Hunting the rhino-horn cartel

From an outpost in northeastern Thailand, a couple of shadowy men have for years been running the world’s most elaborate poaching ring – earning an enormous fortune by destroying some of the planet’s most exotic creatures. How can an enterprising vigilante finally bring down an untouchable smuggling syndicate? THE THUNDER CRACK OF A RIFLE SHOT HUNG FOR A FAINT SECOND IN THE AIR. THEN, WITH A TREMENDOUS TUMBLE, THE WHITE RHINO HIT THE DIRT.

It had taken ve bullets to bring the animal down, the nal one

red from near-point-blank range. Now, as Chumlong Lemtongthai watched the creature give up its last, pained breaths, he saw only one thing: money.

‘Let’s go,’ he said, instructing his associates to clamber over the corpse, plant themselves astride the head and remove the animal’s twin horns with a few thrusts of a bone saw. Lemtongthai, who’d grown up in ailand but had made his way to South Africa to strike it rich on hunts like this one, moved deliberately, keenly aware that the work that mattered most to him was just beginning. He knew that a small fortune was his to be won. But rst, he had to spirit the horns out of Africa and into the hands of his associates in Laos. Once there, they’d be fed down a supply chain that he helped to control.

A er the horns reached the black market in China or Vietnam, they were shaved into a ne powder and packaged into tiny vials, and then sold to those who cling to ancient beliefs about their power to heal all manner of maladies – like rheumatism, perhaps, or maybe cancer. e price for such a specious remedy is steep. Rhino dust –sometimes stirred carefully into tea, other times ingested directly – can fetch R923 000 per kilogram. For Lemtongthai, that meant nearly R2.8 million for a single horn.

Illicit though his scheme was, there was nothing particularly clandestine about Lemtongthai’s behaviour out here in the African bush. He motioned for a young lady – a ai stripper named “Joy”– to approach the dead rhino. Joy had dressed for the hunt in tight jeans and a purple tracksuit jacket. She was given the ri e, and she moved in beside the animal, kneeling with the gun in hand. She ashed a wide smile for a waiting camera. It was critical that she appeared to be the one who’d bagged the rhino. A photo of Joy and her prize would help with that.

Lemtongthai had been tra cking protected species for over a decade –but lately had gathered an increasing degree of in uence in a vast world of poachers, smugglers and other merchants of animal death. He’d had a gritty start in life, selling fruit in a street market in Bangkok. But his fortunes turned around when he fell in with a pair of men who dealt in the bones of exotic cats, which can also be ground and are sold in vast quantities. Under their tutelage, Lemtongthai learnt the tricks of the tiger-bone trade: procuring the carcasses, boiling them to separate

esh from bone, then wrapping the skeletons in plastic bags and shipping them to a major buyer in Laos for R6 392 a kilogram.

From there, the bones would move east, across the Laotian border into Vietnam, or north, into China. Soon he set himself up in South Africa and used the same techniques to begin moving large quantities of lion bone back to Asia. He was rarely troubled by the government export quotas on lion bone – ranchers and local o cials hardly enforced them

– and Lemtongthai could earn

R14 000 for a bag of bones. He found buyers for even the teeth and claws, which couriers smuggled on ights to Bangkok (thanks, allegedly, to the help of corrupt airline employees).

Lemtongthai drove a Hummer, smoked high-quality weed, gambled in the casinos at Sun

City near Joburg, and became a regular customer at the Flamingo Gentlemen’s Club in Pretoria

– a strip club lled with dancers imported from northern ailand.

But he wanted more. Demand for rhino horn was soaring in Asia, and in 2009 Lemtongthai leapt at the opportunity to expand his business. e work would be risky: South Africa imposed long jail terms for anyone caught poaching or trading the animals. But Lemtongthai knew about a gamechanging loophole he could exploit. At the time, under South African law, sportsmen were permitted to hunt one rhino per year and take the head as a personal trophy.

And so it was that Lemtongthai cooked up a simple scheme: he’d hire ringers to pose as trophy hunters, obtain legal export certi cates from the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), and ship the horns to Laos via ailand. Rather than adorn somebody’s wall, they’d be ground down to serve more lucrative purposes.

Lemtongthai made deals with crooked ranch owners. One day, he showed up at the Flamingo and o ered the girls about

R7 000 apiece to join the charade.

at’s how several of the Flamingo strippers, including Joy, were transformed into the world’s unlikeliest big-game hunters.

Soon they were regularly shuttling in Lemtongthai’s black Hummer from the strip club to a ranch a couple of hours away.

e grim business was booming until the scheme hit a snag. In February 2011, customs o cials at Suvarnabhumi Airport stopped a package of rhino horns that had separated from its CITES >>

certi cate. ey noticed that the globe-trotting trophy hunter who’d supposedly nabbed this rhino was actually a 20-year-old woman, originally from northeast ailand. at seemed odd.

IN ALL OF BANGKOK,

nobody was more interested in this little customs anomaly than Steve Galster. A shrewd and determined American conservationist, he’d cultivated a cosy relationship with customs o cials because he craved this sort of intel. When he was tipped o about the strange package, he knew exactly what was going on.

Galster had moved to ailand a decade earlier, setting up his own cloak-and-dagger operation to map – and dismantle – the covert market for illegal animal parts. He had zeroed in on the networks that powered the illicit trade, devoting particular attention to an elaborate organisation that he had dubbed “Hydra”, a er the multiple-headed sea serpent of Greek mythology.

e scheme that Lemtongthai was wrapped up in, Galster believed, looked like a Hydra operation.

Run by a handful of powerful gangsters based in ailand and Laos, Hydra utilised an army of suppliers who would deliver rhino horns, elephant tusks, lion bones, tiger bones, bear bile, the spines of pangolins (anteaters found in dwindling numbers in Southeast Asia and Africa), and other parts harvested from protected wildlife. Hydra also maintained a network of corrupt cops, customs o cials, and court o cials to facilitate shipments and shield itself from prosecution. Lemtongthai, Galster grasped, appeared to be a major gure in the syndicate.

Indeed, Lemtongthai was feeding brisk demand at the time, according to Galster. On 23 April 2011, Lemtongthai’s buyer in Laos placed an order for 50 sets of rhino horns and 300 lion skeletons, which would sell for a total of

R213 million. Lemtongthai would clear R21 million on the deal.

While Galster was focused on Lemtongthai, o cials in South Africa were gathering evidence on the staged hunts, too. In November 2011, as Lemtongthai stepped o a

ight from Bangkok, cops stopped the tra cker at the airport. ‘We found [incriminating] documents and computer les, along with photos of dead rhinos he was posing with,’ investigator Charles van Niekerk told me. Faced with evidence compiled by both Van Niekerk and Galster, Lemtongthai pleaded guilty to running the scam and was sent to prison for six years. For Galster, this victory was just the start. Determined to work up the shadowy Hydra chain, he paid close attention to the scurrying chaos and reorganisation set o within the syndicate by Lemtongthai’s capture. Galster vowed he wasn’t going to rest until he had killed Hydra completely.

THE NERVE CENTRE

of Galster’s operation is tucked inconspicuously into a back alley in central Bangkok. In one windowless o ce, Galster’s obsession is splayed across an entire wall – a blizzard of headshots, birth dates, maps, government ID numbers, biographical text blocks, and hundreds of crisscrossing lines that delineate pecking orders, family relationships, and criminal connections. It’s a map of secrets: a eld guide, Galster says, of

‘who’s who in the zoo’.

e giant dossier is deadly serious for Galster. ‘ ey are mass, serial murderers,’ he tells me. By way of example, he points to the rise in rhinos slaughtered in South Africa in the past two decades – from 13 in 2007 to 83 in 2008 to 1 028 in 2017, an average of nearly three a day – a spike that he attributes in large part to Hydra. ‘ ese guys are laying waste to the world’s most iconic and precious species for a ton of money,’ he says.

While the pace of the slaughter has quickened, the demand in Asia for illicit animal parts is nothing new. Ancient Chinese medical texts are replete with references to the medicinal properties of rhino horn, tiger bone, anteater scales and bear gallbladders. Some of the powers are purely imaginary: the keratin that composes a rhino’s horn has no proven medical value. Other products have uses a bit more grounded in science. Bear bile is rich in ursodeoxycholic acid, which is useful for treating liver and gallbladder conditions.

Scienti c or not, the trade in animal parts has grown more complex. e market for tusks, bones and pangolin scales – which are all hard, durable products that can be stashed away for years

– now includes savvy commodities brokers have hopes of making big pro ts from when prices spike.

For many wealthy elites in China and Vietnam, the reputed health bene ts are almost beside the point. e products have become status symbols, hauled out at parties and business meetings – markers of taste and sophistication. And a fast-rising middle class in both countries is increasingly fueling the trade.

e e ects have been devastating. Aside from the welldocumented mass slaughter of Africa’s rhinos and elephants, Asian tigers have declined from 100 000 over a century ago to fewer than 4 000 today, while the rhino population in Asia has plummeted to the brink of extinction during the same period. And the cruelty is near unimaginable: bear bile “farmers”, who operate throughout Southeast Asia, o en insert catheters into a captive live animal, a frequently agonising procedure, to extract the precious uid from its gallbladder. Sometimes tra ckers save themselves the trouble and just kill the bear outright, cut out the organ for onetime use and ship it on ice.

e ai government has known about the abuses for a long time; but, for many years, it turned a blind eye to them. ‘ ere have been no rewards, no bonuses, no incentives for ghting wildlife crime in

ailand,’ Galster says. ‘Police would rather work in counternarcotics or counterterrorism. We’re trying to change that.’

e Freeland Foundation routinely shares information and resources with the police, and they even work together on tough cases. To a degree, that’s rare among public and private organisations.

Galster is 57 and speaks in the at tones of a native, Midwestern American. He wears a no-nonsense expression and tends to move along in big, loping strides as if he always has somewhere important to get to. One a ernoon, he introduces me to two ex-narcotics agents on his sta : there’s “General Eddy”, who became famous in lawenforcement circles for arresting the fugitive Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout in 2008.

Next, I shake hands with “Poolsub”, who helped gather the evidence that puts Lemtongthai behind bars. In addition to the 20-odd people working here in Bangkok, Galster also employs former military and law enforcement scattered around Southeast Asia – including “Nile”, a secretive character uent in Vietnamese, who has spent thousands of hours gathering surveillance photos and video footage of key Hydra players.

Galster’s rst glimpse of the highest rungs of Hydra leadership came over a decade ago. A wealthy and secretive ai woman, whom Galster has never named, led him to a pair of poachers whom she persuaded to divulge their secrets.

e men, Galster says, pointed to the gure who stood atop the organisation: Vixay Keosavang, a former Laotian military o cer. Soon a er that, Galster learned the identity of Keosavang’s closest friend and alleged partner in crime: Bach Van Limh, a burly, gregarious Vietnamese immigrant to ailand.

e two men lived opposite each other on the Mekong River – Bach on the ai side, Keosavang in

Laos. Bach’s alleged expertise was in slipping contraband into the country. ‘He had people based at ports and airports; he had people in northern ailand and in southern

ailand,’ Galster says. ‘He had smugglers, people within the private sector, and government o cers on his payroll.’ Keosavang, for his >>

“The scene at the Sriracha Tiger Zoo is degrading and depressing: tourists dangle raw chickens from fishing poles over a bleak pen where the cats snarl and fight for the food”

part, excelled in actually moving the product throughout Asia a er it landed in Laos. He was aided in this enterprise, Galster says, by the import-export rms he ran across the river from Bach – legal businesses that are thought to have helped function as clearinghouses for illegal animal parts. He also owned several grim “zoos” in

Laos, private menageries where an assortment of animals were raised for slaughter. Here, tigers, macaques, and other animals were allegedly held and then processed for shipment.

At the height of their business, in around 2013, Keosavang and Van Limh were said to be moving some 270 000kg of wildlife parts a year –including 18 000kg of live turtles, 9 000kg of live snakes, 2 700kg of lion and tiger bones, 68 000kg of pangolin scales, and unknown quantities of elephant tusks and rhino horn. ey were earning billions of rand each year and using the proceeds to buy houses, hotels, expensive vehicles, and frequent trips together to Pattaya, the ai beach resort famed for its sex industry.

But in around 2014, Keosavang faded from the scene, seemingly done in by negative publicity from the arrest and guilty plea of Lemtongthai, the architect of the faux rhino hunts in South Africa.

at year, Galster says, Van Limh also abruptly dropped out of view, returning to northern Vietnam. Perhaps he felt the walls beginning to close in. But wildlife contraband was still moving through the usual routes, leaving Galster to wonder: who could be running Hydra now?

One night in Nakhon Phanom, where authorities were surveilling a group of suspected drug tra ckers, an agent broke into the trunk of a suspect’s vehicle. As he did, he caught the odour of urine and animal parts – a sign that the group might be moving wildlife as well. Galster was shown surveillance photos of some of the suspects and their associates, he says, and ran their names. ey matched those of traders who had worked with Lemtongthai. Galster also noticed something familiar in the photos, speci cally the eyebrows and facial features of one of the men: he looked remarkably similar to the exiled Van Limh.

In their bid to determine who was in charge of Hydra, Galster’s team had, for months, been circling six shadowy gures. A er analysing Facebook data, depositions, and these new surveillance photos, Galster realised, in 2015, that he wasn’t, in fact, chasing six ghosts. He and his team were pursuing only one. e names were aliases of a single person: a baby-faced resident of Nakhon Phanom named Boonchai Bach. He was the younger brother of Van Limh – and he had apparently been anointed as his successor.

SOON AGENTS WERE

scouring Nakhon Phanom, hunting for Bach’s headquarters. en, on 11 December 2017, a er two years in pursuit, Galster says, customs agents at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport received an alert that a Chinese national suspected of being a courier for wildlife tra ckers would be arriving on a ight at midday. e customs men intercepted his suitcase before it reached the carousel – and found, wrapped in plastic, 14 rhino horns cut into 65 pieces. e shipment had a street value of more than

R14 million. e o cers sent the luggage to baggage claim and waited to see what would happen next.

ey watched the Chinese man pluck the suitcase o the carousel and then stroll to the nearby o ce of Nikorn Wongprajan, a longtime airport quarantine o cer. is was strange, they thought. e agents approached Wongprajan’s o ce; and there, stashed inside a locker, was the rhino horn.

Wongprajan – panicky and desperate to spare himself – agreed to help the police continue to follow the horn. e authorities trailed Wongprajan and watched as he passed the package to one of Bach’s relatives. e cops swooped in.

About a month later,

General Eddy and Poolsub interviewed Wongprajan at

Samut Prakan Provincial Prison, on the outskirts of Bangkok. An o cer accompanied them. At

rst, Wongprajan denied any connection to Hydra, says Galster.

en Poolsub pulled out photos obtained by Freeland showing Wongprajan and Lemtongthai together beside a dead rhino in the bush. Wongprajan, it looked like, had been Lemtongthai’s crony and plant at the airport –expediting delivery of rhino horns from the fake hunts in South Africa to Bangkok. With Lemtongthai in prison, Wongprajan had allegedly established new relationships in Hydra. ‘We know you know this guy. You went to South Africa to see him,’ Poolsub said. Wongprajan confessed. en Poolsub showed him a photo of Bach.

‘Was this the guy you were selling rhino horn to?’ the o cer pressed. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Write it down.’ According to Galster, Wongprajan scribbled a note naming Bach as the sponsor of the rhino-horn-smuggling operation – and signed Bach’s photo. ‘I’ve got what I need,’ the o cer said. en he issued a warrant for Bach’s arrest.

On the a ernoon of 18 January 2018, ai provincial police apprehended the suspected Hydra kingpin near Nakhon Phanom and shipped him to Bangkok. Soon, probably dazed and in disbelief, Bach found himself inside a cell at Suvarnabhumi Airport, charged with wildlife tra cking.

ONE EVENING EARLIER

this year, I went with Galster to northeastern ailand, to the epicentre of Hydra’s illicit empire in the river town of Nakhon Phanom. At night, from the bank of the Mekong, we could hear the pulsing of pop music across the water, in Laos. I could also make out the putter of a motorised longboat slipping through the currents carrying who-knows-what – tiger parts, maybe, or methamphetamines or any of the innumerable commodities that journey stealthily through this part of Asia under the cover of darkness. ‘ ey always move at night,’ Galster said.

Shortly before we arrived in Nakhon Phanom, Wild Animals Checkpoint agents just down the river in Mukdahan seized 182 baskets containing 2 730 rat snakes and cobras as they were about to be ferried out of ailand and into Laos.

While we moved along the city’s riverfront promenade, Galster pointed out Bach’s apartment building, which is believed to have provided convenient

“While the pace of the slaughter has quickened, the demand in Asia for illicit animal parts is nothing new”

accommodations to South African lion-bone dealers when they were in town. Galster says it also contains a back room that has played host to Hydra’s meetings, making the operation the Nakhon Phanom equivalent of Satriale’s Pork Store in The Sopranos. ‘All the Hydra players own hotels and resorts,’ said Galster. ‘ ey’re money-laundering machines.’

Just down the street stands a bar owned until recently by Bach. A short drive from the centre of town is the police station where a surveillance team observed Bach’s suspected bagman, making regular drop-o s in a zipped canvas sack.

e milieu is a natural one for Galster, who has spent his career investigating the illicit trade of drugs, arms, wildlife and human beings. Raised in America, Galster attended George Washington University in the ’80s and became interested in the Soviet war with Afghanistan. A er graduation, he landed a job with an NGO that took him to the front, where he documented soldiers and Afghan mujahideen selling heroin to nance weapons purchases. Galster realised that opportunities abounded for a guy looking to mix high ideals with a taste for adventure.

In the early ’90s, he went undercover and joined Christian fundamentalists who were ying guns and bibles to a rebel group in Mozambique. e dissidents were backed by the apartheid South African government, which was trying at the time to reopen the ivory trade. But the intelligence gathered by Galster and a colleague helped to derail the e ort. If there were cartels threatening to wipe out animals, Galster made it his business to stop them.

In ailand, in 2003, he met the turncoat poachers who showed him how the elaborate business worked, tracing the supply lines that led into Laos, and then onward to Vietnam and China.

‘It was a free-for-all,’ says Galster.

‘ e attitude among tra ckers was “Get it to Laos and we’ll be ne”.’

at was the rst time that Galster ever heard of Keosavang, the former military o cer thought to be running Hydra. He quickly learnt that the operation wasn’t just relying on parts shipped from places like Africa. One of Hydra’s suppliers, Galster discovered through informants, was the Tiger Temple, a zoo and meditation centre near the famed bridge over the River Kwai in Kanchanaburi,

ailand. Western tourists ocked to the zoo to pet tiger cubs, learn mindfulness techniques, and walk along footpaths through the woods. Meanwhile, the Buddhist monks in charge were secretly spiriting live big cats to Laos. When ai authorities shut down the Tiger Temple in 2016, they reportedly seized around 150 live tigers, the thawed carcasses of 40 dead cubs, 20 cubs in jars of formaldehyde, two tiger pelts, and 1 500 tiger-skin amulets.

He learnt that rhino horn, hard as a block of wood, can be

own in suitcases or backpacks – travelling either intact or chopped into pieces that are wrapped in tinfoil or bubble wrap and then surrounded by shampoo bottles or deodorant to mask the foul odour. Some of the contraband reaches ailand by cargo ship before journeying to Laos and onward to points north. To get it across the

ai border, the product is either hauled by truck across the handful of bridges on the Mekong River or packed onto what Galster calls “banana boats”, wooden longboats with a single outboard motor, and ferried through darkness.

‘ is is the mother ship of the zoos,’ Galster tells me as we pull into the parking lot of the Sriracha Tiger Zoo, a popular tourist attraction and reputed big-cat-laundering centre. We’re two hours south of Bangkok, near the seaside city of Pattaya, a favoured hangout for the Hydra gang.

For years, the Sriracha Tiger Zoo has appalled Galster. He claims that sources familiar with what goes on inside have painted a harrowing picture of slaughter.

He says he was told that a er tigers outlived their usefulness, butchers routinely knocked out the beasts with powerful drugs, slit their throats and dismembered them, then packed the pieces into vehicles for transport to Laos. e zoo always kept around 500 tigers on hand, one source told him, so that nobody would notice if a few went missing. Galster suspects the zoo may still be laundering tigers. Demand for tiger parts remains strong in Vietnam and China; the hottest new product on the market is a supposed aphrodisiac, extracted from the bones and sold in capsule form for R4 000 per pill.

We follow walkways lined with owering trees, past throngs of tourists, almost all of them Chinese. e scene is degrading and depressing: tourists dangle raw chickens from shing poles over another bleak pen containing a dozen more of the huge, beautiful animals. To the delight of their tormentors, the cats snarl and ght one another for the food. Undercover investigations by wildlife advocates, here and at a similar zoo in ailand, have produced videos that show what tourists apparently come to experience: chained tigers being forced to roar for photos, cubs separated from their mothers being bottle-fed by visitors.

Such zoos have been able to ourish in ailand because of the wealth and political in uence of those who run them – and the hopelessness of the public. ‘You don’t have people power here,’ Galster tells me. ‘You’ve got corrupt rich people getting away with it.’ Nobody knows exactly how many tiger “sanctuaries” exist in the country, and it took a massive media campaign, including an investigative article in National Geographic, to prod the government to shut down the Tiger Temple in 2016.

A er cops hauled Bach o to jail in 2018, Hydra appeared derailed. Conservationists around the world cheered the development. Bach faced charges of rhino-horn tra cking and was eyeing four years in prison if convicted.

As the trial began last year in a provincial courtroom in Samut Prakan, Bach’s lawyers insisted that their client was a victim of mistaken identity, Galster recalls. When it came time for the prosecutions star witness, Wongprajan, to identify the head of the organisation, he refused to point at Bach, seated in the defendant’s chair. Maybe he was thrown o by Bach’s changed appearance – he had let his hair grow out and wore glasses. But it might have been out of pure fear. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said nervously. ‘I don’t know who this guy is.’ On 29 January 2019, as Galster and Poolsub looked on in dismay, the judge dismissed all the charges.

e suspected Hydra boss was immediately hustled out of the courtroom by two escorts.

A er that, Bach disappeared from circulation. Meanwhile, Wongprajan was returned to a jail cell to await his own trial for his role in the rhino-horn scheme. Galster wasn’t shocked. ‘ ey either threatened Wongprajan or promised him money,’ he says.

Galster is still chasing Bach. But he’s refraining, for now, from trying to put him behind bars. Instead, he’s testing a new approach – a Hail Mary attempt born of frustration. During our stopover in Nakhon Phanom, Galster wrote a message to Bach on a Freeland letterhead.

e note, a quixotic appeal to the smuggler’s conscience, invited him to contribute to Project Recover, an initiative recently put together by Freeland and IBM. It aims to use con scated funds from tra ckers to set up programs that help beleaguered populations of elephants, tigers, rhinos and other wildlife recover from poaching.

‘We would like you to consider joining this program,’ Galster wrote in ai. ‘Here is a chance to be on the right side.’

Galster dropped the letter with a clerk at the reception desk at Bach’s apartments on our way to Nakhon Phanom airport. ree months later, he’s still waiting for a reply.