Ep 46: Julian Rademeyer - Killing for Profit, investigative journalism, and organized crime.

The Global Conservation Corps presents The Rhino Man Podcast. I'm John Jerko, your host, and one of the directors of Rhino Man the Movie. This podcast series is a way for me to interview top conservationists on the topics of rhinos, the poaching crisis, the importance of rangers, and community engagement. All is a way to create awareness around these issues and to promote the coming release of our documentary film. In this episode, I'm talking with Julian Rademire. Julian is the director for East and Southern Africa for the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime. Prior to joining the organization, he was a project leader at Traffic, the International Wildlife Trade Monitoring Network. He is a former investigative journalist and is best-selling book, Killing for Profit, exposing the illegal Rhino horn trade, was shortlisted for the Alan Payton Award. His work on illegal wildlife trade and organized crime has been featured on Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN, Sky News, and in the Guardian, New York Times, Economists, National Geographic, and many more. In this conversation, we talk about Julian's current work for the Global Initiative. We dig into his youth and path to becoming an investigative journalist. We dive into his obsession with organized crime and how he ended up focusing on the Rhino poaching crisis. We go into his process and the journey of writing his book and he gives an eloquent summary of his recent report, Landscape of Fear, Crime, Corruption, and Murder in Greater Cruder. Julian is full of stories, passion, and deeply researched information. It was an honor to spend a little time scratching the surface of his knowledge. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Julian Rademire. Alright Julian, welcome to the Rhino man podcast, it's a real honor to have you on here. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, I feel like your name has come up so many times in conversations over the years as I've been working on this project. And I've probably read quite a few of your articles before it just kept seeing your name over and over again. So it just feels like you're such a legend in the space and you've done so much work and research. I'm really excited to dive into a bit about your book, Killing for Profit, and especially your the new report you did for an act as we get going. But maybe to start, could you give us, what do you tell someone if you're at a party? What do you do right now and what's your role in some of the organizations you're working? And yeah, what's your overall day to day look like? I did joke with some prosecutors I was talking with the other day that I don't get invited to parties anymore because I talk about organized crime and it's a bit of a downer. But yeah, these days I say silly things like I work on organized crime, where I work on kidnappings and assassinations, which itself sounds a bit scary. But basically I work for an organization called the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime and I head up our work in East and Southern Africa and that covers an array of organized crime subjects, work around organized crime, policy, work, research, work, and then looking at various illicit markets. So from the legal wildlife trade, which is my sort of post-journalistic area of focus and abiding passion for many years now to the growing numbers of assassinations in South Africa in particular, the illegal gold trade in many neighboring countries in Southern Africa and East Africa, the heroin trade and drugs trade, some of that linking Africa to countries like Afghanistan and Iran and the Americas. So it's a wide range of areas that we focus on. What was the Global Initiative originally founded for you know much of the history or you know how it came about? So the Global Initiative was set up actually 10 years ago this year, formerly a founder. I actually went to one of the founding meetings back then when it was formally launched at the United Nations in New York and essentially the underlying core of this is that there was the people who founded it, some of whom it worked for the United Nations or worked for the UN organized crime division, others who were in fields of law enforcement and academia felt that we needed something to change, we needed a new approach, we need to look at organized crime in different ways and we needed to understand organized crime better. In many cases there was sort of reactive government approaches, policy approaches which were ill informed or could not be properly informed by the available statistics. So the idea was to try and create something back then they called it network to counter networks, bring together expertise from a ground to globe, link people together across civil society law enforcement, bring new research tools, new innovative approaches to gathering data on fence and site pricing and drug markets. I would argue we probably have some of the most accurate drug pricing data in East and Southern Africa as a result of those sort of methods and then work with civil society and governments to try and come up with new approaches. Yeah, I mean I think I've realized in the last probably since six months or so since I've been working on this podcast and interviewing folks connecting with organizations like United for Wildlife and some of their partners that especially with rhino poaching for a long time, I think that part of it seemed to be left out and there's been a lot of efforts to bring people together and look at this more as transnational organized crime as a way to really, you know, figure out how to stop it because just catching a poacher or a kingpin doesn't really seem to do the job on its own. Yeah, I mean it's been a long difficult battle at 10 years ago it was seen as an environmental issue. I think to some degree today it's still seen as an environmental issue where you have instance of pot environmental affairs in South Africa playing very much lead role in trying to coordinate activities related to this. I think the police are playing more and more of a role there. And I think steadily there has been a growing sort of realization of the transnational links. I mean that's what I tried to set out looking at when I worked on the book back in 2010-2011 to look at this as an organized crime issue because the, you know, much of the reporting at the time was quite standardized. Ryan had been poached somewhere, quick interview as a farmer, quick interview as South African national parks officials or parks officials in Zimbabwe or environmental people, but nothing really about where the horn was going or what was the demand for why were people prepared to kill and die for a commodity like this. And I tapped it to other work that I've been doing on organized crime, which is pretty much late to me working on what was crime now for nearly a decade, more than a decade. Yeah. I mean, I'd love to get into the book some, but what if we kind of take it back to the beginning, you know, I'd love to know where you grew up, what kind of inspired you maybe early on to go into journalism or to focus on organized crime and we can kind of work our way to the conservation side and rhino poaching. But yeah, where did this all start? Yeah, I kind of blame my parents a bit for this, giving me too many detective novels and Sherlock Holmes and stuff to read when I was a kid, which gave me sort of the biting interest in organized crime and crime more generally. But I grew up in Pretoria, my dad was a teacher, my mom as well. They were both very artistic. He spoke multiple languages, many of them, dead languages that I won't speak anymore. I mean, I could read and write hieroglyphics and ancient Greek, you could read and write Quranic Arabic, which was always fun to hear and speak to, people who speak ordinary Arabic. And he told stories and he was very good at telling stories. We didn't have a television, so the sort of evening thing was, you know, music and he pull out slides from various travels that he'd done or was national geographics and that kind of thing. And I grew up in the sort of storytelling household. And I think from when I was quite young in high school, from my early teens, I wanted to be a journalist. A critical moment in South Africa where the country was moving from apartheid into a new democracy. You know, there was a lot going on. There was a low level civil war for one of a better description going on in many communities in South Africa, particularly rural provinces like Quasil and Natal, parts of Johannesburg and on the East Rand of Johannesburg, enormous levels of violence, political leaders being released. It was an incredibly turbulent time where anything could happen. And you felt as if you were living through history. I think in many ways I felt then as if I was living through history and there's been no sort of comparable moment. Certainly it's in South Africa. I mean, there've been other things that have happened as historical sort of moments where you remember where you were, like 9/11. But this was something that consumed me. So straight out of high school, I tried to get a couple of jobs and newspapers and quite pain. I'd eventually knocked on the door of a reporter whose work I admired who had an office behind a bar in a sports club in Pretoria. And I persuaded him to give me a job. I think he paid me a hundred bucks a month to pack shelves and then occasionally he'd take me after them when he reported in stories. And through that I got a freelance gig with a couple of people, ended up writing some stuff for a waiter's news agency, some of that about the trial of former members of apartheid era, police death squads in South Africa, so the trial of Eugene DeCocque was a commander of that unit and various, and then the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which exposed many of the horrors of the apartheid years and the abuses that have been committed and moved around from there, worked in many parts of the country, worked for a variety of publications here and internationally. Yeah, quite a journey for sure. And when did you make that connection of your love of kind of being a detective and the journalism side? I mean, is that pretty early on that then I guess the more investigative part of it in the research? I was like digging around, I loved research, I was quite happy to get in some of the library and pause for a box and dig up stuff, we don't speak to people. I mean in high school, myself and a couple of my friends there, we set up a current affairs little newsletter, which we brought up with the help of a very long-suffering English teachers and our publisher and I think he had the foresight to see if this is something you really care about. We had the ability to write sort of real news about real things that were happening in South Africa. Then it sort of grew from there, I started off like many reporters in the sort of mid-90s around that time in the late 80s, mid-90s covering courts and that's where you learned accuracy, if you got it wrong, chances of being sued were pretty high, chances of being fired by your boss was pretty high and then you moved on to crime reporting, politics and various other things and then finally into investigation. So there was sort of career path that was sketched out and I spent many years covering courts and covering crime and then moved on to other things and some investigations. And was there ever anything that would have led you into the conservation worlds? I think I read in the introduction of your book, this attack on a farmer that kind of sparked that journey into this world, but did you have any background? Did you make any visits to protected areas or Kruger National Park when you were young? I don't know if there was much of a connection to the wildlife side for you at all growing up. I mean, not in that sense. We didn't actually wait enough, we didn't go to Kruger much when I was a kid. But my mother was very keen animal lover, we had animals around the house. She would rescue injured birds, raise them, rehabilitate them, that kind of thing. But I had more of an affinity for sort of the chaos of politics and what was going on in the country and I wasn't a particularly outdoorsy kind of person then. Now I love hiking and going on into the bush and so on back then, not so much. I wanted to be in the kind of at the forefront of what was going on in the country. So as only many, many years later where I kind of hit saturation point writing about corruption stories and they were just so many and they still are so many and I'm not diminishing their importance at all. But I was trying to find something just a bit different and I came across a story of a sci-fi game farmer who had been detained in some barbed wire, apparently had been smuggling weapons from South Africa across the border into Zimbabwe and then supplying them to poaching gangs there. Gangs that were poaching Zebra at the time, and they were called Zebra gangs, and that had then morphed into poaching of rhinos. And Zimbabwe at that stage, South Africa was having some poaching, I wasn't really aware of it and the numbers to me didn't seem that high because I just didn't really understand the issue. But Zimbabwe was getting particularly hammered 2006, 2007, 2008 before critical mass sort of hit South Africa. And here you had this African-Sy-African farmer or hunter who seemed to be running with syndicates and Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe at the time was in turmoil, there were land seizures, farms that were being taken over, people were fleeing the country in droves. And there were a lot of quite inscroupular Cy-African hunters and others who took advantage of that chaos to hunt illegally in national parks, to get involved in sort of poaching networks like this. The rifle had been seized there, I managed to get the serial numbers, find out where that weapon came from, and to my astonishment that weapon traced back to a farm attack, an attack on an elderly farmer, his wife, on a farm, not far from where this farmer hunter lived. And they'd been terrorised for several hours, various weapons had been stolen. And one of the rifles that turned up in Zimbabwe was one of theirs. Here it was in the hands of another Afrikaner who was virtually a neighbour. In fact, when they fled the farm, basically became a neighbour and they lived a couple of blocks away from him. So that story fascinating is trade in weapons across the border, the skull diggerie that was involved and the sort of intrigue. And I wanted to then sort of try and understand better who were the poaching gang. Where was the Rhino horn going? And you know, particularly at that point, very much also focus on Zimbabwe and what was going on in Zimbabwe, in the southern conservancies, the Lofort Rhino Trust in Zimbabwe. The southern conservancy, the Booby Valley Conservancy for instance, the poaching was going on was extraordinary. You had gangs of people, some of them ex-solders armed with automatic weapons coming in there at night. People I know who worked there risking their lives to try and save these animals, extraordinary people. People like Natasha, Anderson, Rale, Dittoy and others and Blondy, Liesim as well. People who were to get really on the forefront and these anti-poaching teams that were working on the ground with bolt-actionly and filled rifles at the time facing up to these kinds of heavily armed gangs. So these early days for you as you were kind of diving into this newer topic, what's that process like for you? I think I also read that at some point you decided to quit your job to write this book and kind of go in, go all in on it and I'm just curious, what was that process like for you? How do you decide what to dig into? You've gotten to know all these different people, you're doing stuff that could be similar to police work and some respects, tracking serial numbers, things like that. What's this like in your mind as you're going through this? Yeah, look, I mean, I think there were a lot of other people too investigating and digging into those serial numbers and so on, but, you know, it's like, I think it was a story that was not being reported in that much depth back then. There were a couple of reporters who doing some really good work, but it was something of an under-reported story and it didn't have the depth that you would hopefully see in a story. And I think, you know, what I wanted to try and do was dig a little bit beneath the surface, get a better run, understanding of what motivated poachers, what motivated the consumers of Rhino Horn. At that stage, we still thought, most of it, if not all of the horn was going to China, Vietnam, had publicly not really been identified as a destination country or a transit country. So there were a lot of mysteries. And then why the sudden influx in poaching? No one really got that. And there were a lot of people puzzling in the conservation world, puzzling over the same mysteries. So I think what I got an opportunity to do was write one story which led to other stories in each one of us being South Africa, where almost anything is possible and the unimaginable is easily imagined. Each story just got wilder and wilder from the kind of weapon smuggling in Zimbabwe to tie networks, recruiting prostitutes and strippers in bars in Johannesburg and getting them to pose as hunters in sham hunts. So they could then take the trophies out the country and then sell those illegally on the black market in Laos and Vietnam. To the historical stuff where you had South Africa during the border war, smuggling, ivory and Rhino Horn out the country, the first big U.S. Fish and Wildlife case in South Africa where there was an extradition involved, involved an African army officer who had been smuggling ivory into the U.S. to this larger than life character there. There were all these characters, all these schemes and scams, people making fake Rhino Horn that they were using to dupe and suspecting buyers. And I just became, it was like a rabbit hole. I have a bit of a habit of sort of getting sucked into something and then struggling to come up. And I think it was very much like that. And I saw pretty early on the possibility of doing some kind of book. I was initially approached to write a sort of quick hat three month book. I think my publisher's by the end hated me because I probably missed every single deadline. I'm not known for being the speediest writer. But it was this incredible story that I found so unbelievable and just took me on a new journey and actually took me on a completely different focus in my work and in my life. Yeah. And unfortunately, I haven't been able to read the whole book, but I have browsed a bit. And as I was looking through it, I was like, I wish this was one of the first books on this topic I read because a, your writing is really beautifully put down on paper and it takes you to a place in the moment. And you just get this amazing sense of the people along with all of the detail of the research along with it. So it's just super powerful writing. And you covered the topic from some interesting angles. We kind of mentioned that story with the gentleman and Angola opening those cases of all the legal wildlife trade or Rhino horns and elephant tusks and furs and stuff like that. I kind of blew my mind. Emination cases and so on. So I think just I mean it's trying to go ahead. No, no, it's got everything. You know, it's got killers. It's got this shady CD underbelly of organized crime and the sex trade in Johannesburg and Pretoria, which has decidedly CD. It's got North Korean spies, corrupt government officials, dodgy diplomats, you know, con men, people involved in cash and transit heists. It's really extraordinary what something like this has created this little piece of for these horns that have very little value of any kind, no medicinal value, really at all. How something like that can become this prized commodity that people get extremely blecks to get their hands on. Yeah, I don't know why I just suddenly in my mind I was thinking, I don't know if you guys had it in South Africa, but there is the pet rock. It was kind of like one of these ideas where people just buy a rock and it's it's I mean, it's almost the same thing. It's like it's just a doesn't have any value unless you make a story around it that creates that value. And it's just so sad that there's been that story that is that people will kill for. It's it's pretty wild. You know, trying to get into your mind as a journalist is an author. What's what's that process like is you're kind of going after these stories and following leads and I mean, there's got to be decisions and like, okay, I'm going to spend so much money to fly here to do this. Do I need to get funding? I'm just someone that's not a part of that world. I feel like as a documentary filmmaker, there's some similarities where you're, you know, trying to to learn as you go and find the threads and the story. But with something like a book or an article like this, I feel like there's sometimes more depth, you know, in a film, maybe you're just focused on a couple of characters. But you've got more time and more depth and ability to really dive into these things. So yeah, just curious what your process is like as you're developing this. I mean, I was I was fortunate to have, you know, a lot of people who gave me support from the beginning, including people who were working in conservation, doing incredible work. I'm just a storyteller. They're people on the front lines who are doing things that make the hairs down on the back of your neck in a, you know, in a daily effort to try and keep these animals alive. And it was those stories that also really grabbed me, but I think I had a boss at the time who I'm Jacques Poe's well-known South African journalist. He was my editor in the investigations team that I worked on and really sort of believed on this and connected me with his publisher to catch on this. And then I was lucky to get some funding as well from the Tucker Caper Fund, which is a journalist fund over here, which allowed me to go beyond doing research just in South Africa and a little bit in Zimbabwe a bit to dig a bit deeper in Laos and Vietnam. And I think a lot of it is, I enjoy putting the pieces of the puzzle together, going out and interviewing people, getting those bits and pieces. The hard part is sitting on your backside and writing. And I'm not very good at that. As my boss would say, you need to sit in your butt and write. And that's basically what I had to do. And eventually, by the end, the cat was looking like she wanted to leave the house, and my better half as well. And I had this tiny room with bits of paper stuck all over the walls. I know it was really pretty grim. And I sort of emerged and was a bit moody. This paragraph doesn't work. This one doesn't work, etc. So that was a bit of a fraud process. But for me, the research is always the fun part. That's where you get out, you meet, you get to speak to some really incredible people, you get to hear their stories, you get to put together these pieces. And hopefully you do their stories and their work justice, because very often there are a lot of people who are working quietly away trying to do some of the investigators, some of the conservationists that I write about in the book, just quietly doing their thing without fanfare, without headlines or spotlights. They're the real heroes. Is there anyone that stands out from that book, in particular, that I don't know, you know, change the way you see the world, or you just had so much respect for, you know, I'm sure there's so many. In the time I've been putting this film together, I think that's one of the things that I've realized there's so many amazing people working to, especially in the conservation world, you know, to protect the rhinos or just conservation in general. It attracts some really beautiful humans. And I'm sure you've come across a lot in this work, but just curious if there's anyone that stands out. Yeah, I mean, there are quite a few. There's some who I just can't mention their names, but they know who they are. They took quite extraordinary risks. There are others who trusted me when they didn't need to trust me, with some of the early investigations that they were working on and that I was looking into, included police or conservationists, people in Zimbabwe, for instance, they didn't know who I was. I had no background in conservation or in journalism. There are a lot of people who've been, I gave me short shrift at the time as well, because they sort of get angry, who's this whipper snappy? He hasn't been a ranny, he doesn't know these things. That they're right. I knew very little to nothing about the conservation world. And it was a learning curve for me, which also made it so much interesting. So there were a lot of people who gave of their time extraordinarily generously and helped me out and took a chance on kind of a young reporter who seemed a little bit overly keen, which was good. I mean, what was your attitude? You said you didn't know much then, but I feel like coming at it with a certain amount of curiosity or drive. If you're talking to someone else that's thinking about getting into this field, what would you tell them, like how to bring yourself to those situations? I mean, I think the main thing is to recognize that, hey, there's no such thing as a stupid question, because I think a lot of young journalists and young researchers, and I've seen this with people I work with and so on, you are too afraid to ask a question. And they'll sort of assume something because they don't want to look stupid. So that's the most vital one is to ask the stupid questions. And quite frankly, if someone is going to treat you differently, because they think you're asking a stupid question, they're not really that worth talking to anyway. And secondly, humility. There's no real space for someone to go charging and thinking that they have all the answers. I mean, you need humility. You need to be able to listen. And you need to do your homework. You know, there's, I find increasingly, and it's quite worrying in a way with young junior reporters. And I worry that many newsrooms today, because they're so stretched, there's just something not the time for news editors and more senior journalists to nurture and help grow journalists to talent that you have reporters to contact you and basically they want everything on a platter. I mean, I've had people for me up to say, you brought out a report recently, you talked to me about it. What point about the report? Oh, no, no, we don't know much about the report. That kind of thing. And it's frustrating away. And I mean, I think I try and take time sometimes if someone shows that they're keen, because I was there myself once. I think journalistically it's really important that people, particularly younger reporters, have some kind of guidance that they open to asking any question that they like and that they feel they can nut together a sort of complex picture and tell a story. Yeah, such good points. I mean, I think for myself learning about this world, there's a lot of times where I probably had stupid questions. And I think something that helps too is you could just be like, this is probably a stupid question, but yeah, you know, figure this out. And then, you know, I feel like it disarms people a little bit. So, yeah, don't be afraid to just admit it. No, no, no, absolutely. And even, you know, coming at it with humility, I think interviewing so many people in the conservation space, I think that's something that applies there as well, because, you know, especially someone coming from overseas that wants to help or get involved. I mean, it's, I guess going into any new world, you need to go in there with ears open and more listening than saying and having too many assumptions, you know, you might have some ideas, but be very flexible with them because you don't know yet. And it's, there's so much nuance in everything. And I'm sure, yeah, I can't imagine the amount of depth and nuance that you were exposed to on this journey through just writing this book alone. Yeah, I mean, you know, the bottom line is that you, you as a storyteller, no matter how long you sort of spend kind of better trying to do a story, you dipping in an art, you dipping in an art of people's lives, you can go somewhere else eventually and you probably will. And they remain behind. And they are the people and you know, this as well as I do are on the front lines, you're taking the risks who are under incredible pressures. And the best that you can do, hopefully, is to be a voice for them. And I'm quite old fashioned about this. I don't actually like being the focus of sort of interviews or things like that. I mean, I, I sort of come from the background where journalists, not the story, the journalist should fade into the background and let the people that they, that they're talking to tell the story. I mean, even with the book, I was somewhat co-opted by the publishers into bringing a sort of personal element into which I found somewhat discomforting at the time, which in my current role, luckily I, I can sort of somewhat retreat in the back with a research, although now I'm doing more and more interviews about it. So yeah, it's, it's a trade-off. But I think, you know, I think the thing is you need to be aware of what your role is and that you simply, there is a storyteller and to try and convey a message as based as you can and as accurately as you can. Yeah. I mean, I think that's so important. And I kind of agree even on the documentary filmmaking side, you know, it's been so important for me to make sure that the people's voices that were following come through more than my perspective or, you know, some kind of voice over that's overlaired. And, but yeah, I think it's also kind of balancing that with, you know, if you're telling some of your stories, as long as it's enhancing the ability for their story to get out, I think there's a way to do it right, you know, it's, but I, I feel the reservations as well. And it's always strange to be talking about yourself when there's all these amazing humans doing this really difficult work that you're following. One more thing about the book before we move on to this report that you put out recently, you know, some of it was going to Vietnam and, and kind of researching what those markets are like on the, you know, the demand side and, you know, from the stories about the medicinal effects to the status symbol side of things, what was that like for you when you first dug into it and, and kind of were exposed to what people were going through who were on the buying end of it. I think back then we knew very little and there were people working in Vietnam who doing some research and slowly building up information, but there was so little now, even price data was all over the place. You know, there's extraordinary sums being mentioned for the price of Rhinohorn, many of them inaccurate, but it was trying to sort of get my head around something that I saw as someone had grown up in South Africa. Rhinohs were these majestic creatures that you saw out there and the cruelty that was involved in poaching stood out and getting to Vietnam where you see something that is simply just a product. There's a complete sort of disconnect in a way from the brutality of what's happening in Africa, between that and the consumer markets. People who, in many cases, they had seen a Rhinoh that only ever seen it on television. I mean, certainly with some of the pseudo hunters that I interviewed, some of the young Vietnamese woman and Thai woman who were recruited to become to participate in these sham, these fraudulent hunts in South Africa. The only time they had a casino Rhinoh was on TV until the day they were taken to the caucus of a dead Rhinoh and they made deposes a rifle and pretended they had actually hunted the animals so that the trophy could be shipped to what was supposedly their address in Laos or Thailand or Vietnam and then be cut up and sold off on the black market. That's what stood out, I think, most at that state, but there was the other side too, which was the appalling desperation. I went to one of the oncology, one of the awards, one of the cancer hospitals in Hanoi, quite early on, and this hospital had a traditional medicine section which was encouraging patients to try Rhinoh on as a cure if things weren't working. You had patients who were at their store, many people who had come from rural communities where there were barely any health facilities at all, certainly not the kind of care that they needed and they were in the final stages. You had people cram through to a bed, people queuing to get treatment. I think that gave me an understanding to some degree of the desperation that would cause someone on the medicinal side to buy a Rhinoh and try and use it. A couple of the rail tragedy, which is that most of those people in many cases were not behind what they thought they were buying, they were spending a fortune buying, buffalo horn, and other things. So there's a human side to a two on that aspect and then you've got the other extreme where you have, for instance, the vice chairman of Sackombang at the time who Sackombang being one of the biggest banks in Vietnam, who found up the police one day and said that thieves had broken into his house and stolen the horns of his rhinoceros and the police turned up and they found literally an entire stuffed rhino in his living room and the horns have been locked off and the thieves have made all for them. The police at the time didn't really ask the bank of too many hard questions about where he got this stuffed rhino from and set off to try and find the thieves as far as I know they never did. But it turned out that he'd been given this thing as a gift by someone who's trying to curry favor with him, one of these sort of sham hunters who'd brought the trophy the entire rhino back to Vietnam and then given to him a nice handwritten note wishing him well for the future and on his housewarming. And you know, that's an extraordinary scene. I mean, this is a senior figure in the financial sector who's receiving a gift like this and what that says about sort of levels to how rhino horn can be used in correct ways or how it can also be used to buy a favor with officials can be used as a sort of investment, as a valuable commodity. Today we see these various disparate markets for carvings for bangles bracelets for whole horns and luxury goods markets and how those have evolved and adapted over time where you know, as Western myths about the Aphrodisiac properties of rhino horn suddenly become reality because the networks latch onto that and you've got rice wine with rhino horn being sold as an Aphrodisiac or kids using it, you know, in some cases, they hang over here. So I think it gave me some interesting insights into that and then just looking more broadly at the role of traditional Chinese medicine in Asia and the importance of traditional Chinese medicine in Asia. Yeah, it's such a complicated situation in so many different things, you know, different powers pulling on it. I mean, I can't, I mean, I can only imagine, you know, if your grandmother is in the hospital dying of cancer and there's not even enough room or doctors to take care of her and someone presents this to you, you know, people are desperate, like you said, and we'll try anything and it's so sad that people pray on other people like that, but so it is. Yeah, and then they suck, they suck the elements too, you know, in some cases when, you know, as Vietnam and China as economies have grown, people have had more disposable income, people, they focus returns to their roots and to returns to traditions and what those traditions mean for them. So there's elements there, you know, I think it's very easy and I think some of the initial demand reduction campaign attempts, for instance, in Vietnam were disastrous purely because they came with a sort of very Western view that said, "Buterable people shouldn't be consuming Rhino horn," attempted in some ways to, you know, sort of put down traditional beliefs rather than engaging with them. I think it's very easy, again, you know, come back, we're talking a little about, you know, listening and not having preconceived ideas, but trying to understand things that we may, from our own backgrounds, find unfathomable. Yeah, because I feel like demand reduction is so important, but if you don't understand those subtleties, then yeah, you're kind of just talking to a wall or fending people or maybe even, you know, inadvertently creating a new demand because people didn't even realize it was there until they told them, you know, it's so many ways it could go, which, you know, it's really interesting what you just said and never really heard of the campaigns in that way. And, you know, it's, I think it's difficult to have a 32nd PSA that has a conversation with people about their traditions and valuing them, but understanding that in the current world, these Rhino's are being killed because of a misunderstanding or misuse or other factors. Yeah, I think a number of those campaigns have become more nuanced as the years have gone on. And as we've learnt more and more about the trade and understood the trade better, but it's taken a lot of time to get to that point. Let's jump into the report you released recently, landscape of fear, crime corruption and murder and greater Kruger. What sparked this report for you and what was its goal? So what I wanted to do here, and I've been writing about this issue for a long time now, but I want to take a step back. And I think a lot of what I've written over the years has focused on some of the criminal elements of the networks involved, but fundamentally it's focused, or Rhino's have been at the centre of that research. Or Rhino horns being at the centre of that research. And I wanted to look at the Kruger National Park and how it fits into a broader landscape in South Africa. And what's happening, not only within the park, but what's happening around the park. The Kruger struggle, I think, in many ways mirrors South Africa's struggle against organised crime. And the Kruger is situated in a province that has a particularly complex history, one where corruption has been a key element for decades. Preceding even the creation of that province as a sort of a malgum of what was then the Eastern Transval and a number of the apartheid era homelands that were created to essentially separate blacks and whites. And corruption in those years in the 1980s was widespread when the provinces created in 1994. Many of those elements from both from homeland areas, but also from the Eastern Transval and corrupt government officials who worked there, were melded together. You had different police stopped apartments. For instance, the railway police who were notorious, the useless slash corrupt being brought into what was then the South Africa police and became the South Africa police service. And so you had a number of these these quite complex elements coming together. And put Malunga over the years, I mean, I think at the time, you know, one of the first premiers of the province, Matthew's pauser, the moment, the fact that corruption came out of every poor of society and that there was a culture of corruption in the system that could simply not be rooted out. And that's just become steadily worse. And I think that's been there are a number of reasons for that. The collapse of police crime intelligence capacity in South Africa. Political meddling in the police, particularly during the Jacob Zima years, to some degree, still continuing, even though they are if it's too rooted out. The loss of droves of skilled police officers who went into the private sector, the privatization effectively of policing functions, and if you're wealthy enough in South Africa, you can sit behind why I have walls with cameras and electric fences and private security. And coupled with that, the corruption that's contemplated both at high level but within rural areas. And avoid almost a governance void that's been created in areas around the Krueger National Park where you have entire communities where maybe the politicians pitch up before an election. But communities who, in many cases, are protesting, they use roads access to access the Krueger as a means to draw a line in the sand, block those roads and say, you know, you need to listen to our demands. And some of those communities are communities who've been trying to get running water and electricity and, you know, the basic, most basic of services since 1994. For 30 years, they've been trying. You've got high levels of poverty, close to 50%, and beyond that, people are eating out of living. And you've got an expanding population, I think, 2019 around 2.9 million people living along the Krueger's boundary fence. Probably closer to 4 million now. We'll see when the next census is done. And many of those people see very little benefit from conservation or very little benefit from Krueger. And when you have a governance void and when you have police who are too corrupt or too terrified or just not interested in communities, parallel government structures or parallel structures take shape. And these are run by, you know, these take the form of illicit markets and that full gap with the economy is, is stuttering or dying. These take the form of criminal actors who exploit people, who provide services to people. If you need medicines for your grandmother, who do you go to? You got a local crime boss. He'll get you some medicines, but it comes potentially with a request on the line. You need a loan, he'll lend you money. And in that mix, you have rangers and other staff who work in Krueger. Many of them live there. Many of them do 26 days on in the park, 26 days off, while they're away. Who's at home? Standard cut buses or lower level figures can come up to them and say, look, we know where your wife and kids are when you're not here. Anything can happen to them. You need to do this for us. And, you know, in many cases, you, you'll find that the easiest option is just simply to go and do it and then you get paid and nothing happens to you and you do it again and you get paid and it boosts a fairly poultry salary. There's obscene amounts of money which have gone into the so-called war on poaching. And yet at the same time, many rangers in the Krueger National Park have, you know, lived in a pooling conditions which haven't really improved. Tensions have grown over time. Within the park, I think that you can argue strongly that the systemic sort of structural issues in the park, which are come back to the way it was structured in the 1980s and they're part of it years and the hierarchies that that is created. And imagine yourself trapped in some kind of low-level conflict every day or a threat in the park. You under threat when you're outside the park. You are stacking something that has been going on longer than, say, for instance, the Lebanese Civil War in the 1970s and '80s or longer than the Angolan Wars of Independence in Angolan and Mozambique. And there seems to be no end in sight. Eventually, morale crumbles, professionalism crumbles and fortunately I think that in many cases that wasn't addressed. What is good now is I think that with the new leadership in Sandparks, particularly within the Krueger National Park, Cassie Dreyer, the Head Ranger, you have others there too. There's an awareness of these issues and an effort to try and address them and to try and find ways of rebuilding professions and rebuilding trust and motivation in not only the Ranger Corps but among staff, to try and sort of implement transparent and fair integrity testing, which could include things like polygraphs, but it goes a lot deeper than that. And I think there needs to be transparency about the way that corruption is dealt with. It needs to be dealt with fairly, it needs to be dealt with swiftly and it has to be dealt as consistently across the board, which has not always been the case in the past. And then aside from counselling for Rangers, many of whom are burnt out, particularly people at the forefront who are jumping out of helicopters and not pursuit of purchase, you need to create mechanisms and what shape that will take. And I think Cassie Dreyer has mentioned this in an interview I did with her is to somewhere create safe spaces where Rangers can talk about the challenges they face, where they can talk about the pressures they can face, where they can find ways of ideas of how they can better protect themselves or improve their lives or where they can feel that their concerns are being heard. And the need also for independent whistle-blowing mechanisms. And I think we've seen recently there were the arrest of two Rangers in the Kruger National Park last year in the Stoltsnake area of the park. Those arrests were the result of financial investigations conducted by the auditing firm KPMG together with the Hawks and also with the involvement of the National Prosecuting Authority and Sand Parks and Kruger. And that led to an arrest of the arrests of various others, including family members of the suspects, there's a bank accounts that have been and sort of complex and not so complex movements of money have been unraveled, accounts open in the names of young children and that sort of thing, potentially amounting into millions of rounds. And the impact of that was almost immediate, poaching fell to nothing in that area of the park for three months, not a single incursion or a single incident, poaching itself overall fell dramatically. So there are things that can be done. The problem as is the problem in South Africa more broadly is that there is so much damage that's been done. There is so little political will that's been demonstrated. There's so little impetus. People throw their hands on the air and say we're becoming a mafia state. I mean, I hear this every day now. Virtually every second interview I do, I get asked, are we becoming a mafia state? And there's an urgency. We have a limited amount of time to turn things around and it's going to require a commitment. Political commitment, a commitment if you're taking the example of Kruger from Kruger management from Sandparks and this is not a short-term commitment. You cannot undo years of damage. You cannot undo a situation where you, for instance, believe that 40% possibly more of your, the people that you work with, your staff, the people that you interact with daily are corrupt in some way, shape or form or are potentially, for various reasons, aiding networks and and coaching groups. So this is going to be a long very hard battle. I mean, I think there's some incredible people who are really putting an effort in. We're really trying to turn things around and who are really thinking long and hard and coming up with innovative responses. But it's not going to be an easy and easy challenge. Yeah, it was a brilliant summary of a lot of the issues and some of the solutions. I mean, they're just thinking about on the corruption side within Kruger. If it's 40% plus, I can think of times working jobs when it's probably a small group and there's one bad apple and it might not even be corruption at this level, but just someone with that negative energy. And what that does to that workplace let alone 40% and people that could be aiding in killing rhinos and potentially even threatening other people within the organization. It's such a complex situation and corruption just feels like such a hard thing to crack. I mean, you kind of offered some of the solutions and I've heard within integrity testing too, it's more of needing to look at it more holistically where it's not just a test, but like you're saying, it's creating long-term career paths, more trust between people within the organization. I think that's a huge thing is it's trust, which has probably been lacking since before apartheid and still between people. If that trust isn't there, it's so hard to move forward. And for rangers that are being threatened too in a lot of cases, if they don't trust their management, then what are they supposed to do when someone's saying, "Hey, we're going to come to your house and kill you or your family," or, you know, if you don't play along with us, you're in big trouble. So yeah, a lot of that needs to be addressed. I mean, specifically around that issue, what are your thoughts? Because I feel like, and maybe this is, I don't know, maybe another question is, you know, what are people not looking at that you feel like needs addressed or what are people more hesitant to talk about? I mean, I think there's a lot being looked at within Krueger now. And I think importantly, it's not just looking at corruption, but it's looking at the drivers of corruption. Why do people become corrupt? Is it a case of people are corrupt because they're all bad apples? Or is it because some instances they have pressures, in some instances they have resentments that have built up for whatever reason. In some instances, maybe they took money once to help a sick relative or something and then it became an easy way to continue. In some cases, maybe they just sociopathically corrupt and up to their eyeballs in organized crimes. So I think there's an array, an array of different drivers that feed into that and why people become corrupt and the sorts of pressures that are involved. And there's been a, you know, a study that was done, an internal study with the assistance of WWF and USAID together with the Krueger, where staff, management, ranges were interviewed to try and understand some of these elements. So I think that's a very important starting point. I mean, you know, it comes back to the whole thing of listening. You know, how do you, you need to be able to work on this jointly? You know, this is not something where you, you kind of raced your way out of this problem. You certainly not in Krueger, not in South Africa. There is no way we will ever arrest our way out of the organized crime problem that we face today. So we need to come up with alternative things, you know, we need to look at at a range of possible options. And I think that's important. I think the other thing that is really important and to some degree, this is being addressed, but it's not being addressed at the right levels in some cases, is a look at how organized crime has grown, how it's entrenched itself, how it's metastasized in Ampumalanga more broadly. From the fact that Escom, our power utility has been corrupted to every single corner, there are syndicates who are stealing coal, replacing it with rocks. There are syndicates that are stealing copper cable by the tonne. To the point where the entire country's economy has been corrupted, obviously, there are also issues around maintenance in Escom, but ultimately the issue around Escom, the sole power utility in South Africa is that it has become so corrupt, it's become, to the point where it's even been divided up by criminal networks, that the entire country is suffering. And you know, Ampumalanga more broadly, you have cash and transit highest is barely a week that goes by with art yet another spectacular cash and transit highest. No, military style operations, that he guys with assault weapons, explosives, fast cars, BMW X-Fires, ramming cash vehicles off the roads, killing drivers, in some cases, blowing doors off, making office money, ATM machines being blown up. Kidnappings, which have grown at a staggering rate in South Africa and in Ampumalanga. Illegal mining, another big issue in the sort of goldfields, the oldest goldfields in South Africa, around Barberton and Ampumalanga. All of those different illicit economies coalescent feed into each other. So then you end up with a situation where you've got someone like Chief Clyde Mnisi, who's someone I've written about recently. He became a traditional leader in October last year, replacing his uncle, if I remember correctly. There's a big coronation, he had a sort of plastic wrought iron gold chair that he sat on, he was decked out in leopard skin robes. There were senior officials there, including the treasurer of the African National Congress, the ruling party in the province, who attended this. But Clyde Mnisi was a crime boss. He was one of a triumvirate of crime bosses in Ampumalanga, along with people like Petro Sidney Mabusa, who was assassinate in 2021, who's involved in loan-sharking and cash and transit haste, and have been involved in purchasing or running, purchasing gangs in Kruger since the mid-2000s. He had someone like Big Joe, in Yalunga, as his nickname, and he's a massive guy, Dodgy Ex-Cop, who had been arrested several times since 2011. Once in 2011, when they found traces of Rhino Horn in the back of his vehicle that linked through DNA to two rhinos perched in Kruger, plus at the time around $300,000 in cash in his vehicle. 2012, he was arrested again in another police operation when he was set up in a sting to buy Rhino Horn. They raided his house. There they found, again, at the exchange rate of time, around $500,000 in metal, boxes in the house, various weapons, rifles, a camera with photographs of a terrified young man being tortured, clearly, cans of beer in the background, a battery, and jumper cables, and he was clearly in pain. No one's ever found him. And then again in 2018, he was arrested in what was a police operation called Project Broadbull, which also targeted Big Joe and Yalunga and Clyde Mnisi, the Chief. And then subsequently, to that again, he was arrested for a murder that had taken place at the Snuff Big Joe and Yalunga for a murder that had taken place in 2010. When a neighbor of his, he also happened to work for the power utility, S-GOM, that disappeared and been murdered. And the neighbor had been beaten to death in his body, waited down with a rock and tossed into a dam that supplied drinking water to one of the towns. And that's the sort of situation that you have these kinds of figures who've become embedded in communities who've become respectable in a way. You know, I looked up to you can see videos of them being cheered outside court. There were demonstrations when they appeared in court. And then slowly you've shengu Petrus Siting Mabusa gets assassinated in 2021. And then a week ago Chief Clyde Mnisi gets assassinated, classic organized crime hit his car was tracked by five guys in a BMW X5. Somehow he had a puncture. There's some questions about why the vehicle he was in had a puncture. Four of them get out onto the salt rifles and they said something along the lines of you thought we wouldn't get up to you. Now we've got you and they pumped him full of bullets. This morning I heard that his wife had been assassinated two days after they buried him. Again, guys forced their way into Clyde Mnisi's home, shot his wife point blank range twice in the head, shot two other people in the house and wounded them and took off. That's the sort of violence that surrounds us. You know, we we have extraordinarily high levels of violent crime in Cypherica, but what makes them even more terrifying is how violent they are. And how embedded these people are. Clyde Mnisi's funeral this past weekend, again, the same ANC treasurer. This is the ruling party, is present at the funeral. It says nothing about Nisi's alleged links to two organized crime. The president of Contral에서, the congress on traditional lead for traditional leaders in South Africa is also present. Again, doesn't say anything about it. The democratic alliance, the opposition party, even issues a statement, although admittedly, they do mention the rhino perching charges, but tendering their condolences to Clyde Mnisi's family and villages and so on. And in nowhere at a high level, are you seeing people aside from the police and statements about the murders saying anything about this? It's extraordinary. There's no condemnation of the activities that he has involved in. So that's where we've got to in this country where organized crime groups have become an alternative for many people. They replace in a government that is something ought to deliver. And they've gained sort of newfound respectability in some communities. Well, we're getting close to the end. And I feel like that's, don't want to leave it at such a dark place. There's so many challenges to be faced. But I guess on the flip side of that, I've spent probably close to a year in total in South Africa. And there's just so many beautiful people and amazing humans doing a lot of really amazing things to combat this and save wildlife, change the communities, make things better. I guess as a final question, what gives you hope in the midst of so much turmoil and corruption? And I mean, which you painted almost sounds like a scene out of Mad Max or something. You know, what what gives you hope and why do you keep doing this work? Yeah, some days it does feel like a scene out of Mad Max. We've got a sort of saying in South Africa that this country is a movie. And some days it feels like a tragedy of fast and a nightmare or wrapped into one. But I think what gives me hope, as you said now, the people. There are some truly extraordinary people who are going beyond the call to do everything that they can for this country. And we blessed with remarkable people, not so much in politics, one sort of major sort of political leadership roles in government. But outside of that, we have truly extraordinary people who are taking on pressures, taking on stresses that most people crumble at, people in conservation, people who are working in national parks, people who are trying to find solutions. And I think that that for me is what gives me hope. This is not we can't sit back and expect government to solve this. Government's not going to solve. Government hasn't solved. Government makes it worse most of the time. The police make it worse most of the time. So it's kind of up to us as the citizens. You know, it's up to us to become a more engaged as a citizenry. And that's difficult in South Africa because this is a country that's deeply unequal, that is deeply divided. But it's something we need to strive for. I think that we blessed as well. We have strong civil society organisations. I don't entirely buy this argument that we are becoming a mafia state. I think that sure, there are areas of massive concern. The numbers of assassinations. The rise in violent organised crime. The rise is the nearly 70% rise in murder rates in the last decade. But I think also that we've shown in the past that we can overcome these sorts of things. We've shown that we are determined. And quite frankly, we don't really have much of a choice. Well, we do have a choice. We can throw our hands up in the air and say it's all over. This is give up and we'll curl into a ball and die. All we can actually stand up and be counted and make our voices felt and do even the smallest things to try and improve the country for ourselves and the people that live around us. And that's a really hard thing, hard thing sometimes to do, but that's what we need to look at. This is about us. We need to pull our way. People need to get involved. You need an act of citizenry. You can't sit back and sit on a couch and complain all the time. And there are people out there every single day, people in the conservation world. You've met many of them. I've met many of them over the years. People in the Krueger National Park, people in the Hawks, the organised crime investigators, people in the South African Revenue Service and the National Prosecuting Authority and all these structures who get up every single day and they keep going and they try to make a difference. And that inspires me. Well, thank you, Julian, for the work you're doing for your voice and for all the voices that you've been able to highlight and the good that you're able to bring to the people that are doing a lot of this work on the ground. It's been a pleasure getting to speak with you. I feel like we could probably spend another half a day digging into a lot of this stuff. But yeah, this has been really great. No, thanks. Thanks so much for having me on it. It's a real privilege. No one last thing. Where should people go to follow you? They want to learn more and find your book and see your work. So the book's called Killing for Profit. And if you want to look at some of the work that we're doing at the Global Initiative, go to globalinist.net. Perfect. All right, Julian, I'll let you go. Thank you so much again. Take care. Thanks very much. Thank you for listening to The Rhino Man Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and you're excited to see the film succeed, please subscribe and review our podcast on Spotify and iTunes, then follow us on Instagram and Facebook at Rhino Man the Movie. More details about Rhino Man, the social impact campaign and future screenings are at RhinoMantheMovie.org. To learn more about the Global Conservation Corps and their work, visit globalconservationcord.org. Sign up for the newsletter and follow GCC on all of the social platforms. If you like this podcast, make sure to subscribe and catch up on GCC's "A Voices of Nature" podcast, where Bob Ledke interviews a wide range of people who've dedicated their lives to making a difference in conservation. A special thanks goes out to Simone Wilson for the music for this podcast. He's the brilliant composer for Rhino Man the Movie. Learn more about his work at SimoneWilsonMusic.com. Until next time, I'm John Jerko and this is The Rhino Man Podcast.