A hell of a walk in the dark and I slipped many times, but eventually we reached the wood around midnight—as quietly as possible W climbed the tree. When he was only half way, [the eagle] started screeching and clapping her wings up and down on the edge of the eyrie … W shouted to me that he could not get her off. I called up to him to remove a branch from the eyrie and ease her off. After a few minutes she decamped and W was able to reach in, only to find the eagle had broken the second egg and so we left it, hoping she would continue to incubate it. Both disappointed, we had a long walk back along the loch.
Such accounts reinforced McWilliam’s view that egg collecting was an act of pure selfishness, an attack on the sanctity of the wild. As Holly Cale, the chief curator at Jemima Parry-Jones’s International Centre for Birds of Prey, put it: “The [mother] bird’s whole purpose of being is to procreate, to rear her young. She will be terribly distressed, traumatized by the loss, will vocalize about the fact that the eggs have gone, and sometimes she will come back to the nest, looking for the eggs.” Birds can sometimes lay another clutch during the same breeding season if their first one fails, but producing calcium consumes a tremendous amount of the female’s energy; usually the opportunity is lost until the next year.
But McWilliam wasn’t incapable of feeling compassion for those he arrested. Many whom he came across were “loners and social misfits” in his eyes, who seemed to live for little else but their eggs. Dennis Green had resided with his mother in poverty until she died, then Scotch-taped a life-sized photo of her to the settee where she used to sit. Matthew Gonshaw was a recluse surviving on public assistance. He traveled to nest sites by public transport, and calculated down to the last pence the cost of every supply he would need in the field, according to The New Yorker, “from butter to packets of instant custard made by a company called Bird’s.”
Anthony Higham was a different sort. He had a solid job as the manager of a printing firm, a decent house, a long-term partner, and friends, and he was mortified that he had jeopardized everything to satisfy what he recognized as an addiction. “I can’t believe that I’m going to prison, all for taking birds’ eggs,” he lamented to McWilliam in 2004, when the policeman visited him at his home in Merseyside, shortly before he began a four-month sentence. McWilliam, touched by Higham’s genuine distress over what he had done, shared the perception of Timothy Wheeler, who likened the behavior of the egg collector to that of an alcohol or drug abuser. “They are somehow able to rationalize their behavior because the lust for the egg becomes more important to them than seeing that they’re actually harming the very thing they love,” Wheeler told the Audubon Society. Scientific research into what compels men like Anthony Higham has been thin, but a study of collectors of fossilized dinosaur eggs, published in the Journal of Economic Psychology in June 2011, hypothesized that the pursuit of eggs is a modern residue of a “signalling” strategy used by our ancestors to attract a mate through the acquistion of “rare and difficult to obtain … resources.” Although such behavior has “low reproductive value today,” it became hardwired into our genetic code through natural selection, the author suggests, and, for some anyway, is impossible to resist. The Anxiety and Depression Association of America drew a distinction between hoarding—which it linked to obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and depression—and the more refined and organized pursuit of collecting. For some egg collectors such as Dennis Green, however, who lived surrounded by useless mementos and seemed unable to throw anything away, the differences were clearly blurred.
McWilliam stayed in contact with Higham following his release on parole. Higham managed to get his old job back at the printing firm and had engaged a craftsman to make replicas of some eggs in his confiscated collection. “They’re good, aren’t they?” he told McWilliam, proudly showing him a peregrine egg made of plexiglass. Oh my God, McWilliam thought, saying nothing, but disturbed by the depth of Higham’s obsession. Higham still loved walking in the wilderness, but he worried that his criminal record made him vulnerable to arrest. One day he went hiking on a mountain trail in North Wales and spotted a dead chough on the ground. The bird had half a dozen leg rings from scientific studies and a succession of owners, and Higham, fascinated by such arcania, could hardly resist retrieving the chough to study its history. He phoned McWilliam from the mountain. “If I pick this bloody thing up and get stopped, I’ll be in trouble,” he said. “What should I do?” McWilliam advised him not to lay his hands on it. Then he contacted a wildlife police colleague nearby, who met Higham on the trail, and took away the tiny corpse.
For other collectors, the stigma of incarceration did nothing to break the mesmerizing power of the egg. Gregory Peter Wheal, a roofer from Coventry in the West Midlands, was arrested ten times in a decade; he “just didn’t seem to be able to stop,” McWilliam said, even after serving a six-month prison sentence. After D’Cruze served five months in jail, McWilliam asked, “Is this going to be it? You going to quit?”
“You can never say never,” D’Cruze replied.
* * *
Between 1999 and 2005 magistrates in the United Kingdom jailed eight egg collectors for their crimes; McWilliam arrested five of them. Anthony Higham served four months in prison and Carlton D’Cruze five. Dennis Green went to jail for four months in 2002 for “perversion of justice,” after hiding dozens of illegal taxidermic trophies in D’Cruze’s house and then lying to authorities about it. In 2004 McWilliam arrested John Latham, a cabinetmaker who had amassed 282 eggs in a three-month spree, including 14 from the rare kingfisher. That same year he apprehended Manicunian Derek Lee, who specialized in hard-to-find specimens. Then, thanks to Operation Easter’s success and the imposition of jail sentences rather than fines, “egg collecting just fell off completely,” says Guy Shorrock. “The major collectors stopped or died.” While there are surely some big collections still hidden away in England, periodic amnesty programs have been successful at encouraging owners to turn them over to the police.
Yet despite a string of arrests and successful prosecutions, many of McWilliam’s colleagues saw what he did as a bit of a joke. McWilliam and Harris would bring to the Crosby station a suspect they had just arrested for stealing rare birds or collecting endangered eggs, and other police officers would poke fun at them. “Put him before the beak,” they would tell McWilliam—a British slang term for magistrate. Wildlife crime “was regarded as trivial,” Harris says. But McWilliam shrugged off the mockery. After years of investigating egg enthusiasts—observing their idiosyncracies, familiarizing himself with their subterfuges, and grasping their obsessions—McWilliam understood the stakes of bird-related crime. And he would soon turn his skills to taking down the most formidable egg thief that he would ever encounter.
NINE AFRICAXTREME
In the summer of 1998, Jeffrey Lendrum was thirty-six years old, recently divorced, and residing in Jukskei Park, a leafy middle-class neighborhood in northwest Johannesburg. Thirteen years had gone by since he’d left Bulawayo in disgrace, and he had built a new life for himself. He’d married a South African woman, who had a son with a previous partner, and though the relationship hadn’t lasted and they’d had no children of their own, the two had stayed on good terms. She would still drop by Lendrum’s house with her son for an occasional meal.
Lendrum now ran a one-man business called Wallace Distributors, procuring auto parts, mining equipment, and aircraft components and then driving them in his Toyota pickup truck to customers across the border in Zimbabwe. Strict limits imposed by the Mugabe regime on the flow of foreign currency in and out of Zimbabwe, along with high taxes and quotas on imports, had made it increasingly difficult to obtain spare parts through official channels. And Lendrum could get his hands on nearly anything: braided ropes for mine elevator shafts, engine blocks, chrome door-edge moldings. He seemed to be always on the road, driving as far north as the copper, tungsten, and nickel mines near Zambia, a fifteen-hundred-mile round trip.
Some years, during droughts, if he wasn’t running other hustles, Lendrum would return to Zimbabwe to carry out mercy killings of elephants and other species on behalf of Parks and Wildlife. But he had, he would insist, abandoned his nest-raiding ways completely. “I had nothing to do with birds at all,” he said. (Later, on a witness stand, he would modify that claim, admitting that he had continued to dabble in cliff climbing and nest raiding, legally “collecting black sparrowhawks for the Transvaal Falconry Club for their breeding program.”)
Paul Mullin, a British businessman, met Lendrum that July after settling in Johannesburg as a senior manager for an American firm helping to roll out Internet access across southern Africa and the Middle East. Mullin’s job was to advise state-owned telecommunications firms on installing servers and other hardware. Mullin was an army brat who claimed that his father had guarded Spandau Prison in Berlin when the Nazi war criminal Rudolf Hess was its sole inmate. He was a nomad who had traveled across Africa half a dozen times, a racing car enthusiast who self-published guidebooks each year to the Formula 1 Grand Prix season, and a spycraft aficionado who drove a Mitsubishi Pajero with the vanity license plate PCM 007.
Mullin’s girlfriend, a former stripper at a nightclub called the House of Lords, who’d met Lendrum at work and sometimes paid him to be her driver, made the introduction. Lendrum invited Mullin to drop by his bungalow, a modest home that overlooked a garden bisected by the Jukskei River, a narrow, shallow stream that coursed over a bed of rocks. Over a round of beers, the men discovered that they shared an interest in fast cars and African safaris. Mullin found Lendrum personable, garrulous, and passionate about his red Mini Cooper S. Before long they were getting together regularly for coffee or to take Lendrum’s Mini Cooper out for 140-mile-per-hour spins at a Grand Prix–style racecourse outside Johannesburg. During their excursions, Lendrum bragged several times about his exploits as a member of the Special Air Service during the Rhodesian Bush War. Mullin says he knew it was “bollocks,” but didn’t let it get in the way of their developing friendship. A few months later Lendrum enlisted Mullin for a favor: to carry back from England a coil of walnut wood for the dashboard of a Jaguar E-type sports car that a friend was customizing in Bulawayo.
Lendrum was always looking for the next opportunity, and in early 1999 he made his friend a pitch. He had been struck by the curio shops he saw across South Africa, selling everything from novelty T-shirts to carved rhinos. There was even a large one at Johannesburg’s international airport. “Wouldn’t it be a good idea,” he told Mullin, while eating oysters at an Ocean Basket seafood franchise in a Johannesburg shopping mall, “if we could bring African handicrafts into the UK and sell them?” Mullin thought that Lendrum might be on to something. “Let’s give it a go,” he said.
Mullin and Lendrum pooled their resources and came up with £15,000. They made a trial run to Zimbabwe, where they found reliable vendors and a company to clear everything with customs and ship the goods. Then they opened their first shop in Southampton, seventy miles south of London, where Mullin owned a house and where a former girlfriend and their five-year-old daughter still lived. Mullin hired his ex to work behind the counter, and decorated the store in African-bush-style, stringing a tented canopy from the ceiling, painting the walls in a zebra-skin pattern, and covering the countertops with thatch. Mullin and Lendrum called their venture AfricaXtreme.
The partners began traveling to Zimbabwe every month, on the hunt for handicrafts. Mullin could make his own hours, and none of his clients complained if he vanished for a week. He and Lendrum would drive from Bulawayo north to Victoria Falls, and then back south through Hwange National Park—a thousand-mile journey that typically took them five days. After their first binge-buy to fill the Southampton shop, an entrepreneur with a few dozen artisans in her employ struck a deal with the partners to produce wooden safari animals in bulk. Mullin and Lendrum paid cash and also gave the carvers soap, sugar, mealy meal (a coarse flour made from maize), clothing, and other necessities. Other dealers provided them with ebony walking sticks, hippos and rhinos carved from soapstone, leopards fashioned from the mottled dark green mineral serpentine, herons and storks made of polished mukwa wood, teakwood side tables and fruit baskets, traditional drums, and carved giraffes of all sizes, from two-inch miniatures to nearly life-sized sculptures.
They packed their purchases into a trailer attached to Lendrum’s pickup truck and, back in Bulawayo, loaded everything into a container at the Southern Comfort Lodge—a thatched-roof retreat with a pool filled with the skulls of culled elephants, owned by one of Lendrum’s boyhood friends, a professional leopard hunter named Craig Hunt. A shipping company fumigated the goods, transported them to Durban, a South African port on the Indian Ocean, and put them on a boat to London. Mullin collected the crafts and delivered them to the store in Southampton. Mullin and Lendrum tried to avoid buying mass-produced kitsch and sought out hand-carved works by skillful artisans: in Cameroon Mullin found antique tribal masks in a street market that he bought for a pittance and sold in England for several hundred pounds apiece.
Lendrum was still bringing spare parts to his clients in Zimbabwe for Wallace Distributors, and Mullin often came along for the ride. To avoid the hours-long traffic jams at the Beit Bridge, the main crossing point between South Africa and Zimbabwe, Lendrum would pay someone at the front of the line two hundred rand (about $20) or give him case of Coke to trade places with him. Then he would chat up the Zimbabwean customs agents and slip them small gifts to wave him through the checkpoint. “If you’re a border controller, and you’re paid the equivalent of a month’s salary to turn a blind eye, that will do it,” Mullin says. Lendrum would make his deliveries, receive payment in cash, and play Zimbabwe’s wildly fluctuating currency markets, trading rand, Zimbabwe dollars, and US dollars. Lendrum impressed Mullin as a relentless wheeler-dealer, willing, he said, “to do anything to make a quick buck.”
The business spun off in new directions. A Harare craftsman sold them African heron and egret sculptures made of welded steel, three to four feet tall, which did so well in Southampton that they decided to manufacture their own. They imported welding machines from South Africa, set up a metalwork shop in Bulawayo, hired local craftsmen, and struck a deal with two chains of garden centers in the United Kingdom to export the steel birds in bulk. In Nairobi, they discovered an open-air crafts market and soon had a procession of carvers of ebony and kisii stone (an easily shaped, peach-colored soapstone found only near Lake Victoria) bringing their wares to their hotel room. They bought woven reed baskets in the wetlands of Botswana and wooden masks in Zambia. Lendrum knew how to bargain, had an eye for African arts, and chatted easily with the traders. As a boy, he’d picked up some isiNdebele, the Zulu-based language of southern Zimbabwe, and could converse in Fanagolo, a mix of Zulu, English, and Afrikaans that had become the lingua franca of Southern Africa’s miners and other workers, who came from a collage of ethnic and linguistic groups. (Many white Rhodesians of a certain age learned to speak Fanagolo to communicate with their servants.)
When Lendrum claimed to be short on funds, Mullin assumed more and more of the financial risk. Mullin knew his business partner would probably never contribute his fair share, but he also understood that if he didn’t keep providing the money the handicrafts would stop flowing and the venture would collapse. “There’s something wrong with that guy,” Mullin’s ex—while still working behind the counter—warned him. “You can’t trust him.” By that point Mullin was in way too deep.
Their frantic pace led, on one occasion, to near-disaster. Mullin had bought a four-wheel-drive Mitsubishi Pajero, ideal for driving in the bush, and souped it up with a three-liter engine and a supercharger—an air compressor that feeds extra oxygen into the engine, greatly improving the car’s performance. Racing up to Bulawayo from the Beit Bridge one scorching afternoon, he and Lendrum saw black smoke billowing out the side of the four-by-four, and a trail of black oil on the road.
As they would later discover, one of the pistons had burned through, building up pressure in the crankcase and sending oil cascading over the engine manifold. When Mullin opened the hood to have a look, the influx of air ignited the oil. The pair managed to pull out their valuables just before flames destroyed the vehicle. They hitched a ride and left the Pajero smoldering on the road. Mullin bought a new Toyota Prado three-liter diesel four-by-four with the insurance money; this time he customized the license plate to read BOND.
* * *
As they traveled through the bush, Mullin began to see a different side of Lendrum. Often they would drive together into Matobo National Park and climb a sloping, lichen-covered rock face whose summit provided panoramic views of mist-shrouded pinnacles receding into distant hills. Hippos lolled in the reserve’s rivers far below, their tiny ears and eyes protruding just above the waterline, while twelve-foot-long crocodiles basked in the sun on the sandbanks. Antelopes, zebras, warthogs, klipspringers, and baboons sometimes leapt across the roads as they approached. Scanning the sky over the craggy rock faces where African black eagles nested, Lendrum impressed his partner with his expertise about ornithology. He knew the scientific name of every bird, from the short-toed snake eagle (Circaetus gallicus) to the black stork (Ciconia nigra), from the white-necked raven (Corvus albicollis) to the mocking cliff chat (Thamnolaea cinnamomeiventris). He could glance at a raptor and instantly identify the creature’s species and gender. “You could blindfold him and let him touch a dozen falcons and he could tell you which was which,” Mullin says.
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