The Falcon Thief

by Joshua Hammer

  Many years later, Mullin would try to rationalize his role in what he would forever refer to as a “black op.” He pointed out that he had never raided a nest nor touched a gyrfalcon egg; that was all “Lendrum’s business,” not his. “He was always protective of the eggs,” Mullin remembered. “I wasn’t even allowed to hold one to feel what it was like.” He repeated Lendrum’s argument that stealing eggs was an unorthodox conservation method—“rescuing” the raptors from probable death. (There’s some truth to Lendrum’s reasoning. About 60 percent of gyrfalcons in the wild don’t survive past their first year.) And he emphasized that the trip had been motivated by a lust for adventure, not greed. All he was getting was a vacation, all expenses paid. The real payoff—between $70,000 and $100,000 per white gyrfalcon egg, he had been told—would come long after Mullin had moved on.

  Yet the phony identities, the secrecy (Mullin had kept his South African girlfriend in the dark about the trip), and the possibility of arrest had a powerful appeal. Like Lendrum, there were days he enjoyed being an outlaw.

  * * *

  On that first full day in northern Canada, Mullin says Lendrum climbed into six nests and took eight gyrfalcon eggs. Back at the hotel, he placed the trophies inside two incubators stored in a suitcase. The next morning the accomplices went up in the helicopter again. Over four days Lendrum invaded nineteen nests, found clutches in twelve, and stole twenty-seven eggs, a far greater haul, says Mullin, than any one of them had dreamed possible. Although Lendrum had announced to Mullin a plan to replace the live eggs with hard-boiled chicken eggs—with the hope that the breeding pair would reject them as rotten and lay a new clutch—Mullin admitted, “We never bothered to do that.”

  Lendrum wrapped the eggs in woolen socks and stored them in his hand luggage for the twelve-hour helicopter flight back to Montreal. At every refueling stop he took them out and shone a flashlight on them—a process known as “candling”—to make certain, through the glow of the light against the thin eggshell, that the embryos’ hearts were still pumping. From Montreal, the pilot flew back to Northern California and returned to his job in the sheriff’s department, telling nobody about what he had been up to in Nunavik. Mullin and Lendrum caught a British Airways flight to Heathrow with the twenty-seven eggs concealed in Lendrum’s carry-on bag. There they parted ways. Mullin headed to Johannesburg, Lendrum to Dubai. Lendrum reported that he had delivered all the eggs alive to his sponsor.

  “It was a total success,” he announced.

  It was such a triumph that Lendrum was already thinking ahead to the next year’s trip. They would leave for Kuujjuaq a few weeks earlier, he told Mullin, when not as many chicks would have hatched and there would be even more eggs for them to steal. Lendrum had decided that he would hire a pilot and helicopter from a company in Kuujjuaq, rather than bring his boyhood friend back from California. He was financing this next venture himself, and he wanted to keep costs to a minimum. Mullin felt uneasy about inviting outsiders into their scheme, but Lendrum brushed off his concerns. It was the prelude to a disastrous series of events that would come to haunt Mullin for the next two decades.

  TWELVE BUSTED

  They couldn’t see a goddamned thing.

  Paul Mullin trudged through knee-deep snow on a ridgeline high above a frozen lake, lugging his video camera, his face hidden behind a woolen ski mask. He wore a heavy down parka, fur-lined boots, and fur-lined gloves, the best he could find in London, but his fingers were so cold that he could barely feel them. When he went to urinate, the stream froze on impact. Every breath he took felt like a knife thrust in his lungs.

  He was perched atop a cliff forty miles west of Kuujjuaq, the tiny Inuit settlement on the Koksoak River that he was visiting for the second time in a year; the tumbling snow had diminished visibility to a few yards. He and his partner, Jeffrey Lendrum, had instructed the helicopter pilot to leave them there, in the middle of the wilderness, with a promise that he would come back to fetch them in ninety minutes. They were shooting a documentary for National Geographic, they had told him, lying. If the helicopter stayed at the scene, the pilot would have to keep the engine running to avoid ice buildup, and the rotor noise would scare off the birds.

  Mullin hadn’t been keen on the plan. What if the pilot got waylaid somehow? They had no way of reaching him, no satellite phone, no cell phone signal, no emergency kit, a single Mars bar apiece if they got hungry, and no weapon for protection against polar bears or other predators, except for a twenty-two-inch Buck knife that Mullin had strapped to his leg.

  What the hell had Lendrum been thinking?

  It had been Lendrum’s idea to arrive in Canada in early May, calculating that fewer eggs would have hatched but those would be far enough along to survive a journey to Dubai. He hadn’t anticipated that four weeks might make all the difference in the subarctic between spring thaw and whiteout, between forty degrees Fahrenheit and ten below. The weather had been so bad they’d managed just a single flight during their first three days in Kuujjuaq, raiding three nests and stealing five eggs. They’d spent the rest of the time tooling around the frozen Koksoak River on snowmobiles.

  While immersed in these thoughts, Mullin heard the whup whup whup of a rotor. Through the fog and the snow, he could just make out the ghostly outlines of the helicopter. The AStar 350 touched down on the frozen ground fifty yards from them, and Lendrum and Mullin climbed aboard. But rather than order the pilot to return to Kuujjuaq, Lendrum instructed him to drop them off at another lookout point farther west. The pilot, an Inuit from Kuujjuaq named Pete Duncan, steered the chopper through the snowstorm with fierce concentration. Mullin, in the front seat, would remember being mesmerized by “the Star Wars effect” of the flakes hurtling against the windshield.

  “This is getting too much, man,” Duncan muttered, looking for a place to land.

  * * *

  Duncan was the cofounder, vice president, and chief pilot of Nunavik Rotors, an all-Aboriginal-owned division of Air Inuit, the biggest commercial airline in Quebec’s far north. He’d flown hundreds of sightseeing expeditions deep into the Nunavik outback—and conducted a fair share of search-and-rescue missions. The Kuujjuaq native had saved a tourist whose snowmobile had run out of fuel and who had wandered on foot, disoriented, deeper into the wilderness and pulled out five people stranded on an ice floe after a boating accident. He’d also taken hunters, fishermen, adventure tourists, and photographers into the Torngat Range—3,750 square miles of polar-bear-infested tundra and glaciated mountains stretching north from Saglek Fjord to the northern tip of Labrador.

  But in his twenty years of running the airline Duncan had never encountered any clients like the two he was flying with today. He’d recognized the shorter one with the South African accent immediately: the man had hired a helicopter and pilot from Nunavik Rotors back in 2000, flying over rock walls for what he had claimed was a reconnaissance trip for a nature film. At the end of the mission, the South African had surprised Duncan by asking whether he could buy the helicopter. “I’m planning to come back for a few years in a row,” he’d explained. “I’ll just need it for May and June, and for the rest of the year you can do what you want with it.” The fellow had even offered a large sum of cash, but Duncan, suspicious, had turned him down.

  He’d seen the South African again the following June, although they hadn’t spoken at all. On that trip the man had brought his own helicopter from the States, and a pilot and an English friend had joined him. Now, eleven months later, the South African and the Englishman had returned to Kuujjuaq, claiming to be gathering more documentary footage. Duncan didn’t believe them for a minute. The Englishman behaved as if he’d never shot video before; Duncan wondered whether the camera even held a battery. And when the “film crew” repeatedly had him drop them on a ridge and pick them up an hour later to take them to a new location, he was sure they were up to something shady. “Any wildlife photographer who’s serious would ask to be dropped off at sunrise and picked up
at sunset,” Duncan would say years later. “Who in the hell sits around on a mountain and asks me to go back in town and return in a couple of hours? These guys had something to hide.”

  After his first day in the field with the suspect documentarians, Duncan stopped by the Kuujjuaq headquarters of Quebec’s wildlife protection agency, to look up his old friend Dave Watt.

  “There’s something fishy about these two,” he told Watt, a veteran law enforcement officer. “I’ll be finished with them on May 11.” He asked his friend to wait until they’d paid him for his last day of work before he closed in.

  Early the next morning, during a break in the weather, while Mullin and Lendrum were charging around on snowmobiles, Watt and Vallée Saunders, another wildlife protection officer, retraced the route that the two alleged filmmakers had taken with Duncan the day before. As they flew low in a police helicopter over the frozen tundra, they could spot the men’s footprints in the virgin snow along the ridgeline, clearly leading to ledges where gyrfalcons and peregrines nested. Circling in for a closer look, Watt and Saunders saw that several clutches at fresh aeries appeared to be missing.

  “These guys are stealing eggs,” Watt told Saunders, and Saunders agreed.

  The officers contacted their superiors at the head office in Chibougamau, a logging and mining town in central Quebec, and requested a search warrant. Late in the afternoon of May 11, Watt, Saunders, and two officers from the Quebec Provincial Police drove across town to the Auberge Kuujjuaq Inn, where Mullin and Lendrum were settling down after a brutal day of egg snatching in a blizzard.

  * * *

  Stretched out on their backs on twin beds, too tired to remove their boots and gaiters, the two egg thieves luxuriated in the warmth of their hotel room. Twenty minutes earlier, Duncan had dropped off the pair in front of the inn and received his $5,000 payment, in cash, for eight hours of flying plus fuel costs. Duncan had known the police were planning a raid that evening, but hadn’t given anything away. Now, as Watt and his fellow officers closed in, the men talked obliviously about the subzero temperatures, the sealskin gloves Duncan had lent Mullin to prevent frostbite, and their plans to leave the following day.

  Conditions had been so awful today that Lendrum had rappelled down to only a single gyrfalcon nest in the snow and retrieved two eggs, giving them a total of seven for a week’s work. Though just a quarter of the previous year’s haul, “it was enough to turn a decent profit,” Mullin would later say. (Mullin understood that he wouldn’t be sharing in the profits; he had simply been hungry for another adventure.) Those eggs were now keeping warm in a portable incubator plugged into a wall socket. Ropes, carabiners, climbing harnesses, and egg boxes lay scattered about the room.

  At five o’clock, someone knocked on the door. Mullin and Lendrum looked at each other.

  It must be the police, Mullin thought, his heartbeat quickening. “This is it, Jeff,” he said.

  “Okay,” Lendrum replied with resignation.

  Mullin swung his legs around, stood up, and opened the door. Saunders, Watt, and the two Quebecois police officers burst into the room.

  “Are you Paul Mullin and Jeffrey Lendrum?” asked Watt.

  The men nodded.

  “Stand to one side,” he said.

  Lendrum and Mullin watched silently as the officers removed the film from Mullin’s video camera and seized the climbing equipment, GPS devices, and mobile telephones. They opened carry-on bags, unplugged and removed the incubators, and peered at the creamy white-and-yellow eggs being kept warm inside.

  “Have you been stealing eggs?” asked Watt.

  “No, no, I’ve been filming,” insisted Mullin, gamely explaining that he was gathering “exclusive footage” about gyrfalcons for National Geographic. The four officers ordered Lendrum and Mullin outside, led each to the back of a separate four-by-four, and drove them across Kuujjuaq toward wildlife protection agency headquarters.

  Lendrum and Mullin stared out the windows as they passed long rows of single- and two-story bungalows encrusted with snow and ice. They had agreed that if they were caught, they would stick to their cover story. The officers escorted them into the Wildlife Protection Services building and down a fluorescent-lit corridor, into separate rooms. Asked what he and his partner were doing with seven gyrfalcon eggs in a heated incubator in their hotel room, Mullin, who was still carrying the twenty-two-inch Buck knife strapped to his leg, professed ignorance.

  Lendrum was a bit more voluble. He had taken a break from gathering National Geographic footage, he explained, to retrieve a few “addled” specimens from nest sites to perform postmortems to investigate possible pesticide poisoning. He planned to weigh and measure the eggs, just as the British ornithologist Derek Ratcliffe had done to examine the effects of DDT in rural England in the 1960s. He also intended, he insisted, to put the clutch back on the ledges the following day.

  Watt, however, had found a laptop containing a record of expenses from the pair’s trip the year before—including a $30,000 helicopter rental and thousands of dollars for plane tickets between London and Philadelphia, and Philadelphia and Montreal. Lendrum and Mullin were, he was sure, well-financed international wildlife smugglers, who intended to profit from selling the live eggs of one of Quebec’s most endangered species. If it were his decision, Watt would have had them tried on wildlife trafficking charges, an offense that potentially carried a $1 million fine and a five-year jail term in Canada. But Watt knew that he lacked indisputable evidence—boarding a flight with the contraband, for example—that the two men intended to smuggle the gyrfalcon eggs abroad. Instead he conferred with the provincial prosecutor in Chibougamau, then came back to Lendrum and Mullin with an offer:

  “You can either plead guilty and pay a fine, or we’ll lock you up and Monday you’ll go to court,” Watt told them.

  “How much?” Mullin asked.

  “Seven thousand two hundred and fifty dollars,” said Watt. It was the highest penalty possible under Canadian wildlife legislation.

  “I need to speak to my partner,” said Mullin.

  Half an hour later Mullin and Lendrum pleaded guilty to twelve charges of illegal hunting and wild egg possession. The men paid their fine with US dollars. After the money changed hands, the police drove them through the darkened streets and deposited them in front of their hotel.

  “Be on the first plane out of here tomorrow,” Watt advised, “and don’t come back to Canada.”

  Wildlife authorities transported the eggs to a birds-of-prey recovery center near Montreal, where only one hatched; the others had apparently died of shock from being ripped out of their nests and jostled by either the thieves or the police. Dave Watt would claim that Lendrum had turned up the heat in the incubator either in the hotel room or during a brief period when he was close to the hatcher at headquarters after his arrest. “He wanted to destroy the evidence,” Watt would say. But Mullin insists that Lendrum would never deliberately kill a bird of prey under any circumstance. “He would risk his own life to save them,” Mullin says.

  * * *

  Mullin and Lendrum, shaken by the arrest, speculated about who had turned them in. On the flight back to Montreal, Mullin hypothesized that a room cleaner might have rummaged through their equipment while they were out. But the most likely culprit, he believed, was the pilot. “He was the weakest link in this whole damned thing,” he told Lendrum. “We shouldn’t have done it this way.” For his part, Lendrum suggested that his old friend Howard Waller might well have betrayed them “out of jealousy.” Up to that point, Mullin had assumed that Waller may have been on the receiving end of the eggs. Lendrum, who had been guarded with Mullin about his clientele this time, now implied that he was freelancing for wealthy backers in the United Arab Emirates.

  The first article about the pair appeared four days later on the front page of the Nunatsiaq News, a northeastern Quebec weekly. The antics of the globe-trotting criminals stood out amid the vocational school graduations, airport reno
vations, and other small-town events that typically filled the paper. “Poachers Fined for Illegal Possession of Falcon Eggs,” the article was headlined: “Two men masquerading as nature photographers, one from South Africa and the other from Britain, were caught red-handed in Kuujjuaq last week with a cache of falcon eggs worth thousands of dollars on the international black market.” In the article Guy Tremblay of the Quebec wildlife protection agency noted, “Kuujjuaq isn’t a big place and word traveled fast. People found their activity strange.” He estimated the black market value of each gyrfalcon egg at $30,000, theorized that the thieves “were linked to some organization,” and said that the Quebec government planned “to alert federal officials to the men’s identity so they can’t try to enter Canada at some later date.”

  Toronto’s National Post picked up the story on May 18. “Poached Eggs Seized from Fake Film Crew,” the headline declared. “Wildlife Officials Confiscate Incubator to Thwart Falcon Trade.” A spokesman for Canada’s Ministry of the Environment and Fauna told the paper, “Nobody goes to Kuujjuaq to collect eggs to make an omelette. Clearly, they had another goal in mind.” Canadian TV news ran a brief report about the arrests. Mullin and Lendrum later appeared at number fifty-seven in the rankings of the world’s one hundred top birds-of-prey smugglers on the website of savethefalcons.org, an obscure conservation group run by an American raptor biologist. But after this flurry of attention, the story disappeared. The public shaming that Mullin had feared never happened. None of his friends or relatives ever learned about what had occurred during that bizarre week in Kuujjuaq.