The response was ravenous. The following day he ordered more Ziploc bags, these ones large enough to ship full bird skins. Two days later he logged back in to announce that only a limited number of Indian Crow feathers remained, “so if you still want some, now is the chance!”
* * *
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On November 28, Edwin uploaded a photo of the small turquoise Blue Chatterer to eBay.co.uk, using an account he’d registered a couple of months prior to his first visit to the Tring: Fluteplayer 1988. When news of the auction hit the forum, there was a surprised reaction.
Angler Andrew: From Britain as well, I’ve never seen one on Ebay from Britain. Anyway there’s about 10 mins left and still no bids. Man if I won the lottery!
Monquarter: Hmm the seller is “Fluteplayer 1988.” Edwin Rist sold some Indian Crow to pay for a new flute recently. Coincidence? Maybe however I suspect the seller is Mr. Rist so it should be good quality and from an honest seller.
mitch: anyway I wish him well and hopefully gets his flute before Christmas. Cheers.
Meanwhile Adele was still waiting on the forensics results from the bit of latex glove, the drop of blood, and the diamond-blade glass cutter. She was skeptical that a match would come back. A more experienced burglar, the kind with prints already on file, would have been more careful about removing potentially incriminating evidence. In the meantime, she contacted the National Wildlife Crime Unit, charged with enforcing anti-trafficking laws. Formed only three years earlier, the police unit specialized in gathering intelligence on wildlife crime, working closely with various branches of law enforcement, including the UK Border Force, which maintained a dedicated CITES team trained in identifying protected species at Heathrow Airport. Adele asked them to be on the lookout: if an agent discovered someone with a bunch of exotic birds, she wanted to be the first to know.
* * *
–
Around this time, “Mortimer,” a dentist and avid fly-tier from the Pacific Northwest, landed in London for an eight-hour layover on his return from a fishing expedition in Africa. He took a cab to the Jurys Inn, where he found Edwin waiting in the hotel restaurant.
Edwin didn’t seem particularly concerned about displaying his wares. He ordered a beer and laid out a handful of species that his customer had expressed an interest in over e-mail. As Mortimer inspected the skins, Edwin told him he was helping a pair of aristocratic collectors sell off their collection as a way of funding his studies. Mortimer, unsure of their legality, was wary of returning to the airport with the birds, so he put a hold on three of the choicest skins: a Flame Bowerbird, an Indian Crow, and a Blue Chatterer. He sent Edwin a check for seven thousand dollars. When the package arrived at Mortimer’s dental practice, he found a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service inspection sheet inside, which meant either that Edwin had forged documents or that the federal agency had opened it mid-shipment, examined the birds, and waved them along.
At eighty-seven, Phil Castleman is arguably the community’s longest-running feather supplier. Proprietor of Castle Arms of Springfield, Massachusetts, he has been selling feathers for sixty-four years to a mailing list of customers that approaches fifteen hundred names. His showroom, which includes pelts of fur, taxidermy birds, and a collection of more than one hundred framed salmon flies by the world’s best tiers, is open by appointment only. Castleman kept a close eye on movements in the marketplace, and he would generally hear if a competitor was about to off-load a lot of skins or an obsessive collector was looking to buy. Shortly after Edwin started selling, Castleman’s phone began ringing, as fly-tiers tipped him off to the auctions of rare birds in England, wondering whether they could be legally shipped to the United States. He did a lot of business in Europe but didn’t know anyone in England with a collection like that for sale.
But while Castleman fielded calls from cautious fly-tiers, Edwin found that his buyers, many of whom he had known since his earliest days tying, weren’t asking questions. He knew that their addiction to these birds meant they wouldn’t ask questions to which they’d rather not know the answers. For those whose conscience demanded it, though, he offered a menu of fabricated stories regarding each skin’s provenance. Some had been discovered in overlooked corners of antique shops, others scooped up at a provincial estate sale. His Birds of Paradise had come from a friend in Papua New Guinea as part of a trade.
* * *
–
As 2010 approached, the search for the thief—or gang of thieves—was short on leads. The curators had reviewed their e-mail correspondence with people who had expressed an interest in the species targeted in the theft. Two initial suspects emerged: a Canadian named Luc Couturier and an American named Ed Muzeroll. Just a couple of years prior, both had inquired about the possibility of buying some of the museum’s skins but had been turned away. Adele ruled them out as culprits but remained unaware of how close she had come to the thief, who had learned to tie his first salmon fly with Muzeroll, and had first heard about the Tring’s collection from Couturier.
Although the museum’s curators had publicly expressed a strong desire to recover the skins, they had privately come to the conclusion that the stolen specimens had likely already been broken up and separated from their tags and were no longer of scientific value. Whether this pessimistic assumption colored the police investigation is unclear: what is clear is that the thief was right under their noses. One of the working theories was that a fly-tier was behind the theft, and any Web search for the species in question would have yielded a number of hits at ClassicFlyTying.com, including discussions of Edwin’s bird skin sales on eBay. His forum posts had used the Latin names for each species, the very names now affixed to empty cabinets at the Tring.
The two previous major thefts at the Tring—Shorthouse’s eggs and Meinertzhagen’s skins—had been perpetrated by known visitors to the specimen stacks. Had the latest thief also come to the museum prior to robbing it? No more than a couple of hundred visitors were likely to have entered the vault during the previous calendar year: if their culprit had staked out the museum under false pretenses, surely his or her name would be in the logbook.
The name Edwin Rist was, of course, there, on a page dated November 5, 2008. If they had run an online search for “Edwin Rist,” they would have found a number of websites connecting him to the world of salmon flies and his eBay listings. But six months after the robbery, they were still in the dark.
Adele’s day-to-day work—tackling domestic abuse cases, breaking and entering, and other robberies—continued apace. If the Tring’s curators ever turned up a good lead, she’d investigate, but for the time being, the case moved into the unsolved bracket.
* * *
–
At the dawn of the new year, everything was coming up aces for Edwin. Whenever he needed an infusion of cash, he’d post some feathers on eBay or the forum, which would sell in less than a day. A quick trip to the post office, and the money would pour in; repeat as necessary.
On March 6, he packed a number of skins he was open to selling if the price was right and headed up to the Spring Fly Fishing Show in Newark, a few hours north of London. Dave Carne, who had recently sent Edwin $3,500 that he’d borrowed from his elderly mother for a cape of feathers from a prized subspecies of Indian Crow, was excited to finally meet him in person. Carne had been tying salmon flies since he was thirteen, when he often spent his pocket change on Florican Bustard and Jungle Cock feathers from the fishing tackle shop where he worked.
At the show, Carne saw Edwin sell a full Blue Chatterer skin to Jens Pilgaard, a Danish blacksmith renowned for his collection of hand-forged blades of mottled Damascus steel, medieval weapons, and Viking jewelry. Pilgaard also sold fly-tying materials as the proprietor of Fugl & Fjer Fluebinding—Danish for Bird & Feather Fly-tying. As the Dane tied a fly in front of a small audience of admirers, Edwin approached him with his skins. “Why are you selling this?!” he a
sked, as he and his audience marveled at the quality of the feathers. When Edwin replied that he needed money to buy a new flute, the Dane bought a breast patch of Indian Crow, a Flame Bowerbird cut into a few pieces, and a Blue Chatterer skin. The bill came to about $6,000, along with a commitment to send a Malayan Peacock Pheasant skin—worth another $4,500—from his collection back home in Århus, which Edwin could sell to his growing customer base.
In April 2010 Edwin hopped on a flight to Japan: he had recently started taking Japanese at King’s College London, even taking part in the International Japanese Speech Competition. He bought a travel pass, visited Tokyo and Kyoto, and rode the bullet train. He packed some materials so that he could tie a Popham Fly in the park under the sakura cherry blossoms, wrapping fine silk around Indian Crow and Blue Chatterer feathers.
When he got back to England, he sent a follow-up note to Jens, letting him know he’d spoken to his Bird of Paradise contact and that he would be able to get several King Birds of Paradise. Pilgaard had seen only a couple of skins of that species over decades in the feather business: how had a twenty-one-year-old American student in London managed to find a supplier?
Even as the online residue of his transactions spread and spread, Detective Hopkin and the Tring curators were still without a suspect. The National Wildlife Crime Unit hadn’t turned up any bird skins at the airports. The forensics on the drop of blood, the latex glove, and the glass cutter hadn’t yielded anything useful. The search for the missing skins had officially gone cold.
Safe as he felt, Edwin had no way of knowing that in one month’s time, hundreds of miles away in a small Dutch town, one of his customers would make an offhand comment that would bring it all crashing down.
12
FLUTEPLAYER 1988
If there was one specific moment when Edwin’s plans began to unravel, it was in late May 2010, at the Dutch Fly Fair outside the small city of Zwolle, an hour and a half east of Amsterdam.
The festival, convened every two years, was held in crisp white pagoda tents beneath the Swedish, Dutch, and Icelandic flags that flapped over the shores of the Drontermeer Lake west of town. Massive salmon steaks were roasted on cedar planks over medieval coal baskets, and a pair of bagpipers announced the entrance of the king, who strutted about comically with a velvet robe and a scepter-shaped fishing rod.
In the main tent, where dozens of tiers from around the world convened to demonstrate their skills on an elevated stage, a Dutch construction engineer named Andy Boekholt was at work on a salmon fly, using hard-to-get feathers. Nearby was Chuck Furimsky, manager of the International Fly Tying Symposium in Somerset, New Jersey, known for his trademark handlebar moustache. Vintage reels and fly rods gleamed from nearby glass cases.
Also present was a man from Northern Ireland. “Irish” was two decades into a career in law enforcement. He had operated undercover during the worst years of the Troubles, narrowly surviving multiple bombings and shootings. To keep sane in those dark times, he had taught himself to tie, starting with simple shrimp flies used to catch sea trout. He had recently begun to dabble in classic salmon flies and had come to Zwolle to see the masters in action—but he didn’t share the community’s obsession with rare birds.
Irish wandered through the tent until he arrived at Boekholt’s booth. Next to the bespectacled Dutchman’s vise was a Victorian cabinet containing twenty slender trays, originally designed to store antique microscope slides. Boekholt pulled them out one by one, revealing hundreds of flies with many thousands of dollars’ worth of rare feathers tied into them.
When Irish and Boekholt started talking about hard-to-get feathers, the Dutchman couldn’t resist showing off one of his latest purchases, a flawless full Blue Chatterer skin. To Irish, it didn’t look like the birds that occasionally popped up on eBay after being pried out of a Victorian hat with outstretched wings and legs: its eye-sockets were stuffed with ancient-looking cotton, and the wings and feet were tied closely to the body.
“Where’d you get this?” he asked casually. Nearly a year earlier, he had seen reports about the Tring heist, so when he saw the Dutchman’s museum-grade skin, something fired in his mind, and his suspicions flared.
“Some kid in England named Edwin Rist.”
When he got home, Irish logged onto ClassicFlyTying.com and began clicking through the items being sold on the Trading Floor. The night before the Dutch Fly Fair, a listing had gone up: “Flame Bowerbird male full skin for sale.” The post had already amassed 1,118 views. He discovered several other links on the forum to eBay listings of Birds of Paradise, in which forum members mentioned that the skins were located in England. Irish found that most of the auctions were posted by the same seller.
He rang the Hertfordshire Constabulary and told them to look into the eBay username “Fluteplayer 1988.”
* * *
–
The message made its way to Adele, who petitioned eBay for the legal name and address of the person holding the account “Fluteplayer 1988.”
When the name Edwin Rist came back, she ran him through their system and discovered that he was a student at the Royal Academy of Music. When she shared this information with Mark Adams and Robert Prys-Jones at the Tring, they confirmed that someone by that name had visited the museum six months prior to the theft.
Adele wasn’t easily excitable, but this was the best lead she’d had since the case was assigned to her. She quickly dialed the school administrators to locate Edwin but discovered that she had just missed him: he had boarded a plane back to the States for summer break only two weeks earlier, and had moved out of the apartment eBay had on record.
Thirteen months had passed since the burglary. And now they were fourteen days too late?
Her department didn’t have much in the way of a travel budget—she had a hard enough time getting approval for a train ticket to London—so a flight to New York to interrogate Edwin was off the table. But she was concerned about the fate of the skins—the more time passed, the more likely they were to be separated from their tags, rendering them worthless to the Tring. Had he taken them with him to the United States? If he had left them in England, where were they?
The United States was unlikely to grant any favors by extraditing Edwin back to England. She would have to wait until he returned on his own and hope that he hadn’t traveled with the skins.
* * *
–
When the Royal Academy of Music’s fall term commenced on September 13—the start of Edwin’s fourth and final year of study—Adele was still trying to determine his exact whereabouts. She couldn’t get a search warrant authorized without a valid address, and she was still waiting on the school to notify her once Edwin registered his new off-campus address.
Meanwhile Edwin was back and moving product. In an e-mail to his network of customers, he announced his September 2010 offerings, including a Blue Chatterer with “full plumage” for one thousand dollars, excluding shipping. A few weeks later he was sending messages to Jens Pilgaard, hoping to sell the Dane some Birds of Paradise.
Perhaps in anticipation of a new wave of sales, he logged into eBay and updated his account with his new address.
Shortly thereafter eBay responded to Adele’s request for an updated address for her suspect: a flat in Willesden Green, an eighteen-minute ride on the underground line from the Royal Academy.
* * *
–
The last online listing of Edwin’s feathers on ClassicFlyTying.com went up on November 11, 2010. “A Mix pack for sale” was posted, along with an image showing nine pairs of feathers neatly arranged on a dark canvas backdrop. Beneath each pair, the subspecies and available quantities were typed in a white bold font.
That night Edwin and his girlfriend went to bed on the earlier side—he had a rehearsal the following morning and wanted to be at his best. His dream of playing for the Berlin Philharmonic wasn’t far
from reach: he would soon graduate with a degree from one of the world’s best conservatories, positioning him for auditions with the finest orchestras. He already had an invitation to audition with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He had just turned twenty-two.
Early in the morning of November 12, 2010, Adele and two of her colleagues drove down from the Hemel Hempstead police station to London, their GPS set for the address of Fluteplayer 1988. If she had had only his name, she would have been skeptical that Edwin, an American music student without any prior record, was her man. But she had his eBay records, which included listings of exotic birds and purchases of mothballs, Ziploc bags, and a diamond-blade glass cutter. She knew he’d visited the Tring. She was pretty certain.
A little bit before eight in the morning, Edwin’s doorbell rang. He was awake, trying not to disturb his sleeping girlfriend as he got ready for his rehearsal. At first he ignored it. He wasn’t expecting any packages and was a bit pressed for time. But now someone was banging on the door
“Who is it?” he asked through the door.
“It’s the police,” Adele said. “Open the door.”
Five hundred and seven days after he broke into the museum, Edwin opened the door, glanced at Adele, and asked, “Is something wrong?”
13
BEHIND BARS
When Adele told him they were there to investigate the Tring robbery and had a warrant to search his apartment, Edwin confessed immediately. He knew they would find the birds; there was no point in trying to hide what he’d done.
The Feather Thief Page 12