After all, Edwin had somehow managed to wipe all traces of his website from existence. I knew the ClassicFlyTying.com forum had been a hotspot for buying his birds, but the site had enforced a “No Tring Discussion” policy since Edwin’s arrest, deleting anything remotely incriminating.
As the weeks turned into months and the months into years, my search for the missing skins grew into something like a separate, submerged identity.
By day, I fought to keep the United States’ doors open to Iraqi refugees, managing a small staff and working with hundreds of pro bono attorneys representing the refugees on my list.
By night, I befriended heavyweights in the fly-tying community on Facebook, riffling through their photo albums in search of any hint of the Tring’s birds. I talked my way into private groups on the social networking site dedicated to buying and selling rare feathers, and I started taking screenshots. When the stack of evidence on my desk began to teeter, I organized the papers into manila folders. When the folders grew too numerous, I bought an accordion file.
At some point, the accordion file began to burst at the seams, now with additional notes about Wallace, Kelson, Rothschild, and the Victorian era, which I’d started reading about in an effort to understand this strange obsession. Finally I bought a filing cabinet.
Even as I drew a large net around him, Edwin remained dispiritingly out of reach. I’d obsessively accumulated details about his background and the price points for each species of bird he’d stolen, and I’d developed an intimate understanding of who was who in the feather underground, but with the exception of Ruhan, I still hadn’t located any of the missing skins.
I still didn’t even know whether Edwin had acted alone.
* * *
–
Whenever the well of leads ran dry, I found myself returning to the forum. Though I knew that most of the incriminating posts had been deleted in the chaotic days after Edwin’s arrest was made public in November 2010, I spent dozens of hours searching for anything that the administrators might have missed. Occasionally, I’d find something that raised an eyebrow, such as a post from July 26, 2010—a year after the burglary but a full four months before the arrest was announced. In it, Bud Guidry, the administrator of the forum, uploaded a photo of Indian Crow feathers he’d just purchased, commenting, “This picture always gets my heart racing.” In response to Guidry’s claim that the plumes were originally owned by a turn-of-the-century tier, a well-known feather dealer named Aaron Ostoj quipped: “Well, it was that or stolen from a natural history museum and sold at 3000% profit :)”
“A tad more profit than that Aaron,” replied Guidry, “just a tad more.”
It felt as though I was barging into a speakeasy that had already been tipped off: they had done a frustratingly good job cleaning up any trace of their connection to the Tring heist.
But then I found a time machine.
* * *
–
In October 2001 the Internet Archive launched the Wayback Machine, which dispatches web spiders to crawl through the Internet and take snapshots of pages for posterity. By 2009, the year of the burglary, the spiders had taken three petabytes’ worth of screenshots of constantly changing websites, enough to fill three thousand iMacs.
I stumbled across the Wayback Machine while poring through the Internet Archive’s scans of the 1874 twenty-seven-volume Catalogue of Birds in the British Museum late one night in July 2013. I excitedly typed in EdwinRist.com, hoping to exhume the site I’d heard so much about, but came up empty-handed: “Hrm. Wayback Machine doesn’t have that page archived.”
My luck changed when I plugged in the link to the ClassicFlyTying.com Trading Floor: on four separate dates throughout 2010, the Wayback Machine’s spider crawled through the forum, snapping screenshots of the fly-tying community’s transactions.
I clicked on the November 29 snapshot, and my eyes bulged. It was like peeling back a layer of earth to find a perfectly preserved fossilized skeleton. There were dozens of posts about Indian Crow, Blue Chatterer, and Resplendent Quetzal skins for sale, listings that no longer appeared in searches on the forum. I could see the title and author of each post and the number of views.
There was a listing for a full Blue Chatterer skin from November 28, 2009. An Indian Crow breastplate posted on April 19, 2010. A full Flame Bowerbird skin on May 7, 2010, and packs of Resplendent Quetzal feathers on May 8. “Exotic bird skins for sale” on July 17, and “Packs of feathers/birdskins” on the twentieth. More Indian Crow and a Purple-Breasted Cotinga skin on August 31.
Heart racing, I clicked at random on one of the listings, from April 21, 2010, entitled “Crow anyone?”
I understood why the listing had vanished from the website. At the top was a link to an eBay auction: “VINTAGE FLY TYING FEATHERS—INDIAN CROW SKIN—NON CITES.” Members of the forum, upset by the high price—over one thousand dollars—lamented the rising cost of feathers: “We do it to ourselves by creating the demand.”
I wasn’t sure it was a Tring bird, but when I scrolled to the bottom of the page, I found my smoking gun, confirming the identity of seller. “It’s not Edwin who’s the crook,” wrote one member, “it’s the silly fuckers with more money than sense who’ll pay that.” I raced over to the timeline hanging on my wall and added the transaction. Over the course of the next hour, with the help of the Wayback Machine, I exhumed another fifteen sales.
My excitement mounted when I realized that all the posts had been made by the same person, seemingly working on Edwin’s behalf. Under the screen name Goku, this person created the forum posts, uploaded photos of the birds, fielded orders, and appeared to be handling the financial transactions.
“Have a friend in need that sadly have to sell his IC . . . as he can’t afford to keep the feathers and really need the money for the family,” Goku wrote in late August 2010, referencing the particular subspecies of Indian Crow the feathers came from. “This cape is a top cape, one of the best I’ve seen in person, still very full . . . please send mail for price.”
Elsewhere Goku posted links to Edwin’s eBay.co.uk offerings, trying to drum up bids before time ran out on the auctions.
Edwin even commented on some of Goku’s listings. On October 6, 2010, a month before the arrest, Goku announced a new sale of a Blue Chatterer skin but declined to reveal a price, insisting that only “serious bidders should inquire.” When a number of members complained about his high-handed tone, Edwin rallied to his defense. “Personally I do not find Goku’s tone condescending here, nor do I think there is any problem with him not wishing to display the price,” he wrote. “Everyone knows these items are expensive.”
On November 11, Goku announced a “Mix pack” of feathers for sale, including three species of Blue Chatterer and three subspecies of Indian Crow. After a Belgian named Geert Werbrouck placed an order, Goku replied: “Thank you so much! The money goes to a student friend of mine :) I’ll need your addy, could you send me that on PM?”
The next morning, Adele and her deputies descended on Edwin’s apartment. Goku never posted feathers again.
* * *
–
Who the hell was he?
21
DR. PRUM’S THUMB DRIVE
In September 2013 my memoir about the war was published. That same month I fired myself from my nonprofit, which was chronically low on funding. Though over two thousand refugees had made it to the United States through the List Project, many more never would, and it was hard not to feel that I had failed.
I set off on a book tour, speaking on campuses and encouraging students to tackle global problems while trying to mask how burned out I was. When they asked what I was planning to do next—go to Afghanistan? take on Syrian refugees?—I didn’t know how to tell them that I had become obsessed with righting a different kind of injustice and dreamed of chasing down a feather thief.
On a trip to Ya
le, I visited the Peabody Museum of Natural History to meet with Dr. Richard O. Prum, the William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology and head curator of vertebrate zoology at the museum. I knew Prum was a MacArthur genius and Guggenheim fellow, head of his own prestigious lab, and the world’s leading expert on Cotingas, which constituted nearly a third of the birds stolen from the Tring. But before I stepped into his cluttered office, I had no idea he had also been trying to solve the mystery of the missing skins.
* * *
–
In 2010, the year before I went to the International Fly Tying Symposium in Somerset, New Jersey, Prum had driven down from New Haven to that year’s symposium, pacing the aisles, talking with vendors, gathering business cards, and identifying the various species of exotic birds for sale.
“I was trying to get Fish and Wildlife to bust these fuckers!” he told me. He’d called the agency in charge of enforcing anti-trafficking statutes, urging them to attend the show, but one of its officers had recently been killed in the line of duty by a drunken deer hunter in Gettysburg; all the agents in the region were headed to the funeral that weekend.
“I’m running around with my hair on fire trying to get somebody interested that these wildlife crimes are happening all around us,” he said. “They’ve got tropical birds from numerous continents for sale in New Jersey, and nobody seems to be doing anything about it!”
Before the demands of his academic life put a stop to it, he’d briefly become obsessed with Edwin Rist, pressing the Tring for details about the affected species and looking for a journalist willing to shine a light on a hobby that he wanted to stigmatize into oblivion.
“I’ve been waiting years for you to walk through the door,” he said as he riffled through his desk, an accretion of many years’ worth of memos and journals, a decommissioned computer monitor, manila interoffice envelopes, large Ziplocs stuffed with Golden Parrot feathers, at least seven coffee mugs, and a Darth Vader bobblehead. At last, he uncovered his notes from the symposium.
I recognized most of the names of the dealers—there was John McLain of FeathersMc.com and Phil Castleman of Castle Arms. “Nine or ten vendors were displaying tied flies with feathers of non-US Neotropical, Asian, or European bird species. Three or four vendors were selling flat skins, scientific skins, or taxidermy mounts of non-US tropical birds,” he’d written. The ornithologist had spotted skins of Black-Collared Barbets, Golden Tanagers, Black-Backed Grosbeaks, Bronzed Sunbirds, Bamboo Partridges, Indian Rollers, Eurasian Jackdaws, Dusky Parrots, Yellow-Tailed Black Cockatoos, and Scarlet Ibises.
“But they all say that their birds are from the Victorian era,” I replied, “before the CITES laws came into effect.”
“All of these birds are protected by laws!” Prum shouted, his indignation palpable. “None of them is importable without special permits. Most of them were prepared in ways that indicated they could not have been nineteenth-century birds that they’d received from Grandma.” In his opinion, the skins were obviously being trafficked, an orgy of conspicuous consumption of the birds he’d spent a lifetime studying.
“This material is criminal,” he said, pausing between each word for emphasis. “You can’t possess it and not have broken numerous laws.”
“Did any of them have biodata labels attached to them?” I asked.
“No. There were no labels, but there were price tags! It’s a fuckin’ outrage!” he thundered.
“Even after all this time,” I said, referring to the many sales I’d seen of protected species, “I don’t understand why they would take such risks in the pursuit of their hobby.”
“People don’t actually fish with this shit, right?!” Prum said. “So what is it about? It’s about this fixation, this obsession with originality. Well, there’s no fuckin’ originality in the world! Who are these guys? They’re dentists from Ohio! What claim do they have to originality in anything?!”
When I told him that one of Edwin’s customers was in fact a dentist, Prum laughed. Calming down a little, he went on. “What I see is a story of the struggle for authenticity . . . to try to make what people are doing meaningful. What they’ve done is enshrined this in a period where English fishermen were members of a colonial power that ruled the entire globe and could extract fascinating things from it, then sell them in commercial markets.
“But that dream is extinct,” he said. “That world is gone.
“When I work on feathers,” he added, “knowledge is a consequence. When I pluck a feather and destroy it, we discover things about the world that nobody knew before.” By contrast, Edwin and the feather underground were a bunch of historical fetishists, practicing a “candy-ass, ridiculous, parasitic activity” that Prum would be glad to see go extinct.
Before I left, he told me he had something for me. Rummaging through his desk drawer, he pulled out a small USB drive.
Out in the parking lot, I got my laptop out of the car and plugged it in, gasping when I discovered that Prum had taken meticulous screenshots of Edwin’s website, seemingly the only record of it in existence.
As I clicked through each file, I could see why Edwin had wiped it from the Internet. On the “Exotic Materials Photo Album and Sale Page” were links to thirty-one different listings, using the Latin binomial nomenclature for each species and subspecies.
Each link jumped to a high-resolution photograph of the bird. Although the tags were hidden, the birds displayed the telltale cotton eyes and unique preparation of museum specimens. Skins prepared for research have the wings and legs drawn close to the body, unlike birds that have been mounted on hats with outstretched wings.
Above each listing, Edwin had added some showroom descriptions: “The Masoni subspecies of Indian Crow is by far the rarest, and is very rarely seen in collections. The feathers are a deep brown, with blood red tips and a pronounced crimp.” Introducing a species of Blue Chatterer, he wrote: “Cotinga maynana is the most colorful species of blue chatterer. It is very rare, but is exceptionally bright.” On the page featuring the birds collected by Wallace 145 years earlier, Edwin wrote: “King Bird of Paradise is a bright little bird of paradise, with vibrant iridescent underwing coverts. Please contact me for availability of full skins and prices.” He marveled at the “exceptional” neck feathers of his Flame Bowerbirds: “their shiny translucent nature is unmatched.”
Elsewhere on his site he added, “I also sell birds on consignment, so if you have a bird you want to sell, I can help!
“Don’t worry,” he reassured his buyers: “unless you want me to, I will not say where any given bird is from.”
In Edwin’s sentencing hearings at the Crown Court, the prosecutors had tried to focus the judge’s attention on the financial motive behind the theft: these birds were stolen so that they could be sold. But his defense attorneys had won the day, thanks to Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen’s report, which, beyond diagnosing Asperger’s, asserted that Edwin “had not been motivated by money.”
Although I’d never seen his website until now, I knew that he had registered EdwinRist.com only fifteen days after the Tring heist. It was unmistakably designed to sell birds. On the “About” page, he even wrote: “I have become interested in retailing flytying materials, a venture that started as an attempt to help fund a new flute purchase, but soon turned into a larger, more extensive hobby.”
As I scrolled down the page, I found Edwin in his own words, making lists of his favorite fly-tying books and friends and providing a mini-autobiography. “I am currently working on a book about salmon flies, both modern and classic,” he wrote. “This work will include details on dozens of patterns. . . . In addition, a large variety of exotic feathers and birds will be featured, along with magnificent artwork by Long Nguyen from Norway. Check back here often for progress updates and photos!”
Who was Long Nguyen? I thought I knew everyone in Edwin’s inner circle by this point.
Fr
om the parking lot, I found a faint campus Wi-Fi signal. I asked Spencer Seim, who was friends on Facebook with Edwin, if I could log into his account for a glimpse of his page, which was otherwise walled off to strangers. I found Long Nguyen everywhere. There were photos of Long and Edwin together on rooftops in Norway, mimicking the Scream in front of the Munch Museum, complimenting each other’s flies. Long had tagged Edwin in a photo album of a trip the two of them took to Japan together in the spring of 2010, showing them in the Asakusa Kannon Temple, strolling through parks beneath sakura blossoms, ordering raw fish, shopping at the Harajuku market.
And then I found the painting. Long had uploaded a photo of an oil painting of three birds—a Banksian Cockatoo, a Malayan Peacock Pheasant, and a Flame Bowerbird—which he announced as a gift for Edwin. In the comments section, Edwin replied in Japanese: “Oi! lonngu sama!! kore wa sugoi desu ne!! [Hey! Mr. Long! That is so amazing!]” before reverting to English to ask “Did your box arrive?”
“I’ve to check the mailbox today Edwin-aniki,” answered Long: “I’m so excited!”
I had seen this painting, during a late-night trawling of the forum a year earlier, but thought little of it. I rushed back to the forum, searching for the handle of the person who had posted the painting.
It was Goku.
Goku, who had posted numerous links to eBay auctions of Edwin’s stolen birds, was, in fact, Long Nguyen. Goku, who sold packets of feathers, and breastplates of Indian Crow. Goku, whose sale of a “Flame bowerbird, male, full skin” had been deleted.
The Feather Thief Page 18