HUNTING THE HUNTERS

A conservation N.G.O. infiltrates wildlife-trafficking rings to bring them down

- TAD FRIEND

The Korean barbecue joint near L.A. wasn’t a crime scene, exactly. But on a muggy fall afternoon two of Mexico’s top wildlife traffickers sat in the back, eating lunch and talking shop. One of their most profitable lines of business is smuggling the buoyancy bladders of an endangered fish called the totoaba. The scab-colored bladders are remarkably yucky-looking, and the effort to harvest them from the Sea of Cortez has driven the vaquita porpoise to the verge of extinction. But they taste great in soup and make your skin glow! Or so the folk wisdom has it. They’ve become costly enough in China—as much as fifty thousand dollars a kilogram—that they are often bestowed as gifts or bribes or simply cherished as collectibles, like Fabergé eggs.

The traffickers, Harry and Tommy, were Chinese. Harry, tall and pudgy, stayed bent over his chopsticks, while Tommy often stood to pace and talk on his phone. Both men believed that their host, Billy, a friend of several years, was a Hong Kong businessman who wanted to use their smuggling route. In fact, Billy, who was recording their conversation on his iPhone, was an operative for an N.G.O. called Earth League International. (I have used a pseudonym for anyone identified by a single name.) ELI intends to stop the global trade in rhino horn, elephant ivory, shark fins, lizards, ploughshare tortoises, Queen Alexandra’s birdwing butterflies, and more than seven thousand other species. Its goal is not to catch poachers but to penetrate transnational smuggling networks that, by some estimates, bring in more than a hundred billion dollars a year.