Chumlong Lemthongthai, a Thai citizen, and his band of gun-toting prostitutes were surely one of the most remarkable of the ‘pseudo-hunting’ gangs behind the ongoing rhino poaching crisis.
- For the complete story, see Wednesday's Bangkok Post
In 2003, enterprising criminals in Southeast Asia realised that they could exploit a loophole in South Africa’s hunting laws to move rhino horns legally across international borders. Normally, North Americans and Europeans account for the bulk of South Africa’s rhino hunting permits. But that year, 10 Vietnamese “hunters” quietly applied as well.
Hunters are allowed to transport legally obtained trophies across borders under various international and domestic laws. The Vietnamese hunters each returned home with the mounted horn, head or even whole body of a rhino.
Word spread. Though Vietnam and other Asian countries have no history of big-game sport hunting, South Africa was soon inundated with applicants from Asia, who sometimes paid $85,000 or more to shoot a single white rhino.
To acquire more hunting permits, Chumlong hired more than two dozen women to pose as hunters. The women received around $550 just to hand over copies of their passports and to take a brief “holiday” with Chumlong and his men in South Africa.
A Thai woman, who was hired to hunt rhino in South Africa, poses with her trophy in Nov 2010. (Julian Rademeyer via The New York Times)
Chumlong likely would have gotten away with the scheme were it not for Johnny Olivier, a fixer and interpreter in South Africa. Olivier worked for Chumlong, but after 50 or so rhino kills, his conscience began to nag at him.
“This is not trophies or whatever,” Olivier said he recollected thinking. “This is now getting into slaughtering, purely for money. These rhinos are my nation’s inheritance.”
Olivier discussed Chumlong's dealings with a private investigator, who began digging. The investigator eventually compiled 222 pages of evidence.
When the case went to court in 2012, South African prosecutors described Chumlong as the mastermind behind “one of the biggest swindles in environmental crime history.” To Chumlong's shock, and that of many observers, he was sentenced to 40 years in prison.
It was a punishment unheard-of in its severity, especially in a country with notoriously low rates of conviction for alleged wildlife crimes. Of 317 arrests related to rhino poaching in 2015, for example, just 15% resulted in guilty verdicts.
A photo provided by Julian Rademeyer shows, Chumlong Lemthongthai, a Thai national convicted in South Africa in a rhino-hunting scheme, during a bail hearing following his arrest in Pretoria, South Africa, in 2011. (Handout via The New York Times)
But Chumlong served nowhere near 40 years. In 2014, his sentence was reduced to 13 years in prison, plus a fine of about $78,000.
This month, South Africa granted Chumlong early release after serving six years. Amid an uproar of criticism from conservation groups and government officials, he was swiftly deported to Thailand.
During an interview at the Pretoria Central Correction Centre on a sunny Sunday morning in October 2016, Chumlong said in a gush of broken English that he was a legitimate businessman who recruited Asian tourists to hunt in South Africa. “I get tourists to shoot, I get commission,” he said. “I’m never poaching. I go legal way.”
He described having what he thought were legitimate hunting permits, only to be arrested by South African police for fraud and railroaded into jail after signing what he believed was an agreement to pay a fine.
Soon enough, he was practically shaking, his eyes wide, his voice high.
“He said lie to me, my lawyer! Rhino farmer go home, me go to jail 40 years!”
The way he told it, it did sound possible that Chumlong had been a scapegoat for savvier criminals who took advantage of his ignorance to help get rhino horns out of the country.
According to South African and Thai authorities and conservationists, Chumlong’s boss was Vixay Keosavang, a Lao national once called the Pablo Escobar of wildlife trafficking. He has denied involvement in trafficking, and Lemthongthai told me he had not had any contact with Keosavang after his arrest.
“Vixay never talk. Only me, ‘kingpin,'” Chumlong scoffed. “Company, friend, family — never talk to me.”
A photo provided by Julian Rademeyer shows Vixay Keosavang, left, a Lao national once called the Pablo Escobar of wildlife trafficking, and his deputy, Chumlong Lemthongthai, a Thai national convicted in South Africa in a rhino-hunting scheme. (Handout via The New York Times)
— Mr. Big Doesn’t Matter --
Chumlong’s case illustrates one of the most profound obstacles to disrupting the international trade in illegal wildlife: the decentralised, constantly morphing networks along which poached goods are transported.
South Africa tightened its sport hunting rules after Chumlong was arrested, and in the overall story of the illegal wildlife trade, pseudo-hunting proved a “temporary sideshow,” as Ronald Orenstein, a conservationist, put it in his book Ivory, Horn and Blood.
Straight-up poaching and trafficking now dominate. Yet many of the players are still the same.
Again and again, Chumlong and Keosavang’s associates from a decade ago, or longer, have turned up in wildlife trafficking cases, among them Bach “Boonchai” Mai, arrested by Thai police this year.
But because of the way the poaching and trafficking networks work, taking down any one of these supposed kingpins will not stop the illegal trade.
Once the contraband begins its trafficking journey, the route often isn’t direct. A China-bound ivory shipment may be sent first to Spain from Togo, or else a passenger carrying rhino horn may fly to Dubai before heading to Kuala Lumpur and then to Hong Kong.
Trafficking bosses themselves are often also involved in legitimate and even well-known local businesses.
In the West, “organised criminals live in a somewhat parallel society,” said Tim Wittig, a conservation scientist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. But among wildlife traffickers, “the big criminals are typically also big business people.”
“Usually, they’re involved in logistics-type businesses — trading or shipping companies, for example — or in commodity-based ones, which is why it’s easy for them to move things around,” he added.
One of the most important characteristics of poaching and smuggling networks is their diversity, according to Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert on international crime at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
While some networks are highly organised, others are completely dispersed. A dealer smuggling ivory out of an African port may not know the local boss overseeing poaching or the trader who eventually sells the contraband in Asia.
In the cartels run by just one or a few individuals, vacuums left by arrests are quickly filled.
That is why these convictions, even high-profile ones like Chumlong’s, usually have little effect on shutting down illegal trade — in wildlife, drugs or any other kind of contraband, Felbab-Brown pointed out.
Breaking up the decentralised criminal networks of poachers, experts say, will require the building of new networks among those who oppose the decimation of animal species. Arresting a few “kingpins” here and there will never be a substitute.
“If the genie in the bottle were to grant me just one wish to combat international wildlife crime, I would ask that everyone work more collaboratively,” Sellar has written. “I remain convinced, utterly convinced, that we would make major inroads into combating international wildlife crime if we could only get our act together.”
- For the complete story, see Wednesday's Bangkok Post