Secret agents enter the battle against wildlife smugglers

Jonathan Franklin

Mark Davis loves to pretend he is a criminal. During a 30-year career working undercover for the FBI as a special agent, Davis posed as a cocaine smuggler, negotiated million-dollar deals with money launderers and showed up at a criminal rendezvous with $200 000 in cash. Davis retired from the FBI in 2016 to work another beat. Today, he runs undercover assignments to help arrest rhino horn smugglers, jaguar skin dealers and spider monkey brokers.

Davis specializes in gathering evidence for international law enforcement agencies, working to take down smugglers profiting from the illegal trade in wildlife and endangered species. In Bolivia, he secretly filmed meetings with jaguar traffickers and, in China, he negotiated the sale price for shark fin. In a McDonald’s parking lot in Chula Vista, California, near the border with Tijuana, Davis surveilled the scene as a fellow informant set up a faux deal to sell a quarter of a million dollars worth of organs from the totoaba, an endangered Mexican fish so valuable that traffickers call it “The Cocaine of the Sea.”

As director of intelligence for Earth League International (ELI), a Los Angeles-based non-governmental organization, Davis and his colleagues work to disrupt smuggling networks that every year move $23 billion worth of wildlife products around the world. Since he left the FBI nine years ago, Davis has witnessed wildlife trafficking migrate from an oddball hobby into a global market. In February, a campaign coordinated by Interpol and known as “Operation Thunder” included the seizure of 12 427 birds, 5 877 turtles, dozens of monkeys and several zoos worth of exotic animals, all across the globe. Most days, however, the wildlife traffickers don’t get caught. So many exotic fish, plants and animals are bought and sold online that the UN ranks this as the planet’s fourth-most lucrative smuggling market - after drugs, weapons and counterfeiting.

As profits have soared, this illegal business has garnered the attention of organized criminal groups, ranging from Chinese seafood smugglers to Mexican fentanyl producers. “It is sharks, cocaine, humans, sex trafficking, whatever,” Davis says. “In South America a year ago, they were hot and heavy with shark finning, but now they made the pivot and [the] guy offers rhino horn. We are like: What the hell? Where do you get it?”

Investigators are increasingly working with task forces probing fentanyl traffickers and human smugglers. The front lines of the fight against wildlife traffickers include former US Secret Service technical supervisors, ex-Drug Enforcement Agency undercover agents, veteran intelligence officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as Fish and Wildlife Service special agents. They bring decades of experience on how to best infiltrate, disrupt and dismantle wildlife smuggling cartels.

ELI founder Andrea Crosta describes his organization as “an intelligence agency for Earth.”

In recent years, investigations have ramped up. Despite his disdain for federal funds being spent on biodiversity protection programs, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order during his first presidential term acknowledging the link between organized crime and wildlife crime. Early in his second term, Trump signed a barrage of executive orders targeting cross-border smuggling syndicates, including Tren de Aragua, La Nueva Familia Michoacana and Sinaloa Cartel. Thousands of troops deployed along both sides of the US-Mexico border to fight drug traffickers also are disrupting the illegal wildlife trade.

“We see an overlap with the same gangs trafficking cocaine, parrots and people,” Crosta says. “This is high-level crime, it isn’t an environmental problem. As long as you consider it just a wildlife problem? A biodiversity problem? That is not working. You need a whole new approach.”

For centuries, capturing, transporting and selling rare animals provided huge profits. But beginning in the early 1990s, animal trafficking marketplaces opened to a wider array of consumers with the creation of online auction sites. Andrey Guidera, a retired Fish and Wildlife Service special agent, remembers his first case in this new era of global connectivity. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to a rush to capitalize on unusual but perhaps valuable items, like the barrels of whale teeth discovered stashed away along the docks of Odessa. Dock workers who stumbled upon the long abandoned teeth suddenly realized they could sell the teeth to collectors, according to Guidera, who tracked the illegal shipment of 548 teeth from Odessa to a buyer on Nantucket in 2005. The investigation led to convictions, and for Guidera, it was a sign of a new reality: Wildlife trafficking was open to everyone.

Much of the illegal wildlife trade happens online. An investigation by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) studying online ads between 2018 and 2024 uncovered 24 million illegal wildlife listings. During the 2020 Covid lockdowns, online commerce was turbocharged as time and money spent online soared, creating larger markets for wild animals, plants and reptiles.

“You just go into these groups, even those that aren’t closed. You post a question like ‘I need a howler monkey’ and you will get replies,” says Alex Olivera, senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity. “Everybody says it’s legal and that they have the registration [papers]. But what you find out, when you ask, it isn’t.”

Last year, Olivera says spider monkeys were in. The boom in the spider monkey market - with prices hitting $12,000 per monkey in the Dallas area - was juiced by a slew of influencers on Instagram and TikTok who filmed spider monkeys with mini-Converse sneakers and photographed them posing with Chanel handbags. The monkeys went viral. Demand outran supply and prices soared.

Smugglers could buy each spider monkey in Central America or Mexico for less than $300 apiece and this huge profit margin - plus the relative ease of smuggling the monkeys across the border - attracted organized crime groups. Rather than move them in massive shipments, the cartels broke the cargo into smaller loads. US Border Patrol agents kept catching drivers last year with beer coolers packed with four spider monkeys or a migrant hauling a backpack filled with six malnourished monkeys.

Selling spider monkeys is legal in Texas as long as the animal has paperwork showing it’s captive-bred - not ripped from the wild - but forgers often invent paperwork. Texas has a robust legal spider monkey trade, making it easy for the smuggled monkeys to be folded into this larger market.

In 2024, spider monkey smuggling surged so much that zoos in border towns like Brownsville, Texas, were swamped with confiscated monkeys. The Gladys Porter Zoo in Brownsville hired extra staff and purchased incubators. “These animals may look cute and cuddly [but] the consequences of acquiring them as pets have far-reaching negative effects,” says Pat Burchfield, the zoo’s executive director. “The babies are traumatized by the loss of their mothers. While they can be hand-raised, they can no longer be safely returned to their native habitats.”

Organized crime has changed the trade, investigators say. In Northern Mexico, a Chinese crime group known as the Dragon Cartel provides chemicals to make fentanyl to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel in exchange for the right to traffic the highly valuable totoaba - a dinner plate delicacy in China.

“You don’t just wake up one day and decide to traffic in wildlife,” says Shannon Jayroe, a former supervisor at the US Secret Service who is now the special agent in charge of law enforcement training for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. “You have progressed to that point and discovered that there is money to be made in conjunction with the fentanyl or marijuana or whatever else you may (already) be moving across the border.”

In late 2023, the Department of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) launched a wildlife and environmental crimes unit. The office received a $7 million budget and a 14-person staff. HSI's extensive investigative capacity are often called upon by agencies, including the Fish and Wildlife Service, as they jointly organize complex sting operations and surveillance across continents. “We are trying to bring everyone together at the table to address this,” says Keith McKinney, a 35-year veteran who was placed in charge of the new unit. “If we’ve learned nothing else from the drug war, we know we’re not going to be able to just arrest our way out of this.”

McKinney is often asked by his superiors why the largest investigative agency in the US ought to be worried about the illegal wildlife trade. “They’ll be like: Look, we had 80,000 fentanyl overdoses in the United States last year,” he says. “How can I justify committing resources to do this instead of battling these transnational organized crime groups that are distributing opioids? And the answer is: It’s the same ones that are bringing drugs into our country, that are trafficking in human beings, that are laundering proceeds.”

Wildlife trafficking also is used to test newly established clandestine smuggling routes, says Gloria Freund, who recently retired from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. If the wildlife transactions are successful, the criminals then add weapons, drugs, cigarettes and other illicit goods using the same routes and the same brokers, she says.

In September, HSI hosted its first Environmental Crimes Summit in Washington, drawing 150 attendees. After years of remote collaboration, agents from around the world met to compare case notes. Confidential informants met federal investigators to discuss investigations, ranging from illegal gold mafias in the Colombian Amazon to profitable rackets smuggling baby eels from Spain to Asia.

“Part of our strategy is working with foreign countries to disrupt and dismantle trafficking organisations,” says Phil Alegranti of the International Operations Unit at the Fish and Wildlife Service, citing collaboration with Colombian National police units. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a US prosecution or a foreign prosecution, or sanctions, or seizing assets as long as we can facilitate an investigation.”

Jayroe, the former US Secret Service special agent, spent years planning the takedowns of bank robbers, carjackers and kidnappers as a member of the FBI’s Violent Crimes and Fugitive Task Force in Miami. His proficiency in concealing surveillance cameras in an office thermostat or wiring agents with glasses capable of secretly recording video are now focused on convicting wildlife traffickers. But he says the best intelligence is human. “More valuable than an undercover is a co-operator. It would take 10 years for an undercover to get the kind of contacts, knowledge and trust that one co-operating defendant can get.”

Given the difficulties of flipping insiders to leak information from inside trafficking groups, infiltrating smuggling gangs is often the only option. These assignments are extremely dangerous, and Crosta’s team at ELI prepare for months. “We become friends with them, go to their wedding and family events,” says Crosta, describing how ELI, a dozen-person NGO, infiltrates syndicates.

“It is easy to go after the poachers,” says Chiara Talerico, a senior crime analyst for ELI. “To stop the networks, we have to do intelligence-led operations. Not just arrests, raids or seizures.”

The undercover investigations run by ELI often last three or four years. Investigators from the group typically spend months laboriously reviewing telephone records, tracking international bank transfers and mapping the multinational routes used to evade detection during the smuggling of high-value wildlife.

For Crosta, the key is to stay under the radar. “The best way for us is that they don’t see us, don’t know who we are,” he says. “When they get hit, they have no idea why they got hit. That’s intelligence.”

Despite overwhelming evidence of massive wildlife trafficking, penalties for wildlife smuggling crimes are often just a misdemeanor in the US and in many countries. After a seven-year investigation, Moazu Kromah was arrested in Kampala, Uganda, in 2022 for his role in organizing a 10-ton shipment of illegal ivory. Despite evidence of a criminal conspiracy that likely led to the deaths of hundreds of wild elephants, Kromah received a sentence of just five years. Later in 2022, a band of US smugglers was convicted of shipping 8 738 protected animals, including iguanas and pythons, to Asia. The leader, who ran an operation that moved $5.3 million worth of illegal wildlife, was sentenced to jail for 12 months. He was fined just $20 000.

The preeminent wildlife trafficking law used by US prosecutors, passed in 1900 and known as the Lacey Act, often caps prison sentences at one year.

“Nature crimes are so high-reward and low-risk, we are finding other crime groups are turning towards nature crimes,” says Sarah Ferguson, policy director at TRAFFIC, a London-based non-governmental organisation fighting illegal wildlife trade. “It used to be that drugs would be hidden within timber, but they are realizing: Why bother with the drugs?” she says.

Prosecution of animal smugglers is further hampered by the dominance of Chinese traffickers and the difficulty posed for law enforcement teams attempting to infiltrate their tightly knit organizations. Operating in the shadow of the central party’s infrastructure investment project known as the Belt and Road Initiative, Chinese business owners and entrepreneurs now live and work in previously inaccessible regions - notable biodiversity hotspots. New roads, bridges and international shipping routes provide new opportunities for trafficking.

But slowing the traffic of illegal wildlife has become a higher priority for Chinese authorities. Between 2009 and 2021, Chinese officials made 750 seizures of illegal wildlife, including pangolin, shark fin and ivory, far more than any other nation. In 2022, a court in Guangzhou sentenced a pair of ivory traffickers to life in prison. But demand for Traditional Chinese Medicine remains beyond the control of even the Chinese Communist Party as local consumers continue to scoop up rhino horn powder (to help alleviate hangovers), buy jaguar teeth (as good luck totems), and choose shark fin soup off the menu when celebrating a special occasion.

Some intelligence professionals say governments worldwide are now taking a broader view regarding the costs of wildlife trafficking, and how it affects humans.

“The loss of biodiversity, loss of fisheries, loss of economic opportunities, these are all basic elements of stability and governance. Everyone cares about this,” says Freund, who worked at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “A host country that may not talk about internal security concerns like terrorism or rising local extremism will talk with us about problems like illicit fishing, as it relates to their viability and stability – giving people enough to eat, to feed their families.”