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  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book is based on dozens of first-person interviews plus trial transcripts, videotaped interrogations, contemporary media accounts, and secondary source materials. FOIA requests filed with the British government for transcripts of police interviews were not successful, as these transcripts are generally disposed of after five years. In such cases, I reconstructed the exchanges based on extensive interviews with participants. Some other dialogue has also been reconstructed from memory and notes, to the best of my ability.

  PROLOGUE

  Shortly after New Year’s Day in 2017, I was on vacation with my family in England when I happened to pick up a copy of the Times of London. A short article buried inside the newspaper caught my eye. “Thief Who Preys on Falcon Eggs Is Back on the Wing,” declared the headline. The report by the Times’s crime correspondent John Simpson described a notorious wild-bird trafficker who had jumped bail and disappeared in South America:

  He has dangled from helicopters and abseiled down cliffs in search of falcon eggs for wealthy Arab clients … Now, the international egg thief is on the wing again after the authorities in Brazil admitted that they had lost him. [Jeffrey] Lendrum, 55, slipped the net after being caught with four albino falcon eggs stolen from Patagonia and jailed for more than four years. He is said to pose a serious threat to falcons in Britain and beyond …

  The story of the egg thief grabbed my attention. The notion that there was a lucrative black market for wild birds’ eggs seemed faintly ridiculous to me, like some wacky quest out of Dr. Seuss’s Scrambled Eggs Super!, which I’d read aloud many times over the course of a decade to my three boys. I’d never considered that obtaining the world’s most valuable eggs would require dangerous, logistically complex missions to the most remote corners of the planet. What kind of character would make a living that way? Was Lendrum one oddball or part of a whole hidden industry? Always a little skeptical of tabloid hype, I also wondered how much of a threat to endangered raptors Lendrum really posed. I tore out the clipping and started making casual inquiries when I got home.

  As I found myself falling deeper into the life of Jeffrey Lendrum, discovering his childhood fascination with falcons and his compulsive tree climbing and nest raiding, something not altogether unexpected happened: I began to notice birds. That spring I traveled to southern Wales with two officers from Great Britain’s National Wildlife Crime Unit to search for peregrines and their aeries in the cliffs of the Rhondda Valley. Later that summer, on a magazine assignment in the marshes of southern Iraq, I threaded through canals in a motorboat, acutely attuned to the avian life around me. Pied kingfishers, little black-and-white birds with needle-sharp beaks, darted out of the reeds as our craft sped past; a sacred ibis, with enormous black-tipped white wings and a scythe-like black bill, skimmed the surface of the marsh. I reread “My Bird Problem,” a 2005 New Yorker essay, in which Jonathan Franzen described how his early bird-watching forays had heightened his excitement about venturing into the wild and encountering nature’s breathtaking diversity. “A glimpse of dense brush or a rocky shoreline gave me a crush-like feeling, a sense of the world’s being full of possibility,” he wrote. “There were new birds to look for everywhere.”

  It wasn’t only the rare ones that caught my eye. In April 2018, I returned from one of my last field-research trips about the falcon thief to discover my five-year-old son in a state of high excitement. By a remarkable coincidence, a pair of common pigeons, Columba livia, had built a nest on the bathroom window ledge of our third-floor apartment. For a month, as I wrote about the breeding behavior of birds in the wild and excavated the story of Lendrum’s transformation from an adolescent nest raider to an international outlaw, I found regular inspiration looking at that ledge, easily visible across the courtyard from our kitchen window. Watching the pigeon incubate her eggs, observing the tiny, down-covered chicks as they huddled beneath their mother and grew in two weeks into awkward fledglings, made Lendrum’s crimes more vivid to me—and more outrageous.

  The bird-watching urge was proving irresistible. On Martha’s Vineyard, in Massachusetts, the next summer I followed by kayak a pair of regal, ruffle-headed ospreys circling high above their man-made nest at the Long Point Wildlife Refuge; lost myself in a canoe for an hour among honking, socializing Canadian geese on Chilmark Pond; admired a red-tailed hawk soaring above the dunes at Great Rock Bight; and called my family outside to watch when an American robin briefly alit in our garden.

  And then, as I was writing this book in the fall, came the most serendipitous moment. Early one morning I caught a flash of color just outside my office window in Berlin. A parakeet—an Australian parakeet—had landed on the ledge. Its brilliant green body and yellow head, illuminated by the morning sun, matched the changing leaves of the linden tree behind it. The bird must have escaped from somebody’s cage and would soon be devoured by the predatory crows that stalk our neighborhood. One year earlier, I would probably have paid no attention to the sight, but now I called my partner excitedly and we watched it together, exhilarated by the bird’s vivid presence, aware of its near-certain fate. The parakeet sat on the ledge for a good two minutes. Then it flew off and, pursued by a sparrow, was swallowed up by the leaves of the linden tree.

  ONE THE AIRPORT

  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 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.

  * * *

  As hundreds of people hurried past them to their gates, the Counter Terrorism agents turned the woman over to colleagues and led the man into a small, windowless room near a security checkpoint. Several other officers squeezed into the space. The police asked the passenger to sit down at a table, and informed him that they would be questioning him under schedule seven of the Terrorism Act 2000, which allowed them to detain him for up to twenty-four hours without a lawyer.

  “Are you carrying any sharp objects?”

  “No,” he said, turning his pockets inside out.

  “May we see your airline ticket and travel documents?”

  The passenger presented an Irish passport identifying him as Jeffrey Paul Lendrum, born in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, on October 26, 1961. He was traveling economy gold class in seat 40F on flight EK040 on his Emirates Skywards frequent flyer miles, arriving in Dubai at twelve-fifteen in the morning local time after a nearly seven-hour flight. Then he had a fourteen-hour layover before catching a connecting Royal Emirates flight to Johannesburg at two-thirty in the afternoon. It seemed a roundabout way to travel to South Africa: a journey of more than thirty hours, as opposed to a twelve-hour direct flight from the United Kingdom. Stapled to his boarding pass were baggage-claim stubs for four pieces of luggage, including a mountain bicycle.

  A search of his hand luggage turned up an assortment of unusual gear: insulated hot-cold thermal bags, a Leica viewing scope, a thermometer, binoculars, a GPS system, a walkie-talkie, and a golf ball retriever, which used telescopic extensions to stretch up to seventeen feet. Lendrum carried plenty of cash: £5,000, $3,500 in US dollars, and some South African rand. He also had two more egg cartons. The first was empty. The other was filled with ten quail eggs—tiny white orbs with black speckles, about one-quarter the size of a hen’s. Lendrum presented a receipt from Waitrose, the British supermarket chain, and explained that he was carrying farm-fresh organic eggs back home, because they were hard to find in Johannesburg.

  The police ordered Lendrum to strip to his underwear.

  Lendrum unbuttoned his shirt and slipped out of it. He stood there, arms at his sides, a blank expression on his face.

  The agents stared.

  Ribbons of white surgical tape were wrapped around his abdomen. Tucked snugly beneath the tape were one green, one black, and one blue woolen sock. Plastic zip ties divided each sock into five segments, and inside each segment was an oval-shaped object. The police unwrapped the surgical tape, removed the socks, cut off the ties, and, one by one, extracted the contents. They laid fourteen eggs gently on a table.

  They were slightly smaller than ordinary hens’ eggs, ranging in hue from marbleized brown to dark red. One was pale, with chocolate speckles; another had a background of caramel, bruised with plum-colored blotches. Yet another, all brown archipelagoes and continental landmasses juxtaposed against bright red lakes, gulfs, and seas, resembled high-resolution telescopic images of the surface of Mars. None of the police had ever seen anything like them.

  “What kind of eggs are these?” an officer asked Lendrum.

  “They’re duck eggs,” he replied.

  “What were you planning to do with them?”

  “Well, actually,” he said, “I was taking them down to Zimbabwe, where my father lives.” He was going to play a trick on the old man, he explained, hard-boiling every egg but one, and then getting a good laugh when his unsuspecting father cracked them all open.

  “Why were you hiding them on your body?”

  He was suffering from spinal problems, he explained, and his physiotherapist had recommended that he carry raw eggs strapped to his abdomen. Wearing the fragile objects against his belly would force him to keep his stomach muscles taut, he said, and strengthen his lower back.

  The police officers exchanged incredulous looks.

  This one, they realized, was entirely out of their league.

  TWO THE INVESTIGATOR

  Andy McWilliam was in the rear garden of his home in Liverpool, playing with his two-year-old granddaughter in the late-afternoon sun, and trying to keep the toddler from running through the flower beds, when his cell phone went off in his kitchen. An officer of the Counter Terrorism Unit at Birmingham International Airport was on the line. He apologized for disturbing McWilliam on a bank holiday, but the unit was dealing with an unusual case, and a policewoman from Staffordshire, the neighboring county, had recommended that they contact him for guidance.

  McWilliam was a retired policeman who now served as a senior investigative support officer for the National Wildlife Crime Unit (NWCU), a twelve-person team created in 2006 and headquartered in Stirling, outside Edinburgh. The unit employed four former detectives with a comprehensive knowledge of wildlife legislation to travel across Great Britain, helping local police investigate a range of offenses—from the trading of endangered species to a
nimal cruelty. Unlike active-duty policemen, these support officers had no powers of arrest and couldn’t obtain search warrants. They were essentially consultants, providing close-at-hand expertise to law enforcement officers who lacked a background in wildlife law.

  Before joining the National Wildlife Crime Unit at its 2006 birth, McWilliam had spent thirty years on the police force in Merseyside, the county covering Liverpool and five metropolitan boroughs on both banks of the Mersey Estuary, which flows into the Irish Sea. In his last four years on the Merseyside force, McWilliam had specialized in wildlife crime, pursuing rhino-horn and ivory smugglers, tracking down dodgy taxidermists, and building cases against “badger baiters”—criminals who use dogs fitted with transmitters to corner the short-legged omnivores in their burrows six feet belowground, and then drag them outside to torture and kill them for sport. Now he was doing much the same thing in an advisory capacity, and his beat had expanded to cover half of England. At the moment, the officer was gathering evidence against a trader in endangered-animal skulls, as well as a man who illegally sold protected tortoises over the Internet, and a Chinese-medicine dealer who was clandestinely distributing plasters made from the ground bones of leopards.

  McWilliam’s particular area of expertise, however, was bird crime. A ferocious rugby player for an amateur police team until his mid-thirties, he had quit the sport after suffering a series of injuries, and, in an attempt to fill his leisure time, had taken up a pursuit that could not have been a greater departure from the world of blood bins and choke tackles: bird-watching. Since then he had spent many weekends ambling through a wetland reserve north of Liverpool, twelve square miles of marshes and fields that attracted tens of thousands of migrating pink geese, along with snipes, black-tailed godwits, dunlins, lapwings, redshanks, great crested grebes, ospreys, and dozens of other species that rotated in and out throughout the year.