Trafficking Diaries™ - What Traffickers Told Us, Recorded Undercover: Case Study 01

Trafficking Diaries™ – What Traffickers Told Us, Recorded Undercover

By Andrea Crosta, Founder and Executive Director, Earth League International (ELI)

Today I start this series of mini case studies called Trafficking Diaries™, to provide food for thought to government agencies, policymakers, academia, media and the public. Over the years, working with Earth League International, my teams and I have gone undercover to earn the trust of some of the world’s most significant wildlife traffickers and environmental criminals, including several top-tier organized crime figures, accumulating hundreds of hours of recorded conversations – audio and video – almost no one else gets access to.

What they reveal, again and again, is crime convergence: environmental crime and wildlife trafficking intertwined with drugs, money laundering and corruption. This kind of intelligence is rare and hard-won, and it’s often the only real way to understand how these networks operate, and how to stop them.

Every week or so, I’ll publish one real conversation, with a brief analysis of what it reveals.

Our hope is that governments and agencies invest more in long-term undercover operations, still the most effective way to understand how these networks operate and get what is needed to dismantle them.

Case Study 01: Rhino Horn, Ephedra and Money Laundering

Let’s have a look at how trafficking happens in Europe, drawing from ELI’s Operation OLD WORLD, which focused on the trafficking of illegal wildlife and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) products from China to Europe, and the convergence with other serious crimes.

The following extracts are drawn from recorded conversations between ELI undercover operatives (ELI UC) and Persons of Interest (POIs). Translations from Mandarin Chinese are ELI’s own.

POI Eu1: “The special Sino-EU train is amazing as it goes from China to Poland, and it takes one month to get here. This pipeline is perfect for illegal stuff, and the transport costs are higher than boat, but the logistics guys guarantee the safety and customs clearance to EU. The profit of this illegal stuff can be 9 times. Trust me, I get all stuff into EU by this pipeline.”

ELI UC: “Is it that easy?”

POI Eu1: “The train route we use now is very safe for banned stuff as our customs clearance guy in China will sort out all issues in China and Poland and then once cleared in Poland, they will be delivered to us by a shipping company (name redacted) from Poland to Holland. It’s a Chinese company in Guangzhou who has very good connection with China Railways.”

POI Eu1: “European authorities need documents when the TCM stuff is imported from China and it is very complicated. So for any banned stuff, we use the rail to send stuff to Europe. This pipeline is very safe… Also, the train is faster than cargo ships, like one or two months to get to Holland.”

ELI UC: “How do you distribute it in Europe?”

POI Eu1: “I just got them to send another 2 tons of TCM from China to here (Netherlands)… into container and then send by train to Europe… Then members of the network transport the goods driving a big truck to the destination, to Romania, France, Italy, Hungary, Belgium, Germany.”

POI Eu1: “Some of the products I brought here are risky and so the profit must be high. For example, Ephedra is a common TCM medicine but it’s illegal to import and sell here. Risk means more profit.”

POI Eu15: “We also have ‘An Gong Niu Huang Wan’ (安宫牛黄丸), but very very expensive. We have the ones from (redacted) in Beijing… It is 250 euros per pill”

POI Eu1 introduced us to another Chinese TCM trafficking network we called E2, which operates between Italy and the Republic of San Marino (a micro-state within Italy), through a company called (redacted).

According to POI Eu1, the E2 network is also involved in large money laundering schemes and shadow banking, and it has a solid collaboration with corrupt public officials. These money laundering schemes allegedly involve high-profile Asian officials and Swiss banks.

What This Conversation Teaches Us:

An unconventional route. The China–Europe rail freight line to Poland is a legitimate, high-volume logistics corridor. Trafficking networks are constantly looking for new, lower-risk smuggling routes hidden inside the legal trade. Here we have a route nobody was paying attention to. Undercover operations are often the only way to identify these new routes.
An unusual direction of the flow. Our attention tends to focus on illegal products moving into China. Here we see the opposite: TCM and wildlife products flowing out of China into Europe, to meet the demand of the affluent Chinese diaspora there (estimated at 1.6-1.7 million, though the real figure is probably much higher). This is an under-investigated phenomenon, hard to detect through conventional trade or customs analysis. Europe, and the U.S., are now destination countries for illegal wildlife products.
A variety of sophisticated products. The network can smuggle and distribute a prestige product like ‘An Gong Niu Huang Wan’ (musk and rhino horn, among its eleven ingredients), at 250 euros a pill, catering to the affluent end of the Chinese diaspora. They are also trafficking the herbal stimulant plant Ephedra, illegal across most of Europe and banned in competitive sport.
Crime convergence. This network is not just a wildlife trafficking group. The same people and infrastructure launder money through shadow banking, serving a wide range of clients. That’s an important element to understand crime convergence: once a network builds a solid trafficking and business pipeline, it becomes a service provider for whoever can pay, from the ‘Ndrangheta to politicians and tax evaders.