How I Got Arrested Working to Save Elephants | National Geographic

Imagine this: I'm in Tanzania and I am about to enter the airport in Dar es Salaam. I have a large suitcase with elephant tusks inside. I'm trying to put all the bags in together to try to mask, and the bags go through. Then he says the worst thing an airport official can possibly say in a moment like that: he says, "Open that bag."

I open the bag and there's really no getting around it. I lift the tusks out, and all hell breaks loose. So what I haven't told you is that these elephant tusks were fake. I had them made by a taxidermist in New Jersey named George Dante, and he's the taxidermist for the American Museum of Natural History.

I went to him and I said, "George, I need perfect elephant tusks, and inside I want to put a satellite-based GPS system. I'm going to take these tusks over to Africa, and I'm going to use them in the black market."

He said, "Brian, I've never done anything like this." And then he asked, "Brian, let me get this straight: are you telling me you could get killed if they don't believe that these are real?"

I said, "It's going to be very important." George takes a couple of months; he has made these perfect tusks. They have the right feel, the right look, the right density, and the right sound. You know if you cut a tusk in half, like cutting a tree, there are rings inside—he's painted those, hand-painted. He's painted all the little cracks along the tusk. It was extraordinary.

You know, elephants are under siege and this isn't just an animal problem. The Rangers on the ground to protect these elephants are being killed, and the ivory is being used to fund terrorist organizations operating in Africa. So this is a human problem as well as an animal problem, and it's one we have to do better on.

So I'm telling the Tanzanian airport official that these are fake, that I've had them made and that it's part of a study I'm doing. He starts to believe me, and then behind him, people start pointing at the X-ray machine. I hear him saying, "No, it's not ivory." He's looking at the electronics inside the tusk, and he says, "That's not an elephant tusk; that's a bomb."

And then it was about as bad as it's ever gotten for me in terms of being thought of as a criminal. The police grabbed me and took me to an interrogation room, and then things went from kind of amusing—"Won't this make a good story?"—to, "Uh, okay, this is real."

The next morning, all the officials come, and after five or six hours, they're mostly convinced. They're convinced enough to let me go, let's put it that way. There were some people who never stopped believing I was real.

After everything was over, after they said, "Okay, you're free to go," many of the officials who arrested me came to the airport to say goodbye. They've all become Facebook friends. So I don't get in too much trouble, but occasionally, I get in a lot of trouble. [Music]