Illegal wildlife trade in Eastern and Southern Africa and the rise of transnational organized criminal networks
Introduction
Ivory has been moving out of Eastern Africa for many centuries. Ancient Egyptians, Greco-Romans, southern Arabians, South Asians and finally what have been called the ‘Swahili’, an East African coastal people of mixed indigenous African and Middle Eastern immigrants, traded natural product commodities transported from the hinterland to port towns along the 4,000 kilometer-long coast from Somalia to Mozambique for more than two millennia (see Figures 1–3).[1]
During most of this more than 2,000-year history of ivory trade there were no legal restrictions, except for local laws that may have applied to commerce in this commodity. With the advent of CITES in 1975 and the listing of the Asian elephant on Appendix I and the African elephant on Appendix II, trade restrictions were first applied. In addition, some African countries such as Kenya, one of the largest ivory exporters at the time, prohibited trade in all wildlife products in 1978.
Increasing ivory trade restrictions in the 1970s up to 1989 and the almost total ban on all international ivory trade by CITES resulted in the old trading networks undergoing a profound transformation. Up to 1989 there was a mixture of ‘legal’ ivory, which was acquired by governments and licensed traders from natural mortality, problem animal control and culling, plus illegal ivory entering the trade chain from poaching.
As with rhino horn, with increasing trade restrictions in the 1970s came price rises. The average raw ivory export price in 1970 was only US$ 7.50/kg, jumping ten-fold to US$ 74/kg in 1978 after Kenya banned ivory trade. Just as demand was rising in eastern Asia with their fast growing economies, the supply spigot was being turned off. The traders saw the writing on the wall and began to stockpile, especially in Hong Kong and Japan, at the time the two largest ivory markets in the world. The stockpiling caused increased poaching.
The skyrocketing prices attracted new players and even influential African political and business interests began muscling in. Members of Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta’s family and other politicians began dealing in large quantities of ivory and other wildlife products. Charles Hornsby in his book, Kenya: A History Since Independence, describes how Kenya’s wildlife was slaughtered for export to Hong Kong, Japan and elsewhere. He estimated that at least 15,000 elephants were killed each year, while 10,000 rhinos were shot dead between 1973 and 1979.[2]
John Hoyt in his Animals in Peril claimed that Kenya’s elephants plummeted from 167,000 in 1970 to 16,000 in 1989, and that the Kenyatta family was deeply involved, even using government vehicles to ferry the ivory to the Mombasa port.[3]
The legal ivory in Eastern Africa was being supplied through government-authorized auctions in Mombasa, Dar es-Salaam and Zanzibar from ivory provided by game departments, national park services and other authorized sources. Ugandan ivory usually sold in Mombasa. Licensed traders would bid on lots of different sizes and qualities of ivory and ship it to the buying countries.[4]
It is quite possible that some of these same legal dealers purchased the poached illegal ivory from the Kenyatta family and politicians. After all, it was the Mombasa dealers who had the knowledge of the Kilindini Port operations in Mombasa and buyers in Asia.
Legal ivory export prices hit US$ 120/kg in 1987 and more than doubled to US$ 300/kg in 1989, the year CITES voted the ban. With the rapid rise in prices in anticipation of the CITES ban stockpiles in Asia hit their peak — the media were awash with alarming stories about the “elephant holocaust”, celebrities condemning ivory, the “African Chainsaw Massacre” and, of course, the obligatory photos of orphaned baby elephants standing forlornly next to the carcasses of their mothers. The period was capped in 1989 by the iconic image of hundreds of elephant tusks going up in flames in a massive pyre in Nairobi, symbolizing that ivory trade must stop.[5] The traders knew that even if legal trade stopped, the black market would respond to future consumer demand.
In Africa, ivory prices dropped everywhere that was surveyed, except Nigeria, between 1989 and 1999. Nigeria showed a significant rise. In Asia, the price data were mixed when comparing raw ivory prices in 1989 or immediately before with 2002–2003 prices, the dates of the surveys.[6]
Higher prices after the ban were seen in Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos and Sri Lanka, lower prices were found in China, Japan, Cambodia and Myanmar. According to informants in the ivory industry 1999–2003 in the respective countries surveyed, ivory trade activity and prices dropped for a few years after the 1989 CITES trade ban, but in the late 1990s, after the new trafficking supply chains and trading networks were organized, trade — now largely illegal — was picking up again. The pre-1989 raw ivory stockpiles in Hong Kong, Japan and elsewhere were also running low, so needed to be replenished.[7]
Overview of the “poaching crisis” trafficking networks
In the 1990s and 2000s the criminal elements throughout Eastern and Southern Africa continued to be the politically connected people at the top who were running poaching networks spreading out below them that operated in most of the elephant-rich habitats.[8] Tusks flowed into the main cities endowed with international airports or seaports imitating a water drainage system, beginning with rivulets running into streams, which joined into rivers and eventually entering the sea. Demand is equivalent to gravity, both inexorable forces that draw a substance from its source to its destination, with wildlife products analogous to water.
The ivory was then prepared for export using various camouflaging materials and packing methods in collusion with bribed shipping and Customs agents, and were dispatched on their way by sea or air.
In most countries, it was common to have corrupt units within the military, police and even the wildlife protection agencies involved in the ivory poaching and other wildlife trafficking business. They were either working for protected elites or became rogue entrepreneurs. One of the best studies illustrating how the military and police ran poaching rings was carried out by Christian Apobo in the early 2000s in northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). An estimated 17 tonnes of ivory were poached out of the Ituri Forest alone in the last six months of 2004, much of it smuggled to Uganda.[9]
The identities and operational details of the transnational organized criminal (TOC) networks up to 2014 in eastern Africa were shrouded in mystery, because no arrests or successful prosecutions were made of the “big fish” or “kingpins”, as the media like to call network heads. The triggermen and their accomplices out in the field collecting tusks were killed or caught in the thousands, and hundreds of wildlife rangers were unfortunate casualties as well, with no apparent effect on poaching rates.
In the 1990s, with economic growth and freedom of movement increasing in China along with globalization, Chinese began emigrating in ever-larger numbers abroad seeking business opportunities. Families that had been involved in the fishing industry for generations in Shuidong, Guangdong Province, found good opportunities in Zanzibar for various seafood products, such as sea cucumbers, fish maws and shark fins, and set up shop. There was a nice little port with cooperative port officials and, more importantly, Zanzibar’s local laws regarding wildlife applied only to native species. Elephants were not native to Zanzibar.
The infamous “Ivory Queen”, Yang Fenglan, ran probably the biggest transnational organized criminal (TOC) enterprise trafficking ivory in Africa from at least as early as 2006 up to 2015 from Dar es-Salaam, Tanzania. There is evidence that Yang supplied the Chinese Shuidong Network that operated out of nearby Zanzibar,[10] cooperated with the Sheikh-Feisal group based in Mombasa and with the Moazu “Kampala Man” Kromah network based in Kampala, Uganda, which operated in Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, Guinea, Togo, Senegal and elsewhere. Yang may also have been involved with supplying the Hsieh-Wang trafficking network based in Malawi, as ivory was seized in a truck coming from Dar es Salaam on its way to Lilongwe, described below.
Together, these four trafficking TOCs ran the trade chains that scooped up and shipped out hundreds of tonnes of poached tusks from a wide area from Zambia, eastern DRC, north and west Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya between the late 1990s and about 2016, with some shifting of activity depending on arrests and court cases. Shuidong and Kromah continued trafficking ivory and other wildlife products from Central and West Africa after 2016. The tusk origins of 49 ivory seizures determined by DNA analysis supports this scenario.[11]
None of the original networks are operating in 2023, although an offshoot of Kromah is still active. The key players of each have either been arrested and prosecuted in eastern Africa, or have fled the sub-region. One other Chinese TOC network also operated during this period, based in Nigeria, described below.
The TOC Networks
The TOC networks are described in chronological order of their founding. None operated in isolation of the others and there was interaction between them of varying degrees and type through time. They shared a common overarching goal of obtaining and transporting valuable illegal wildlife products from source to export location and then ship to destination with the least amount of risk and loss. They were able to ravage such large numbers of elephants, rhinos and pangolins because they operated within a culture of corruption in which bribes and other financial incentives could obtain political, judicial and law enforcement facilitation of their poaching and trafficking activities.[12]
Hsieh-Wang /Lin-Shang Syndicate in Lilongwe, Malawi
In June 2002 over 6 tonnes of raw ivory and 40,000 seal blanks (hankos) were seized in Singapore, the first seizure anywhere near that weight size since the CITES ivory trade ban came into effect in 1990.[13] TOC was inaugurated with ivory trafficking for the first time, with an illegal trade chain consisting of poachers, collector-buyers, transporters, packers, exporters and destination importers, plus the required facilitators such as shipping agents. Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) research established that the ivory had originated in Zambia, had been handled by a Chinese trafficking ring based in Lilongwe, Malawi, and smuggled from there by road to the Mozambican port of Beira and on to Durban, South Africa by feeder ship, where it was exported in a freighter bound for Japan via Singapore.
The hankos had probably been manufactured in Allena Handicrafts, an ivory workshop in Lilongwe, run by the Gwedeza family, who were the exporters of the shipment. Before the CITES ban, Allena Handicrafts were working with a Taiwanese named Fong Ken Hsieh to sell and export legal worked ivory to buyers in China. After the ban in the 1990s a Malaysian Chinese named Wang Yong Sai, more commonly called Peter Wang, began working with Hsieh and the Gwedeza’s to smuggle mainly raw ivory in large shipments to China and Japan.[14]
This TOC is a good example of how a legal ivory supply business pre-CITES trade ban transformed into an illegal ivory TOC supply business.
EIA established that since 1994, the syndicate had made at least 19 previous ivory shipments.[15] Even if the average weight of the 20 shipments had been half that of the 2002 seizure, 60 tonnes of ivory would have been shipped out in the eight years, a massive amount equalling the deaths of up to 6,000 elephants. Figure 4 shows the approximate area from Which the early Hsieh-Wang network obtained its tusks.
Global ivory seizures known from the years 2000 to 2002 totalled only 5.9 tonnes,[16] which included the largest of 1,255 tusks from a house in Dar es-Salaam.[17] The 5.9 tonnes total was before the 6.2-tonne Singapore seizure, so at least 12.1 tonnes was seized from 2000 to mid-2002. No one was ever charged in Africa in either the Singapore or Dar es-Salaam seizure, although a shipping agent in Singapore was fined USD 3,000.
Nothing further was detected from this syndicate until May 2013 when a random inspection of a truck by a customs unit in northern Malawi was to show the resiliency of the Hsieh-Wang syndicate. The truck was transporting 2.6 tonnes of ivory tusks found hidden by cement bags coming from Dar es Salaam. Brothers Charles and Patrick Kaunda in the truck were arrested, tried and convicted in 2015, but only received a fine equivalent to about USD 5,400 at the time, far below the state prosecutor’s requested penalty of 18 years in jail and a fine of approximately USD 9,800. On appeal by the state, they were sentenced to eight years in jail. Unfortunately, the authorities had not detained the brothers and they promptly absconded and remain at large to this day.[18]
The EIA found that Charles Kaunda had been recruited as a driver and factotum by Hsieh in the late 1990s and, in the aftermath of the 2002 Singapore seizure, he rose through the ranks and began working directly with Peter Wang, effectively side-lining Hsieh.
Shipping records analyzed by EIA also showed that Charles Kaunda had shipped 14 containers along the Lilongwe-Beira route to East Asia between 2010–15, using the same freight agent, a relative, each time. The containers were either declared as sawn wood or semi-precious stones and the destinations were Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia.[19] No seizures of these earlier shipments are known. Therefore, in addition to the roughly 60 tonnes shipped 1994–2002, another perhaps 45 tonnes of ivory of unknown origin was smuggled 2010–2015, the peak of the elephant poaching crisis years, totalling possibly 105 tonnes of ivory for the Hsieh-Wang syndicate, although the margin of potential error is great with the lack of weight records.
EIA indicated that after Zambia in the early years, Tanzania became the main source of Hsieh-Wang ivory, but do not specify from whom or how they obtained it. Given that Kaunda and probably other transporters were ferrying ivory to Malawi from Dar es Salaam since the mid 2000s it is likely that Yang Fenglan was involved in supplying at least some of this ivory. EIA revealed that Tanzanian politicians were involved in the trafficking and facilitated the traffickers. Yang was known as a person who connected high-level Tanzanians with the Chinese business community to promote commercial activity.[20]
Peter Wang disappeared, thought now to be deceased, and Hsieh brought in Lin Yunhua and his wife Zhang Quinhua around 2014 to take over operations, launching the Lin-Zhang syndicate. Hsieh died soon after. It’s not known how much ivory was successfully exported, but they also smuggled out poached rhino horns, pangolin scales and hippo teeth.[21] They also engaged in illicit mining and money laundering.[22] The syndicate was broken up in 2019–2020 and 10 Chinese and four Malawians were sentenced to long terms in prison.[23]
Yang “Ivory Queen” Fenglan in Dar es Salaam and the Shuidong Network in Zanzibar, Tanzania
Yang first came to Tanzania in 1975 to act as a Kiswahili-Chinese translator during the Building of the TAZARA rail line from Dar es Salaam to Zambia, returning to Beijing afterwards. In 1997, she returned to Tanzania and set up her two businesses. Yang ran her own operation from a two-story building in Dar with her Chinese restaurant on the ground floor and Beijing Great Wall Investment company on the floor above, where she stored her tusks on occasion.[24] She also served as vice-chairwoman and secretary-general of the China-Africa Business Council of Tanzania, where she met and cultivated important business and political personalities. Yang and her Beijing restaurant became active in bringing together Tanzanian and Chinese business interests.
Since business and politicians are closely linked, Yang probably gained political protection for her poaching and trafficking operations in exchange for cutting some of the influential politicians in on the business. EIA’s Vanishing Point report names who some of these politicians were, but none have ever been charged or prosecuted.[25]
It does not appear that Yang exported the ivory herself. She ran a number of poaching gangs that operated in Tanzania, northern Mozambique and possibly north-eastern Zambia through Tanzanian lieutenants who worked for her. She accumulated the ivory they poached in Dar es Salaam and found others to buy from her and export it. It appears she initially sold her ivory to the Hsieh-Wang network for export, but in the late 1990s or early 2000s she met a group of Chinese closer to home who had the perfect attributes to become ivory smugglers — the seafood exporters from Shuidong mentioned above.
In November 2013 three Chinese were arrested in Mikocheni, Dar es Salaam — near Yang’s Beijing restaurant — packing 1.9 tonnes of ivory into a container. The Chinese worked for the Shuidong Network, who had bought the ivory from Yang. Shortly afterwards, investigators seized a container belonging to Shuidong traffickers in Zanzibar linked to the Mikocheni bust with almost 3 tonnes of ivory. The three Chinese were tried and two were sentenced to long prison terms. The one who got off, Chen Jinzhan, used Yang Fenglan’s lawyer to defend himself.[26]
In 2014 the Protected Area Management Solutions (PAMS) Foundation teamed up with the Tanzanian National and Transnational Serious Crimes Investigation Unit (NTSCIU) to investigate Yang. They gathered enough information to charge her and two accomplices, Salivius Matembo and Manase Philemon, in October 2015 with specific cases of ivory trafficking, including some involving Shuidong Network members. Following a dramatic car chase through the streets of Dar es Salaam, Yang was apprehended. She and her two accomplices were eventually convicted and sentenced in February 2019 to 15 years’ imprisonment for “leading an organised criminal gang” by the Tanzanian court.[27]
From 2009 to 2014, 22.6 tonnes of ivory was seized inside Tanzania while 40.7 tonnes of ivory linked to Tanzania was intercepted outside the country, indicating that corruption in Tanzania’s ports was allowing most of the ivory to be shipped out.[28] In 2014 a Zanzibar-based sea cucumber trader called Wei Ronglu, from Shuidong, told EIA undercover investigators that 20 containers with ivory hidden inside were shipped to the Chinese mainland, usually via Hong Kong, in 2013. Wei claimed that on average, one out of 20 containers of ivory is seized. Each container usually holds between two and three tonnes of ivory inside, packed with low value goods such as shells and dried fish used for concealment.[29] So in 2013 alone, some 40 to 60 tonnes of ivory were shipped to China by the Shuidong syndicate.
Soon after Yang’s arrest, the NTSCIU arrested Boniface Matthew Malyango, aka Shetani (Satan), on 29 October, 2015, on the outskirts of Dar. In March 2017 he and two of his brothers were sentenced to 12 years imprisonment.[30] Malyango got off on appeal and is now roaming free.[31]
Following previous arrests and convictions in Mozambique in 2013 and 2014, Mateso “Chupi” Kasian was arrested again in July 2017 in northern Mozambique. Mozambique’s National Administration of Conservation Areas (ANAC) and the NTSCIU, with the support of the Wildlife Conservation Society and the PAMS Foundation, have been cooperating since 2014 to track Kasian’s movements. He managed as many as seven armed poaching gangs in southern Tanzania in 2013, hitting Selous National Park, Mikumi and others, and moved his operations to northern Mozambique in 2013–14 where his poaching gangs decimated elephants in Niassa National Reserve.[32] He was extradited to Dar es Salaam in 2018 and in 2019 was convicted. His sentence, including jail time and the forfeiture of two houses, was quashed on appeal and he was let go after paying a fine equivalent of USD 215.[33]
Malyango and Kasian were level 2 in the supply chain, meaning they bought the tusks from the poachers in the field and transported it to collection points. Matembo and Philemon assisted Yang, all of whom were level 3, in getting the ivory to Dar and preparing large batches that were sold to the Shuidong people, level 4, who in turn packed and exported it. Shuidong Network traffickers in China, level 5, received the shipped ivory and sold it on at a good profit to those who would process it into worked ivory sold to consumers. Figure 5 shows a simplified illustration of the Yang-Shuidong trade chain.
With PAMS and the NTSCIU on the job, things were getting too hot for the Shuidong people in Zanzibar, and there was no Ivory Queen to supply them, so they shifted operations to Pemba in northern Mozambique during 2014 and 2015. There was a nice little port with cooperative officials not unlike Zanzibar and initially they had Mateso Kasian to supply them directly. They made several ivory shipments from Pemba before the Mozambique authorities, with international pressure, made the ivory business unprofitable. After Kasian’s arrest and the disruption of the poaching gangs’ supply chains, the Shuidong Network moved their ivory operations to Lagos, Nigeria, in 2017 and added pangolin scales to their trafficking ventures.[34] Several seizures of ivory and pangolin scales have been made there, although not all linked to the Shuidong syndicate.
China began taking an interest in the well-publicized ivory trafficking activities of its citizens abroad, and with its own domestic ivory market about to close at the end of 2017, they took action. After release of the EIA’s The Shuidong Connection report,[35] Chinese law enforcement raided the syndicate’s operations in Shuidong and arrested 27 suspects, charging 16 of them. Of the three main players running the Shuidong syndicate, one was arrested during the raid and a second was located in Tanzania, from where he voluntarily returned to face justice. The third was eventually found in Nigeria and repatriated for trial in 2019. They were sentenced to several years in prison in 2019,[36] unlike the Feisal, Shetani, Chupi and many other cases, which fell apart in African courts.[37]
The Kromah Network, Kampala, Uganda
Moazu “Kampala Man” Kromah, from Liberia, ran a motley crew made up of Amara Cherif, from Guinea, Kromah’s two sons Bangaly and Mohammed, and two Kenyans from Mombasa named Mansur Mohamed Surur and Abdi Hussein Ahmed. Kromah was arrested on 12 June 2019 in Uganda and whisked off the next day for New York City charged with smuggling at least 190 kg of rhino horn and 10 tonnes of ivory between 2012 and May 2019 from Eastern Africa, a massive underestimate.[38] Amara Cherif had been arrested five days previously in Senegal and later extradited to New York, while Surur fled to Yemen and was only arrested in July 2019 in Mombasa, when returning on a charter flight. He was extradited to New York in January 2021 and pled guilty. Abi Hussein Ahmed was arrested in Kenya in 2022 and was also extradited to New York. In addition, Kromah, Cherif and Surur were charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering, and Surur and Ahmed were charged with participating in a conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute more than 10 kilograms of heroin.[39] All three have pleaded guilty.[40] So far, Kromah has been sentenced to 63 months, Surur to 54 months and Cherif to 57 months in prison.[41]
The key players currently known who were involved in transporting at least some of the poached ivory to Mombasa, aggregating and storing it, packing it into containers, getting it undetected through port security, free on board a freighter and preparing the “road” to get it safely to Asia are Abdulrahman Sheikh, Sheikh Abdulrahman, Mahmoud Abdulrahman Sheikh and Tanzanian Abdulrahman Mohammed (aka Said Juma Said). The Skeikhs were working with Kromah. Other important players connected with the network acting as fixers were Samuel and Nicholas Jefwa. Jefwa and his brother Nicholas are still on the run after two large ivory seizures totaling 7.8 tonnes were made in Singapore and Thailand in 2015.[42]
Feisal Mohammed Ali was also probably working with this group, acting as liaison between Mombasa and Dar es-Salaam and transporting ivory from Tanzania to Mombasa. Feisal was arrested in 2014 in connection with a 2.1-tonne ivory seizure in Mombasa of Tanzanian and Kenyan ivory originating in Kampala, Kromah’s base. He was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment in 2016, but was later freed on appeal.[43]
This network is linked with the Akasha narcotic drug trafficking syndicate, which was also based in Mombasa. Although the exact relationship has never been made clear,[44] the Akashas most likely assisted the ivory traffickers through their connections with politicians and police for protection and port officials to ensure that proper inspections of the cargo were not made and bribing judges when prosecutions started was normal. The Akasha ring was arrested and extradited to the U.S. in 2017 and are now in prison there.[45]
Tommy Cindric, a former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Special Agent, told the author in emails in December, 2018, that “We have no knowledge of the Akasha’s ever shipping ivory. We do know from undercover meetings that they could get us ivory… I do firmly believe it [ivory and rhino horn] is a facet of their overarching family business like drugs, guns, extortion, bribery. I believe they probably take a cut and provide protection for the people in their organization engaged in ivory trafficking.”
Cindric’s view was shared by Gretchen Peters, at the time working for the U.S. State Department on transnational organized crime (TOC) links to ivory trafficking. She told the author in an email in November 2018 that the Akashas were not exporting the containers with ivory, they were bribing the officials to let them through. They also allegedly bribed the judge that overturned Feisal Mohammed Ali’s conviction.
No large ivory seizure has been made in Mombasa since 2016, indicating that the arrests of Feisal, the Sheikhs and the Akashas disrupted the trafficking operations of this major export port.
Little is known about where and from whom they purchased their ivory and rhino horn. Ally Cherif, Amara’s brother, was arrested and tried for trafficking 660 tusks in Dar es Salaam in 2016.[46] Amara was involved, but fled and has been on Interpol’s Red Notice list for wildlife offenses in Tanzania since then, so Tanzania was certainly a source. Ally, and his wife who also charged with ivory trafficking, were resident business people of Tanzania and the charges stated they belonged to a trafficking ring that operated as early as 2006. Yang Fenglan escaped Dar in 2014 and stayed in Uganda for several months, suggesting that she was linked to Kromah. The New York indictment also mentions Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea, Kenya, Mozambique and Senegal as the Kromah Network’s area of operations, but no details are given.
Sam Wasser’s DNA work shows the great majority of tusks seized exiting Kampala, Uganda, which is assumed to be Kromah Network ivory, originated from elephants poached in Tanzania and Kenya with a few from northern Mozambique, north-eastern DRC, Zambia and Uganda.[47] The Tanzania and Mozambique ivory would suggest links with both Yang and Shuidong.
Kromah product is known to have been smuggled out of Entebbe and Nairobi by air and from Mombasa port by sea.[48]
The Kromah Network extended to West Africa, Kromah’s original home, with numerous ivory seizures made between 2012 and 2022 in, originating from or in transit from Togo, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria and the DRC. There are links to Vietnamese in these seizures.[49] Other evidence links Kromah to Vannaseng Trading in Laos. In 2014 the Lao government illegally authorized Vannaseng to import 90 tonnes of ivory, 4 tonnes of rhino horn, 20 tonnes of big cat parts and 120 tonnes of pangolin products.[50] Between 2014 and 2017 Vannseng Trading sent Kromah at least USD 190,000, suggesting that Kromah was a supplier of at least some of these illegal wildlife products.[51] Laos is a known transit country for onward movement of illegal wildlife products to Vietnam and China.[52]
Figure 6 shows the Kromah social network analysis reconstructed from seized mobile phone dumps.[53]
Figure 7 shows the approximate poaching areas that supplied Yang, Shuidong and Kromah for the years that they operated.
The Chen Family in Lagos, Nigeria
The Chen family from Shanting Town in Putian, Fujian province founded this TOC, referred to by the Wildlife Justice Commission (WJC) as the Chen organized crime group. It was led by the father, Chen Jiancheng, and his two sons, Chen Chengguang and Chen Chengzong. The family created a TOC network consisting of members working along the entire Africa-China supply chain, with contacts inside and outside of China, and in Customs,[54] which was typical of all of the syndicates described here. They operated out of Lagos, Nigeria and exported to Hong Kong via Singapore in 2013 and thereafter up to 2018 to Yantai port in the northeast of China via Busan, South Korea.
The Chen TOC network operated from at least 2013 until their eventual arrests in March 2019. The WJC found that South Korea “appears to be increasingly popular among wildlife smuggling networks as a transit location”, where 26 seizures of shipments destined for China have been recorded since 2013, involving more than 23 tonnes of ivory and 10 tonnes of pangolin scales.[55]
The Chen TOC began to struggle to sell their ivory in 2018, and it appears that an ivory shipment of February 2018 was stranded for more than a year in storage due to China closing its domestic ivory market on 31 December 2017 and the crackdown.
Around this time, ivory stockpiling also began occurring in neighbouring countries in Southeast Asia as the crackdown caused difficulties in smuggling shipments across the border into China.
In November 2018 Chen Chengzong was found and arrested while dining at a restaurant in China and four months later, on 30 March 2019, police followed up by arresting 20 suspects and seizing 2,748 pieces of ivory weighing 7.48 tonnes at the Changfeng Cable Factory in Anhui Province. The arrests included network members along the whole supply chain. Chen Jiancheng and Hu Juqiang, a senior ivory buyer in Nigeria, evaded arrest and were wanted persons, both becoming subjects of an INTERPOL Red Notice. They were both later arrested and escorted back to China through collaboration with Ghanaian and Malaysian law enforcement partners.[56]
In December 2020, the Chen family TOC network in China ended with 17 people jailed, including Chen Jiancheng andChen Chengzong for life.
The future
The arrests and prosecutions of key members of the Yang, Shuidong, Kromah, Lin-Zhang and Chen networks had a profound effect on ivory and rhino horn trafficking out of Africa. The arrest and extradition in 2022 of Teo Boon Ching from Thailand to New York for prosecution disrupted even more ivory, pangolin scale and rhino horn trafficking.[57] Ching handled large numbers of shipments from Mombasa, Lagos and elsewhere to Malaysia, Laos and Thailand for onward transport to Vietnam and China.[58]
After continued drops in African elephant and rhino poaching from 2016 to 2020 thanks in large part to the TOC network disruptions, 2021 showed an uptick in the poaching of both types of pachyderms,[59] probably continued in 2022.
Large seizures of ivory and pangolin scales in, or exported from, Lagos in West Africa, seizures in the DRC and Cameroon destined for Lagos, and DNA evidence point to an emerging TOC network that is trafficking southern and Central African ivory and pangolin out of Nigeria. Investigations are needed to identify the members and operations of this or these network(s). It could be remnants of the Kromah cartel, as Vietnamese and Guineans have been implicated.[60] The large number of seizures and arrests in Lagos indicates that the operations have been penetrated by law enforcement and it is likely that a new export port will be found.[61]
With disruptions to transport coming to an apparent end with the current controlling of the COVID-19 pandemic and China’s ending its zero-COVID policy, demand and the ability to transport product will once again be rising. As a Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) ivory study found, even after severe disruption, “transnational organized crime networks have shown themselves to be very resilient, capable of regrouping and reorganizing after law enforcement or other setbacks, so if long-term solutions to poaching and IWT are not found, another round of the ‘poaching crisis’ may be just over the horizon.”[62]
Investigations are urgently needed to identify the members and operations of this or these network(s) so that they can be disrupted before tens of thousands of pachyderms are poached, and not after the poaching spree as it was in the 2009–2015 period.
Endnotes
[1] Ivory was mentioned in the 1st century A.D. Periplus of the Erythrean Sea and a history of East African trade can be found in Mark Horton and John Middleton, The Swahili: The Social Landscape of a Mercantile Society, London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000. A detailed listing of East African ports and the products they traded can be found in Daniel Stiles, ‘The ports of East Africa, the Comoros and Madagascar: their place in Indian Ocean trade from 1–1500 A.D.’ Kenya Past and Present 24: 27–36, 1992. https://www.academia.edu/47436727/The_Ports_of_East_Africa_the_Comoros_and_Madagascar_Their_Place_in_Indian_Ocean_Trade_From_1_1500_AD.
[2] Charles Hornsby, Kenya: A History Since Independence (1963–2011), I.B. Taurus, 2011.
[3] John Hoyt, Animals in Peril, Penguin, 1994.
[4] The system in Kenya is described in Ian Parker and A.D. Graham, ‘Auctions and export from Mombasa 1960–1978: elephant ivory, rhino horn and hippo teeth, Parts I and II.’ Pachyderm 61, 2020.
[5] For good treatments of the history leading up to the CITES ban and subsequent outcome see Keith Somerville, Ivory: Power and Poaching in Africa, London: Hurst & Co., 2016 and John Frederick Walker, Ivory’s Ghosts: The White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2009.
[6] Daniel Stiles, ‘The ivory trade and elephant conservation.’ Environmental Conservation 34(1): 309–321, 2004. https://www.academia.edu/5013030/The_ivory_trade_and_elephant_conservation.
[7] Daniel Stiles and Esmond Martin, ‘Status and trends of the ivory trade in Africa, 1989–1999.’ Pachyderm, 30: 24–36, 2001; Daniel Stiles and Esmond Martin, ‘The trade in African and Asian ivory in South and South East Asia.’ Pachyderm 33: 74–87, 2002; Daniel Stiles and Esmond Martin, ‘The trade in African and Asian ivory in East Asia.’ Pachyderm 35: 82–99, 2003.
[8] The EIA describes how Tanzanian MP’s and senior officers of the ruling political party were accused of being deeply involved in the ivory trade 2009–2013, in Vanishing Point: Criminality, Corruption and the Devastation of Tanzania’s Elephants, London: EIA, 2014; numerous articles have linked Zimbabwe’s former First Lady Grace Mugabe with ivory trafficking and the police even announced they were going to arrest her. See Keith Somerville, ‘How Grace Mugabe poaching claims benefit Zimbabwe’s new president.’ The Conversation, 12 April 2018 and Peta Thornycroft, ‘Grace Mugabe accused of smuggling ivory, gold, diamonds from Zimbabwe.’ The Sydney Morning Herald’, 25 March 2018. Many other African leaders or their families have been linked with ivory trafficking.
[9] C. Apobo, Rapport sur le braconnage D’éléphant et sur le commerce de l’ivoire dans et à la périphérie de la Réserve de Faune à Okapis (RFO) Ituri, RDC. ICCN and WCS, 2004. https://library.wcs.org/doi/ctl/view/mid/33065/pubid/DMX1787800000.aspx.
[10] See EIA, Vanishing Point: Criminality, Corruption and the Devastation of Tanzania’s Elephants. London: EIA, 2014 and EIA, The Shuidong Connection: Exposing the global hub of the illegal ivory trade. London: EIA, 2017.
[11] Samuel K Wasser, Charles J.,Wolock, Mary K. Kuhner, John E. Brown III, Chris Morris, Ryan J. Horwitz, Anna Wong, Charlene J. Fernandez, Moses Y. Otiende, Yves Hoareau, Zofia Kaliszewska, Eunjin Jeon, Kin-Lan Han, Bruce S. Weir, ‘Elephant genotypes reveal the size and connectivity of transnational ivory traffickers.’ Nature Human Behaviour, March, 2022. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01267-6.
[12] Tanya Wyatt, Kelly Johnson, Laura Hunter, Ryan George & Rachel Gunter, ‘Corruption and Wildlife Trafficking: Three Case Studies Involving Asia.’ Asian Journal of Criminology, 13: 35–55, 2018. DOI 10.1007/s11417–017–9255–8.
[13] EIA, Back in Business. Environmental Investigation Agency, 2002. https://eia-international.org/report/back-in-business/.
[14] Julian Newman, ‘Intelligence Week: How we put the pieces together in the landmark ‘Singapore seizure’ ivory case.’ EIA, 23 February 2021. https://eia-international.org/blog/intelligence-week-how-we-put-the-pieces-together-in-the-landmark-singapore-seizure-ivory-case/.
[15] Op.cit. Back in Business, 2002.
[16] CITES, Consideration of Proposals for Amendment of Appendices I And II, Prop. 12.11. CITES CoP 12, 2002. https://cites.org/sites/default/files/eng/cop/12/prop/E12-P11.PDF.
[17] Could this have been connected with Yang Fenglan? See James Astill, ‘Huge haul of tusks raises spectre of poaching revival’, The Guardian, 1 February 2002. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/feb/01/jamesastill.
[18] Julian Newman, ‘Twenty years since a massive ivory seizure, what lessons were learned?’ The Daily Maverick, 27 June 2022. https://news.mongabay.com/2022/06/twenty-years-since-a-massive-ivory-seizure-what-lessons-were-learned-commentary/.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Paul Tyson, ‘Chinese ‘Ivory Queen’ accused of leading one of Africa’s largest-ever smuggling rings’. ITV News, 8 October, 2015. http://www.itv.com/news/2015-10-08/ivory-queen-accused-of-leading-one-of-africas-largest-ever-smuggling-rings/.
[21] EIA, ‘Yunhua Lin, notorious kingpin of wildlife crime syndicate, is jailed for 14 years in Malawi.’ EIA, 28 September 2021. https://eia-international.org/news/yunhua-lin-notorious-kingpin-of-wildlife-crime-syndicate-is-jailed-for-14-years-in-malawi/.
[22] Golden Matonga, ‘How the notorious Chinese wildlife syndicate Lin-Zhang looted Malawi’s mineral wealth.’ Investigative Platform, 16 September, 2022. https://www.investigativeplatform-mw.org/2022/09/16/plunder-from-the-east/.
[23] Op. cit. EIA, ‘Yunhua Lin’, 28 September 2021.
[24] Linah Clifford, TRAFFIC Tanzania, pers. comm. 18 July 2018.
[25] Op. cit. EIA, Vanishing Point.
[26] Ibid.; Tristan McConnell, ‘The downfall of Yang Fenglan, the “Ivory Queen” ‘. The New Statesman, June 8 2016. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/business/2016/06/downfall-yang-fenglan-ivory-queen.
[27] Citizen Reporter, ‘Chinese woman’s story.’ The Citizen, October 10, 2015. http://www.thecitizen.co.tz/News/Revealed--Her-story/-/1840340/2907058/-/13081chz/-/index.html; AFP, ‘Chinese ‘Ivory Queen’ Yang Fenglan is jailed for 15 years in Tanzania.’ The South China Morning Post, 20 February 2019, https://www.scmp.com/news/world/africa/article/2186825/tanzania-convicts-chinese-ivory-queen-trafficking-hundreds-tusks.
Salivius Matembo was involved in an earlier case involving another of Yang’s collaborators, Li Guibang. Li was arrested in Dar es Salaam, where he was based, in 2011 for exporting over 2 tonnes of ivory from Zanzibar seized in Haiphong, Vietnam, in 2009, reported by the Lusaka Task Force. He was let out on bail and promptly fled to Kenya with Matembo’s assistance.
[28] Op. cit., EIA, Vanishing Point.
[29] Ibid.
[30] BBC, ‘Tanzania jails notorious elephant poacher.’ 3 March 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-39157783.
[31] Daniel Stiles, ‘Elephant poacher kingpins go free: Injustice or incompetence?’ Swara 46(2): 27–30, 2021. https://www.academia.edu/49205568/Elephant_poacher_kingpins_go_free.
[32] GI-TOC, ‘Elephant poaching has dramatically decreased in Mozambique’s Niassa National Reserve, once an epicentre of the illegal trade.’ Risk Bulletin 5, 2020. https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/esaobs-risk-bulletin-5/.
[33] GI-TOC, ‘Why did two major ivory trafficking cases in Tanzania collapse, with one conviction quashed and the other resulting in only a small fine?’ Risk Bulletin 16, 2021. https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/esaobs-risk-bulletin-16/.
[34] Op. cit. EIA, The Shuidong Connection.
[35] Ibid
[36] Shreya Dasgupta, ‘China busts major ivory trafficking gang following EIA investigation’. Mongabay, 15 January 2019. https://news.mongabay.com/2019/01/china-busts-major-ivory-trafficking-gang-following-eia-investigation/.
[37] Oddly, the Ivory Queen lost her first appeal and still has a 15-year prison sentence. This might be because of Chinese government pressure, see https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2186997/beijing-backs-jail-term-chinese-ivory-queen-yang-fenglan-tanzania/. But Yang won her second appeal and may be released this year https://www.seej-africa.org/africa/the-ivory-queen-wins-second-appeal-but-not-her-release/.
[38] SeeJ-Africa, ‘The Kromah Conviction — The Solution Needs to Come From African Courts.’ 31August, 2022. https://www.seej-africa.org/africa/the-kromah-conviction-the-solution-needs-to-come-from-african-courts/.
[39] DEA press release, ‘Members of African criminal enterprise charged with large-scale trafficking of rhinoceros horns and elephant ivory and heroin distribution.’ June 14, 2019, https://www.dea.gov/press-releases/2019/06/14/members-african-criminal-enterprise-charged-large-scale-trafficking; Chris Morris, ‘Moazu Kromah and the Case of the West African Ivory Cartel’, International Policy Digest, 24 August 2019, https://intpolicydigest.org/2019/08/24/moazu-kromah-and-the-case-of-the-west-african-ivory-cartel/; Chris Morris, ‘Kenya Needs to Get the Surur Extradition Right’, International Policy Digest, October 5 2020, https://intpolicydigest.org/2020/10/05/kenya-needs-to-get-the-surur-extradition-right/.
[40] GI-TOC, ‘The long road to prosecuting Moazu Kromah and his wildlife-trafficking network’, Risk Bulletin 25, 2022. https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/esaobs-risk-bulletin-25.
[41] Anon., ‘Wildlife Trafficker Sentenced To 57 Months For Large-Scale Trafficking Of Rhinoceros Horns And Elephant Ivory’, U.S. epartment of Justice, December 14, 2022. https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/wildlife-trafficker-sentenced-57-months-large-scale-trafficking-rhinoceros-horns-and.
[42] See various 2015 stories in the Business Daily Africa https://www.businessdailyafrica.com/economy/How-Sh1bn-ivory-was-shipped-out-of-Kenya/3946234-2724208-wqsneh/index.html and https://www.businessdailyafrica.com/economy/Mombasa-container-with-3-000kg-of-ivory-seized/3946234-2698854-krq6bf/index.html and The Daily Nation http://www.nation.co.ke/news/Judge-now-freezes-the-assets-of-seven-ivory-case-suspects/-/1056/2846378/-/view/printVersion/-/cmpx8c/-/index.html.
[43] Jim Karani, ‘Ivory traffickers gain from flawed judicial system (Kenya).’ The Daily Nation, August 18, 2018. https://www.nation.co.ke/oped/opinion/Ivory-traffickers-gain-from-flawed-judicial-system/440808-4717478-15a26ce/index.html. Feisal has been seen attending the Sheikhs’ trial in Mombasa.
[44] At the time of the Feisal ivory seizure and arrest, Feisal was in close communication (supported in phone data) with Mohamed Tenge, half-brother to one of the Akasha’s.
[45] Elephant Crisis Fund, ‘The Downfall of a Notorious Smuggling Family.’ January 25, 2018, https://www.elephantcrisisfund.org/stories/the-downfall-of-a-notorious-smuggling-family/.
[46] Anon., ‘Ten in court over Sh4.5bn haul of ivory’, The Citizen, 15 July 2016. https://www.thecitizen.co.tz/news/Ten-in-court-over-Sh4-5bn-haul-of-ivory/1840340-3295602-qpuxdlz/index.html.
[47] Op. cit. Samuel K. Wasser, et al., ‘Elephant genotypes reveal the size and connectivity of transnational ivory traffickers’, 2022.
[48] Daniel Stiles, ‘Open and not shut: ivory trafficking court cases in East Africa linked to the Kromah cartel’, Medium, 29 August, 2022. https://medium.com/@danielstiles/open-and-not-shut-ivory-trafficking-court-cases-in-east-africa-linked-to-the-kromah-cartel-79ea7a4594cb.
[49] Op. cit. Chris Morris, ‘Moazu Kromah’, 2019.
[50] Nick Davies and Oliver Holmes, ‘Revealed: how senior Laos officials cut deals with animal traffickers.’ The Guardian, 27 September, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/27/revealed-how-senior-laos-officials-cut-deals-with-animal-traffickers.
[51] EMS and BAT, The Extinction Business, 2018. https://emsfoundation.org.za/the-extinction-business-south-africas-lion-bone-trade/.
[52] Loy Chantamvongsa, mentioned in this article, was linked to an ivory export made by Kromah from Nampula, Mozambique to Vietnam in 2015: Nick Davies and Oliver Holmes, ‘The crime family at the centre of Asia’s animal trafficking network.’ The Guardian, 26 September, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/26/bach-brothers-elephant-ivory-asias-animal-trafficking-network.
[53] J. Costa, Social network analysis applied to illegal wildlife trade between East Africa and Southeast Asia. Working Paper 35. Basel Institute on Governance, Basel. https://baselgovernance.org/publications/ SNA_IWT/.
[54] WJC, Bringing down the Dragon: An analysis of China’s largest ivory smuggling case. Wildlife Justice Commission, 2022. https://wildlifejustice.org/publications/bringing-down-the-dragon-an-analysis-of-chinas-largest-ivory-smuggling-case/.
[55] Holly Chik, ‘Despite crackdown, ‘demand keeps China’ on wildlife smuggling map.’ South China Morning Post, 1 February, 2022. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3165489/china-will-continue-wildlife-smuggling-centre-while-demand.
[56] Op.cit. Bringing down the Dragon, 2022.
[57] Al Jazeera News, ‘Malaysian extradited to USA for alleged rhinoceros horn smuggling.’ 8 October 2022. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/8/malaysian-extradited-to-us-over-alleged-rhinoceroshorn-smuggling.
[58] SeeJ-Africa, ‘Teo Boon Ching and His Ivory Connection to Africa’, 2022. https://www.seejafrica.org/international/teo-boon-ching-and-hisivory-connection-to-africa/.
[59] For elephants see, CITES Secretariat, Report on Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants (Mike), CoP19 Doc. 66.5, 2022. For rhinos see, CITES Secretariat, The African and Asian Rhinoceroses — Status, Conservation and Trade, CoP19 Doc. 75 Annex 4, 2022.
[60] A Nigerian delegate attending the CITES 19th Conference of the Parties in November 2022 confirmed to the author in Panama that it was the Kromah Network.
[61] WJC, ‘Nigerian authorities arrest 8 suspects from major network trafficking pangolin scales and ivory.’ Wildlife Justice Commission, 4 August, 2022. https://wildlifejustice.org/nigerianauthorities-arrest-8-suspects-from-major-networktrafficking-pangolin-scales-and-ivory/.
[62] Daniel Stiles, African Elephant Ivory. 2022. Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/african-elephant-ivory/.
