There is no better crime than the trafficking of rare animals, according to Stanislavas Huzhiavichus.
“Narcotics and weapons smugglers don’t know what the best deal is,” said the 30-year-old Ukrainian, a convicted rare bird smuggler who is for the first time denouncing the methods of a global billionaire. Illegal dollar trade. “Of course, it’s the animal business.”
Huzhiavichus, a trained veterinarian, worked for a rare bird trafficking ring for nearly a year. His job was to keep the animals alive despite the often miserable conditions. He later operated as a courier through Europe.
Leveraging Cites, a permit system created to regulate the trade in rare species, the group trafficked some of the world’s most endangered birds from their home countries to high-profile so-called conservationists in Europe.
Huzhiavichus said rare birds such as the palm cockatoo were sold for more than 30 times their purchase value, earning the group around 50,000 euros (Β£42,000) each trip, with very little expense.
Arrested by Austrian authorities during a courier trip to Vienna in April 2018, Huzhiavichus spent four months in an Austrian jail before returning to Ukrainewhere reporters from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) tracked him down last October and he agreed to share his story.
During his time in prison, gang members and drug dealers at first mocked him as the “birdcatcher.” When he explained how profitable trading rare birds could be, his bewilderment turned to admiration, and some inmates suggested they go into business together.
The European Union and the United Kingdom support efforts against wildlife trafficking abroad, but experts say it is incredibly easy to smuggle wild animals within the bloc.
Huzhiavichus said that, in half a year, he was able to smuggle more than 1,000 rare birds across Europe with ease. He said the favorite method used by his boss was to bribe train drivers in Kyiv to lock the birds in compartments and smuggle them into the EU.
Huzhiavichus said he then picked them up at major train stations in cities like Budapest, from where he could drive anywhere within the Schengen zone without fear of inspection.
A second route involved bribing corrupt border officials at a crossing between Ukraine and Slovakia.
On his first mission, in September 2017, he collected four birds-of-paradise in KoΕ‘ice, Slovakia, loaded them into a rental car with EU registration plates and headed north of France via the Channel Tunnel to the UK. United.
The few times Huzhiavichus was arrested, he produced a handful of permits. None of them applied to the birds he was transporting, but they satisfied border officials, he said. Huzhiavichus said the birds ended up being sold to an associate of a British collector.
Wildlife traffickers have learned to operate in conjunction with a legitimate trade in protected species that has an estimated one million transactions a year.
The legitimate industry is governed by the convention on international trade in endangered species of wild fauna and flora (Cites). While many animals are protected, Cites lists a number of exceptions under which nearly 38,000 protected species can be traded for profit, including animals born in captivity. This can be exploited by traffickers, experts say.
The documentation issued by Cites acts like a passport: each animal that crosses an international border must have a unique permit, which is presented to officials to be allowed to pass. But it is rare for a border official to be able to tell the difference between a real permit and a fraudulent one, or between one bird and another.
This means that once a trafficker has obtained a permit, βthey can use one and the same one over and over again,β Huzhiavichus said. In some cases, he said he used the same permit to smuggle 20 different poached birds.
A permit found by Austrian police in his possession, for a palm cockatoo, had been issued by the German federal agency for nature conservation (BfN) to a wildlife park in western Germany, which it said had used permission to import a palm cockatoo for another breeder. It is not clear how the original document or a copy of it ended up in the hands of the smugglers.
Huzhiavichus said the smugglers also used other techniques to get around Cites rules. Captive-bred birds, which can be legally traded, are outfitted as juveniles with a small metal ring around one leg engraved with a unique serial number. Since these rings are too small to place on adult birds, this system has long been considered a foolproof way to ensure that wild birds cannot be traded.
But Huzhiavichus said his group found a way around this, using a special tool to put a larger ring on an adult bird and then tighten it tighter to make it look genuine.
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After his first successful trip to the UK, Huzhiavichus said his boss began to trust him as a courier and assignments began to pour in.
One of the exchanges, he stated, was with the Association for the Conservation of Endangered Parrots (ACTP) in Germany, which promotes itself as a protector of endangered parrots and is registered as a zoo.
Lawyers for the ACTP said that it acted in full compliance with the law and that it had no information about wildlife trafficking networks. The lawyers said that ACTP discussed the purchase of birds with an associate of Huzhiavichus, but that at the time his client was not aware that there were or could be any indications of questionable or even illegal activities in connection with him. In particular, they said, the person identified himself through identification documents and presented all the required documents, and in any case the sale did not take place.
Huzhiavichus said he brought palm cockatoos to an architect in Bratislava and sold long-tailed parakeets to a woman in the Netherlands. He once set up shop in a large bird market in Reggio Emilia, Italy, where he sold less obviously trafficked birds and said he made β¬150,000 in one day.
βCompared to smuggling weapons, drugs, or even human trafficking,β Huzhiavichus said, β[bird smuggling] it is the best business because there is no responsibility for it anywhere. I mean, even in Europe there is no responsibility for it as such.”
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