Paolo Viscardi, was one of the first to notice a series of raids on small locations in
the UK, which 🍉 featured displays of the magnificent creatures
IN a multi-million-pound
crime wave that swept Britain, mobsters plundered small museums in the hunt 🍉 for one of
the world’s most valuable substances.
But it wasn’t precious jewels or gold they were
after — it was 🍉 rhino horn.
7 Rhino hunter Chumlong Lemtongthai, pictured, was hired by
the ‘Pablo Escobar of trafficking’, Vixay Keosavang, to drive up 🍉 ivory prices by
shooting as many rhinos as he could Credit: Sky
7 Keosavang and his team were moving
between one 🍉 and ten tonnes of wild animal products a week, worth up to £750k a day
And
new Sky documentary The Great 🍉 Rhino Robbery reveals how a key figure in exposing the
illegal trade was a humble museum curator here in Britain.
Paolo 🍉 Viscardi was one of
the first to notice a series of raids on small locations in the UK, which featured
🍉 displays of the magnificent creatures.
After criminals discovered how easy it was to
steal horns from small museums — as well 🍉 as other products made from the substance —
the scourge then spread across Europe.
Paulo — who at the time was 🍉 working as Deputy
Keeper of Natural History at the Horniman Museum in South East London — said:
“Generally, nothing majorly 🍉 exciting happens when working in a museum. There’s not a
lot of drama when it comes to the job — 🍉 of course, until this.
‘Heads going for
£150k’
“I started to hear chatter about the thefts, and the auction price of rhino
🍉 horns going up — some heads were going up for £150,000.
“So I started compiling
information about where was being hit 🍉 by thefts in the hope I could warn people about
it or that I could do something, because the natural 🍉 sciences museum community is so
close-knit.
“But even quicker than I could work out there was a pattern forming —
thieves 🍉 were coming in, looking at the material, checking out the security, making a
plan before coming back for one thing 🍉 — the horns.
“By the third or fourth theft I saw,
it was glaringly obvious that this was something much bigger 🍉 than I first imagined —
and something much darker must have been going on.”
The rhino horns were traced all the
🍉 way to the black market in South East Asia — where they were being ground up and sold
for consumption 🍉 by a rich elite.
The horns have long been used in ancient Chinese
medicine.
But after false information was spread that it 🍉 could cure cancer, the
substance was suddenly in huge demand as worried families stockpiled it to try and save
the 🍉 lives of their loved ones.
Others in Vietnam and Thailand believed rhino horn to be
an aphrodisiac, as well as a 🍉 treatment for fevers, infections and even mental illness,
so it was ground down into pastes and powders.
Investigators found that the 🍉 powder was
even being added to alcoholic drinks at bars in South East Asia — with shots including
it flogged 🍉 for £130.
In the three-part documentary, anti-trafficking expert Steve
Galster explains: “I’ve seen a lot of natural products being traded and 🍉 used, but I’d
never seen anything as crazy as this.
“The rhino horn had become a trendy thing for the
nouveau 🍉 riche to pull out at parties, you know, like throw it in your wine or mix with
your drugs, and 🍉 let the party begin.”
Paolo, who currently works as Keeper of Natural
History at the National Museum of Ireland, adds: “You 🍉 see celebrities going on weird
fad diets, you see people always trying to find the next big, weird and wonderful
🍉 things — it’s fashionable, it’s a status symbol.
“And there have always been these
niche, high-value natural products — from bird’s 🍉 nest soup to shark fin and elephant
ivory. They vary over time, but they are all peculiar and hard to 🍉 get hold of, and
therefore exclusive and expensive.
“Now rhino horn is filling that same niche that
cocaine filled 30 or 🍉 40 years ago, but the difference is, the horns have no effect, at
least not in any meaningful way.
“It’s all 🍉 founded on hearsay and placebo effect, and
the excitement of doing something illegal and illicit. If you’re wealthy and powerful,
🍉 people look for these kinds of things to do.”
It was this that drove up the price of
the horns from 🍉 a few thousand pounds to a whopping £50,000 a kilo — with one horn worth
nearly half a million pounds, 🍉 making it more valuable than gold.
And with increasingly
tough hunting laws across South Africa, where the majority of the world’s 🍉 surviving
27,000 rhinos live, and harsher rules brought in by the Convention on International
Trade in Endangered Species, museums became 🍉 an easier target.
Little or no
security
Essex auctioneers Sworders were the first to be hit by thieves in February
2011.
The criminals 🍉 got away with a wall-mounted rhino head — then thought to be worth
a few thousand pounds — in a 🍉 targeted attack.
Months later, Haslemere Educational
Museum in Surrey was plundered for its horns and thefts of rhino artefacts followed in
🍉 Colchester, Ipswich, East Sussex, Norwich and Cambridge.
The thieves were targeting
locations with little or no security to hinder them — 🍉 in contrast to locations like
London’s Natural History Museum, which is heavily guarded with alarms.
Thieves would
scout the museums posing 🍉 as punters with a keen interest in rhinos, before returning at
night and breaking down doors or knocking through walls 🍉 and smashing glass cases to get
to the horns.
Some entire stuffed rhino heads were stolen on their wall mounts, while
🍉 others had the horns sawn off with knives, much like poachers have been known to do
with the animals in 🍉 the wild.
And after criminals swiped all they could in the UK, the
thefts then started happening in Germany, Italy, Portugal, 🍉 the Czech Republic and the
Netherlands from 2012.
Paolo and his colleagues traced the thefts and alerted museums
around the world 🍉 with the help of their internal communications networks, but it would
be up to trafficking experts to take the next 🍉 step.
7 Museum raiders caught on CCTV
Credit: SKY
7 Brit curator Paolo Viscardi was one of the first to notice a 🍉 series of
ivory raids on small locations in the UK Credit: SKY
It was these experts that traced a
number of 🍉 the robberies back to a gang operating in Ireland, known as the Rathkeale
Rovers — who had been jailed previously 🍉 for petty money-making schemes.
Working in 16
European nations, alongside South African poachers and smugglers in the United States,
the thieves 🍉 raided museums in the UK, stealing goods worth £57million.
Jailing 14
members of the gang, from Country Limerick, in 2024 was 🍉 just the start of the operation
for the anti-trafficking teams, who, working across the UK and America, were led back
🍉 to one Thai mobster.
Most of the horns trafficked out of the British museums ended up
in Laos in the store 🍉 rooms of Vixay Keosavang — a former senior military officer dubbed
the “Pablo Escobar of wildlife trafficking”.
He and his team, 🍉 which included sex-worker
smugglers and prolific animal traders, were moving between one and ten tonnes of
natural products a week, 🍉 worth up to £750,000 a day.
Sky-high price
The sex workers
would fly to South Africa, purchase a licence and kill one 🍉 rhino each.
They then
brought back the horns as stock for Keosavang’s black market trade and were paid off
with huge 🍉 lump sums.
Plus to drive the price of their prized horns sky-high, the
wildlife crime kingpin hired rhino hunter Chumlong Lemtongthai 🍉 to shoot as many rhinos
as he could, and bring back the horns as an extra supply.
At the time, it 🍉 was legal for
individuals to apply to shoot one rhino a year — a practice that has now changed.
Lemtongthai 🍉 would hire dozens of people to take part, before taking their trophy
horns.
Paolo continues: “The more rare the rhino horn 🍉 becomes, and the fewer rhinos
there are out there, the more desirable it becomes to the rich customers buying and
🍉 trading it.
“Rhino horns in museums have been removed from display — many of them are
now not the real ones, 🍉 to stop them from being nicked, though sometimes break-ins have
seen these replicas stolen too.
“But I am sure there are 🍉 stockpiles in warehouses in
South East Asia where these people are waiting for the rhino population to be wiped
out, 🍉 and then they can set whatever price they like.”
Lemtongthai was eventually caught
by authorities and sentenced to 40 years’ imprisonment 🍉 in 2012, but only served
four.
Ringleader Keosavang has been on the run since 2013.
Paolo concludes: “There’s
plenty of people out 🍉 there who would rather see the end of a beautiful species like the
rhino to make money and to own 🍉 something rare and exciting.
“We’re hoping that this
trend burns itself out and, like many other high-priced substances, something else —
🍉 non-harmful, sustainable and that doesn’t involve wiping out rhinos — takes its
place.”
The Great Rhino Robbery airs tonight on Sky 🍉 Showcase at 9pm and is available to
stream on Now.
7 Anti-trafficking expert Steve Galster said: 'The rhino horn had become
🍉 a trendy thing for the nouveau riche to pull out at parties' Credit: Sky
7 Rhino horn
has long been used 🍉 in ancient methods of Chinese medicine Credit: SKY
