Fiona Macleod
Members of an international smuggling syndicate were arrested in Portugal this week in possession of 155 elephant tusks from Southern Africa, which they tried to sell to officers from the South African Police Service’s endangered species protection unit (ESPU).
The syndicate, headed by two Portuguese nationals, used to specialise in truck hijacking and drug smuggling in South Africa. It appears one of their “clients” who owed them money paid them in ivory.
The ESPU first heard of the deal in February 1995 when the syndicate was looking for a buyer for 300 tusks. The ivory was smuggled to Lisbon from Durban in December 1994, and in the intervening years half the consignment was sold on the black market.
In May this year the unit was tipped off that the syndicate was still trying to sell 155 tusks. Colonel Pierre Erasmus, posing as a well-to-do businessman with links in the shady smuggling underworld, set up a meeting with the two ringleaders at a Durban hotel.
“I had a driver, a bodyguard and a blonde,” he says. “Everything had to be just so. We had drinks, chatted for hours, and when the big guy took off his shoes and lay on the couch, I knew he had relaxed. That’s when I knew I would get them.”
Erasmus courted the two for four months, playing for time while the paperwork was sorted out. “I’ve learnt how to do this from women I know. I start out wooing them, but then I play hard to get to arouse their curiosity.”
During the course of their meetings over the months, the Portuguese gave him photographs of the tusks. He used these to put pressure on the South African bureaucrats and the Portuguese police to assist him.
“Operation Tusk”, as Erasmus named his investigation, climaxed at a “safe house” in Lisbon this week. While Erasmus checked the ivory, Portuguese police swooped on the syndicate. Details of the charges to be laid against the syndicate members were not available when the Mail & Guardian went to press.