A black-market trade in exotic animals, sometimes worth more dead than alive

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A black-market trade in exotic animals, sometimes

worth more dead than alive

 

Saturday December 07, 2002

 

By SHARON COHEN

AP National Writer

 

ALSIP, Ill. (AP) The trailer loaded with nine tigers

and two lions rolled past the wire-fenced gates under

the cover of night so no outsiders were around to see

what was about to happen.

 

Heavy double doors lifted and the zebra-striped truck

that had hauled the trailer from Wisconsin entered the

brightly lit warehouse.

 

Two men waited inside with handguns.

 

The driver got out, carrying a stick. He poked it

through the slats of the trailer to prod the trapped

animals into position to make it easier for the

shooters taking aim.

 

The gunmen opened fire, killing eight of the tigers.

 

Their work had just begun.

 

All three men dragged the bloody carcasses out of the

trailer and onto the concrete floor. The shooters

began skinning the tigers, then loaded them up for

their final destination: an exotic butcher shop in

another suburb of Chicago.

 

There, according to the one of the gunmen, the

skinning was completed, and the carcasses hung on

hooks, weighed, and sold by the pound. But tiger meat,

authorities say, was labeled as lion which is legal to

sell.

 

Two days later, the driver of the truck was

frustrated. He still had a tiger and two lions in that

load that had been rejected because they were too

small. Now, he wanted to get rid of them.

 

``I'm gonna shoot 'em,'' he warned, ``and throw 'em in

a hole!''

 

=

 

This secret slaughter in March 1998, described in

court records by two of those involved, was part of a

ruthless black market: a ring that authorities say

bought, killed and sold endangered species tigers and

leopards for tens of thousands of dollars.

 

``There's an old saying that if you can make a dollar

off of it, there will be someone trying to kill it and

sell it,'' says Tim Santel, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife

Service agent who led a 4{-year investigation that

resulted in charges against 16 people.

 

The illegal trade in exotic and endangered species,

from big cats to tiny beetles and butterflies, is a

multibillion-dollar business.

 

Some are smugglers who cross international borders

with fragile and sometimes dangerous animals Komodo

dragons in suitcases, pythons around their waists.

 

Others work inside the United States, trading in rare

animals from roadside zoos and mom-and-pop game parks,

specialty magazines and Internet sites.

 

The investigation led by Santel underscored a cruel

reality: There may be more tigers in private hands in

the United States than in the wild and, chopped up for

their meat and hides, they can be worth more dead than

alive.

 

``You still have these black holes of horror and

butchery going on,'' says Jim Mason, an animal

activist in Missouri. ``It's like the drug trade. We

know it's bad ... but we don't have the means or the

will to put an end to it.''

 

Santel and other wildlife agents documented the

killing of 17 tigers, one leopard and one barasingha,

an Asian swamp deer all endangered along with numerous

African lions, cougars and ligers (a tiger-lion

hybrid), which are not.

 

The cats were shot at close range while confined to

cages or trailers.

 

Agents tracked a ring that spanned eight states

Illinois, Michigan, Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma,

Wisconsin, Kansas and Missouri and involved animal

park owners, taxidermists and ``trophy hunters,''

whose only safari was into an underground that thrives

on the slaughter of captive animals.

 

The ring shed light on a world where wildlife agents

are spread thin, where tigers can be cheap a litter

might go for as little as $750 and where the laws are

filled with loopholes that are readily exploited.

 

Even when traffickers are caught, critics complain,

the punishment isn't all that severe.

 

``For the most part ... it's really just a slap on the

wrist,'' says Alan Green, author of ``Animal

Underworld,'' an expose of the trafficking of exotic

and endangered species.

 

Judges and prosecutors aren't necessarily to blame;

federal guidelines limit the length of sentences.

 

Fourteen of the 16 people charged in this case have

pleaded guilty; two await court dates. The charges

included violating the Endangered Species Act, which

addresses the killing, and the Lacey Act, which covers

the sale and transport of these protected animals.

 

Of 10 people sentenced so far, Stoney Elam, former

operator of an Oklahoma exotic animal farm, received

the stiffest punishment: one year, half in home

confinement. He also was ordered to pay a $5,000 fine

to the Fish and Wildlife Foundation's Save The Tiger

Fund.

 

Elam sold two tigers and three leopards to an

undercover agent for $4,800, then falsified the

paperwork to make it look like it was a lawful

donation.

 

It is a federal violation to sell endangered animals

across state lines, but donations are permitted.

Lantz, the driver who delivered the cats to the

warehouse and brokered another deal involving four

tigers that were later killed, was sentenced to five

months in prison and fined $5,000.

 

His wife, Vicki, who pleaded guilty to aiding in the

sale of tigers, received six months' home detention.

 

A judge condemned their conduct as ``cowardly.''

 

Despite the success of this case, Green, the author,

says it's hard to get prosecutors to make such cases

high priority.

 

``If a wildlife agent goes to a district attorney and

says, 'I've got a case of a guy who killed a tiger,'

they've got a guy who's moving tons of heroin,'' he

says. ``Is the tiger that important in their mind?''

 

=

 

Tim Santel got the call in 1997.

 

An exotic-animal dealer in southern Illinois said she

had heard that people in the Chicago area wanted to

buy big cats to shoot them for their skins.

 

Santel frequently gets tips, but as one of only about

240 wildlife agents spread across the nation, his

resources are limited.

 

But Sherry Roche's tip with its suggestion of cruelty

and commercialization turned out to be worth pursuing.

 

To infiltrate the ring, wildlife agents posed as big

game hunters, a hired hand, an interior decorator and

animal dealers.

 

Working with informants, the agents gained the

confidence of the traffickers, transporting animals,

making deals and witnessing the falsifying of records.

 

Money was the motive for most of those involved.

 

But some were collectors including Dr. Robert

Martinez, a family practitioner who lives in Palos

Heights, Ill.

 

He is a hunter, but in this case, his ``hunting''

amounted to killing four caged cats; he pleaded guilty

to shooting the endangered one, a black leopard. In

his plea, Martinez said he paid $6,000 to buy the four

animals, and also admitted killing a tiger in a

trailer.

 

He sometimes posed with his kill: According to an

affidavit, he showed undercover agents a photo of

himself with the dead tiger and pictures with bears he

claimed he had illegally bagged in Russia and Canada.

 

Martinez declined comment, but his lawyer, James

Valentino, said the doctor ``got caught up with this

idea of having these mounts,'' and offered a

comparison:

 

``Why does a woman want alligator shoes or purse?''

 

That attitude isn't unusual, says Craig Hoover, deputy

director of TRAFFIC North America, the wildlife trade

monitoring arm of the World Wildlife Fund.

 

``It's a status thing,'' he says. ``There's this

mentality that I need to have one of everything in my

trophy room.''

 

=

 

To build their case, wildlife agents used video

cameras to conduct surveillance and even installed one

inside a trailer used to haul animals.

 

They faced a dilemma: how to keep the investigation

going to determine how widespread the ring was,

without jeopardizing more cats.

 

``How many animals do you let them kill to document

it?'' asked Dan Burleson, a wildlife agent who posed

as a hired hand.

 

A decision was made: Once an agent had witnessed the

killing of an endangered animal, investigators would

try to intervene to stop others.

 

On April 1, 1998, Burleson got a grisly, firsthand

look.

 

The setting was Roche's farm as Burleson watched the

two warehouse shooters Kevin Ramsey, who pleaded

guilty, and Bill Kapp, who awaits trial kill the two

lions and the tiger that had been rejected just days

earlier, according to records.

 

``The cats would be looking out, thinking this person

was there to provide them with food, water or some

loving,'' Roche says. ``It's just like a dog waiting

at the door and somebody shooting them.''

 

Agents tried to save animals before others could get

to them: They paid Tim Rivers who also pleaded guilty

$1,750 for a panther and pair of black leopards.

 

The leopards had special billing: They had reportedly

appeared on the TV show ``Miami Vice.''

 

=

 

There are just too many tigers.

 

Experts say there may be as many as 10,000

captive-bred tigers in private hands in the United

States compared with up to 7,500 in the wild.

 

A tiger can be bought for $1,000, or even less. Its

parts can generate a lot more.

 

In Santel's case, the hides of two tigers and one

leopard were sold for $10,500 to a Michigan man who

pleaded guilty. Meat was sold to the market for about

$3 a pound; depending on the cut, retail prices

approached $15 a pound. Internal organs were saved,

believed destined for the Asian medicinal trade, which

is also a lucrative market for tiger bones.

 

A full tiger skeleton can be worth more than $61,000,

according to an estimate in a 2000 TRAFFIC report.

 

The huge growth in tigers prompted the Fish and

Wildlife Service in 1998 to relax its rules for

generic tigers the offspring of different subspecies,

such as Bengal and Siberian.

 

To streamline the paperwork, people with these generic

tigers no longer needed permits to sell them across

state lines; Santel says the new rule did not change

their protected status.

 

But Scott Kamin, a lawyer for Bill Kapp, maintains

generic tigers are not the endangered species

protected by federal law and plans to use that as his

defense.

 

He compared the tiger killing in this case to deer

hunting. ``I'm not sure how different this is

morally,'' he says.

 

The only other person awaiting trial is Richard J.

Czimer Jr., president of Czimer's Game and Sea Foods,

a third-generation exotic meat market in Lockport,

Ill.

 

After being charged this year with buying and selling

the meat of endangered species, Czimer protested his

innocence, saying animals brought to his shop had been

skinned. ``The meat doesn't come with stripes,'' he

said.

 

His lawyer, Alan Bruggeman, now says in most cases,

Czimer thought he was buying lions.

 

But Kevin Ramsey, who helped deliver some animals to

the shop, said in his plea that Czimer was present

while he and others skinned and gutted cats, including

a leopard.

 

Wildlife agents visited Czimer's, bought meat labeled

lion and sent it to the agency's forensic lab in

Oregon.

 

A third of the items tested turned out, in fact, to be

tiger.

 

=

 

Word of this case has spread in the small world of

people who deal with exotic cats.

 

Agents say they hope the convictions will be a

deterrent, but they are pragmatic.

 

``We're not going to cure the world,'' Burleson says.

``As long as there's money involved, people will try

to make a profit. We know we can't stop it. But

hopefully we've got them looking over their shoulders

now.''

 

=

 

On the Net:

 

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, http://www.fws.gov

World Wildlife Fund, http://www.worldwildlife.org

The Humane Society of the United States, www.hsus.org

Animal Protection Institute, www.api4animals.org

 

(Copyright 2002 by The Associated Press. All Rights

Reserved.)

 

 

 

 

 

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