The fierce beauty of falcons makes them highly prized by collectors — and wildlife smugglers.
By Mindy Weisberger - Senior Writer 6 days ago
(Image: © Courtesy of Simon & Schuster)
Below is an excerpt of "The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird" by Joshua Hammer, published by Simon & Schuster on Feb. 11, 2020.
Read more about the amazing true story of the man who spent decades smuggling and selling wild falcons, some of which commanded prices in the tens and thousands of dollars.
The man had been in there far too long, John Struczynski thought. Twenty minutes had elapsed since he had entered the shower facility in the Emirates Lounge for business and first-class passengers at Birmingham International Airport, in the West Midlands region of England, 113 miles north of London. Now Struczynski stood in the corridor outside the shower room, a stack of fresh towels in the cart beside him, a mop, a pail, and a pair of caution wet floor signs at his feet. The janitor was impatient to clean the place.
The man and a female companion had been the first ones that day to enter the lounge, a warmly decorated room with butterscotch armchairs, a powder-blue carpet, dark wood columns, glass coffee tables, and black-shaded Chinese porcelain lamps. It was Monday, May 3, 2010—a bank holiday in the United Kingdom—and the lounge had opened at noon to accommodate passengers booked on the 2:40 p.m. Emirates direct flight to Dubai. The couple had settled into an alcove with a television near the reception desk. Minutes later the man had stood up and headed for the shower, carrying a shoulder bag and two small suitcases. That had struck Struczynski as strange. Who brings all of his luggage into the business-and-first-class shower room? And now he had been in there two or three times longer than any normal passenger.
A tall, lean man in his forties with short-cropped graying hair and a brush mustache, Struczynski had spent a decade monitoring 130 closed-circuit television cameras on the night shift at a Birmingham shopping mall, a job that “gave me a background in watching people,” he would later say. That February, after the security firm laid him off, a management company had hired him to clean the Emirates Lounge. The first week he was there, the contractor enrolled him in an on-site training course to identify potential terrorist threats. The course, he would later say, heightened his normal state of suspicion.
As Struczynski puttered around the hallway, the shower room door opened, and the passenger—a balding, slender, middle-aged white man of average height—stepped out. He slipped past Struczynski without looking at him.
The cleaner opened the shower facility door and looked around the room.
My goodness, he thought. What do we have here?
Struczynski recalled the terrorism workshop that he had taken three months earlier, the exhortations from the instructor to watch out for odd looks and unusual behavior. This passenger was up to something. He knew it. Not sure what he was looking for, he rifled through the towels and facecloths, rummaged beneath the complimentary toothpaste tubes and other toiletries, checked the rubbish bin. He mounted a footstool and dislodged two ceiling tiles, wedging his hand into the hollow space just above them. Nothing.
He shifted his attention to the baby-changing area. In the corner of the alcove stood a plastic waist-high diaper bin with a round flip lid. Struczynski removed the top and looked inside. He noticed something sitting on the bottom: a green cardboard egg carton.
In one of the middle slots sat a single egg, dyed blood-red.
He stared at it, touched it gently. What could it mean?
He recalled the recent arrest at Heathrow Airport outside London of a man trying to smuggle rare Indian box turtles in egg cartons. But that seemed so odd. More likely this passenger was moving narcotics—like the gangsters in Liverpool who wedged packets of heroin and cocaine inside plastic Kinder Egg containers. That’s it, he thought. It must have something to do with drugs.
Struczynski approached the reception area, a few steps from where the man and his traveling companion were sitting, and spoke softly to the two women working at the front desk. We may have a problem, he murmured, describing what he had just observed. He suggested that they call airport security, then returned to the shower and locked the door so that no one could disturb the evidence. Soon two uniformed security men entered the lounge, interviewed Struczynski, and examined the shower. The facility couldn’t be seen from the alcove in which the passengers were sitting, and so, absorbed in conversation, the couple failed to notice the sudden activity.
The security guards summoned a pair of airport-based plainclothes officers from the West Midlands Counter Terrorism Unit. Formed in 2007 in the wake of the London bus-and-underground bombings, the unit had grown from seventy to nearly five hundred officers, and was chiefly concerned with combating Islamist extremism. Counterterrorism forces had recently arrested a gang that had conspired to kidnap and behead a British officer and post the footage online, and had helped foil a plot by a Birmingham-born terrorist to blow up transatlantic airliners using liquid explosives. These men, too, questioned Struczynski, examined the egg box in the diaper bin, and asked the janitor to point out the passenger. They flashed the badges attached to lanyards around their necks, and chatted with him and his companion politely. Struczynski watched discreetly as the pair stood up and, flanked by the police, exited the lounge.
Excerpt from THE FALCON THIEF by Joshua Hammer
Copyright © 2020 by Joshua Hammer. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc, NY.
The Falcon Thief' exposes the high-flying life of a notorious rare-bird smuggler
An international wildlife criminal made a fortune stealing and selling rare birds and their eggs.
(Image: © Courtesy of Simon & Schuster)
Below is an excerpt of "The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird" by Joshua Hammer, published by Simon & Schuster on Feb. 11, 2020.
Read more about the amazing true story of the man who spent decades smuggling and selling wild falcons, some of which commanded prices in the tens and thousands of dollars.
The man had been in there far too long, John Struczynski thought. Twenty minutes had elapsed since he had entered the shower facility in the Emirates Lounge for business and first-class passengers at Birmingham International Airport, in the West Midlands region of England, 113 miles north of London. Now Struczynski stood in the corridor outside the shower room, a stack of fresh towels in the cart beside him, a mop, a pail, and a pair of caution wet floor signs at his feet. The janitor was impatient to clean the place.
The man and a female companion had been the first ones that day to enter the lounge, a warmly decorated room with butterscotch armchairs, a powder-blue carpet, dark wood columns, glass coffee tables, and black-shaded Chinese porcelain lamps. It was Monday, May 3, 2010—a bank holiday in the United Kingdom—and the lounge had opened at noon to accommodate passengers booked on the 2:40 p.m. Emirates direct flight to Dubai. The couple had settled into an alcove with a television near the reception desk. Minutes later the man had stood up and headed for the shower, carrying a shoulder bag and two small suitcases. That had struck Struczynski as strange. Who brings all of his luggage into the business-and-first-class shower room? And now he had been in there two or three times longer than any normal passenger.
A tall, lean man in his forties with short-cropped graying hair and a brush mustache, Struczynski had spent a decade monitoring 130 closed-circuit television cameras on the night shift at a Birmingham shopping mall, a job that “gave me a background in watching people,” he would later say. That February, after the security firm laid him off, a management company had hired him to clean the Emirates Lounge. The first week he was there, the contractor enrolled him in an on-site training course to identify potential terrorist threats. The course, he would later say, heightened his normal state of suspicion.
As Struczynski puttered around the hallway, the shower room door opened, and the passenger—a balding, slender, middle-aged white man of average height—stepped out. He slipped past Struczynski without looking at him.
The cleaner opened the shower facility door and looked around the room.
My goodness, he thought. What do we have here?
"The Falcon Thief," by Joshua Hammer"Joshua Hammer has that rare eye for a thrilling story, and with The Falcon Thief he has found the perfect one— a tale brimming with eccentric characters, obsession, deception, and beauty. It has the grip of a novel, with the benefit of being all true." — David Grann, NY Times bestselling author VIEW DEALThe shower floor and glass partition surrounding it were both bone-dry. All the towels remained stacked and neatly folded. The toilet for the disabled hadn’t been used. The washbasin didn’t have a drop of water in it. Though the man had been inside the room for twenty minutes, he didn’t appear to have touched anything.
Struczynski recalled the terrorism workshop that he had taken three months earlier, the exhortations from the instructor to watch out for odd looks and unusual behavior. This passenger was up to something. He knew it. Not sure what he was looking for, he rifled through the towels and facecloths, rummaged beneath the complimentary toothpaste tubes and other toiletries, checked the rubbish bin. He mounted a footstool and dislodged two ceiling tiles, wedging his hand into the hollow space just above them. Nothing.
He shifted his attention to the baby-changing area. In the corner of the alcove stood a plastic waist-high diaper bin with a round flip lid. Struczynski removed the top and looked inside. He noticed something sitting on the bottom: a green cardboard egg carton.
In one of the middle slots sat a single egg, dyed blood-red.
He stared at it, touched it gently. What could it mean?
He recalled the recent arrest at Heathrow Airport outside London of a man trying to smuggle rare Indian box turtles in egg cartons. But that seemed so odd. More likely this passenger was moving narcotics—like the gangsters in Liverpool who wedged packets of heroin and cocaine inside plastic Kinder Egg containers. That’s it, he thought. It must have something to do with drugs.
Struczynski approached the reception area, a few steps from where the man and his traveling companion were sitting, and spoke softly to the two women working at the front desk. We may have a problem, he murmured, describing what he had just observed. He suggested that they call airport security, then returned to the shower and locked the door so that no one could disturb the evidence. Soon two uniformed security men entered the lounge, interviewed Struczynski, and examined the shower. The facility couldn’t be seen from the alcove in which the passengers were sitting, and so, absorbed in conversation, the couple failed to notice the sudden activity.
The security guards summoned a pair of airport-based plainclothes officers from the West Midlands Counter Terrorism Unit. Formed in 2007 in the wake of the London bus-and-underground bombings, the unit had grown from seventy to nearly five hundred officers, and was chiefly concerned with combating Islamist extremism. Counterterrorism forces had recently arrested a gang that had conspired to kidnap and behead a British officer and post the footage online, and had helped foil a plot by a Birmingham-born terrorist to blow up transatlantic airliners using liquid explosives. These men, too, questioned Struczynski, examined the egg box in the diaper bin, and asked the janitor to point out the passenger. They flashed the badges attached to lanyards around their necks, and chatted with him and his companion politely. Struczynski watched discreetly as the pair stood up and, flanked by the police, exited the lounge.
Excerpt from THE FALCON THIEF by Joshua Hammer
Copyright © 2020 by Joshua Hammer. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc, NY.
The Falcon Thief' exposes the high-flying life of a notorious rare-bird smuggler
An international wildlife criminal made a fortune stealing and selling rare birds and their eggs.
By Mindy Weisberger - Senior Writer
When Lendrum was apprehended in June 2018, he was carrying rare falcon eggs strapped to his body in a custom sling. (Image: © Crown Prosecution Services)
Two grinning men pose for a video camera in front of a helicopter: "We're going on a tour," one of them says and laughs. But what they were about to do was no joyride; it was both dangerous and illegal. They were attempting to steal the eggs of rare falcons from the birds' nests, on a perilously steep cliff in Nunavik territory in northern Quebec.
Another clip shows one of the men, Jeffrey Lendrum, dangling from a harness, a pouch at the ready for holding stolen eggs. Recorded in 2000, the footage was found in Lendrum's luggage when he was arrested in May 2010 in the United Kingdom on suspicion of smuggling 14 peregrine falcon eggs out of the country, the BBC reported that year.
Lendrum pled guilty to that crime in August 2010, but the conviction wasn't his first — nor would it be his last. Over four decades, Lendrum steadily built a reputation as a master smuggler of endangered falcon eggs, stealing them from locations around the world and selling them to private collectors for tens of thousands of dollars apiece. His remarkable tale comes together piece by astonishing piece in the book "The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird" (Simon & Schuster) by Joshua Hammer, published today (Feb. 11).
Related: See gorgeous photos of birds of prey
Falcons are swift and graceful birds of prey, and people have trained and bred these raptors as hunters for thousands of years across the Middle East, where falcons are still highly valued, Hammer told Live Science.
Breeding captive falcons for collectors is a tightly regulated and extremely profitable business. Healthy adult peregrines (Falco peregrinus) may fetch as much as $25,000 from eager collectors in Qatar, while the Arctic gyrfalcon (Falco rusticolus), the largest of all falcons, can command a price of up to $250,000, Forbes reported in 2015.
"Some Arab sheiks are willing to pay $400,000 for a single white gyrfalcon, which is considered the most beautiful and rarest of birds," Hammer said.
White gyrfalcons (Falco rusticolus), the biggest of all falcon species, are highly prized by illegal collectors. (Image credit: Shutterstock)
In fact, demand across the Persian Gulf for wild falcons is so high that opportunities abound for people like Lendrum, who steal and sell the protected birds and their eggs. Research into Lendrum's underworld network revealed just a glimpse of an extensive black market for illegal falcons, Hammer added.
"Lendrum's not the only one who would go off to remote corners of Russia or Pakistan or any place you find wild raptors, and catch these birds and then smuggle them," he said.
When writing "The Falcon Thief," Hammer tracked down the camera operator who shot the Quebec helicopter footage, an associate of Lendrum's named Paul Mullin. That story became one of the centerpieces of Hammer's book, and the "outlandish, expensive operation, apparently financed by the sheiks," marked the pinnacle of Lendrum's criminal career, according to Hammer.
"It was kind of all downhill from there," he said.
Multiple arrests
Though Lendrum is but a single player in the illegal falcon trade, he's arguably the best-known of these egg thieves, due to the spectacle of his airport arrests over the past 10 years. His capture in May 2010 at Birmingham Airport airport in the U.K. made headlines, and was accompanied by a photo of Lendrum wearing 14 swaddled peregrine eggs taped to his body in a custom sling to keep them warm, according to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).
But Lendrum insisted that they were duck eggs, and that he was wearing them on his doctor's recommendation to help with back pain, Hammer wrote in the book. That excuse didn't fly with the judge, who sentenced Lendrum to 30 months in jail, the RSPB reported.
Related: World's fastest animals: The peregrine falcon and other speedsters
Lendrum was arrested again in October 2015 at Sao Paulo International Airport in Brazil, as he was trying to board a plane with an incubator holding four eggs he had stolen in Chile; those eggs were thought to belong to the rare peregrine subspecies Falco peregrinus cassini, or Cassini falcon, the UK National Wildlife Crime Unit (NWCU) reported. Chicks from these eggs would have commanded up to $80,000 each on the black market, accrding to the NWCU.
In January 2016, a Brazilian judge sentenced Lendrum to 4.5 years in jail, but Lendrum had already skipped bail and left the country (he is currently facing extradition to Brazil, The Guardian reported).
However, Brazilian officials will have to wait for Lendrum to first finish serving yet another sentence in the U.K. He was arrested in June 2018 arriving at Heathrow Airport from Johannesburg, South Africa, and he was carrying a substantial payload of purloined avian wildlife, a U.K. Border Control representative said in a statement.
"During a full search, he was found to be wearing a body belt concealing 19 bird eggs as well as 2 newly-hatched chicks," according to the statement.
At the trial, Lendrum told the court that "his intention was to rescue the eggs after he encountered some men chopping down trees containing their nests." But wildlife experts overturned his story when they identified the eggs as originating from nests on cliffs, and on Jan. 10, Lendrum was sentenced to 3 years and 1 month in prison.
"He can't stop lying"
For some people, serving a string of jail terms in multiple countries might be a deterrent to future crimes, perhaps encouraging them to rethink their thieving ways. However, that was clearly not the case with Lendrum, who to this day downplays the seriousness of his acts and continues to spin fabulous fabrications about his intentions for the eggs that he has stolen, Hammer said.
"He can't stop lying," Hammer said. "I saw the interrogation tapes when he was on trial in Brazil; he'll tell these incredibly outlandish lies one after another, which the judge basically laughed at before sentencing him to five years in prison."
Lendrum's convoluted and fantastic explanations for his so-called conservation activities, along with his utter lack of remorse, likely also contributed to the length of his latest prison sentence in the U.K., Hammer added.
"He was very opaque — sort of a self-deluding liar — and he remained in total denial about everything that he had done, even though the evidence was just so overwhelming," Hammer said.
As Lendrum himself said in an interview with Hammer: "I honestly didn't think that there would be a problem if I were caught."
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