I’ve Made It My Life’s Mission To Hunt Down A Unique Kind Of Criminal. Here’s How I Catch Them.

I still remember the blood. The vultures. Most of all, I remember the stench.  

We had been riding on a bumpy dirt road for hours, my stomach in knots before the Jeep even left Nairobi, twisting more and more as we twisted deeper into the bush. 

We were looking for elephants. Kills, to be more precise. As we drove past wildebeest and impala, I thought I knew how I would react — how it would feel — but how can anyone know what will happen when they come face-to-face with death? 

We came upon a dry patch of savannah — dry except for the red pooling and painted across the tall grass, everywhere. And everywhere, spent shell casings fired from AK-47s. Standing over a family of elephants, or what was once a family, I felt helpless, angry, powerless.

It was 2010, the height of the ivory war, when poachers would open fire on anything with tusks. I had seen reports on CNN, read about it in The New York Times, and I knew the global market for ivory carvings and statues was causing destruction here. But knowing that intellectually, and seeing a baby elephant hacked to pieces in real life is something else. 

At the time, there were rumors that poached ivory was being sold to al Shabaab, the Somali extremists who pledged allegiance to al Qaeda. Word was that Shabaab smuggled and sold this “white gold” to overseas buyers, using the profits to fund attacks like the Westgate shopping mall assault that killed 71 in downtown Nairobi in 2013. And here we were, in Tsavo National Park, deep in Shabaab’s territory at a crime scene. 

The killers were so sure they wouldn’t be caught, they left their evidence strewn across the bush. And they were right — no one would hunt them. That’s because most people, including most authorities, don’t see environmental crime — which includes illegal logging, illegal fishing, gold and mining and many other linked crimes in addition to this kind of illegal wildlife trade — as real crime. What’s worse, they don’t realize organized criminal groups often fund a laundry list of other crimes, from narcotics to human trafficking, through their environmental crimes.