GENEVA: To slip their illegal cargo through customs, wildlife smugglers still use traditional methods like bribery and threats but can also go creative — like hiding live geckos in their underpants.
John Sellar, chief enforcement officer at CITES, the UN agency against illegal wildlife trade, gave several examples.
The Bad
Caviar might add a touch of class to the average dinner table, but it might have gotten there thanks to prostitution, bribery and death threats orchestrated by the Russian mafia.
Sellar said the ‘crime’ starts with the poaching of sturgeon from the Caspian Sea and the processing of caviar.
In one instance, the delicacy was then smuggled into a Middle Eastern country where officials were offered cash bribes or prostitutes or, if they did not comply, given death threats to issue genuine CITES documents for the illegal caviar.
‘With the documents, the caviar then enters national markets as genuine certified caviar,’ said Sellar.
Once the caviar is certified as legal, the trade helps the mafia to launder their money.
The Ugly
Criminals have been caught smuggling animals such as beetles or snakes with proper CITES documentation, but using them as drug mules.
Sellar pointed to a case where a crate of beetles were found dead at customs. ‘Officials thought initially that they must have been smuggled for collectors, but they were all stuffed with amphetamines,’ he explained.
In another case, a shipment of snakes from South America arrived in the United States with the right permits, but US customs officers found that most of them had died.
It turned out that the snakes were full of condoms stuffed with cocaine, Sellar said.
If that shipment had passed through, the criminals would have made money in several ways — not only the drugs, but also the snakes would have earned a tidy sum, dead or alive, said Sellar.
Alive, they could have been sold to collectors; dead, they could have been offloaded for their skins, he explained.
And the downright bizarre
Some individuals who want to bring rare birds across a border sometimes smuggle in eggs before they have hatched, said Sellar.
‘You will get men and women with special constructed vests with eggs,’ he said. ‘There are women smuggling eggs in their bras or men smuggling live lizards and geckos in their underpants.’
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