NB: THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A TRANSCRIPTION UNIT RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT: BECAUSE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF MIS- HEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY, IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS ACCURACY. ........................................................................ PANORAMA "Animal UNDERWORLD" RECORDED FROM TRANSMISSION: BBC-1 DATE: 25:02:01 ........................................................................ TOM MANGOLD: This rare crocodile was smuggled into Britain. It's worth £100,000. It's part of a global racket in the trafficking of rare and endangered animals. ERNEST MAYER: Millions of dollars.. billions of dollars to be made in the wildlife trade. JAMES BURROUGHS: He will take it, and slide it into the sock. ROEL HOOGMOED: I have the money on my passenger seat. PAUL SULLIVAN: By Friday we would like 100. MANGOLD: Tonight Panorama goes behind the scenes of the £4 billion a year illegal trade in exotic creatures and reveals why the animal underworld just can't be stopped. Cameroon, West Africa, in the cool of the evening the hunters come out. The catch is small and vulnerable, the harmless creatures of the night, and the pickings are easy - frogs, chameleons - they don't flee or fight back. Trapped inside linen bags the reptiles are on the first leg of a journey that will end in a glass tank or cardboard box somewhere in the First World. Scarcity, gender, breeding habits or the effect on the delicate ecology of the forest are irrelevant. If it moves and has market value, it's taken. Dr STEVE GARTLAN Consultant, World Wide Fund for Nature The world is being impoverished. It's being chipped away, the death of a thousand cuts. What we're actually into now is the greatest extinction of historical time. MANGOLD: The traffic that begins here is the front end of what Interpol estimates to be a full billion pound a year global racket in protected wildlife, bigger than the world's arms smuggling rackets and second only in size to the illegal traffic in drugs. At dawn, Ernest, one of the village heads, brings in the night's takings. It's been a good haul and Ernest's British boss is delighted. Paul Sullivan, animal dealer, used to live in Devon. Had a bit of trouble with the Customs over VAT and left for West Africa to become a trafficker. PAUL SULLIVAN The trade has benefits, benefits for hundreds of people. I make a living, and lots of people make a living, from something which is a useless item to a person in a Third World Country. And it's not an item which is facing extinction. It's a common item. MANGOLD: Nevertheless, Sullivan has broken laws that protect reptiles from being poached and traded to extinction, although international agreements to protect these species carry little weight in countries like Cameroon where illicit animal dealing is a fact of life. SULLIVAN: Well I'll tell you want my friend will do, he will give you three times the price for the live snake than you can sell it for food. You say your price for food and he'll give you three times the price for the live one. Not a mark on, not a scratch on it. TOM MANGOLD Paul Sullivan's African operation based here in Limbe has some troubling links to the animal underworld. Last February he was sent to prison in California after pleading guilty to several charges of illegally trafficking endangered reptiles to the United states. San Francisco, location for a remarkable sting operation run by US Federal agents against a global network of animal traffickers including Sullivan. ERNEST MAYER Head of Special Operations US Fish and Wildlife Service We became aware several years ago that there was a very lucrative business in the smuggling of wildlife, reptiles and amphibians from Third World countries into Europe and into the United States and the only way to really address organised smuggling, criminal rings that were smuggling the animals in, was to set up an undercover business, a sting operation to catch them in the act. MANGOLD: Operation Chameleon involved starting up a fake reptile dealership whose job was to trap top members of the animal underworld. This is Rick Leach, a former undercover agent and still unidentifiable. It was he who led the investigation into Sullivan. Leach and his colleagues from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service posed as crooked reptile wholesalers and worked from this building. They called their business Pac Rim and filled these offices with thousands of reptiles. RICK LEACH Special Agent US Fish and Wildlife Service, 1972-2000 We began advertising, we began putting price lists out on a national basis. We advertised in national publication and generally in the trade it's through word of mouth. As we began importing from particular suppliers, word of us spread. MANGOLD: And Sullivan fell for it. He began offering these giant Goliath frogs, the biggest frogs in the world. They weigh up to 8lbs and their import is forbidden in America. Nevertheless there is a huge demand for this endangered species. LEACH: He told me how they could be imported. He described a scheme to me where they would be labelled as a different species, that he thought they could get through the US Fish and Wildlife Service inspectors, and that he would only include smaller specimens in the shipment. LEACH: [on telephone] Hello. Paul? SULLIVAN: Hello? MANGOLD: All the incriminating calls were recorded. In this one Sullivan offers to mislabel the species. SULLIVAN: [telephone] The problem with the Goliath frog is it's now forbidden in USA apparently. Which airport do you ship to? LEACH: San Francisco. SULLIVAN: I mean I can ship it, no problem. There is a sub species of the Goliath. I can ship it as that. LEACH: You could like fax me the real invoice later and it could be a different invoice with the shipment maybe. SULLIVAN: Yes, no, sure, sure. MANGOLD: And you did mislabel the frogs didn't you. PAUL SULLIVAN They asked me to describe the frogs and I described it as a bullfrog, simply as a bull....... MANGOLD: But it's not a bullfrog. SULLIVAN: It is a bullfrog, it's a big frog. MANGOLD: It's a Goliath frog. SULLIVAN: It's a bull.. it's a big frog. MANGOLD: You faked the invoices. SULLIVAN: I wrote 'bullfrog'. MANGOLD: Which is not true. SULLIVAN: I didn't sort of lie.. or did not like. They asked me to put bullfrog so I put bullfrog. [US Fish and Wildlife video] February 20th 1997: Two boxes of reptiles imported from Paul Sullivan in the Cameroon. MANGOLD: When the Goliath frogs arrived at Pac Rim, what was their condition? LEACH: Generally dead. [Video] That also contains dead frogs. These are small, Goliath frogs. LEACH: The way they were packed and concealed and smuggled in these shipments, the absorption of their own faeces through the skin. MANGOLD: So they poisoned themselves. LEACH: They poisoned themselves. [Video] These animals were packed in a cardboard box but everything in it was dead. MANGOLD: I'm told that the ten frogs that you sent, nine died. SULLIVAN: I don't know.. I wouldn't consider Fish and Wildlife experts at keeping Goliath frogs. MANGOLD: Perhaps you think they're lying when they say that? SULLIVAN: I don't know how they kept them. Possibly they died but when did they die? MANGOLD: They said they died in transit. SULLIVAN: In transit. So I.. I don't know. MANGOLD: The Federal Agents decided the time had come to close Sullivan down. Leach lured the Britain to California with a promise of more deals. Over a dinner that night, in the airport hotel restaurant, Sullivan offered to set up new illegal deals. The next morning, David Layman, as Leach called himself, went to Sullivan's room. It was all over. SULLIVAN: The man who said he was David Layman, I knew for 2 years, he said "I'm Special Agent..." MANGOLD: Rick Leach? SULLIVAN: "Rick Leach and don't move, we want to inspect everything in the room, just leave everything as it is.." And handcuffed behind my back. LEACH: I felt like mission accomplished. I mean we had successfully arrested Paul Sullivan. MANGOLD: Last January Sullivan pleaded guilty to numerous criminal charges and was sentenced to 70 days in prison and two years probation. Sullivan was important but there was one man above him the agents really wanted. They knew him as 'King Rat' and prayed he'd make contact. After a little while he finally took the bait. Anson Wong, a Malaysian, he ran the biggest global animal dealer and smuggling operation that's every been broken. Today he sits inside this Californian prison Operation Chameleon's most significant catch. Young, cultured, ruthless, Wong had worked his way to the top of the animal underworld and his name carried weight and respect. In Malaysia Wong owned this private zoo. A perfect front for illegal dealing and protected wildlife. Behind the scenes Wong dealt with creatures protected by an international convention called CITES, which lists in its two appendixes rare and endangered species threatened with extinction. Trade in these creatures is either forbidden or strictly regulated. ERNEST MAYER US Fish and Wildlife Services From an international standpoint it's hard to really quantify how big he really is because he works behind the scenes. His legal business stands for itself. He's one of the largest wildlife dealers I the world. The illegal business is a little harder obviously because he tries to conceal that from authorities. But we think he was probably one of the largest illegal smugglers in the world, particularly for reptiles and amphibians. MANGOLD: He stole the almost extinct Komodo dragons from their remaining islands in Indonesia, the world's largest lizard, value £20,000. He dealt in the critically endangered Chinese alligator worth at least £11,000 on the black market. The Madagascar Tree Boa, so many stolen it's now a snake vulnerable to extinction. It's yours for a mere £1500. The False Gavial, on a few are left in Borneo and Malaysia. Even zoos can't find them but Wong could. Market value £3,000. And the delicate ploughshare tortoise from Madagascar, less than 1000 left, street value £35,000. From his base in the Far East Anson Wong procured and shipped some of the world's rarest reptiles around the globe. Agents tracked Wong's contacts and the trail that began with Sullivan led to the United States and a loose network of associates including Tom Crutchfield and Mike Van Nostrand, both dealers from Florida, and James Burroughs, a courier based in California. Several of Wong's shipments came here to San Francisco carried by Burroughs, a 60s hippie who had never quite settled down. He showed us just how reptiles were smuggled into the US. Baby turtles were hidden deep inside athletic socks. JAMES BURROUGHS So, you have a turtle, you take masking tape, and he would tap on the head and makes them withdraw. At the point of withdrawal he would take tape and tape it around the shell and the leg holes front and back. Then he would take it and slide it into the sock. MANGOLD: Because it's about as big as your fist. BURROUGHS: It's about as big as your fist, yes. And you must remember that most of the animals that we did transfer were adolescent. They would be the strongest, the ones who could make the trip the easiest. They would be in their like this, then he would take and fold it back over again, twist it and either put a rubber band or pull it so far where you could twist it and pull it down again. MANGOLD: How many turtles could you carry like that? BURROUGHS: Well with a square metre you could carry as many.. I think the most I ever carried was a dozen. MANGOLD: Burroughs smuggled the creatures into San Francisco in a large suitcase he affectionately called 'big blue'. The animals were tucked inside clothing and he simply bluffed his way through Customs. At the other end Burroughs claims Wong had bribed a senior Customs official to let the rare animals, leave. BURROUGHS: The gentleman would meet me upon arrival at Penang Airport, wave his had to the other Customs officials that we're in the check in stand when you come in and they would go [looks the other way] and I would bring the suitcase in. MANGOLD: And this was how Burroughs carried what he thought was a baby crocodile but turned out to be one of the world's rarest animals, a Komodo Dragon. Within a short time it would have grown into a creature that slept wherever it wanted to. Who, in their right mind, would want to keep a Komodo Dragon that grows to 10ft at home, one which can kill and eat a wild pig, or take off your leg with one bite, who would want to keep that? ERNEST MAYER US Fish and Wildlife Service I can assure you that there are very few people anywhere that are going to keep a 10-15 foot long Komodo Dragon and try to keep it fed. I'm sure those animals end up dying. MANGOLD: But Burrough's Komodo was lucky. Seized by undercover agents it found a home at the local zoo where it's become the star of the reptile house and it's still growing. Anson Wong also worked through some of America's biggest dealers who were prepared to join his network. Undercover agents now targeted them, men like Tom Crutchfield from Florida. Wong invited Crutchfield to Malaysia where he showed his total disregard for CITES regulations. Did he offer you quite a lot of CITES 1 and CITES 2 creatures? CRUTCHFIELD: Yes, constantly. MANGOLD: Like what? Such as what? TOM CRUTCHFIELD Well all kinds of live pythons and boas and turtles and tortoises and various things. In fact he was so nice that sometimes when you'd tell him not to ship things he'd put them in the box anyway, whether you wanted them or not. MANGOLD: Both Anson Wong and Tom Crutchfield were regulars at this annual Orlando Florida reptile fair. On the surface everything is wholly legitimate but underneath valuable contacts are made now and deals made later. The live reptile trade in America has increased by 2000% in a mere 9 years. This fair alone turned over £3 million in just one weekend. Interest and demand are insatiable. Today a whole new generation wants to collect. Taste and fashions change, people with smaller homes prefer undemanding pets which need little attention. The price tags speak for themselves. £200 for a baby python and they sell like hot snakes. It's never too soon to introduce youngsters to youngsters and the novelty factor plays an important part. Forget temperamental cats and messy pups. Reptiles are us. MAN AT FAIR: Real easy to keep. Feed them once a week. They go to the bathroom once a week. All you've got to do is keep their water full, they're great. MANGOLD: Don't like creepy crawlies? Actually even snakes can inspire affection. 2nd MAN AT FAIR: I've liked snakes a long time. They're the perfect animal that as a pet you can take them out and you can hold them. They don't take up much room, so you can keep quite a few of them. MANGOLD: And somewhere, disguised as buyers or dealers, the special agents infiltrated the fair and observed. Word about Tom Crutchfield's activities reached them and he was arrested. Crutchfield eventually fled to Central America, fought extradition but was brought back, pleaded guilty and went to prison for 30 months plus community service and supervised release. He new claims he found the law confusing and impossible to follow. CRUTCHFIELD: I got out of the business because it's almost impossible to do business without breaking a law some place, whether you knowingly do it or not. MANGOLD: Another top dealer who got into trouble doing business with Anson Wong was Mike Van Nostrand who developed new techniques for smuggling reptiles into the United States. He was regarded as America's biggest reptile dealer. He dealt in Florida which, with its subtropical climate and huge air and sea ports, has always been the major centre for the reptile trade both legal and illegal. Just outside Miami is the barn of a business run by Van Nostrand which has been both. [US Fish and Wildlife Service video] MANGOLD: He tried to corner the world market in rare Indonesian frilled dragons, a protected reptile. But during operation 'Chameleon' the lizards were intercepted by special agents and carefully daubed with invisible pigmentation identifiable only under ultra- violate. MANGOLD: A secret mark? SPECIAL AGENT PICON: A secret mark, and when the animals when they arrive here in the US we were running the ultra-violet light to ascertain that in fact this is the type of method that.. they were the ones who are caught. MANGOLD: It took nearly three years to prepare the case against Van Nostrand. This video was taken at the time of the raid on his premises A somewhat disgruntled Van Nostrand, seen here on the left, has always protested that he was a small fish in a big pond. Nevertheless, this raid was to reveal some interesting new revelations about life in the animal underworld. JORGE PICON Special Agent US Fish and Wildlife Service At the time that he got busted, at the time that we took the operation down, he was the biggest importer.. or reptile importer, that I believe in the United States, if not the world. MANGOLD: Legal but what about the illegal side? PICON: Ah, absolutely, he was number one. His operations were anywhere between $4-7 million profit on a yearly basis. MANGOLD: Illegal or legal or both? PICON: That's the thing, we never knew what his legal income he had. MANGOLD: Van Nostrand is still running his business just outside Miami. VAN NOSTRAND: Let's get Fred put up in his cage here, let him heat up for a while and then we'll turn the sprinklers on him so he gets a good drink. MANGOLD: Why did you feel it necessary to smuggle animals in? MICHAEL VAN NOSTRAND It was purely for profit. And you know, something neat, something different, and for profit at that time. MANGOLD: So the profits can be big if you get away with it? VAN NOSTRAND: The profits, no, no, the profits are not big. The profits are not as big as everybody believes that to be. MANGOLD: Not true. The Van Nostrand case revealed the true scale of profits for the animal underworld. This diary, carried by one of his couriers shows the truth. This is the original diary from the courier. So what does that show? PICON: The trip of February 14th, '92 shows that he brought in close to 102 reptiles, anywhere from little turtles to beautiful rainbow snakes. MANGOLD: These are all protected. PICON: They're all protected. He bought, probably from the village, a piece for $6, and he sold that for $50 a piece to Van Nostrand. That is.. and then of course this would sell here in the US once you get them for $150-200 per animal. So just with one animal, that is a turnover of almost close to 2000% profit. MANGOLD: 2000% profit! PICON: 2000% profit. MANGOLD: The profit scales that this diary reveals are about the same as the profit scales in cocaine and heroin. PICON: There is no question. MANGOLD: So you make exactly the same amount of money, but if you get caught, you get a slap on the wrist in America, don't you. PICON: Yes. MANGOLD: Van Nostrand pleaded guilty to several smuggling charges and was sentenced to 8 months in prison and ordered to pay a quarter of a million dollars to a reptile conservation programme. But Operation Chameleon's major target remained Anson Wong. By now, working as an illegal reptile broker, he'd become involved in the equivalent of the reptilian great train robbery, the biggest ever theft of precious reptiles. This beautiful tortoise smuggled here to California by Wong is the jewel in the crown of the reptile world. Unfortunately, nature's generosity with this extraordinary shell has been part of the Ploughshare's undoing because it has been stolen and hunted to the point of extinction. This lady was part of a British-sponsored breeding programme which virtually collapsed when the animal underworld decided to steal 76 of them. There are less than a thousand of these creatures left, probably insufficient to sustain continuity of the species. The attempt to run a breeding programme in Madagascar to save the ploughshare collapsed when thieves simply cut through the wires of this compound and made off with most of the young tortoises worth one and half million pounds. ERNEST MAYER US Fish and Wildlife Service So when the ploughshare tortoises ended up being stolen from the facility in Madagascar we began to look at different wildlife dealers, their price lists throughout the world, and the European enforcement community was doing the same with a pretty good expectation that some of those animals, if not all of them, would end up on price lists, or end up through private contacts being available.. So, that's exactly what happened. MANGOLD: And the next thing is, he offers Pac Rim, your front organisation, he offered them a couple of ploughshares. Mayer: He did. MANGOLD: And you took them. MAYER: And we did, we bought them from him. MANGOLD: Wong gained access to about 37 of the stolen ploughshares. He sent two hidden in backpacks to buyers in Japan. He sold another two to Pac Rim in California, and then a handful eventually turned up in Holland and Belgium. But US Federal agents cannot operate in Europe. So, desperate to find the missing reptiles, the British sponsors of the ploughshare breeding programme turned to private investigators in Holland. And this man, Wil Luiyf, a former policeman and now wild life conservationist, he was asked privately to find the missing ploughshares. How did you get your first break on it? WIL LUIYF We used some people that are very well known in the branch of illegal trade in animals and within a few weeks they found people who were offering the animals for sale. MANGOLD: Luiyf's key contact was a former animal smuggler. So when he asked around he was soon offered a stolen ploughshare. He was told to wait at a petrol station with the money. ROEL HOOGMOED I have the money on my passenger seat and after 20-25 minutes there was someone at my car. MANGOLD: What, he'd knocked on the window? HOOGMOED: Yes, he knocked on the window. He said "Are you Roel?" I said "Yes". And he put a shoebox on my seat, he take the envelope and he went away. MANGOLD: There were two ploughshares in the box. Eventually more were found in Belgium and Wong's fingerprints were all over the dealing. How on earth did Anson Wong, way out in Malaysia, get to hear about that? LUIYF: It is a very small world and if some rare species are shown somewhere on earth and they know it within five, six days. MANGOLD: So how was Wong able to offer a couple of these tortoises to his contacts? LUIYF: We know that some of them were for sale at the Orlando reptile fair in Florida and I know Mr Wong also visited those fairs, so it's easy to get them. MANGOLD: So he doesn't physically have to possess the ploughshares, he just has to get on the telephone to somebody, establish that he can buy them for a certain price. LUIYF: I think as simple as you made reservation for your plane, they make reservations for their animals. Yes. MANGOLD: But slowly Federal agents in the United States were uncovering more and more of Wong's smuggled animals . He was running them to San Francisco and also to Arizona where he and accomplices had bribed a Federal Express employee to help smuggle the reptiles into the country. "Operation Chameleon" now timed a series of co-ordinated arrests. As the case against Anson Wong hardened, it became just a question of luring him to the US, using the world's oldest temptation. MAYER: We offered to bring him over, pay for his flight, take care of him, go to Acapulco with him. In other words a nice business trip where he could have some personal pleasures along with business. MANGOLD: Yes. We are talking very, very personal pleasures in Acapulco. MAYER: It's a very active city, yes. MANGOLD: Wong fell for the offer and was arrested as he stepped off the plane in Mexico. Today he sits in this Californian prison and eventually pleading guilty last month to serious indictments of trafficking in the most endangered species. He will be sentenced next month. He can expect up to five years in prison. Federal officers hope for the first real exemplary sentence. To date Operation Chameleon has caught 26 animal smugglers and traffickers from six countries. All have been successfully prosecuted. But even this huge operation, which continues to this day, has failed to do much more than set the traffic back a while. MAYER: I'd like to say we're wining it but I have my doubts. Coupled with the loss of habitat and the illegal smuggling of animals for profit and gain, there are many animal species that are going, that are not going to survive, they're going to go extinct, so I think from that standpoint we're losing MANGOLD: Proof of the continuing worldwide trade, dead tortoises by the sack load intercepted in Holland. With such huge profits the criminals can afford big losses during transportation. Badly packed, starved, dehydrated, frozen in holds the journeys are a nightmare. In Germany more evidence of the growing demand for illegal reptiles and evidence too of the lengths traffickers will go. This python arrived in a bizarre package. This is a simple pre-prepared package for a CD disk, isn't it? And the back of it says the contents are three disks. But when you opened this at Frankfurt what did you find? RALF SIMON: In this case we found some of these little pythons. It's a baby one and if you see the size.. MANGOLD: She's grown a little bit now, hasn't she? Ralf Simon: She's grown a little bit, yes, but they are quite agile and if you just see the size, and two of them, or three of them, have been in this package. So you see that? And sometimes it takes maybe days or even weeks. MANGOLD: How can they live for weeks inside a package like this? RALF SIMON Special Agent German Customs Investigations Service They can't. We have a mortality of about 80 or 90 per cent. MANGOLD: So Herr Simon, what's the story with this box here? SIMON: This is a typical box for smuggling poisoned arrow frogs or other amphibians. In this case we have seized more than 100 small poison arrow frogs, only in this, and this is only one box of some. MANGOLD: Now, there's one in there, isn't there? SIMON: Yes. MANGOLD: That's a poison arrow frog. What is the most you have ever seized in a box this size? SIMON: We just have a seizure of 650. MANGOLD: 650 of these frogs in just this amount of space? SIMON: Yes, in this amount of space and, as you can imagine, more than 200 were dead when they arrived in Germany. MANGOLD: Your best guess. What percentage do you not catch? SIMON: 90 per cent. MANGOLD: 90 per cent. SIMON: At least MANGOLD: And the trade continues in Britain too. At Heathrow UK customs do their best but detection is difficult. Only eight prosecutions for reptile smuggling in twelve years. Smuggled animals are often hidden deep inside crates of legal animals. Venomous reptiles can be dangerous at any time and detailed hand searches are not inviting, and only the real experts can tell the difference between the legal and the illegal. This is Chewy, a bad tempered Caiman and one of hundreds of reptiles smuggled illegally into Britain last year. She was discovered rotting in a pet shop and saved by a Rescue Centre in Newcastle. She is very frisky. HEATHCOTE: Oh yes, she is very, very strong. MANGOLD: She is very frisky. HEATHCOTE: A very dangerous animal. MANGOLD: Now someone is going to say that looks cruel. Is it cruel? HEATHCOTE: This is the only safe way of trying to handle her with a steel pole. MANGOLD: How dangerous is she? HEATHCOTE: Oh she's lethal. She's absolutely lethal. MANGOLD: What literally lethal? HEATHCOTE: Absolutely. MANGOLD: What happens if she bites your ankle or your leg? HEATHCOTE: She would quite easily kill an adult. She would certainly kill somebody my size. MANGOLD: Really? HEATHCOTE: Right, Stuart's just securing the head. Now what I'm doing is coming behind Stuart. Now, they've got very, very weak jaws to open their mouth. But very powerful ones to close the mouth. And what we're going to try and do.. MANGOLD: Is tape the mouth closed obviously. HEATHCOTE: That's right, get the mouth closed on this one Tom and once we've done that we can release her. We'll try and do it as quickly as we can so she's not stressed. MANGOLD: Right. So what was she doing in the pet shop? HEATHCOTE: Well in her case, she was being held illegally. Good girl, it's okay, settle down sweetheart, settle down, settle down. MANGOLD: Chewy is now worth over £100,000. But even though she's been rescued she can't be returned to the wild because she would probably die or, at the very least, she would infect other wildlife with her acquired Western bacteria. So now she's off to a German zoo for a breeding programme. In a Bournemouth pet shop a killer cobra. It's the demand for unsuitable pets that helps fuel the illegal trafficking, and that demand is still growing, despite the risks involved in keeping these animals. Sometimes the collector's desire for reptile novelty fashions can backfire. This is an iguana called Dave. As he grew up he dared to behave like an animal. IAN BURDELL: He came here because he was very naughty towards his owners. MANGOLD: What did he do? IAN BURDELL Basically he smashed through the glass of his tank and attacked his owner's girlfriend and then - ah, ah, watch your fingers - he attacked his owner's girlfriend and then after doing that twice he eventually ended up biting his owner in the throat. MANGOLD: That's nice. BURDELL: Took him right across here. MANGOLD: Really? BURDELL: And that was it. Then the girlfriend said, 'finished, it's got to go'. MANGOLD: And now a new generation of collectors is fuelling even further demand like this end user - with his shed full of water dragons, half a dozen pythons, plus the bull snake he keeps in his bedroom. JASON MILLER: It's like a living picture, it's like being there. And every time you look at it, it's something different. MANGOLD: This is the market that feeds the whole chain, collectors aren't criminals but the criminals understand them better than they know themselves. Where would you stop? JASON MILLER I don't think I'd probably ever stop. I think I'll keep collecting for quite some time and it will stop when I finish collecting all the animals I can really. MANGOLD: Yes, but at what point are you going to say that's enough? MILLER: When there's no more animals left to collect really. MANGOLD: Back in Cameroon, for Paul Sullivan, another day, another deal, another dollar. So realistically, could the trade empty the jungles and forests of animals? With all that free loot on his doorstep Sullivan is convinced the animals will never run out. SULLIVAN: Well this does not happened in Cameroon. MANGOLD: How do you know? PAUL SULLIVAN Because the animals are still in the bush and no one has been shouting to the exporter coming back 'we can't find the animals.' MANGOLD: But that's simply not true. Sullivan's own man, who snatches the reptiles for him, tells a different story. ERNIE: We find it now more difficult because we have too much caught the animals here in the forest. MANGOLD: You have caught so many that you have to go further into the forest. ERNIE: Yes, normally before we get them, before we see the other animals. And we normally get them in night, not in the daylight. MANGOLD: But what will happen when there are no more animals? ERNIE: Well when there is no more animals, we will look for another forest, look for it. MANGOLD: You will take the animals from another forest? ERNIE: Yes. SULLIVAN: [Negotiating with villagers] Today is Sunday. So by Friday we would like 100 please. MANGOLD: Business has never been better for the man who sees himself as a local benefactor. SULLIVAN: I can prove that in our circumstances here in Cameroon that these animals that are exported are common animals which are reproducing and it's a sustainable business. Leaf frogs lay thousands of eggs, chameleons lay hundreds of eggs, and the forest is vast and also there is, you know.. MANGOLD: You began your answer by saying "I can prove" but you can't 'prove', you 'suppose'. SULLIVAN: I can show logical.. I can show a logical process by taking people out. MANGOLD: I don't want to play the semantics game but you can't prove it, can you? SULLIVAN: I can't prove it. ERNEST MAYER US Fish and Wildlife Service They actually increase the demand for the animals, whether it be Anson Wong or whether it be Sullivan, as his crews are going in and taking these illegal animals out of the wild you can be assured there are other smugglers doing the same thing. SULLIVAN: [With village boys] I've got this lizard here boys, look. I don't know if you've seen this one before but it's very harmless. Alright? And I just got this from the village a little bit farther down. I think you call it monitor lizard but it's a skink, shiny lizard, black with red sides. I need them plenty. I need a lot of these. Dr STEVE GARTLAND Consultant, World Wide Fund for Nature We have taken the timber, we have taken the ivory, we have taken the ebony, we have taken the oil palm. There is virtually nothing left. What is left? The frogs, the toads, the small mammals. We are now cleaning them out, and when we've cleaned them out we will go and turn out the lights. SULLIVAN: But the most important thing I will be checking the chameleons, checking their legs, checking that you have not been pulling them off. So be very careful because the animal is only of value when it's nice condition. MANGOLD: Today 71 reptile species are on the verge of extinction. The animal underworld will play its part just as long as supplies last. SULLIVAN: [With village boys] Ok chaps, so good hunting then and do your best and we'll see you in the morning, yeah? ________ www.bbc.co.uk/panorama You can comment on the issues raised in tonight's programme by visiting our website. Next week, following Peter Mandelson's forced resignation, Panorama investigates the Hinduja brothers' links with British politicians. CREDITS Reporter Tom Mangold Film Camera Ian Perry Dubbing Mixer John Rogerson Music Elizabeth Parker Graphic Design Kaye Huddy Julie Tritton Film Research Eamonn Walsh Production Team Leanne Ward Jessica Kenny Charlotte Simmonds Amanda Vaughan-Barratt Production Manager Yolanda Ayres Unit Manager Maria Ellis Film Editors Bob Hayward Bernard Lyall Researcher Sarah Mole Producer Martin Wilson Deputy Editors Clive Edwards Karen O'Connor Editor Mike Robinson 15 ______________________________________________________________________________________________________ Transcribed by 1-Stop Express Services, London W2 1JG Tel: 0207 724 7953 E-mail 1-stop@msn.com