yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Infiltrating the Illegal Wildlife Trade: A Trafficker’s Downfall | Nat Geo Live


3m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Anson Wong is a wildlife trafficker. He's also a guy who was trafficking at the time all the things we care about when we think about precious wildlife. He was offering snow leopard pelts, rhino horn, and he was moving live elephants. He had a tiger farm in Vietnam where they raised tigers, killed them, mounted them as taxidermy specimens, and sold them as trophies for people to put in their living rooms. He had this Spix's Macaw. It's a bird that's supposed to be extinct in the wild. Anson was offering three for $100,000 apiece.

The US Fish and Wildlife service considered him in the 90s the biggest international wildlife trafficker in the world. They launched an investigation called "Operation Chameleon". And it was successful. When he got out of jail, he went immediately back to the reptile business. I also know from talking to reptile traders he was never out of business. While he was in jail, his wife was trading for him. So, we came up with another operation we called it "Operation Big Ego".

So, I learned his techniques and then I went to Indonesia where his major customers and competitors are. I lived on a reptile breeding farm and met as many of his competitors and... clients, as possible. Then I flew to Malaysia. And I didn't know what Anson looked like. I said—I walked into the shop, 22-B, Jones Road and I—there are two Chinese guys standing in the doorway. I said, they said... "Can we help you?" I said, "Yeah, I'm looking for Anson Wong." And then the same guy said, "I'm Anson Wong."

I said, "Oh, I'm Bryan Christy." He said, "I've heard of you. I hear you're writing about Strictly Reptiles. What you should really be doing is writing about me. I'm much bigger." And that... is when Operation Big Ego really took off. (audience laughter) And he, and he said not only that but "look" and he slid a stack of blueprints across the desk to me. I said, "What's this?" He said, "A tiger farm. I'm building a tiger park here on Penang Island. And the government is funding me."

So, this is the world's leading wildlife trafficker arrested in the United States. He returns, his own government funds him to build a tiger park. This is a guy who is trafficking in tigers. I said, "I have a story." The story was called "The Kingpin". This story ran in Malaysia. Within weeks law enforcement officials raided Anson's facilities. They stripped him off his business license and his license to move endangered species. Members of parliament took that literal magazine and held it on the floor of parliament and demanded change.

Malaysian parliament passed the first new reform legislation for wildlife in 40 years. That summer, Anson was arrested. And he was tried and convicted, sentenced to six months in prison. The public outcry over a six month prison was so great that the government effectively appealed its own victory, retried him and he was sentenced to five years in prison. A massive penalty... in any country in the world. The prosecutor and the judge held up this story and said, "This is what we're doing."

More Articles

View All
Ron Conway - Startup Investor School Day 4
That was a, I think, a fantastic survey, a summary of how to think about what it means to be a good investor. Paul Graham actually wrote an entire essay about what it means to be a good investor, with Ron Conway as the subject of the essay. So, the guinea…
The Ice Thumpers | Continent 7: Antarctica
CHRISTIAN OHNEISER: I’m pretty certain that we’re going to lose the actual ice shelf itself and parts of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet at some point in the future. It will turn into water. But it’s where that water goes and how much of it turns actually in…
Top 10 Most Expensive Perfumes In The World
[Music] The top 10 most expensive perfumes in the world. Welcome to alux.com, the place where future billionaires come to get inspired. Hey there, Alexers! It’s time to really talk about luxury and fine taste. It’s not often we encounter products that ar…
Wave transmission | Waves | Middle school physics | Khan Academy
When we’re talking about waves, transmission is when a wave passes from a material into another one. For example, here we have the sun, 93 million miles away on average, and imagine the different materials that the light has to travel through from the sun…
Worked example: Derivatives of sin(x) and cos(x) | Derivative rules | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
What we want to do is find the derivative of this G of X. At first, it could look intimidating. We have a s of X here, we have a cosine of X, we have this crazy expression here, we have a pi over cube root of x. We’re squaring the whole thing, and at firs…
Inverse matrices and matrix equations | Matrices | Precalculus | Khan Academy
In a previous video, we talked about how you can represent a system of equations as essentially a matrix equation. So, for example, here I have two equations with two unknowns, x and y. Well, let’s just assume that we know what a, b, p, c, d, and q, r are…