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.
At a table across the room, Andrea Crosta, ELI’s founder, sat monitoring the action with Mark Davis, his director of intelligence. They watched as Billy stepped out for a smoke. “I always think, This is the time to leave your phone behind, because you could capture a great conversation,” Crosta said. He glanced over and laughed: Harry and Tommy were mutely gorging themselves on bulgogi. “I have almost no emotions toward those people,” he said. “They are in the business of death, and I do dislike them for that, but it would be counterproductive to hate.”
A fifty-four-year-old Italian with pale-blue eyes and a wistful air, Crosta shares a one-bedroom apartment in Marina del Rey with his rescue dog, Argos. Like many animal lovers, he is frequently disappointed by humans. “Andrea is one of my favorite people,” Jane Goodall told me. “He’s passionate, he’s courageous—what he’s doing is very dangerous—he loves dogs, and he won’t ever, ever give up.” Preoccupied with his next counterstrike, Crosta often goes all day without eating, then, as night falls, finds himself eying the ground mackerel in Argos’s bowl.
ELI’s annual budget is just three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, but its operations have led to the arrest of an alleged jaguar-fang ring in Bolivia; helped the Mexican government pursue the Cartel of the Sea, a network in Baja California that trafficked sea cucumbers and totoaba; and sparked at least seven ongoing investigations by the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of Homeland Security, and the F.B.I. These agencies now treat ELI as trusted colleagues. Chris Egner, the Homeland Security agent who works most closely with Crosta’s team, told me, “Our partnership with ELI is invaluable. Their access to these particular criminal networks is simply something we can’t do.”
After lunch, Crosta and Davis drove to a nearby boba shop and waited outside to debrief Billy. A boyish Jack-of-all-trades, Billy speaks Cantonese, Mandarin, several Chinese dialects, English, and a bit of Spanish and French, and has worked undercover on five continents. He has a knack for seeming rich, venal, and slightly dense—the perfect customer. He bounced up the sidewalk and began his report: “It’s going great! They were a little cautious at the beginning. They asked, ‘Where is the boss?’ ” Billy’s boss had been played by Larry, another undercover, but Larry was travelling that week. “I said, ‘Oh, he got COVID.’ ”
“Nice!” Mark Davis said, admiring the improv and offering a second take: “Oh, he’s dead.” Davis retired from the F.B.I. in 2016, after thirty years as the agency’s preëminent undercover agent. He played some two hundred roles and ingratiated himself with drug cartels led by Pablo Escobar and by El Chapo. Wiry, with a white mustache and soul patch and earring holes from past performances, Davis has a surf-bum vibe that’s as disarming as it is misleading. He works for ELI without pay.
Once Harry and Tommy loosened up, Billy said, they described a variety of schemes carried out by their associates, including importing sea cucumbers to San Diego and manufacturing counterfeit Gucci bags. They also elaborated on the way they smuggled Chinese nationals into the U.S., via Macau and Ecuador. “They use fake Japanese residence cards that get the people into Mexico City, then bribe customs to get them on local flights to Tijuana,” Billy said. “Then the cartel brings them over the border by a mountain road.” Tommy had admitted that the journey had its hazards: “Sometimes the cartel would take your cash, and there are some crazy things happening. But normally no rape.”
Crosta knew that these details would interest Homeland Security, a vital consideration for ELI. Broadly speaking, law-enforcement agencies care less about animals than about “convergence”—the other crimes that wildlife traffickers commit. The bootleggers from the Golden Triangle who smuggle pangolins and bears into China also smuggle opium and methamphetamines; the group that brings monkeys to Europe from northern Morocco also conveys hash, counterfeit goods, and people. Crosta aims to harness the agencies’ agenda to his own. “You won’t scare people if you arrest them for wildlife trafficking,” he said at the restaurant. “You have to charge them with human smuggling and money laundering and put them away for twenty years.”
Davis added, “I don’t care if these motherfuckers start dealing cocaine instead—we just want to get them off of trading on Mother Earth.”
The problem for ELI is that, while most people treat nature as an inexhaustible resource, the traffickers know better. Billy reported that Harry had said, “Seafood, I’m not doing right now, because it’s not sustainable.” Davis laughed, and Crosta said, “Of course, of course”—his habitual response to ecological destruction caused by human greed. “I hear this all the time,” Billy said. “They all say there’s less and less rhino horns and shark fins, so we have to grab all we can before it’s finished.”
Reports of wildlife trafficking often have a “weird news” aspect: the passenger stopped at the Amsterdam airport with hummingbirds in his underwear; the travellers from Guyana who arrive at J.F.K. carrying dozens of hair curlers, each containing a chestnut-bellied seed finch. (The finches are destined for singing competitions in the Guyanese community in Queens, where a particularly melodious one can sell for more than ten thousand dollars.)
The oddity of these stories obscures a pernicious effect of globalization: a scrambling of the world’s wildlife map. South American butterflies arrive in the U.S. after being routed through Thailand; Mexican cartels sell tiger cubs. In this business, animals are overnighted, alive or dead, to wherever they’re worth the most. Nils Gilman, a globalization expert at the Berggruen Institute, told me, “Where price difference is based on differences of moral opinion, the likelihood of enduring profit margins is very high.” At times, rhino horn has been worth more than gold—so South African rhinos are often killed with Czech-made rifles sold by Portuguese arms dealers to poachers from Mozambique, who send the horns by courier to Qatar or Vietnam, or have them bundled with elephant ivory in Maputo or Mombasa or Lagos or Luanda and delivered to China via Malaysia or Hong Kong.
Social media is a powerful market facilitator and accelerant. A 2020 study of Facebook found four hundred and seventy-three pages that openly traded wildlife and another two hundred and eighty-one groups that participated in the global bazaar. The code words were transparent: “ox bone” for elephant ivory, “striped T-shirt” for tiger skin. Gretchen Peters, the head of the Alliance to Counter Crime Online, which performed the study, told me, “Everything from tarantulas to cheetahs and elephants go into population collapse once they start trending.”
As many as a million plant and animal species are expected to vanish by 2050. Ninety-three per cent of the world’s fish stocks are fully or excessively exploited. On land, humans now constitute thirty-six per cent of the vertebrate population, and livestock fifty-nine per cent; all the other terrestrial animals account for just five per cent. The erasure begins whenever a road is carved into a virgin forest. Logging, mining, and palm-oil plantations or cattle ranches rapidly follow, along with poaching and trafficking. After a logging company built a road in Congo, wildlife populations in the surrounding forest declined more than twenty-five per cent in just three weeks.
The chief weapon against wildlife trafficking is the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. CITES, propounded in 1973, has been signed by nearly all the world’s countries, and governs how more than forty thousand species move about the globe. But the agreement, designed to expedite trade rather than suppress it, is in many ways impracticable. Elephant trophies with tusks can be traded, but elephant ivory can’t; in the CITES database, customs officers must identify a species by its Latin name before they can take action. Most significantly, CITES lacks an enforcement mechanism, and it doesn’t mandate what to do with confiscated animals, which are often euthanized. John Scanlon, who served as the secretary-general of CITES from 2010 to 2018, told me, “It’s completely obvious there’s no way to tackle transnational organized crime using a fifty-year-old trade agreement.”
Trafficking has global consequences. When species are removed from an environment, carbon sequestration and pollination decline, fires and floods are less contained, and animal-borne diseases such as bird flu and H.I.V. arise and spread. Yet there is no global will to supplant CITES. “Because the word ‘wildlife’ is in wildlife crime, governments don’t take it seriously,” Mary Rice, the executive director of the Environmental Investigation Agency U.K., an influential conservation group, said. “They think of cuddly little animals. They don’t see it through the lens of a criminal act that involves conspiracy and bribery and corruption and sometimes murder.” The world spends a hundred billion dollars a year to stop drug trafficking, and far less than a billion to stop wildlife trafficking. For the most part, the tools used to pursue drug runners—wiretaps, undercover informants—are unknown in combatting wildlife offenses. A top U.N. environmental-crimes official told me that in one Nordic country “the environmental officers were known as the Snake Squad—two agents at the end of their careers relegated to a back office.”
The United States is often looked to as the globe’s animal cop. The Lacey Act, in concert with other federal statutes, dictates that if any part of an illicit wildlife transaction touches American territory—even if a payment merely passes through a server in the U.S.—federal agencies can step in. Yet, while Homeland Security receives nine hundred and fifty billion dollars in annual funding, its Wildlife and Environmental Crimes Unit, which launches this year, will get just $7.5 million of that. Fish and Wildlife’s Office of Law Enforcement has a budget of ninety-four million dollars, but even that is inadequate to dent the global trade. When I spent a day with its officers at J.F.K., Paul Chapelle, the agent in charge of the New York District, told me, “We are absolutely beyond capacity.” There were three inspectors at the airport, who were expected to screen four hundred tons of mail, four thousand tons of cargo, and well over a hundred thousand passengers.
The inspectors are tasked with thwarting a primal need. We find wild animals more beautiful, more exotic, healthier, tastier, and more efficacious than domestic ones. Around the world, they are used as medicine, as subjects for lab experiments, as props for selfies, as pets, as food, for their furs and skins, for breeding purposes, and for sport hunting. Even childish wonder is implicated in this compendious scavenging; the trade in owls soared after “Harry Potter.” What unites these uses is a desire for animals’ atavism, for their astonishing strangeness. We project onto them all the wild qualities that we have lost, and that we long either to reclaim or to destroy.
The infinity pool glimmered in the October twilight above the Los Angeles Basin. Jim Demetriades, an entrepreneur and an environmentalist, was hosting a fund-raiser for Earth League International at his Tuscan-style mansion in Beverly Hills—a place called Villa Theos, Greco-Roman for “God’s Country House.” Eighty beautifully dressed people milled on the lawn, among them the director Oliver Stone and the actress Rebecca De Mornay. Crosta found himself hoping that he might raise his entire pie-in-the-sky budget of five hundred thousand dollars that night.
There were pitfalls to evade. The Demetriades family and their set were Republicans and hunters, so Crosta had pushed to insure that their chef’s hors d’œuvres wouldn’t repulse vegans. Then Demetriades mentioned in his introductory remarks that his daughter was on ELI’s board, even though her inclusion hadn’t passed the discussion stage. Crosta kept quiet: Maybe we should make her a board member, so she and Jim will support us.
He’d told me, “Our biggest challenge isn’t going undercover—it’s fund-raising. I hate it, I suck at it.” Crosta had been to galas that raised millions with emotional appeals, but he found that approach distasteful. He told me, “I pitched a big donor once and he said, ‘Don’t you have something nicer I can do with my son, like adopt an orphaned baby elephant?’ In L.A., they’re obsessed with adopting three, five, ten orphaned baby elephants. I said, ‘I am in the business of producing less orphaned baby elephants.’ We didn’t get any money.”
“Adopting” baby elephants is a staple tactic of conservation N.G.O.s—a way to attract funding for less charismatic wildlife. Rikkert Reijnen, an adviser to the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), explained, “Elephants require space, and you can protect a lot of animals within that space. The most important animal in that system is actually the termite.” Termites recycle deadwood and leaves and aerate the soil; without them, there would be no plants for animals to feed on. “But termites make a very unappealing poster child.”
Crosta, truckling as much as he could bear to, had blazoned a photo of a mother elephant and her baby across the event’s posters. And he began his presentation by recalling his earlier days as a security consultant who occasionally trained park rangers: “My story begins twelve years ago in Kenya, in the middle of the elephant-poaching crisis, when we were losing up to fifty thousand elephants a year. I was going out with the rangers, and one day I saw one of the most horrific scenes of my life—an entire group of elephants that had been gunned down with AK-47s, just for the ivory. There was only one survivor, a little elephant later called Zambezi, hacked on the spine. He was probably trying to protect his mother. What I remember is the faces of the rangers.” He gestured, evoking helplessness. “The day after, they actually caught two of the people involved, and you can’t imagine two people more poor and desperate and dirty, making a few bucks for every kilo of ivory, where the traffickers were making thousands.”
As Crosta clicked through images of a rhino-horn trafficker in Vietnam, orphaned orangutans in Thailand, and illegal timber in Gabon, he explained how ELI works: “We put together a team of former F.B.I. and former C.I.A. undercover operators to infiltrate the most important wildlife-trafficking groups in the world. Twelve undercovers of different nationalities, and their work is to identify these people and become their friend. We never buy anything illegal, we are not armed—we are just really good at becoming your friend.” This overview was somewhat misleading: though ELI has used operatives from Taiwan, South Africa, and Colombia, it typically fields just two or three undercovers at a time, and none of them are former agency members. (One ex-C.I.A. operative has said he’d join up once Crosta could afford him.) And ELI does sometimes participate in buys on behalf of law enforcement: in 2021, at the request of federal agents, Billy and Larry spent hours in a U-Haul parked outside a McDonald’s in San Diego, negotiating the purchase of totoaba bladders from a trafficker.
Crosta’s fibs and elisions derived in part from sheepishness—“I’m almost ashamed to say how small we are”—and in part from a need to protect his team. During the U-Haul buy, the trafficker brought along a countersurveillance squad from a drug cartel. Crosta told me, “We did a ton of work for that buy, but we can’t take any public credit, because the cartel is a danger to us.”
At Villa Theos, Rebecca De Mornay told Demetriades, “It’s thrilling! It’s so important it should be a movie.” He nodded vigorously: “This is NASA—it’s the future!” But many in the crowd remained unconvinced by Crosta’s approach. Two guests suggested to ELI team members that, instead of empathizing with poachers, they should go to Africa and kill them.
Donors like direct action, and they like feeling that their donation is fixing the problem. So N.G.O.s display photos of rescued animals and skim over measurable outcomes. Jane Goodall told me, “Facts, facts, facts—people don’t care.” In Crosta’s situation, she said, “I’d show video of someone pulling a scale off a live pangolin. Then I’d jump to footage of a big, fat, complacent kingpin eating pangolin flesh and tiger bones—make the people watching hate, because there’s no end to the lengths that people will go to get their beastly way. And then I’d show a pangolin recovering in a sanctuary. You must end on a positive note.”
As the benefit wound down, Demetriades invited the Earth League team and a dozen other lingerers to his underground bunker, which contained a wine cellar, a bowling alley, a disco, and a shooting range. Hunting guns gleamed on the walls. Demetriades brought out Cuban cigars from a humidor and poured 2005 Château Smith Haut Lafitte. For some, the night got a little woozy. When everyone emerged, an hour or two later, the technician who’d wired Crosta’s A.V. system limped up the driveway, having just been bitten by one of Demetriades’s dogs. (Demetriades denies this.) When the partygoers shone their phone lights on the technician’s shin and exclaimed at the blood, someone offered to shoot the dog. “It’s time to go,” Crosta muttered. “It’s really time to go now.”
By Crosta’s calculus, ELI could shut down trafficking in much of the world with an endowment of ten million dollars. The event had raised eleven thousand five hundred dollars. Driving home, he kept shaking his head. “This is why I hate hope,” he said. “Hope is just a commodity, selling you beautiful words and pictures. People at these fund-raisers want to enjoy themselves, to forget, maybe because they feel guilty that they haven’t done enough for Earth.” Wealthy donors, he said, are “like the little puppy that is focussed on a flower—and then a butterfly goes by, and they follow that.”
In November, a Cambodian man named Masphal Kry was arrested at J.F.K., for his role in allegedly trafficking two thousand six hundred and thirty-four long-tailed macaques to U.S. pharma companies, to be used as test subjects. Kry was the deputy director of his country’s Department of Wildlife and Biodiversity, on his way to a CITES conference in Panama; his boss was also indicted. Many of those charged with protecting their country’s resources end up exploiting them. Malaysia’s former minister of planning and resource management enabled the destruction of the Sarawak rain forest. Burundi’s ivory stockpile was repeatedly plundered, despite being stored at a military compound.
Because so many countries facilitate wildlife crime, N.G.O.s have tried to fill the enforcement void. For decades, they underwrote military-style training of rangers across Africa, an approach known as “fortress conservation.” When the paleontologist Richard Leakey was appointed to run Kenya’s wildlife service, in 1989, he instituted a policy of shooting poachers on sight, which soon spread through the continent’s parks and beyond. At one preserve in India, the rule was simply “Kill the unwanted.”
Poachers, too, could be indiscriminate. They sometimes killed elephants using oranges spiked with strychnine or pesticides—which had the additional effect of killing vultures, whose circling might otherwise alert wardens to a dead elephant. But the policy of vigilante justice eventually inspired moral revulsion. “Many N.G.O.s aren’t comfortable anymore with ‘shoot to kill’ policies, with funding a paramilitary institution,” Brighton Kumchedwa, Malawi’s director of parks and wildlife, told me. Fortress conservation also proved to be inescapably neocolonial: creating Africa’s parks entailed the forcible removal of the Maasai and Wameru people, among many others.
From 2015 to 2017, Damien Mander, a former commando from Australia, helped wage what he calls a “ground-level offensive against the local population” to stop poaching in South Africa’s Kruger National Park. “We had one hundred and sixty-five personnel, helicopters, drones, canine attack teams,” he told me. “We were essentially an occupying force.” Realizing that the result was at best a Pyrrhic victory, he started a program that deploys female rangers in four African countries. “You have zero corruption with women, they naturally de-escalate situations, and they bring more money back to their communities, so the communities buy in,” Mander said. “You’re on a continent that’s going to have two billion people by 2040—sustained conflict with the local population is not the way to go.” Ultimately, fortress conservation is predicated on a landscape devoid of people.
The biggest problem with fortress conservation, though, is that it doesn’t work. “Every rhino has its own security detail,” Rikkert Reijnen, of IFAW, said, exaggerating only slightly—the last two northern white rhinos live under twenty-four-hour protection in Kenya. “And still they’re getting poached.”
As a teen-ager, in Milan, Andrea Crosta used earplugs to sleep, because his bedroom was so noisy. It housed an African gray parrot; softshell and red-eared turtles; an aquarium filled with angelfish, tetras, guppies, barbs, and a red-tailed shark; a python; and his cat, Goccia. “I got more happiness from the animals than from my human interactions,” he told me. His parents got divorced when he was seven. “I think that day destroyed my ability to trust, or to want to have children,” he said. “Not to mention that my mother later killed herself with gas in the car—that she left me doubly. I still wonder, What if I had been watching TV the day they told me about the divorce, like my brother”—Nicola was eighteen months younger—“and he had been the one they told? Because he is married twenty years now, and has three children.”
While Crosta was at the University of Milan, studying zoology, he worked at an endangered-species breeding center. He hoped to continue there after graduating, but the center couldn’t pay him. So he served a stint as a military policeman, worked in crisis P.R., and then started an online-shopping company called Think Italy, which was briefly worth eight million euros, until the dot-com crash of 2000. Still restless, he became a security consultant. The work, which entailed collaborating with Italy’s antiterrorism police unit and with entrepreneurs who’d come out of Israel’s élite cyber squad, versed him in a variety of threats.
In 2011, when he was in Kenya, advising a security team for the former Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi, Crosta came upon the group of elephants slaughtered with AK-47s. He knew that in different circumstances he’d have committed the same crime: “Of course I’d be a poacher, if shooting one elephant got me four years of salary to feed my family. If I offered people here in L.A. four years of salary, they’d bring me their mother.”
He and an Israeli colleague, Nir Kalron, began raising money to train rangers. But Crosta grew increasingly aware that poaching was inseparable from financial and political networks that extended around the globe. The U.S. intelligence community had already begun to understand wildlife trafficking as both a cause and an effect of instability. Rod Schoonover, a State Department analyst at that time, told me, “Biodiversity loss started to become a concern in national security. It has security consequences—water stress, food stress, civil unrest, deep corruption.”
Working for Gedi, Crosta and Kalron had heard that Al-Shabaab, the terrorist organization that controlled much of Somalia, was exporting ivory to China. They investigated, somewhat clumsily—their surreptitious videos often showcased an orange-juice glass or a hotel-room curtain—and spoke with a dozen sources. In 2013, they completed a study that said Al-Shabaab was trafficking up to three tons of ivory a month.
Crosta launched an N.G.O. called Elephant Action League, and posted a summary of the study on its Web site, but no one picked it up. Then Al-Shabaab attacked the Westgate mall in Nairobi, leaving seventy-one people dead. Crosta tweeted, “Elephant poaching helped fund Kenya attack,” and the Times and other papers mentioned E.A.L.’s findings. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that there was growing evidence that Al-Shabaab “fund their terrorist activities to a great extent from ivory trafficking.”
The international outcry about the attack contributed to China’s decision, in 2017, to ban ivory entirely. Yet Crosta and Kalron’s study angered some conservation N.G.O.s, which believed that they’d embellished their data. Rosaleen Duffy, a political ecologist, argued in a paper written with colleagues that the study was “poorly evidenced” and “based on false assumptions.” She also claimed that it advanced the U.S.’s global agenda, by making wildlife preservation a mere by-product of mitigating security risks.
Crosta said, “There was a camp that saw terrorists everywhere, and a camp that saw them nowhere, and we were in the middle with our little study.” He later published a full report elaborating their findings: “The mistake we made in the original was not to contextualize ivory trafficking as just part of the way Al-Shabaab funded itself. They were also involved in kidnapping, piracy, and charcoal.” He added, “I got a ton of shit for our original study. But it resonated all the way to China, so I’m happy, because it helped the elephants.”
Once Crosta grasped the implications of Al-Shabaab’s funding, he decided that he needed to figure out how to trace webs of traffickers. He launched WildLeaks, a site where people could anonymously report trafficking, and eventually recast Elephant Action League as Earth League International. In 2017, he got a tip that informants in South Africa had a trove of intelligence. He flew to Johannesburg and drove to meet with three men at an abandoned ranch near the Botswana border. Two worked in security; the third was an ex-cop. South Africa’s wildlife was a notorious global buffet: for years, Vietnamese and Lao rings flew in Thai prostitutes and registered them as “rhino hunters” for a CITES-approved “trophy” cull. (Czech riflemen were imported to do the actual killing.) Yet Crosta was stunned by what he was shown. “They had incredible information on rhino-horn trafficking,” he said. “There were Chinese Embassy links, North Korean Embassy links, links to terrorist groups in Zambia and Mozambique, hundreds of people in the government on the payroll, including a top South African leader and his son. We were walking on their crime map, it was so big.”
The informants had details on twenty networks, and an unsentimental plan for smashing them: “They wanted a hundred thousand dollars per network to go apprehend the leaders, or kill them if necessary, and millions more to fly a helicopter to Mozambique to take down a big trafficker.” Crosta had neither the funds nor the murderous inclination to fall in. But, he said, “it was a pivotal moment. I realized there are three hundred environmental organizations just in South Africa that do advocacy, awareness, social media, work with local communities—but what the world needed was a real agency to fight these guys. Because we were like Boy Scouts going up against Escobar.”
As Tom Toth, a Fish and Wildlife inspector, showed me the international-mail facility at J.F.K., he strode past bins of parcels headed to South America and Europe and planted himself by one marked “China.” “I look at China and Hong Kong and try to check every package going out,” he said. Paul Chapelle, the senior agent, stepped in to add, diplomatically, “We look at all of Asia, really.”
Blaming one country or region for wildlife trafficking is a ticklish matter. “Everyone is sensitive, because the issue gets framed as ‘the West against China,’ ” Rikkert Reijnen said. “But almost every investigation you do around the world quickly leads to Chinese interests.” Many of Crosta’s tactical, strategic, and ontological worries are about Chinese traffickers and buyers. “They are eating the planet alive,” he told me. “They have this Pantagruelic appetite for everything.”
Through the Belt and Road Initiative, China has forged links to a hundred and forty-nine countries, spending more than a trillion dollars to develop roads and bridges and ports and to help poorer nations open up their natural resources. The effect is an open flow of commerce, both licit and illicit. A Chinese trafficker in Peru told an ELI operative that Embassy officials would gauge the demand from China: “Who or which company needs seafoods? Who needs a very rare treasure or specialty?”
China is by far the leading destination for illegal wildlife: between 2009 and 2021, there were at least seven hundred and fifty airport seizures of products headed for China; the next-largest offender, Vietnam, had a hundred and thirty-five, and the U.S. ninety-four. A primary driver is traditional Chinese medicine. China is expanding T.C.M. around the globe, particularly in Africa—planning, according to its State Council, to make it a four-hundred-and-twenty-billion-dollar industry. Although most T.C.M. ingredients are botanical, the pharmacopoeia includes products from seventy animal species. Rhino horn, now banned, was long held to cure impotence, and pangolin scales are used to treat rheumatism and to improve lactation. The curative mechanism is obscure, as both rhino horn and pangolin scales are composed of keratin, the material in our fingernails. Still, a hundred thousand pangolins a year are killed for their meat and their scales; the four Asian species have been hunted nearly to extinction, and the four African species are next.
Demand is created by ever-shifting narratives. For decades, rhino horn went chiefly to Yemen, to make dagger handles. In 2007, only thirteen rhinos were poached in South Africa, which contains most of the world’s population. Then a story arose in Vietnam that a politician had been cured of cancer by ingesting horn. (Some conservationists believe that this tale was created by the politician himself, who then began trafficking in horn.) In the next seven years, the number of rhinos poached in South Africa shot up ninety-two hundred per cent. More recently, clubgoers in Southeast Asia have been snorting powdered rhino horn like cocaine.
An ecological counternarrative has emerged in China. The government has curtailed the sale of illegal species on social media, and a court recently convicted seventeen people in the Chen organized-crime family of smuggling more than twenty tons of ivory. The two ringleaders were sentenced to life in prison and forfeiture of all their personal assets. But the crackdown has been spotty. “China has prosecuted loads of wildlife cases—many more than any other Asian country,” Scott Roberton, the executive director for countertrafficking at the Wildlife Conservation Society, told me. “And it’s still not nearly enough.”
The struggle between the country’s factions leads to ambivalent policy. In 2016, China modernized its wildlife-protection law, rolling back language declaring that animals existed for humans’ use and benefit—but similar language was recently restored to the law. The registry of T.C.M. ingredients has stopped listing pangolin scales as a stand-alone cure, yet it still endorses them as an ingredient in many patent medicines. After COVID-19 emerged, officials temporarily banned the sale of wild animals at wet markets, but other officials promoted bear bile as a cure for the virus.
N.G.O.s with offices in China risk getting kicked out if they confront the government about such contradictions. The director of one such office told me, “If we say, ‘We need to reduce demand for these products among the Chinese people,’ officials will say, ‘Why do you always mention demand? It suggests that China’s economic development is linked to illegal behavior!’ So we’ve learned to say, ‘How can we increase public awareness of this issue?’ The Chinese personality is that we hope to hear good things, and only then will we encourage ourselves to do better.”
As Crosta started working with Mark Davis, in 2016, he assessed what other N.G.O.s were doing. Fortress conservation was proving insufficient, but no one had another comprehensive approach. Several organizations were working to “build capacity” in resource-rich countries. The Basel Institute on Governance collaborates with state agencies in places such as Peru, Uganda, and Malawi to help them strengthen their protocols. Juhani Grossmann, who heads Basel’s green-corruption program, told me, “If the risk to the government official for issuing a fake permit increases, the size of the bribe increases, and the profit margin goes down. That’s what I hope, anyway.”
Investigating traffickers was another matter. Their tradecraft is routinely negligent, since they often don’t view their crimes as serious. One prominent Vietnamese trafficker in ivory and rhino horn used the same phone number for years; so did one of Africa’s biggest ivory traffickers. Yet their pursuers were often equally slipshod. Among researchers, a few weeks on the ground in Zambia could distinguish you as an expert. A former law-enforcement official who’s worked with environmental N.G.O.s told me, “I’ve seen counter-wildlife-trafficking operations where people did ‘bottom-up’ training by watching ‘C.S.I.’ and ‘Narcos.’ ”
People defending the environment were killed in at least sixty-four countries between 2015 and 2019. Even skilled operatives run grave risks. Wayne Lotter, who helped lead the PAMS Foundation, an N.G.O. that was instrumental in jailing Tanzania’s so-called Ivory Queen, was ambushed in a taxi in 2017 by assassins who fled with his laptop. Eleven people were sentenced to death for the murder, but it is not clear that the ringleaders were among them. Lotter’s co-founder, Krissie Clark, who was in the taxi with him, told me, “We’re all still trying to figure out which button we pushed without meaning to.”
Crosta, trying to design a more effective organization, was impressed by Ofir Drori, of an African N.G.O. called EAGLE. Drori, who has a piratical air, has had more than three thousand traffickers arrested, including Guinea’s former top CITES official. (The official was convicted but given a Presidential pardon.) He explained to me that, once he had evidence against a trafficker, he’d meet with the relevant minister: “I’d say, ‘I need you to lend me your police force. And I’m not going to tell you, or them, who the trafficker is until we’re at the house.’ We’re working more from a place of force than of relationship.” Crosta worried, though, that many of Drori’s targets were henchmen: “Ofir was working his ass off during the worst years of elephant poaching, arresting tons of people, and the problem got worse and worse.”
Crosta planned to identify the higher-ups, and to amass information on them until his dossiers compelled prosecutions. But collaborating with other nonprofits was difficult; most treated insight as a precious resource. Rob Parry-Jones, who runs the wildlife-crime initiative at W.W.F. International, told me, “N.G.O.s don’t want to share information about trafficking—for security reasons, but also because they lose their competitive advantage, their ability to tell a donor, ‘Only we understand this.’ ”
As Crosta investigated, his goal was to be patient, professional, and invisible. A host country shouldn’t even know that ELI is there. Billy doesn’t stay at the hotel where he meets his targets (so that they can’t bribe the desk clerk to examine his passport), and the team communicates with him through encrypted apps. Computers are air-gapped, and Crosta maintains his schedule on an unhackable medium: a paper desk calendar.
Many of Billy’s interactions in a new country begin as “cold bumps”—seemingly accidental run-ins. After he befriends a target, “if we have some chemistry, I say, ‘Oh, do you have sea cucumber?’ ” he told me. It helps that he sympathizes with traffickers, up to a point. “Some have lovely characters—loyal, generous, brave, a good sense of humor,” he said. “They came to Africa with their parents, let’s say, and learned Swahili and English and all the details of the shipping industry, even if they didn’t finish middle school. Commendable! But they were predestined for this terrible business by their parents, who were doing it, too.”
Billy’s elastic résumé enables him to explore almost any opportunity: My rich boss/uncle in Hong Kong/Taipei/Singapore has a bunch of brothers who are into timber/wildlife/money laundering/whatever. To build credibility, he deploys tiger-bone stories and pangolin photos borrowed from traffickers in other countries: “Then the guys feel comfortable and vouch for me with their friends.” Gradually, in the course of months and years, he glad-hands his way toward the kingpins.
Last year, Billy started visiting Costa Rica, and by assiduous work in restaurants and barbershops he identified nine “persons of interest.” Costa Rica wasn’t an obvious target for ELI. It has perhaps the best-run government in Central America, and has called for the U.N. to add a wildlife-trading protocol to its bans on trafficking humans and guns. But there was reason to believe that locals were exporting significant quantities of shark fins. Although Costa Rica reported only one seizure in the past decade, a biologist who works with ELI had pored over shipping documents and determined that Costa Rican shark fins were entering Hong Kong at as much as ten times the officially recognized rate.
ELI had received a hundred thousand dollars from a two-year grant limited to Costa Rica. (Crosta’s global agenda, to his dismay, must often be pursued one country or species at a time.) For investigators, Latin America poses particular challenges. Crawford Allan, the senior director for wildlife crime at W.W.F. U.S., told me, “In Africa, the elephant crisis was obvious—you have enormous animals with their faces hacked off and someone packing a container full of ivory. In Latin America, it’s much more hidden. It’s someone taking a boat to a remote place in the jungle three times a week.”
Earlier this year, Crosta and Davis and their crime analyst, Chiara Talerico, a fiercely bright Italian, were finishing a lunch of fried rice in San José, the Costa Rican capital, when Billy texted from next door. He was done talking with Mr. Lin, a stalwart in the local black market, and was going “across the street” to a seafood shop to discuss exporting fins. The team traipsed around the city’s Chinatown for fifteen minutes, looking for a “big red sign” that Billy had said marked the shop. It turned out to be four blocks up and around the corner. “Across the street, my ass!” Crosta grumbled.
After Billy emerged, the team reconvened in the lobby of a Marriott, next to a “Please Do Not Feed the Coatis” sign. “So,” Billy said, “the woman at the seafood store said some of their dried shark fins come from Puntarenas”—a city on the coast—“and some actually come from the U.S.”
“That’s super strange,” Crosta said.
Billy shrugged: It’s all super strange. The global slaughter of sharks is enormous—humans kill a hundred million a year—and particularly short-sighted. Sharks regulate the environment in two crucial ways: they help maintain populations of phytoplankton (which produce half the oxygen we breathe) by eating their predators, and they help maintain the ocean as the world’s greatest carbon sink by scavenging animals that remove carbon from the air. Many of the sharks that we kill are unwanted bycatch, but we also use their teeth as jewelry, their meat for pet food, their cartilage and liver oil as moisturizers in sunscreen and lipstick, and their fins for soup.
As a tropical rain drummed on the hotel roof, Billy started to sketch a web of buyers and contacts. There was Mr. Lin: “short, chubby guy who wears crazy clothes.” On his phone, he scrolled to a photo of Lin, who wore a gold-brocaded jacket worthy of a Gilbert and Sullivan admiral. There was Diego, a local businessman who had introduced Billy to a trafficker named Pascal, and who had also promised to connect him with Mario, a legendary shark-fin exporter.
Talerico, who’d been scowling at her laptop, said, “O.K., I found Diego’s Skype and WhatsApp info! Let’s put him here on my map—that makes it nicer. Is he a, let’s say, client provider for Mario?”
“Diego is not in the business,” Billy said, “but he would like a commission.”
“I’d love to do a network analysis,” she went on, “but we need at least three people to make a network.” Once Talerico has identified the rudiments of a network, she runs visualization software on the traffickers’ phone records to home in on the group’s “secret keeper,” or key middleman. Then she runs an eigenvector-centrality algorithm to reveal the ultimate boss—often the person who connects to the secret keeper and no one else.
It’s nebulous, inferential work. A trafficking network is almost never the hierarchical “link chart” outlined in yarn on cop shows. A forensic scientist named Sam Wasser, who consults with Homeland Security, performed a DNA analysis on forty-nine ivory shipments seized in Africa between 2002 and 2019. By collating genetic matches between tusks and correlating those results with phone records and bills of lading, Wasser came to believe that no more than four transnational criminal groups were shipping the majority of the ivory out of Africa. Still, he told me, “over and over again, you think you’ve got the kingpin, and then you see ivory moving out that has all the same hallmarks and points of connection.”
That night in San José, Billy went out to dinner with Pascal; the ELI team sat at a table ten yards away. Talerico glanced over and murmured, “Pascal brought his family.” His parents were tonging shrimp and corn from a hot pot. “So the dinner may be good for bonding, but terrible for information.” Crosta shook his head: “Pascal will talk business.”
Afterward, Billy said that Pascal, undeterred by his parents’ presence, had chatted freely about a slew of “dodgy transactions,” including smuggling in mercury used in wildcat mines to separate gold from other minerals. “And he told me that there were a couple of secret gold mines in southern Costa Rica, near the Panamanian border. Maybe next time I can be introduced to the gold guy.”
Crosta’s methodology has worked strikingly well—at least, as far as the investigations go. In 2021, after two years in Bolivia, ELI had intricate knowledge of a jaguar-fang-trafficking network there; the teeth, bought from poachers for twenty-two dollars apiece, were being sold for nine hundred dollars in China and Vietnam, where they were often labelled as tiger fangs. Pauline Verheij, a Dutch researcher, had written a thoughtful trafficking report on Bolivia and Suriname in 2019, based on open-source research and interviews with local law enforcement. But she told me that ELI’s techniques revealed “much more detailed information about these networks’ modus operandi.”
Crosta shared his information with a prosecutor named Moisés Palma Salazar, who runs Bolivia’s environmental-crime office. The police raided six properties, detained four Chinese nationals, and recovered sixteen reptile belts and four jaguar fangs. But there was a leak: a few months later, as a new investigation began, a WeChat message to the trafficking community warned everyone to take cover. When Billy returned that year, a hit man whom he met at a party told him about other texts detailing exactly what the police were looking for. Billy told me, “Luckily, it was my fourth or fifth time in Bolivia. If it had been my first time, they would have suspected me.”
For a while, the network behaved as Crosta had hoped: traffickers told Billy that it was no longer safe to sell. But business soon resumed. Palma told me that, even if he wins convictions, the defendants face sentences of at most seven years, and probably nowhere near that. The Bolivian police force, which included only about fifty environmental cops, had no Chinese speakers and was generally overmatched. “Only ELI was able to get close to these networks,” he said.
ELI had similarly mixed luck in Mexico. In 2018, it began sharing information with the Mexican government about the Cartel of the Sea. But a prosecutor who worked on the matter admitted to me that the sea-cucumber case against the cartel had stalled. In the related totoaba cases, a Chinese national was arrested but not prosecuted, and the first Mexican to go on trial was acquitted.
Crosta and Davis had spent considerable time in Baja, and ELI had produced a painstaking report about the trade in bladders and its effect on the vaquita porpoises, which get snared in fishermen’s mile-long gill nets. The population had declined from five hundred and sixty-seven in 1997 to about eight. Yet not only were the traffickers going unpunished but the vaquita’s story was being commandeered. Sea Shepherd, an N.G.O. that had stationed surveillance boats in the Upper Gulf of California since 2015, claimed in a fund-raising e-mail last summer that its work was having a “measurable, positive impact on the vaquita”—a narrative not of demise but of resilience.
The longer the vaquita is perceived to be thriving, the more money N.G.O.s can raise off it. But Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho, a marine biologist who has long overseen the Mexican government’s efforts to save the porpoises, told me that local incentives run the other way. “Some authorities are betting the vaquita will go extinct, and maybe they even want it to,” he said. “As long as the vaquita is around, the fishermen are mad at the government for forbidding them to fish, and the government faces international pressure and sanctions. The saying we have is ‘Once the dog is dead, the rabies is gone.’ ”
Time was running out. “I had a dream about the last vaquita,” Crosta told me. “I was at sea on a boat, and I saw a little head popping up outside the water, and he was calling to the others—they’re very social—but no one was answering. And I was so sad. It would be the first CITES-protected species that goes extinct, an epic failure of conservation.” He laughed, abruptly. “I’m always saying, ‘Epic failure of conservation.’ ”
After these experiences, Crosta said, he realized, “We can’t continue with the Bolivian environmental police or the forest police of Ecuador—Jesus Christ!” Henceforth, he would bring his juiciest morsels only to American law enforcement. Ultimately, he hoped to establish “an intelligence agency for earth” modelled on the C.I.A. and its comprehensive reach. “I’d be a pariah in the N.G.O. community,” he told me. “They’d say, ‘What Andrea is doing raises questions of lack of transparency, corrupting local people as informants and putting them in danger, blah blah blah.’ I’m very comfortable with all that, because right now the cost for traffickers to do what they do is zero.”
Crosta’s unstinting zeal has taken a toll. In 2014, he married Nirmala Fernandes, a Dutch model, but the marriage didn’t last; he left for Los Angeles in 2018, and they began divorce proceedings. “The work Andrea did in that dark world left a shadow on him,” Fernandes said. “I would be cooking dinner and I would hear these awful sounds as he watched a video of gorillas being tortured. Laughter and joy with his friends—all that faded. People think it would have saved our marriage if Andrea had worked less, but it would make him too miserable not to be doing all he can for the animals. I don’t even think he’d like to be called a human anymore. More like a wolf.”
Puntarenas, on Costa Rica’s western coast, bears the impress of illicit globalization. Mexican and Colombian cartels transport cocaine through it, and, outside the area where cruise ships briefly dock, the houses have window bars, the wharves are gated, and strangers face lingering scrutiny. When the ELI team visited the port of Caldera, just south of Puntarenas, two ships were taking on containers—a gantry crane performing rapid, relentless work—and nine more waited in the bay. “This is the perfect small port for smuggling,” Crosta said. “If you pay off one person there, you can do whatever you want.”
Yet, for days, evidence to support Crosta’s inferences had proved scant. Billy met with a prosperous local, Victoria, who’d hinted that she could sell him seahorses and sea dragons. But she’d been cagey. “I can learn more, but only after I place a little order with her and her husband,” he told the team afterward, at a beach restaurant. A black spiny-tailed iguana basked on a nearby stack of concrete blocks, perfectly camouflaged.
“We were hoping Victoria could introduce you to someone bigger,” Talerico said, frowning at her skeletal link chart.
“The big one would not introduce you to anyone, because they’re the big one,” Billy said.
Two days later, Billy announced that he’d found a big one who was less wary. In the lobby of the team’s hotel, he showed photos he’d taken of a mansion owned by a seafood exporter named Joshua. “Man, this guy’s house is beautiful!” he said.
“Joshua is who, exactly?” Talerico said, crossly. “I really need you to start at the beginning.”
Billy launched into a detailed narrative: he had hoped to see Mario, the fabled exporter, but Mario refused to meet strangers, so instead Diego picked him up at his cover hotel and brought him to meet Joshua and his wife. For several hours at the house, and then over Glenfiddich at a nearby restaurant, Joshua explained his shark-fin operation. Billy played shaky video of laundry baskets full of fins—from silky sharks and thresher sharks, which have a quota for export; from hammerheads, which can’t be exported; and from oceanic whitetips, which are illegal even to hoist aboard a boat. “This is the piece that was missing—the visual,” Crosta said. He clasped Billy’s arm. “So many great details that would not be in the transcript! I’m very happy.” Billy blinked. Earlier, he’d told me, “Andrea and I have never even drunk a beer together, over four or five years. No buddy-to-buddy conversation.”
Billy said, “Most of these fins, including the hammerheads, are captured in Costa Rican waters, because they extend far south to include Cocos Island. Beautiful tourist spot for diving.”
“Of course, of course,” Crosta said. “Of course, they take hammerheads in Cocos Island National Park.”
Joshua had gone on to tell Billy about a scheme enabled by greedy officials—the sort of transnational corruption that might interest Homeland Security. Joshua drives to Nicaragua to pick up fins, along with cocobolo, a CITES-protected tree with ruby-colored heartwood. He drops three hundred dollars to customs at the border, and fifteen hundred dollars more to slide the cargo onto a boat in Caldera, uninspected. “He said, ‘I can introduce you to the customs guys there.’ He also said the Costa Rican government is basically making it O.K. to ship cocobolo out if it comes from outside the country. He told me, ‘They started smuggling cocobolo through Costa Rica because the Nicaraguan government confiscated seventy containers. Those containers were later sold into China by’ ”—he named a leading figure in Nicaragua.
Talerico was shifting between files among the hundreds on her desktop, typing rapidly. “Sometimes I think, If I have a brain stroke, we’re all fucked,” she muttered.
Crosta said, “This is just when it starts to get interesting. Let’s lean into the money, the network, the shipping, the paperwork.”
“Diego was doing his best to translate all this from Spanish for me,” Billy said. “When we were leaving, Joshua’s wife said, ‘Diego, you really should pay us, because you are learning so much about the business.’ ”
Everyone grinned. “I could not have dreamed of more!” Crosta said. “Can we now say these guys are the top three shark-fin traffickers: Mario, Joshua, and Victoria and her husband?”
Mark Davis was pleased but wary. He later told me, “If we had general budget money, we’d do three times as many ops here—and discover five times as many people to go after.”
A large bull elephant’s tusks can go for more than four hundred thousand dollars on the clandestine market. Most environmental organizations hope to shift our perspective so that we see elephants not as a liquid asset, like a stock or a bond, but as an illiquid one, like a mountain view. Yet some conservationists believe that the only way to save the animals is to financialize them. By one estimate, that same bull elephant, if left alive, could contribute twenty-three thousand dollars a year to its home country’s tourism revenues. Ralph Chami, an assistant director at the International Monetary Fund, suggests that animals, by maintaining ecosystems, are already saving us a fortune. According to his calculations, that elephant’s carbon-sequestration services make it worth $2.6 million. A blue whale, doing equivalent work in the ocean, is worth at least three million. Chami told me, “Intrinsic-value-of-nature people, your arrogance is actively helping to destroy nature. My crowd are the what’s-in-it-for-me people, so I have to speak to them in a language they understand: ‘Elephants are quietly saving your butt, so how about you pay them a salary?’ ”
Chami advocates a framework that works like carbon credits. Charities and companies would buy the carbon offsets of, say, Chile’s blue whales, and the money would help to preserve the aquatic ecosystem. Chami acknowledged that the true heroes of marine systems are seagrass and phytoplankton, but said, “We have an affinity for whales. Same with elephants—a baby elephant melts your heart in two seconds.” One nettlesome problem is that carbon credits have proved vaporous: the Guardian recently determined that many rain-forest-offset credits are “phantom credits” whose purchase provides no benefit to the environment. Also, while some animals help sequester carbon (yay, otters and wildebeests!), some do the opposite (boo, sea urchins!). Under Chami’s system, we’d be singling out trophy species to valorize, just as traffickers do.
The larger problem with financialization strategies is that no amount of funding can stave off the greatest threat to wildlife: the human population, which is expected to grow to nearly ten billion by 2050. More people will mean more contact, and more conflict, with animals. Matt Morley, who runs IFAW’s wildlife-crime program, told me, “Because we’ve been successful at controlling poaching, there are now some areas where more elephants are being killed because of efforts to mitigate human-elephant conflict.” During the past two years in conservancies in northern Kenya, hunters have killed three elephants for their ivory, and a hundred and thirty because they trampled crops and livestock. “What will ultimately make or break elephants will be our ability to live with animals,” Morley said. “Can we? The answer, we found in Europe and North America, where we wiped out all our charismatic megafauna long ago, is no.”
ELI’s partnerships with U.S. agencies have not yet had the transformative effect that Crosta hopes for. This winter, he tipped off Fish and Wildlife to two shipments of seafood from Joshua’s company in Costa Rica to the United States. The agency’s inspectors found nothing suspicious. “I guess these people don’t always send illegal stuff,” Crosta said. “Or maybe the inspectors missed it.” (Shark fins that have been processed—bleached, dried, and peeled—resemble noodles.) Meanwhile, Mark Davis understood from Fish and Wildlife that, later this month, the authorities would arrest a trafficker whom ELI had identified. Homeland Security was also promising arrests, sooner or later. Crosta was still betting that his targets would eventually be charged with heavier crimes, and nonetheless recoil not from money laundering or human smuggling but from wildlife trafficking. “My assumption is that they’ll realize, Oh, it was the sea cucumber that got us in trouble,” he admitted.
Will the might of the U.S. government change the equation? In 2017, Moazu Kromah, a major ivory trafficker, was arrested in Uganda; the ivory in his shipments came from elephants in seven countries. But he was soon released on bail. Then Fish and Wildlife and the Drug Enforcement Administration got involved. Kromah was extradited to America, and last year he pleaded guilty to trafficking at least ten tons of ivory and a hundred and ninety kilos of rhino horn to Asia and the United States. It was by some measures the most successful prosecution of a transnational crime organization. But his sentence—just sixty-three months, or about what you might serve in the federal system for trafficking four ounces of heroin—has evidently not deterred wildlife crime. “Kromah’s network has re-formed around others, and corruption remains in place,” Morley told me. “We’ve got a guy in Uganda in our crosshairs, an offshoot of Kromah—but can we get his case moving there? Very difficult.”
Even extinctions merely displace the trade. Glass eels, used in soup and eaten broiled as unagi, can sell for twenty-seven thousand dollars a kilo in Japan. Because Asian glass eels have been fished out, traffickers now have mules fly them in from Europe in suitcases containing hidden water tanks, with controlled temperature and oxygen levels. The demand side, too, is constantly evolving, in a perverse form of natural selection. In southern and central Africa, Vietnamese gangs now compete with the Chinese. And some traffickers have begun evading surveillance by “smurfing” (breaking transactions into units small enough to avoid oversight) and “layering” (setting up a bewildering stack of companies to process transactions).
“I’m under no illusions that law enforcement alone is going to stop wildlife trafficking,” Phil Alegranti, a senior official at Fish and Wildlife, said. “The goal is to disrupt, delay, and allow time for demand to be reduced and for the trade to become reprehensible.” Efforts to raise global consciousness include a campaign to have the International Criminal Court treat “ecocide” as an atrocity on the level of war crimes and genocide. Traffickers may not be much moved by moral suasion, however. Elliott Harbin, the head of Homeland Security’s nascent Wildlife and Environmental Crimes Unit, said, “Andrea is onto something with the idea that you can scare the people who have ‘legitimate’ businesses to protect. The dabblers you can scare, and there are a lot of them. But the hard-core guys will just be emboldened to take over.”
Crosta told me, “What keeps me awake at night is that I’m surrounded by irreplaceable people: Billy, Mark, Chiara—all single points of failure. Also, my project is definitely harder than I thought.” When he and I began talking, last summer, ELI’s global list of high-level persons of interest contained a hundred and two names. Now it has a hundred and seventy-two—and the kingpins they sell to in China remain unidentified.
In March, Crosta became a U.S. citizen, and he’s in a new relationship with a critical-care nurse named Sofya. He’s promised to be with her every full moon, even if he has to leave a conference to come home. Since his divorce, he said, he’s had a recurring vision of himself as a wolf at the edge of a forest: “There’s a long meadow on the border, and beyond it are houses and lights and women and food. And I think, Ooh, that must be really warm and cozy. But crossing the meadow was impossible. It was the fear of feeling, because if you feel you’re fucked.” With Sofya, he said, “I became fully aware that I do need the kind of warmth you can only get from humans, once in a while.”
At a global scale, that same challenge—mastering one’s impulses—has enormous consequences for our species. If we can’t transcend our instinct to conquer nature, there won’t be much nature left to conquer. Crosta went on, “It’s not that I don’t give a shit about all these other great ideas—tourist dollars and economic value and everything. I do, but they’re way down on my list. For us to save the animals, we have to grow larger than we are. Because wildlife has a right to exist regardless of its economic value, regardless of its usefulness to us in any way. It’s the same thought I have had since I was five: Animals are our family. They are my family.” ♦
An earlier version of this article mischaracterized Nir Kalron's role in the launch of Elephant Action League.
