The Falcon Thief

by Joshua Hammer

  The investigator was developing complicated feelings for the thief. “He’s well traveled, he’s fearless, he’s resourceful, and his preparation is superb,” said McWilliam. “I respected him without wanting to condone what he did.” Nevin Hunter, who would command the National Wildlife Crime Unit from 2012 to 2014, shared his colleague’s respect for Lendrum’s gifts. Both of them had dealt with hundreds of wildlife criminals in their careers, but neither had encountered one who had covered so much ground, employed such flamboyant methods to carry out his thefts, and been so apparently successful at moving living, fragile creatures across vast distances. “I sat down with Andy, Ian Guildford, and Alan Roberts, one hundred fifty years of experience among us, and we couldn’t come up with any other individual who works like Lendrum does,” Hunter would say. “He identified a marketplace that hadn’t been exploited by any criminal, and he was ideally suited for it.”

  Perhaps it was possible to appreciate Lendrum’s accomplishments without too much guilt because the thief hadn’t threatened any species with extinction. “Peregrines and gyrfalcons are not going to die out because one guy takes their eggs to sell to the Arab market,” McWilliam’s colleague Alan Roberts said, although he did sadly concede that “the principle is there. If the sheikhs decide that a more vulnerable species is going to be what they want, Lendrum made sure that all the mechanisms are in place.”

  In any event, begrudging respect didn’t stop McWilliam from building a strong case. To round out his picture of Lendrum for the prosecution, McWilliam asked Nick Fox, the Wales-based falcon breeder to Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, to estimate the value of the thirteen live peregrine eggs found on Lendrum’s person. Fox projected that ten would have survived the journey to Dubai, and half would have been female. At £10,000 for a wild female, and £5,000 for a wild male, which is two-thirds the female’s size and generally a slower racer, he placed a market value, in a sworn affidavit that would be presented in court, of £75,000 on the lot, then worth about $117,000. Officials of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species based in the United Arab Emirates corroborated the figure. Though far more conservative than other estimates of wild falcon prices over the years, the sum would hardly have been a bad income for a single month’s work.

  * * *

  At the Warwick Crown Court in Royal Leamington Spa outside Birmingham, a media-heavy crowd began forming in the hour before Lendrum’s mid-morning plea hearing on August 19, 2010. Alerted by McWilliam, reporters from the BBC, Sky News, the Independent, the Sun, the Daily Mail, and the Times, as well as local TV, radio, and print journalists, converged on the eighteenth-century colonnaded courthouse, one of the oldest still in use in Great Britain. The tale of the globe-trotting thief who had rappelled down cliffs to steal live falcon eggs on behalf of Arab sheikhs was irresistible to the tabloids and the evening news. McWilliam noted the satellite trucks as he walked up the courthouse steps, pleasantly surprised by the turnout. The outcome of the appearance was not in doubt: prosecutor Nigel Williams had let it be known that Lendrum, facing a compendium of powerful evidence against him, would acknowledge his guilt on one count of theft of an endangered species and one count of smuggling in violation of the regulations of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. He hoped for a lighter sentence, possibly just a fine, in return.

  McWilliam walked past the gallery in the small, wood-paneled courtroom—from which eighteenth-century thieves and murderers had been delivered in irons to the hangman. A few feet away, Lendrum sat in the dock. Not a single friend or family member was present. The falcon thief nodded at the investigator in recognition. McWilliam nodded back. McWilliam had faced plenty of defendants who’d hurled obscenities at him or threatened him in the courtroom. “I’ve been to court where I wouldn’t piss on a defendant if he was on fire,” McWilliam would say. He had once arrested and brought to trial a goshawk launderer named Leonard O’Connor, “a grade-one asshole,” he says, who had flashed him his middle finger from the witness box every time the magistrate wasn’t looking. McWilliam responded to each insult by repeating the obscene gesture. “We were like a pair of children,” he would say with a laugh. Lendrum—polite and soft-spoken—was a pleasant change from such surly characters.

  “You all right?” McWilliam asked.

  Lendrum shrugged. “I’ve been keeping okay,” he replied.

  “You’re pleading guilty,” McWilliam said.

  “Well,” Lendrum replied, “you caught me bang to rights.”

  Judge Christopher Hodson entered the courtroom. He asked Lendrum to rise.

  “How do you plead?”

  “I’m guilty, Your Honor.”

  Lendrum’s advocate, Nicola Purches, told the judge that her client had been “a model prisoner” in the remand block at Hewell. He was remorseful and ashamed, and the crime was completely out of character. What was more, Lendrum’s father, Adrian, a lifetime heavy smoker now in his seventies, had developed emphysema, and had only a few months to live. His son hoped to fly to Zimbabwe and see him, Purches said, before he died.

  Hodson asked Lendrum to rise again and to listen while he quoted from Costing the Earth, a document that Lord Justice Stephen Sedley, a distinguished appeals-court jurist, had prepared the previous year as a guide for sentencing wildlife criminals. “The environmental crime strikes not only at a locality and its population but at the planet and its future,” Sedley had declared. “Nobody should be allowed to doubt its seriousness.” Lendrum, Hodson said, had been motivated by the basest of reasons, “commercial profit … The amount that you would have needed to expend, on equipment, on travel, and in preparation, in my judgment proves that,” he continued. “You have had two previous warnings of the consequences of dealing in protected wild birds and their eggs; convicted in 1984 in Zimbabwe; and in 2002 in Canada.”

  Then Hodson pronounced his judgment. “At the end of the day, a substantial sentence … needs to be imposed to punish you and deter others,” he said. “The sentence on the indictment will be one of thirty months’ imprisonment.”

  “Bloody hell,” muttered McWilliam from a side bench. Two and a half years. The sentence was tougher than he had been expecting. He was happy enough to take the falcon thief out of circulation for a while, but he felt unexpected ambivalence about this punishment. Like a master jewel thief or other skilled practioner of the felonious arts, the man commanded appreciation of his talents, however twisted they might be. McWilliam regarded him as an accomplished adversary. He had even come to like him, in a way. He glanced at Lendrum, who looked back, stunned.

  * * *

  Over the next days, British newspapers devoted pages of coverage to Lendrum’s exploits. “Caged: The £70K Egg Snatcher,” the Daily Mirror declared. “A Bird in the Hand, a Smuggler in Jail,” ran the front-page headline in the Times of London. “Jailed, Former Soldier Caught Smuggling £70,000 of Falcon Eggs,” the Daily Mail proclaimed, reporting, inaccurately, that Lendrum had served in the Rhodesian SAS. The Independent, also embellishing a tale that needed no exaggeration, repeated the misreporting that Lendrum was “a former member of the Rhodesian SAS.” Lendrum, the paper reported, “becomes the first person in 19 years to be prosecuted in the UK for attempting to smuggle peregrine falcon eggs out of the country,” a reference to the two German citizens who had pleaded guilty in 1991 to smuggling twelve live eggs hidden in the dashboard of their Mercedes. The Daily Express ran a photo spread of “The Rare Falcon Chicks Saved from Clutches of Daring Egg Smuggler,” while spinning a sensational yarn that bore little relation to the truth. “Police feared a terrorist attack on a British airport was underway,” the piece began. “The ingredients were all there—a shady character acting in a suspicious manner who was once a special forces soldier for a foreign power. Among his possessions were thousand of pounds in cash. But it wasn’t explosives he was trying to sneak onto an international airliner—it was rare bird eggs.”

  McWilliam gave televisi
on producers permission to use the confiscated video from northern Canada, and dramatic excerpts played and played on British TV. Back in Bulawayo, members of BirdLife Zimbabwe and others who had felt betrayed by Lendrum in the 1980s expressed satisfaction that justice had been served. “At last the fellow is in prison, though a spell in a Zimbabwean jail might be a more effective deterrent,” wrote Peter Mundy, the ornithology professor and friend of Val Gargett, who had once tried to arrange Lendrum’s extradition to Zimbabwe, in the magazine Honeyguide. Mundy acknowledged that much of the case was likely to remain a mystery. “Few of the end users of illegally obtained wildlife ever seem to get convicted,” he wrote. Lendrum “has proven himself to be an unrepentant reprobate and will presumably remain tight-lipped so we may never know his contacts.”

  Both the media and McWilliam had left another important question unanswered: What had happened to the money? Under the provisions of the Wildlife and Countryside Act, the police had confiscated everything that Lendrum had been traveling with: his Vauxhall Vectra Estate car, laptops, incubators, a spotting scope, cameras, lenses, and climbing equipment, as well as an expensive mountain bike that he was shipping back to South Africa, and a few thousand British pounds and US dollars. The total value of the forfeiture was placed at £20,000. Lendrum had a part interest with South African friends in a Cessna aircraft and owned a four-by-four in Johannesburg, both of which were outside the jurisdiction of the British authorities. But a search for other assets under the 2002 Proceeds of Crime Act would turn up little else. A close friend in Zimbabwe had once jokingly called Lendrum “the world’s poorest thief.” The mystery lingered, and Lendrum wasn’t talking.

  McWilliam had a bite with the Counter Terorrism agent who’d worked on the case with him from the beginning and then made the 130-mile drive home to Liverpool, answering a dozen more reporters’ calls along the way. After brewing coffee and watching the late-evening news on the BBC, featuring images of Lendrum dangling from a helicopter, McWilliam and his wife went to bed.

  One hundred ten miles away at Hewell, Jeffrey Lendrum settled into his first night in his cell as a convicted endangered-species smuggler, still insisting that he was misunderstood, and still holding secrets that McWilliam was determined to shake loose.

  FIFTEEN PRISON

  After his sentencing, Jeffrey Lendrum moved into a wing for convicted felons at the high-security “B” block of Her Majesty’s Prison Hewell. During his three months awaiting trial, his cellmate had been Jonathan Palmer, a white-haired former businessman accused (and later convicted) of bludgeoning his wife to death in the hallway of their home after she discovered his multiple affairs. Now he had a new cellmate and a new prison routine that stressed rehabilitation and vocational workshops. Cells opened at seven forty-five. Then came showers, breakfast, job training, lunch, cell cleaning, menial work, classes, dinner, gym, and a lockup at six-fifteen p.m. The staff offered prisoners a choice among courses in construction, double-glazing manufacture, industrial cleaning, waste management, and laundry services. Lendrum, who was forty-nine years old and had never held a nine-to-five job since managing the cannery in Bulawayo in his early twenties, wasn’t interested.

  Yet Lendrum discovered certain satisfactions in his life behind bars. As he moved through the exercise yard, cafeteria, and other communal areas of the cellblock, he was often treated like a celebrity. Hardened felons wanted to hear about his adventures and expressed surprise, amusement, and sympathy that Lendrum was doing two and a half years for stealing eggs. “You got hit for taking birds?” they would ask. “My God, this country is nuts.” Some prisoners, amazed by the reports that peregrine eggs could be sold in the Arab world for £5,000 or £10,000 apiece, begged him for tips on finding aeries. Lendrum assured them that the stories were “grossly exaggerated” and that the market price of a peregrine egg was barely one-tenth of that.

  Two months into Lendrum’s sentence, Andy McWilliam made an appointment to see him. Now that Lendrum had pleaded guilty to trafficking in wild peregrine eggs, the investigator hoped that he might be more forthcoming about his Middle Eastern sponsors. McWilliam had become increasingly aware of the role of wealthy Arabs in the underground falcon market. With Lendrum’s admission of culpability, he saw an opportunity to implicate specific sheikhs—and pressure the Emirates or other Gulf states to take action. Lendrum was “a guy at the top of his game,” recalled McWilliam, who a few days earlier had attended a ceremony in Birmingham presided over by Great Britain’s Environmental Minister, honoring the sharp-eyed Emirates Lounge janitor, John Struczynski, for his contribution to Lendrum’s May 2010 arrest. “We wanted him to spill the beans.” And perhaps, McWilliam acknowledges, he hoped for more than that. From his encounters with repeat offenders such as Carlton D’Cruze, who had admitted he might never be able to control the impulse to raid aeries, and Gregory Peter Wheal, who had been arrested for stealing eggs ten times in a decade, McWilliam knew how difficult it was for a recidivist egg snatcher to break from lifelong criminalty. Still, he thought that maybe—just maybe—Lendrum would find a path out of the outlaw life.

  McWilliam and his colleague from the West Midlands Counter Terrorism Unit drove through the gates to the old country estate one fall afternoon and followed a road past the manor house to the high-security block. They parked the vehicle, passed on foot through several more gates, and waited for Lendrum in a private interview room just off a sprawling prisoners’ lounge. The falcon thief cast them a broad smile when he appeared. He shook their hands and sat opposite them at a scuffed table, chatting amiably about conditions inside the prison. After the shock of receiving a two-and-a-half-year jail sentence, he was surprisingly relaxed and seemed to be coming to terms with his loss of liberty. He was looking to the future, he told McWilliam. He had signed up for a photo-editing course, and was learning Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop.

  Lendrum also seemed willing to cooperate with the police. He turned over to McWilliam the GPS points of all four aeries that he had robbed in the Rhondda and Garw Valleys. He dropped inside information about the birds-of-prey trade in Southern Africa, mentioning species that he knew were being systematically taken from Matobo and other Zimbabwe reserves and smuggled abroad. (A decade later, McWilliam still wouldn’t say whether Lendrum had identified individual trappers and smugglers by name. Such material remained “restricted intelligence” under British law, and he could be criminally prosecuted for divulging it.) He spoke emotionally about his father, Adrian, who had died on September 2, two weeks after Lendrum’s guilty plea, following a long struggle with emphysema. Great Britain’s Prison and Probation Service had turned down his request to attend his father’s funeral in South Africa.

  But when pressed for intelligence about his clients in the Arab world, Lendrum claimed not to know what McWilliam was talking about. He didn’t have any business in the Middle East, he insisted. McWilliam asked about his relationship with Howard Waller, mentioning a photo he had seen of Lendrum and Waller sitting together in a bar at Heathrow. Lendrum admitted that he had known Waller growing up in Rhodesia, but denied ever smuggling eggs for him. He insisted that he had stolen the live peregrine eggs in southern Wales to save them from being destroyed by pigeon fanciers. “It was spur of the moment,” he said. “If you had seen me in Africa, and seen how I rescue things, then I think you would understand me. I catch snakes. I’m nuts.” He was still covering for his Arab patrons, McWilliam assumed, perhaps fearful of retribution, perhaps eager to return to business with them once he was released from prison.

  Despite his continuing evasiveness, the Hewell administration considered Lendrum a model prisoner who stood a good chance of successful reintegration into society. In late autumn, shortly after the visit from McWilliam, the governess rewarded him for his good behavior by moving him across the grounds to Hewell’s Grange Resettlement Unit, a manor house that had once belonged to the Earls of Plymouth. The Grange had no formal lights-out, no lockdowns, and practically no supervision; prisoners lived toget
her in a dormitory. The governess’s only caution was a half-joking warning to Lendrum that “your pilot friend” refrain from “attempting a rescue” in his helicopter. Prisoners had relaxed phone privileges as well, and one of the first people Lendrum reached out to was McWilliam. He chatted about his progress in his photo course and mounted his usual defense of his actions in the Rhondda Valley, without any prompting from McWilliam this time, rambling on about pigeon fanciers and the shootings and poisonings of peregrines. “If I hadn’t saved those birds nobody would have,” he told the officer. Surprised by the call, McWilliam wondered whether any of his friends or family had been by to visit.

  * * *

  Soon Lendrum received more good news. On February 1, England’s Court of Appeals ruled that his punishment was “manifestly excessive and out of step with the sentences imposed in earlier cases” of bird smuggling, including that of Harry Sissen, the North Yorkshire rare-parrot trafficker whose two-and-a-half-year sentence had been reduced to eighteen months on appeal. Citing Lendrum’s willingness to plead guilty and his “family circumstances in South Africa,” the court reduced his sentence to eighteen months, including time served. Providing that he could present a proper residential address and find employment, the prisoner was free to leave Hewell immediately on parole. He would, however, have to remain in the United Kingdom for another nine months, until the end of his reduced sentence, and report weekly to a court officer.