been translocated to the Lowveld. Driven by Raoul du Toit, a conservationist and rhino specialist, a number of conservancies had been created as safe havens for the animals. They were on land that had previously been used for cattle ranching. But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a series of crippling droughts hit the Lowveld. Coupled with decades of exploitative cattle farming and overgrazing, the impact was devastating.

  Clive Stockil, later chairman of the Savé Valley Conservancy, said at the time that the cattle ranches ‘were headed for an economic disaster, let alone an ecological disaster’.

  ‘We saw soil erosion. We saw overgrazing. We saw the loss of perennial grasses. And we were forced, by the end of the 1980s, to sit down and really think about what our future was.’ Encouraged by a feasibility study which concluded that conservancies, through tourism and hunting, could generate double the income of cattle ranching, many farmers began to embrace the idea.

  Fences between farms were dropped and properties were linked into ever larger conservancies. Without them, Zimbabwe would have no black rhinos today.

  ‘Killing poachers doesn’t achieve anything,’ Leathem says. ‘There are so many poor guys out there and criminal elements that are prepared to take the risk to make quick bucks. No matter how many of them you shoot or arrest, you’ll never stop it. The only way is to cull the market. You have got to get to the guys at the top.’

  2

  The Wiseguy

  The obituary buried in the pages of the Hartford Courant on 27 July 2007 ran to barely a dozen lines. A dry, characterless assessment of a life lived, it recorded the sudden passing of John C. Lukman Jnr in Costa Rica on 7 July 2007 at the age of fifty-three.

  Lukman, also known as ‘Captain Jack’, was a resident of Newington, Connecticut, for most of his life before moving to Central America in 2001, the obituary noted. He was survived by his father, three daughters and two granddaughters. ‘He loved them dearly and will be missed by all.’ A small gathering of remembrance was planned.

  The only hint at Lukman’s identity and life was included almost as an afterthought. ‘He loved to travel and did so extensively in Africa and Central America.’

  A year later, someone started digging for information. Logs of requests made to the Central Intelligence Agency under the Freedom of Information Act show that on 4 September 2008, the CIA received a request for access to files on John Charles Lukman Jnr. The identity of the applicant is not listed and there is no indication whether the files – if they exist – were ever released.

  2 June 1988

  Special Agent Rich Moulton checks the microphone taped to the centre of his chest and buttons up his shirt. He is used to wearing a wire. ‘I have no chest hair left as a result,’ he likes to joke. He has worked undercover for much of the fourteen years he has spent with the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). In law-enforcement circles, he and his colleagues are sometimes disparagingly referred to as ‘duck cops’. It is not something any of them pay much heed to.

  Moulton has that rare, chameleon-like ability, so prized in undercover agents, of being able to become his cover story. It is a bit like being a method actor, only the stakes are far higher. Early in his career, Moulton hadn’t thought he could cut it as an undercover operative. ‘But the more comfortable you got, the more you realised that, hey, this is like being an actor. You just gotta remember the script.’

  Once he posed as a wealthy collector to trap a New Yorker who was smuggling snow-leopard skins from Afghanistan and selling them for US$15 000 each. At the time there were fewer than 2 000 of the animals left in the world. Moulton swapped his jeans for suits and his wheels for a Corvette and an SUV. He pretended that another agent was his chauffeur.

  Today, he’s Rick Moore, a businessman who buys exotic animal trophies and resells them to home decorators. Moulton has code-named the sting ‘Operation Wiseguy’, a name he borrowed from a popular TV show. Moulton is a fan. Every Thursday night, he and millions of other viewers tune in to the improbable exploits of undercover agent Vinnie Terranova as he takes on the Mob. It is fantasy stuff, complete with gunfights, car chases and vehicles that invariably explode on impact. Even the stakeouts are exciting. There will be none of that today.

  The Berlin Diner is a nondescript little eatery in the small town of Berlin in Hartford County, Connecticut. It is a sleepy place with a population of around 16 000. In the street outside the diner, Bob Clifford, a special agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), is sitting in a parked car, fiddling with a radio receiver and a sandwich. He stifles a yawn and shifts uncomfortably in his seat. It could be a long afternoon.

  Moulton’s sixth-floor office in downtown Hartford is run on a barebones budget and the kind of electronic surveillance equipment he needs for the sting isn’t readily available. So he’d turned to the ATF. Clifford was assigned as back-up, and the suits approved access to the ATF’s repository of gadgets. It would be good to work with a buddy. Rich and Bob went back a long way.

  Clifford had been briefed about the case. Four months ago, a guy in Hartford had put out word that he had a stuffed leopard mount for sale. A sports hunter could legally own a leopard trophy, provided he’d taken the trouble to get the requisite permits and paperwork filled out. Selling the trophy, however, was a federal crime, prosecutable under the Lacey Act, America’s oldest national wildlife statute, which made it illegal to import or export wildlife in violation of any federal, state, Indian or – significantly – foreign law.

  Moulton had followed up the tip and called the seller. ‘Hi. My name’s Rick Moore,’ he’d introduced himself, before going on to explain that he had a small decorating business and was looking for trophies. ‘You the guy who’s got the leopard for sale?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said the voice on the other end of the line. ‘But I sold it.’ The buyer had been a guy in New Jersey. He did, however, have a mounted leopard head for about 500 bucks, if ‘Rick’ was interested.

  ‘I’ll think it over,’ Moulton said, and left his number. Later, the man called back and said he also had a leopard-skin rug for sale. ‘How much?’ Moulton asked.

  ‘One thousand two hundred dollars’

  ‘It’s a deal,’ Moulton said.

  They met for the first time in a parking lot. Moulton was accompanied by another agent. Their target was a lean, bearded man in his mid-thirties with jet-black hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He was kitted out in a ‘jungle outfit’. Khaki seemed to be his colour of choice. Perched on his head was a safari hat with a zebra-stripe band. He clutched a black elephant-skin bag. There and then Moulton decided on a nickname. From now on he’d call him ‘Shaka’, after the nineteenth-century Zulu king and warrior.

  ‘I’m Rick,’ Moulton said. ‘This is my business associate,’ he added, pointing at the other agent. Moulton handed over $500 in cash for the head, which they stashed in the boot of his car. He gave the man a cheque for $1 200 for the rug, which would be delivered only once it had cleared. Warming to his new client, Shaka boasted that he had contacts in South West Africa and Zimbabwe who could supply other trophies, including endangered species. Moulton decided to push him. ‘What about rhino horn? Can you get it?’ he asked.

  ‘No dice, that’s taboo,’ Shaka said tersely. Normally, Moulton would end the case right there with a bust-and-buy. But something told him to hold back and let this one play itself out.

  Their next meeting took place in another lot, outside a movie theatre. Shaka pulled up in a Land Rover with a personalised Connecticut licence plate that read ‘ZAMBIA’. A bumper sticker proclaimed: ‘I love Africa’. With him was his girlfriend, Mary Ann
McAllister. ‘Shaka’, it seemed, had begun to trust his new friend, ‘Rick’.

  Clifford gets as comfortable as he can in his car. The meeting is set to take place any minute now. There is a burst of static as Moulton’s shirt catches on the mike, then the audio returns to normal. You never know with these things. Sometimes there’s interference with the signal. They’ll only know when they play back the tapes. Hopefully it works today. The target is ready to deal. Inside the diner, Moulton shakes hands with the bearded man. ‘Hi, John,’ he says. Lukman smiles back.

  Moulton doesn’t really know what to make of Lukman. He’s collected snippets here and there, gleaned what he can from official documents and listened attentively to Lukman’s tales of derring-do.

  He knows that, in 1976, Lukman – then twenty-two – had sued the CIA and its director, George H.W. Bush, for access to classified documents they had on him. In refusing a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Lukman, a CIA review committee said that the only document it had could not be released, as it was a ‘classified document relating to our liaison contacts with a foreign government’. The 1972 file contained ‘information pertaining to intelligence sources and methods which the director of Central Intelligence has the responsibility to protect’.

  A report in the Hartford Courant quoted Lukman as saying that the only explanation he had for the existence of the document was his shortwave radio hobby. As a teenager, he had written to countries around the world requesting broadcasting schedules and ‘cultural information’. Lukman argued that he was seeking a job with the US State Department and wanted to review the document in case he had to undergo a security-clearance interview. The article noted that Lukman, ‘who hasn’t any formal education beyond high school, said he has travelled in the southern and eastern regions of Africa and in Europe, Jamaica and Canada’.

  Moulton quickly learns that Lukman is an incorrigible storyteller. Stroke his ego enough and he’ll tell you everything – up to a point. He likes to impress and name-drops shamelessly. He claims his ‘good friends’ include senior Reagan White House officials and Ian Smith, the former prime minister of Rhodesia. The leopard mount he sold to the man in New Jersey was initially stored in the garage of Smith’s Harare home, he later tells Moulton. Lukman also has ties to the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO), the Mozambican rebel movement established in the 1970s with the shadowy support of Zimbabwe’s Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO). He’s spent time with Jonas Savimbi, leader of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), the South African and US proxy in the Cold War against the Soviets and the Cubans.

  In fact, Lukman seems irresistibly drawn to all things military. He describes the editor of Soldier of Fortune magazine as a close friend. His acquaintances include several members of the Rhodesian Veterans’ Association, and he once paid $5 000 for a leather-bound collector’s edition of a book by military author Peter Stiff about the Selous Scouts, the notorious Rhodesian counter-insurgency unit.

  Lukman’s views of the African continent are rose-tinted and romanticised, his imagination fuelled by the exploits of big-game hunters and tales of mysterious warriors and ancient kingdoms. ‘Africa is where my soul is,’ he often says. He travels frequently to destinations there and also in South America. Once he dropped in on ‘friends’ stationed at the Ilopango Air Base in El Salvador – the launch pad for US military supplies to Nicaragua’s murderous contra rebels. On another occasion, he turned up in Nicaragua. And then there are the frequent trips to Cuba. In those days, what American went in and out of Cuba so effortlessly? None that Moulton knew. For some time now, he’s wondered about Lukman’s background. Could he be CIA? The agency denies it.

  Lukman and Moulton order lunch. Soup for Moulton, a submarine sandwich for Lukman. Moulton hands over $2 400 for a mounted cheetah head and a skin. They arrange for the goods to be shipped from South West Africa to a post office box Moulton has set up for the sting. The goods will be marked as ‘curios’. Lukman assures him his contacts in South West Africa, a man named Marius and his wife Pat, are reliable.

  The conversation drifts from illicit wildlife trophies to Lukman’s adventures in Africa. Then, Lukman broaches a new subject. ‘You know, Rick, I can get you machine guns,’ he says abruptly. Moulton remains poker-faced. In the car outside, Clifford – who has just taken a bite of his sandwich – starts to choke.

  In retrospect, Moulton isn’t too surprised. Often wildlife crime investigations diverge into other areas: drugs, guns, money-laundering, you name it. Pablo Escobar, the violent Colombian drug lord, is known to have his own private menagerie of hippos, zebras, giraffes and rhinos at his sprawling estate near Medellin. It’s a little narco-zoo, perfect for laundering drug money. In Florida, some of the biggest drug kingpins are avid collectors of reptiles and animal trophies. Increasingly, federal agents are seizing consignments of live reptiles stuffed with cocaine-filled condoms. When the condoms burst, the deaths are frightful. On other occasions they’ve found drugs stashed in polar bear hides. Rhino horn, reptiles, guns, drugs – they are all commodities to be bought and sold on the black market, and the smuggling routes are often the same.

  ‘AKs are nice,’ Lukman says. He claims that his contacts handle all the weapons with gloves to ensure that there are no telltale fingerprints for customs or the ATF to work with, should they intercept a shipment. ‘They’re brand new, ready to go,’ he says.

  Lukman boasts that not only can he get AKs, but he has access to Soviet fragmentation grenades and even landmines. He claims the weapons form part of stockpiles captured from Cuban soldiers in Angola by South African troops. He confides that a friend of his in Georgia – a member of the Rhode-sian Veterans’ Association – resells the arms. The profits from these spoils are then divided up between Lukman, his friend, and his South West African contacts, Marius and Pat.

  ‘I’m not much into guns,’ Moulton says. ‘But my marine buddy Bob is.’ It is a coded message to Clifford. ATF can take the guns from here. ‘You tell your marine buddy that if he’s interested in anything that is communist-bloc-orientated, there’s nothing we can’t get,’ Lukman says.

  Moulton arranges for Lukman to meet Bob. Clifford will be the ideal plant. He is a Vietnam veteran and a former marine. No acting required.

  The meeting is delayed when Lukman is suddenly called to Washington. He’s been invited to the White House, where UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi is on a charm offensive to secure US support for the movement. Moulton marvels at how Lukman has managed to get security clearance in only twenty-four hours.

  ‘It makes you really wonder what’s going on,’ he confides to Jim Genco, the US prosecutor who will be handling the ‘Wiseguy’ case. Moulton notifies the Secret Service that a target of an investigation is going to be at the White House. They promise to keep an eye on him.

  On his return to Connecticut, Lukman calls Moulton. ‘Tell your marine buddy I have a few things that those pig-stickers attach to.’ In military parlance, ‘pig-stickers’ are bayonets. The ‘things they attach to’ are evidently AK-47s.

  July 1988

  Lukman ushers Moulton and Clifford into his Newington condominium. It is crowded with the detritus of his travels. On a wall is a large map of Africa. There are wood carvings of animals, line drawings of warriors armed with spears and shields, and an elephant footstool. Rather bizarrely, there’s a bayonet stuck into a wooden table. African masks stare blankly into space. In one corner is an autographed portrait of the bearded Savimbi wearing green army fatigues and a red beret. There is a UNITA flag and election posters for Smith’s Rhodesian Front. A framed photograph shows Lukman posing alongside Smith. They have their arms around one another. Taking pride of place is a painting of Lukman – the great adventurer – in khaki shorts, jungle boots and a bush hat. He’s staring into the middle distance, looking noble, like the explorers of old. The Victoria Falls thunder below him.

  Lukman closes the blinds next to Moulton. He flips a switch in the corner of
the room. Shadows dance up the walls as the white glare of a spotlight blinds the two agents. Without a word, Lukman turns and walks quickly to the kitchen. Blinking, Moulton looks at Clifford. This is odd. What’s going on? They see Lukman reach up for something in the kitchen. When he turns around, there is an AK-47 in his hands. The ‘pucker-factor’, as Moulton likes to call it, goes way up. Lukman had said nothing about selling a gun today.

  ‘Crap, he’s figured out who we are,’ Moulton thinks. Heart pounding, he feels a surge of panic, but keeps it in check. Neither he nor Clifford is carrying a weapon. If Lukman pulls the trigger, they’ll be plugged full of lead and dead in a blood-spattered heap before the back-up team can crash through the doors. There’s nothing they can do.

  Lukman advances, the barrel pointed directly at them. He hands the gun to Moulton. There’s an uncertain pause. Then the tension breaks. They breathe again. ‘Look, Rick, I don’t know him,’ Lukman says, nodding at Clifford. ‘I know you. I’ll only sell it to you and you can give it to him.’ It is a bizarre statement, given that Clifford is standing right there. No matter. The deal is still illegal. Moulton passes the AK to Bob, who does a quick field test. Satisfied, he gives Moulton the money, and Moulton hands it to Lukman.

  ‘The AKs are from Marius,’ Lukman says proudly, referring to his contact. He gestures at a photograph on a counter. It shows an army major in full battle dress. Marius, Lukman explains, has access to South African Defence Force (SADF) warehouses in South West Africa (later to become Namibia) that are ‘loaded with Soviet and Cuban weapons’ taken from Angola. Some of the weapons are being funnelled to RENAMO in Mozambique. In the garage of his home in South West Africa’s capital, Windhoek, Marius has hoarded assault rifles, pistols and even landmines, and is doing a neat trade in ‘war memorabilia’ to US connections made through Soldier of Fortune magazine’s classified ads.