Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade

by Rademeyer, Julian

  ‘Peter. Stop! I don’t believe you,’ Johnny said to him. Punpitak lashed out. ‘I thought you were my friend,’ he whined, and drunkenly grabbed Johnny by the shirt. There was a scuffle. ‘I did a bit of Thai boxing when I was younger,’ Johnny says. ‘I’m old now, so I knew I must moer [him] within three minutes because I can’t hold out longer than that. I aimed nicely and headbutted him and there he lay. I don’t know if I broke his nose, but there was a lot of blood.

  ‘Another one of them just stood there like Chuck Norris, looking at me. He didn’t know a boertjie could bliksem that hard. I just wanted to show him that we aren’t guys who fuck around. We kept the English going for a long time during the Boer War and we’ll keep you Thai guys going just as long.’ Chai was angry that ‘one of his family’ had been injured. ‘To hell with them,’ Johnny thought.

  Johnny talked too much. He liked to impress. That’s how he got chatting to Jim. It is not his real name. Johnny didn’t know it at the time, but Jim is one of Paul O’Sullivan’s informants. He’s good at sniffing out information. Jim listened attentively to Johnny’s ramblings. He didn’t like him and thought he was a bit of a whiner, but Jim was good at keeping up appearances. Johnny told him they were buying rhinos. Jim was intrigued.

  O’Sullivan, meanwhile, had offered his services to Ed Hern, a former stockbroker who had founded the Krugersdorp Lion and Rhino Nature Reserve in the mid-1980s. Hern had lost rhinos to poachers and was desperate. So desperate, in fact, that he and his daughter, together with a vet, had developed a procedure to ‘infuse’ the horns of their rhinos with a pink neon dye and a pesticide as a ‘deterrent’ to poachers. O’Sullivan put out some feelers, but was quickly distracted by the Krejcir case.

  After the fall-out with Punpitak, Johnny grew steadily more embittered, and, he claims, increasingly concerned about the legality of the transactions. ‘I thought about going to the police, but Chai always said that in South Africa you can do what you want if you have money.’

  One of the Thais had been caught by the cops on previous occasions, first for speeding and then for drunk driving. ‘He bribed them with seven or eight thousand rand and they let him go. If I went to the cops, they could just pay them off.’

  Instead, Johnny approached Jim, who had, by now, told him about his connection to O’Sullivan. Johnny gave him sixteen pages of documents, containing a list of five names, farm addresses, identity numbers, and permit after permit for lion carcasses and lion bones. Jim handed everything over to O’Sullivan.

  O’Sullivan poked around, but he had his ‘hands full with other matters of a transnational criminal-syndicate nature’. It would be months before he took another look at Johnny’s file, but the abortive raid on Krejcir’s house provided the impetus. O’Sullivan dusted off the documents and asked Jim if he could ‘get any further data about the foreign links to lion bone activities’.

  Weeks later, Jim called him. He was excited. Johnny wanted to talk.

  11 May 2011

  Securitas’s offices are situated in Wynberg, a bleak industrial zone in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs. Surrounded by car dealerships, tow-trucking companies and scrapyards, the area borders on the poverty of Alexandra Township on the one side, and the leafy riches of Sandton on the other.

  In a boardroom, Johnny is spilling his guts as O’Sullivan takes notes, his grey-green eyes hard, his questions blunt. Johnny is a gold seam.

  His tale is a remarkable one, told quickly with barely a pause for breath. Over the course of two hours, Johnny gives up names, places and dates. He tells O’Sullivan about the lion bones, the rhino horn deals and the pseudo-hunts that gave them access to a steady supply of rhino horn. But his most astonishing claim is that the syndicate used prostitutes – most of them young women trafficked from Thailand to South Africa – as fronts to obtain rhino hunting permits.

  Over the next six days, O’Sullivan pulls together 220 pages of documents, including hunting and export permits, email correspondence and invoices from safari operators for rhino ‘hunts’. It is all there on a platter. Particularly damaging is an order for fifty sets of white rhino horns: 100 horns in total. The price is R65 000 a kilogram. Fifteen rhinos can be shot a month. The document is addressed to Marnus Steyl, a lion breeder and game farmer in the Free State. There are three email addresses and a cellphone number for Chumlong Lemtongthai.

  An image of a cheetah has been used as the backdrop for a crude cutand-paste letterhead bearing the name: ‘Xaysavang Trading Export-Import. Co, Ltd’ [sic]. The company’s address is in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, or Laos as it is more commonly known. ‘Purchasing foreign in South Africa,’ it proclaims in broken English.

  NEW ORDER PRODUCTS MONTH 15-05-2011, TO 20-08-2011

  IMPORT THAILAND I HAVE CITES PERMIT IMPORT THAILAND

  1, WHITE RHINO 50 SET, 1 MONTH CAN SHOOT 15 RHINO

  YOU DO CITES PERMIT EXPORT OF SOUTH-AFRICA

  1,KG X 65,000R CITES PERMIT IMPORT THAI,

  2, LION BONES 300 SET, 1 SET 10,000R FOR 10KG IP.ONLY,

  CITES PERMIT IMPORT LAOS PDR

  In the Michelangelo Hotel, Johnny puts down his cup. His voice is hushed. In the background a man is fiddling with the lounge’s TV set. There is a rugby game on.

  By mid-2010, the Thais were actively refocusing their efforts on the acquisition of ‘bamboo’, the term they use to refer to rhino horn. And, they believed, they had found a loophole in the hunting laws that would give them access to an unlimited supply.

  The regulations are clear: a hunter can hunt only one rhino a year. But there is no national or centralised permitting system. Efforts to centralise this data has resulted in little more than an Excel spreadsheet, rife with spelling mistakes and errors. Part of the problem is that each province approves and issues its own permits in accordance with provincial wildlife ordinances, which can differ widely from province to province. Where there is a will, there is way, and the permitting officials who vet the hunters and check their credentials prove all too easy to manipulate and corrupt.

  Chai is ‘very clever’, Johnny says. ‘He told me that he’s been in the wild-life trade for twenty-two years and has done everything from horn to ivory and bones. He is brilliant. If he looks at the horns on a living rhino, he can estimate their weight exactly. For instance, let’s say he’d estimate it at about 5.3 kilograms. When the rhino is later shot and the horns taken off, he’ll only have been about point five of a kilogram out. He’s that accurate.’

  Johnny put out feelers and found a hunting outfitter. Juan Pace is the owner of Shangwari Safaris, a business established in 1996. Its website boasts that it operates in six African countries and ‘specializes only in dangerous game hunting’. Pace is also a member of PHASA. The Thais said they had heard that Thai citizens could not legally hunt rhinos. Pace said he’d check. The word came back to them: ‘It doesn’t matter what country you’re from, you can shoot.’

  Either in August or September 2010, Pace secured the first rhinos to be slaughtered. Chai paid over R1 million in cash for them. As before, the money was drawn from ATM machines at Emperors Palace. Chai felt safe there. By Johnny’s reckoning, it would have taken more than 500 withdrawals of R2 000 each – the withdrawal limit of the machines – to get the cash together.

  Chai made sure there was a record of the transaction. ‘While we were paying Juan,’ Johnny said in his statement to O’Sullivan, ‘Chai was busy taking pictures with his camera. I know that Chai carries a Sony laptop around with him. If this computer was obtained, I believe investigators would have everything.’

  The photographs show Pace and his wife grinning stupidly over a heap of cash piled up on a pink tablecloth in their home. Their two young sons look on.

  Johnny said the rhinos were taken to the Leeuwbosch Game Lodge near Stella in North West province, where they were promptly dispatched in a hunt. Hunting records show that Punpitak and Tool Sriton, another of the Thais arrested alongside Johnny in the 2008 buy-bust, shot two rhinos at Lee
uwbosch on 10 September 2010.

  This is what Johnny told O’Sullivan:

  Then the horns were sent to a taxidermist by the name of Savuti Taxidermy, and he specialises in mounting the horns onto a shield, thereby turning it into a hunting ‘trophy’. This was an important part of the process, as Savuti would then be able to get a CITES permit for the trophy and it would be shipped to Laos and the whole thing would be legal … [T]he ‘trophy’ is just a cover for getting the horn out of South Africa and into Asia.

  Once in Asia, it obviously would enter the black market as rhino horn for ‘medicinal’ purposes. The person allegedly ‘hunting’ the rhino would never see the animal, or its horn, again, after the ‘hunt’.

  I do know that the horn eventually goes to a guy by the name of Xaysavang … From this I would draw the conclusion that Xaysavang is the ‘big boss’ of the whole operation.

  I interviewed the owner of the farm, Dr Deon Engelbrecht, in July 2011. He denied any wrongdoing. ‘You can’t do canned hunting here, because here you have to go out and look for the rhino. I know they came and hunted a rhino, and then I stopped it. I didn’t supply rhinos to them. It was their rhino that they brought here. I had nothing to do with the transaction.’

  An invoice, dated 14 November 2010, and sent to Chai by Leeuwbosch Game Lodge and Safaris, records the sale of one ‘white rhino bull with 2 horns’ at a ‘unit price’ of R65 000 a kilogram. The horns weighed 7.12 kilograms. Another invoice shows that the syndicate bought twelve female lion carcasses and thirty-two male lion carcasses from Leeuwbosch for R318 000.

  Engelbrecht said he no longer owned rhinos because of the ‘high risk’ of poaching. He lost a rhino to poachers in early 2010 and ‘then got rid of the things’. Some time in January or February 2011, permits were issued for a further two rhinos to be hunted on his farm. Both hunters were Vietnamese.

  The Thais had had their taste. ‘Bamboo’ was where the real money lay. Late in 2010, some of the men, including Johnny and Punpitak, travelled to Winburg in the Free State to examine a stash of lion bones.

  A sign at the entrance to a farm outside the town promised: ‘For all your wildlife needs … Steyl Brothers – We do it in “Steyl”’.

  9

  The Killing

  16 January 2011

  In the shade of a tree on a game farm in North West Province, a white rhino bull has taken shelter from the stupefying heat. It dozes, ears twitching, its massive chest rising and falling in slow rhythm. It is a magnificent beast with long, curved horns.

  There’s a sharp crack and a puff of rust-red dust erupts from the animal’s hide as the first bullet tears into it. A terrible, almost indescribable keening cuts the air, like a baby crying out or a pig being slaughtered. It is a sound you don’t easily forget.

  The GoPro camera strapped to Marnus Steyl’s head records the rhino’s desperate struggle to escape. It rolls onto its side, feet thrashing wildly as it battles to stand. A rifle barrel, distorted by the lens, snakes into view. A second shot hits the animal as it staggers forward and away from the source of its pain, kicking up a cloud of dust. Steyl reloads. The rhino – confused, unable to see or smell its killers – turns full circle. A few seconds later, a third shot rings out. The animal charges behind a bush. Five seconds elapse. Harry Claassens, the PH who regularly accompanies Steyl’s clients, raises his rifle and fires. The rhino runs a few paces and collapses under the tree. Mewling in agony, it tries to rise up on its haunches, then topples over.

  Steyl bends down to pick up a spent cartridge and hands it to the tracker. In the background, a Thai man looks on. The rhino’s cries are getting softer now. Steyl tries to reload, then swaps rifles with Claassens. Forty seconds after the fourth shot, Steyl speaks. ‘Waar moet ek hom skiet? (Where must I shoot him?),’ he asks Claassens uncertainly, voice hoarse with adrenaline.

  The men move closer. About ten to fifteen paces from the animal, they stop. Steyl clumsily shoulders the rifle. He fires quickly. Too quickly. The scope kicks back, cutting him above the eye. The bullet hits the animal in the head. Steyl pauses. The rhino’s movements are weaker, its squeals muted. ‘Daai een te laag? (That one too low?),’ he asks Claassens. Ten seconds tick by. ‘Hy’s gone (He’s gone),’ Steyl announces.

  Steyl ejects the cartridge from the breach, hands it to Claassens and pushes the bolt home. He wipes blood away from his eye. But the rhino isn’t dead yet. Blood oozes from flared nostrils. An eye stares glassily into the middle distance. Its right hind leg twitches. Ragged breaths displace scrub and dust near its head.

  The men approach their kill to inspect the damage. ‘Kyk die eerste skoot, Harry. Die eerste twee. Is hy te laag daar? (Look at the first shot, Harry. The first two. Is it too low there?)’ Steyl asks. Claassens says nothing. They watch the animal die. Steyl removes the camera and appears to hold it in his hand. The camera tilts and focuses on the Thai man. He’s standing there, expressionless, his hands at his sides. He’s not holding a rifle. Steyl walks away from the rhino. He looks down at the camera, fumbling for the off switch. There’s a flash of a striped brown-and-white Jeep golf shirt, blond hair and a ruddy, sunburnt face, puffy from too many braais and booze. Then nothing.

  The dusty little Free State dorp of Winburg lies just off the N1 highway halfway between Kroonstad and Bloemfontein. It’s a shell of a town, grubby and decaying, the roads irreparably potholed. Those who can, escape when they’re young and rarely return for more than a fleeting visit.

  A dirt road leads away from the R708 near Winburg to Steyl’s farm, Klipplaatfontein. Inside enclosures surrounded by double layers of game fencing, lions prowl listlessly in the sun, occasionally feeding off bloody, fly-blown hunks of meat. Corrugated containers, used for game capture and relocation, rust nearby.

  Steyl founded a game-capture business here with his brother Nelius in 2001. Next they established Steyl Safaris and Boschrand Lodge, which was ‘built to fulfil all the needs a hunter might have’. The Steyl Group website boasts that the brothers are a ‘dynamic duo’ with a ‘passion for animals’. Their ventures are described as ‘intertwined … with the sole purpose of promoting South Africa & South African wildlife, and creating a heritage for future generations’. A gallery of hunting images shows an array of hunters grinning over their kills. Many are lions. In one photograph, Steyl crouches beside the carcass of a male lion. He has his arms around his young son. The boy doesn’t smile. The animal’s jaws are agape, its left paw is smeared pink with blood.

  Steyl made headlines in June 2006 when one of his lions, an eight-year-old male, escaped from the farm. Breathless news reports in Die Volksblad, the local Afrikaans newspaper, described how stray lions were terrorising Free State communities. The Free State accounts for the largest number of captive-bred lions in South Africa. It is also a hotbed of ‘canned’ lion hunts, where caged animals are released, only to be shot weeks, days, and sometimes even minutes or hours, later. In some instances they’ve been doped to make them easier targets.

  There have been other escapes from other farms. The previous month a lion had been tracked down and shot near Winburg after breaking free from a game farm. There were also reports of a lion being sighted near Harrismith in the Eastern Free State. In Winburg, a posse of thirty farmers were marshalled to find Steyl’s lion. It had apparently escaped after someone cut the game fence on the farm. Steyl picked up the bill, which ran to about R8 000 a day. It took the men two weeks to capture the errant animal and return it to its cage.

  On a sweltering summer’s day in 2010, Johnny Olivier and Punpitak Chunchom set off on the 300-kilometre drive from Johannesburg to Winburg, bound for Steyl’s farm and a barn stinking of death. One of Juan Pace’s cronies, a man Johnny knows only as Izak, had seen an advert about Steyl’s captive-bred lions in Landbou Weekblad, a weekly agricultural magazine. He’d called him up. Steyl had lion bones for sale and was keen to do business.

  Steyl had done well from breeding lions and from trophy hunts. But the hunters wanted the he
ads and pelts of their kills and little else. They’d have them mounted, usually with lifeless glass eyes and teeth bared in a silent snarl. Displayed in a pub, or spread out as a rug on a living-room floor, the dead beasts were the perfect talking point for alcohol-drenched evenings filled with improbable tales of danger and adventure in the African bush. Perhaps the hunters thought they were the next Hemingway or Selous or Percival. Trophies gave those fantasies a semblance of reality.

  That left the carcasses, which had little use. Grey, skinless, headless obscenities, spattered with blood, they would be left for the vultures and scavengers to feast on or be hurriedly buried in pits to rot into the soil.

  Steyl was a relative latecomer to the lion-bone trade. Other lion breeders in the Free State and North West provinces had been quick to cash in on the growing Asian demand for alternatives to dwindling stocks of tigers, whose bones, flesh, bile, blood, fat, eyes, teeth, claws and whiskers are used in traditional potions, medicines and vile-smelling ‘wines’.

  In December 2009, the Free State’s Department of Environment provoked a furore when it issued permits to a controversial lion breeder by the name of Kobus van der Westhuizen, which effectively licensed him to kill lions and sell their bones. The department unsuccessfully attempted to mollify critics by emphasising that he was only allowed to trade with a dealer in Gauteng and not in China.

  Buti Mathebula, the department’s head, did little to lessen the ire of conservationists and animal rights activists when he told Volksblad journalist Charles Smith: ‘Lions in the Free State are not of any value to us from an environmental point of view. They’re not roaming free in the wild. If someone wants to hunt lions in the Free State, that’s fine. We don’t want these lions here. We’re better off without lions in the Free State. There are problems with fences. If they escape, they kill people.’