Victor Gordon’s cramped antiques shop was called “the most unusual store in Philadelphia,” and it more than lived up to its billing. It was a tomb for African elephants, with about 425 pieces of tusks carved to resemble tribesmen and totems, “one of the largest known caches of illegal elephant ivory in the United States,” court records said, worth about $1 million.
Gordon was a middleman in the grisly supply chain of African elephant ivory and rhinoceros horn who took advantage of a poorly guarded U.S. port. He was by no means a rarity.
For nearly a decade, Gordon orchestrated what prosecutors called one of the “most significant and egregious” violations of U.S. laws against trafficking elephant ivory. He paid smugglers to buy ivory from stockpiles in West Africa and sneak it through New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport in shipping crates weighing as much as a ton.
It was a low-risk operation. With only six U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service inspectors and four police agents to search millions of shipments that arrive at JFK’s massive cargo facility each year, there was little chance of being caught.
While the international response to poaching is focused on Africa and the demand for contraband in China and Vietnam, middlemen such as Gordon have been running extremely lucrative operations within U.S. borders.
They bring cargo in through poorly policed ports and take advantage of legal loopholes that exempt antiques and some hunting trophies from the ban on trading elephant ivory and rhino horn. When agents do manage to snare a wildlife smuggler, the courts are often lenient.
“Our nation hasn’t prioritized wildlife trafficking,” said David Hayes, vice chairman of an advisory panel for wildlife trafficking formed by President Barack Obama. A major part of the problem, Hayes said, “is the lack of inspections at our ports.”
Fewer than 330 Fish and Wildlife inspectors and agents patrol the largest U.S. ports, about the same number as 30 years ago, when the agency’s law enforcement branch was formed.
Since that time, international wildlife trafficking has grown from a small concern into a criminal colossus worth an estimated $20 billion per year, police and economists say — the fourth-largest global black market, behind the trades for drugs, guns and humans for sex.
African elephant populations have been reduced by more than half in the past 30 years. Nearly the entire black rhino population has disappeared since the middle of the 20th century.
The White House in February unveiled a national strategy to attack wildlife trafficking by increasing cooperation among a half-dozen or so federal agencies, toughening laws and enhancing enforcement. But nowhere does it specifically commit to increasing the thin ranks of inspectors and agents at the ports.
For every crate with illegal ivory, rhinoceros horn or some other banned product crafted from a threatened or endangered animal that is discovered, about 10 get by, police said.
“We don’t have enough people to do what we have to do,” said Paul Chapelle, special agent in charge of the Fish and Wildlife law enforcement office near JFK Airport.
The detection of the shipping crate that led federal agents to the immigrant smugglers who led them to Gordon in 2011 was a stroke of luck, essentially the discovery of a needle in a haystack made up of hundreds of thousands of crates.
Gordon admitted to his crime and begged for mercy at a federal court in Brooklyn. “I know I was wrong,” he wrote to a judge.
Gordon was sentenced in June to 2½ years behind bars.
