Transcripts For CSPAN2 Joshua Hammer The Falcon Thief 20240713

Im bradley graham, coowner of the store along with my life and we are delighted to have Joshua Hammer back with us at pmp. Josh was here for his last book about four years ago and matt was the bad ass librarians of timbuktu which told the riveting story of how an archivist in timbuktu managed with some very brave helpers to smuggle more than 350,000 historical manuscripts out from under militant jihadist to safety about 600 miles away and the book was a bestseller and established at joshs someone for a night with an eye for really truly read story. Hes done it again with his new book, the falcon thief which recounts another true and gripping tale of adventure. This one, about wildlife. E t josh is a journalist by training and had a pretty adventurous globetrotting run himselfgl working for newsweek over nearly two decades. He joined newsweek and the late 1980s as a business and media writer but within a few years he was off to cover the rest of the world on postings that paste them in nairobi, brandis andres, berlin, jerusalem, cape town and back here in the u. S. In los angeles. For the past decade and a half hes continued to report and travel widely writing for a range of publications. Four years ago he won the National Magazine award in reporting for a piece titled, my nurses are dead and i dont know if im i already infected. Still a prizewinning story. [laughter] the told the story of a physician in sierra leone who led the effort to control the Ebola Outbreak in there. In addition to the timbuktu book josh has written three other previous works, one about his younger brother who became a religious fundamentalist, another about the siege in 2002 of the church of the tivoli in bethlehem, and a third about the deadly 1923 earthquake and fire that struck japan. It has been said of josh that he reports like a journalist and writes like a novelist. That certainly is the case with his work in the falcon thief. The book describes the exploits of Jeffrey Lendrum, notorious wildlife smuggler who for years traveled the world stealing highly valued eggs and birds of prey and selling them to enthusiasts in the uae where falcons and other raptors are used for sport. The other central character in joshs story is the detective from Britains National Wildlife Crime unit named Andy Mcwilliam who specializes in ornithological crime solving and was determined to catch lendrum. The book is a thrilling, fastpaced chronicle but more than that and its more than just a detective story set in a rarefied world filled with unusual characters and astounding birds. It is, as one reviewer noted, cautionary tale about how the love of nature can go very wrong and what happens when precious wildlife becomes a status symbol on a planet when nature is increasingly imperiled. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Joshua Hammer. [applause] great detailed introduction. Duam humbled. My favorite, i think this is always be my favorite bookstore and my favorite venue to talk about these things. So, thanks everybody for coming out tonight. Im amazed that anyone goes to book events at all. Its always impressive. [inaudible] [laughter] anyway,r] over the course of dog this particular talk now three, four times since i got to new york in the states is to basically present a narrative without giving away the entire book and illustrating that narrative with pictures i think bring the story to life. N i will very quickly start with an introduction about how thi this i assume most of you have not seen the book so basically how to answer the question of how i stumbled into this thing. The badass librarian of timbukd that was a story that i had pretty much followed for many years and i had a beginning in Africa Bureau chiefur for newswk and made a couple trips to molly and wants to timbuktu and continue to visit and over the years and got a couple of smithsonian assignments to write about the great manuscripts of to about two stars pretty well versed in that mill you and that story will kino invaded the country and people i know got caught up in the violence and the capturing of the entire two thirds of the country so it was a story that i owned, i felt, in a way and made a certain amount of sense that the book would come out of it. It was something completely different and a total, an act of desperation because i was looking for another project and had thrown out some terrible ideas including one about the 1969 i wont even go into it but fortunately then one day in 2017 i was in london with my kids and i just happened to pick up the london times and was sitting in a cafe reading and there was an article, a very short article on the about page 12 or so about this character named Jeffrey Lendrum and the headline was Something Like pair again thief on the wing again because the tabloids love those bad puns and this was a story about all it said was the sky notorious thief known for helicopter ring and repelling down cliffs to reach rare falcon eggs to sell to the sheiks in d dubai and united emirates and had been rearrested, sentenced to prison and brazil and had disappeared and nowzi the World Conservation world and bird around the world, Wildlife Police, were alarmed that heor might be coming back to or back on the hunt. That was enough to ignite my interest and i began investigating it further and further and deeper and deeper and becoming, as obsessed with lendrum in a way that he was about his eggs which i think is what a writer does, a journali journalist, and nonfiction but deeper and deeper into a subject and so with that introduction i will tell you a bit about the story as it unfolds in the book so you can get have some coherence without giving too much away. This story begins in a shower room in the emirates First Business class lounge in Birmingham International airport in the ukla where a very vigilat janitor notices a middleaged white fellow, nondescript character, going into the washroom, the shower room with all his baggage, three bags and disappears and therefore 20 minutes. Janitor is waiting to clean the place and he does not know what is going on and spent 20 minutes and there and is a vigilance guy to begin with, job at security monitor looking at closed captions, hundreds of closedcaptioned ccp tvs in a Shopping Mall so he was trained to observe. After 20 minutes the guy comes out in the janitor goes inside the bathroom, shower room and sees absolutely nothing has been touched. Everything is completely dry, shower unused, towels still folded sink, bath toilet, lything so he merely is suspicious and routes around and ends up after five, ten minutes of looking to the Ceiling Tiles or whatever underneath towels he finds in a or sees a diaper been in the corner of the room and goes over to it, opens it up and sees an egg carton in the bottom of the diapermp been otherwise empty diaper bent with a single red, painted red egg like an easter egg inside it. He figures was left by the guy who is just in here so hes completely mystified and somewhat alarmed. [laughter] what could this mean . He thanks is probably got something to do with drugs but not sure its make a long story wort the Counterterrorism Police are brought to the scene and they take him away and stripsearched him, they find beneath his tshirt is a hospital gauze wrapped tightly around his body and inside the hospital because our woolen socks and inside the woolen socks are 14 o of these they dot know what these are actually these counterterrorism pleas are not trained at all in understanding what they are so they asked lendrum what, Jeffrey Lendrum, by that point i looked at his passport and establish his identity and his irish national, what are these and he tells them they are duck eggs and they say okay and would you mind telling us why you are carrying raw duck eggs attached to your body and your belly andm he explains that his chiropractor has told him that he needs to wear raw eggsun wrapped around his body because it will vent him from stooping and lead to tightening of his lower back muscle. [laughter] okay, so at this point they just dont know what they got on their hands and it is at that make ahat they summon phone call to Andy Mcwilliam whn reviews of this book and there have been a few good ones and theyre not always satisfying to read but they tend to give short shrift to Andy Mcwilliam or want to say from the beginning this is a bad guy good guy story. You have a hero in antihero. Jeff lendrum being the hero antihero and Andy Mcwilliam was certainly the most famous Wildlife Police man, his specialty in ornithological crime. So heres the story and realizes it may and briefing season or incubating nesting season so he realizes the guy carrying these eggs on his body probably not to hide them but to keep them warm from the description he instantly knows that they are peregrine eggs. Peregrine falcon is the bird. I have a better image of wantor but for some reason it did not download so this is a hooded Peregrine Falcon but anyway, basically this is a highly productive bird, a raptor, the fastest bird on the planet travels can go into a stoop dive to kill another bird in midair at speeds of up to 180 miles an hour. Mcwilliam knows that they are highly prized by arab falconers in particular, especially the wealthy sheiks of the United Arab Emirates but hes never actually he has sued rumors about this market, this black markets, to bring in these protected raptors into the emirates for these falconers. Here he believes just from the very description offered by the counterterrorism cops that he may have a smuggler on his hands. Ilmcwilliam drives down from liverpool where he is from, this by the way, some of this is out of order but this is Jeffrey Lendrum, portrait of him in 2010. I dont think i told you when his first happen but in may 2010. That picture is timber radius. Mcwilliam comes down and interviews this guy and he is still lying and telling the same story that he told the Counterterrorism Police and mcwilliam pretty quickly lets him know hes not dealing with an idiot and that hes dealing with a wildlife expert, raptor expert and knows exactly what hes got that he puts he finally gets lendrum to admit that yes,as he was still stealig peregrine eggs but the eggs were dead and in fact the eggs were dead and he was only bringing them down to south africa for his private collection and i was the story he gave. Mcwilliam was pretty sure he was lying. Anyway, he also admitted that he had been to or retrieve these eggs from cliffs and whales and this is a picture of the rhondd. Valley, one of the greatest concentrations of Peregrine Falcons in the uk, possibly the world is found in this former coal mining area noted for its cliffs, really amazing landscape in these ledges that are sheltered from the wind. You have howling winds up at the top of the thing and the trees were all cut down decades and even a century or more ago because for coal mining toco basically lined this incrediblee network of coal mines that were built over the century in this part of the uk. This barren landscape with fierce winds and little rocky ledges here, protected from the wins for the peregrine lay their eggs and they dont really create nests but they find these ledges and maybe put a fuse stones or couples around it to protect them from rolling off and but you have to imagine this vast landscape. Huge wilderness area and lendrum somehow was able to have acquired 14 of these peregrine eggs. William is pretty sure hes got a professional on his hands. This is a trip i took a couple of years later or seven years later following the footsteps and that is Andy Mcwilliam who is, as i said, let me give you a quick background sketch of william. Liverpool cop o working class family, grandfather gast in world war i, father worked as a merchant marine grew up with no options but the police and he did not barely finished school but became a cop, liverpool cop, walking the bea beach, driving the beat, became quite well known as investigator and had a midlife crisis in his 40s decided he was tired of drug busting, drug addicts and drug pushers and suicides and murders and wanted to get away from that and he was also a very talented rugby player, fierce rugby player, one of the best police rugby players in england and gave that a series of injuries drove him to drop thatn it became a birdwatcher in the birdwatching that he found he absolutely loved to lead him into this hidden subterranean world,in blackmarket bird trads killers of Peregrine Falcons like pigeon fancies and people who trained pigeons or train falcons to kill pigeons because their mortal enemies and exotic bird smugglers who stick birds inside two plastic tubes and send them on 24 hour horrific journeys to from thailand to the uk to satisfy the hunger of these rare bird fanatics. Also another odd little aspect of this is the egg collectors, these are the very british phenomenon, Trained Spotter guys, middleaged men who spend their time going off to some of the remote corners of the uk, islands north of scotland, wales, stealing eggs of rare birds, protected birds, blowing out the embryos and mounting them in collections, their own collections what they have to keep secret and usually hide them in their addicts k and they go up and spare time and stare at their eggs. Mcwilliam found this whole subculture that very few people. New existed ended up basically pursuing these guys, hundreds of them and almost singlehandedly driving this involved in operation called operation easter it was a major crackdown on these guys and drove them out of business so this is his background by the time lendrum comes across his radar screen. Wellversed and knows almost as much about rare birds protected birds as lendrum does. I go here to this is the market that mcwilliam knew existed and that lendrum suddenly presented a concrete image of and this is a scene picture taken in dubain so falconry, quickly, falconry has been around for at least 3000 years and a lot of people believe it started in the our arab world, bedouins started in the desert as a way to hunt you take these wild birds and there was a migration over the desert and they would trap these birds, pulled him of the sky basically using various strategies and train them to hunt so they would start out as hunters and essentially helping bedouins put food on their table. We are talking even before the arrival of islam f and then over the century this falconry developed and traders brought it to europe and china and all around the world and it became more of a sport and recreational thing vented a necessary way to feed yourself but its essentially was this interaction almost mystical interaction between man and bird in which you train a bird and maybe some of you have read Helen Mcdonald book so you probably know a bit about this thing but it became, even though its better on the world it did die out in the uk u and europe in the states and never really e expanded beyond a Certain Group of people. In the arab world and became very closely identified with arab culture, the bedouin traditions and even though the desert was pretty much wiped or seriously eroded over the course of the last 50 years with the discovery of oil falconry remains really intensely embedded in the culture and this is another trainer of a peregrine and in a dubai desert Training Ground and this is the kind of passion that theseer wealthiest falconers who tend to be members of the royal family have and this is the Veterinary Center for the crown prince of dubai crown prince, [inaudible] sorry, the son of mohammed [inaudible] the 7 billiondollar ruler of dubai essentially built this megalopolis and this is the intense dash they have these stateoftheart hospitals where the staff and veterinarians from all over the world pay huge salaries to two take care of their birds and in the last 20 years as the desert has gotten smaller and the natural prey of the birds has disappeared in the persian gulf you have this new phenomenon called falcon raising where the wealthy sheiks take their birds and even though their natural tendency is to drop the straight drop up to 16n fly or are trained using everything from little mini airplanes and drones to handheld bait to go vertical or horizontally and they gatherer, the sheiks gather in these racetracks, falcon racetracks and they place bets but to prepare they have to go all over the world to find the greatest birds that will participate in these races and its an obsession for these guys. You have breeders basically since the 70s and you cant trade on most every raptor in the world falls under this very severe restrictions as far as the only kind of commercial or trading of these birds taking on these birds out of nests and only a handful are allowed every year and have to have a certificate of proving that your interest is scientific. If youre not, youre completely forbidden to touch these birds. To see this great hunger for birds theres a whole captive reading industry that has risen up where they take birds and bury them in artificial environments to incubate the eggs and huge trade worth millions of dollars but the arabs theres a Certain Group of arabs, mostly these wealthy sheiks who believe thatta captie bred birds can be compared to the wild ones that come out of nests because Natural Selection has bred these birds over the centuries or melania in these wilderness environmentsel and these are the birds that they want and willing to go to any length because they are all loaded and willing to go to any length to hire people who will provide these birds for them and willing to take great risks to get them because they only inhabit the most remote difficult to reach places in the world. One of them was Jeffrey Lendrum. Here we go. So, i became very curious to find out, as did Andy Mcwilliam to find out mcwilliam was abl able he figured out pretty quickly he had a global smuggler on his hand. If you let him go he would escape and go back to doing this again so mcwilliam became fixated and 36 hours to try to persuade a prosecutor to hold lendrum for basically carrying bird eggs on his body, which he knew like prosecutors like those Counterterrorism Police had no clues about these arcane wildlife laws lendrum was breaking so was downad to the we trying to persuade these people this was the guy they wanted to hold, and egg smuggler to hold without fail was a difficult sell that mcwilliam succeeded in doing it and was able to keep them without fail all he began digging into a story and as i did when i found my way to Jeffrey Lendrums life. How does one become an egg smuggler . How does one become an egg thief . What led him to the arab world . Its such a weird case that it does raise the question of what in that background would have created this commerce that he engaged in. He grew up in the second city in rhodesia and grew up basically his father was a thirdgeneration white african, parents originally or great conference originally came from ireland and lendrum grew up within shouting distance of this National Park in Southern Rhodesia which is this magnificent geological phenomenon that has these amazing rock structures, some of which rise thousands of feet and this thick vegetation that makes them perfect for raptors. This particular partha has the greatest concentration of eagl eagles, hawks and falcons on the planet. This was basically lendrums backyard. He became involved with his father, he was born in 60 ones with the late 70s he became involved in a survey on ornithological survey of this bird called the black eaglele which is one of the strongest eagles in the world which is found in huge concentrations at this particular park in pretty much nowhere else in the world. It became lendrum and his father went out to the field and surveyed spent months observing their nests and this is where lendrum learned to climb trees and repelled on cliffs and this is a scene of black evil black eagle survey continues 50 years later even now and they laid their legs like a falcon high up, 200 feet off the ground very difficult to spot their nests but this is how lendrum grew upay getting steeped in ths weird stuff and this is the formation you see in this is just perfect terrain for these creatures to thrive. Another bird this is called the crowned eagle and missus one of the rarest raptors in the world known for having giant talents that occasionally sweeping small children off the ground and making off with them, they been known to do this but i know two occasions of the ballboy that i know of. This was lendrums world. At some point to make a dash to sum up that story basically lendrum was on the ornithological survey in the park with his father learning to climb, learning everything about birds and at the same time his father let him while he was conducting this or logical survey and learning the locations to every nest inside the park they were secretly taking eggs even as a teenager and putting them in their own private collection at the same time possibly it was never verified but selling them abroad so even as a 17 and 18 yearolds father was leading him down and ethically challenged path. He ended up he and his father ended up being arrested for illegal possession of eggs and there was a big trial of interest only to birders in rhodesia or zimbabwe in the early 80s but the consequence was he lendrum was disgraced and e d to flee the country and ended up in south africa in this led to this Global Enterprise back at the very beginning like the 90s when the sheiks were gearing up to get their hands on the most Beautiful Oil money was flowing from a falconry was driving, races weree about to begin so there was a real hunger to get their hands on most beautiful birds in the world. Lendrum its hard to chronicle exactly what he did on his missions because so many of them, we believe, or Police Believe were never came to light. They were always but i managed to find an accomplice of his who told me and not only did he tell me about one of these missions they went on together but actually have the video to prove it in this particular mission was to the arctic, to . , to preserve pursue this gyrfalcon these pure white specimens and the biggest falcons in the world, arabs love them because they are incredibly difficult to keep alive in this great challenge justt to keep them alive in the middle east in the desert environment when they are used to places like green icebergs in greenland and the subarctic and siberia. There was this growing desire for gyrfalcon among these crooked arab sheiks and very hard to find even commercial breeders so really the only way to get your hands on one would be to send somebody like lendrum up to the far north to embark on a crazed expedition to get these things off cliffs so how do you t that . The accomplice told me in the whole story of which a little bit i will give you here, this is from a video that the accomplice shot of jeff lendrum back in his prime, back in 2001, and his partner who was a Rhodesian Army crony of his stayed in touch over the years who became actually began working for the Sheriffs Department in a Northern California county so he was a law man who lendrum enlisted to join him on this illegal a grade up in the north and mullen brought along the video of these guys never imagined that one day the video would end up in known what they were given 100,000 or lendrum was given 100,000 by a sheik in the middle east and i will not give that whole story away but how the connection was made but suffice it to say other acquaintances led him to the arab market and he was dispatched total selfstartee he was one who came up with the idea ofat going after the [inaudible] and sold it to the arabs but this is the before they head off to an inuit village way up north your hudson bay and this is a helicopter perched very near a cliff and what lendrum would do they would spot a gyrfalcon couple hundred feet above the ground or over the frozen lakes lendrum a tie or fasten a harness around himself and the pilot would then ascend to whatever 1000 feet near these cliffs and lendrum would reach out and grab the egg off these nests. Really just plundering this environment and this pristine environment that places almost no one else had ever been and pall mall and we meet in the book was my chronicler of all this and have the the plane ticket and the sound and everything to prove it and thats what to quickly get to that, that was a very close relationship and there was a huge fight between the two men after couple of years after this and in which an evolved mullens girlfriend and competent relationships and stilling the girlfriend and custody fights and they had a huge falling out and mullen was waiting for the opportunity to get even with lendrum, as he called me karma is a bi tch. He came forward and told mcwilliam about this and mcwilliam put me in touch with him and became this incredible lsource of source of lendrums life which is stuff that had never come to light including this incredible expedition and this is one of the nest sites that he took a picture of those chicks have just been hatched. They had to time it perfectly so you need to time it so that you arrive there when the eggs are viable but they are not during the first three weeks and they are still too early and they have to be kept at an absolutely same temperature or a slight variation will kill them and at that point even turning the egg a slightly could kill them so you have to wait until they are somewhat viablee but also not wait too long so you dont run the risk of the egg actually hatching as you try to think it through security which has happened. There are a couple egg thieves and lendrum is not the old one doing the stuff and it happened th the 1990s to an egg thief in the uk with four birds began hatching and tweeting in his underwear. [laughter] he was busted that way and it happened to lendrum many years later but anyway, its an art form not only to have to find these birds in the vast wilderness area and they are territorial soo there are huge areas and they are not like nests are everywhere. All the stuff was new to me but i found myself getting more and more caught up in the awareness of it all. These birds establish their territory like five, 10 miles so there may be a nest there and you may have to sweep along another 5 miles looking along the cliffs until you spot something and they would assess whether or not you could rappel down, land a helicopter on top of the cliff and repelled down or whether it was so steep that they would have to descend from a robe and they spent basically ten days doing this and they captured Something Like 30 eggs which is significant part of the environmental bounty of this pristine part of the world so pretty bad stuff, i think it would not make the gyrfalcon extinct but its nasty business and mullen of course was consumed by guilt about it but he did it anyway and in fact he did it the next year or two. To make a long story short again, sorry, to condense this because again i dont want to get too much of it away, basically lendrum continues on this incredible course reckless and getting more reckless and taking more chances and eventually it leads to this 2010 Birmingham Airport incident where Andy Mcwilliam busts him. Because mcwilliam kept him without bail he is able to dig up a lot of lendrums history improves this is no ordinary bird egg collector about somebody with global reach is been doing it for years, who is a professional, making money and plundering the environment probably with cronies in the middle east so hes working this and there is a trial, highly covered trial just because the british media cant resist these elements of ex Rhodesian Army guy, helicopters, rappelling, arab sheiks, top falcon eggs, lendrumel forgive me for not knowing the details of my own book but i think is a two and half Year Prison Sentence which is the first time hes been years already 20 and hes been caught a couple times but managed to sneak out and get through with a fine and it happened in zimbabwe and again in the back and always managed to skate the thin ice survive by paying off someone or keeping his name out of the papers but thanks to mcwilliam this guy is now all over the British Press in his video is of him dangling as b he carries the [inaudible] in his carryon luggage mcwilliams grabs that an everything is put up on youtube and everything is out there now and lendrum is in prison. Mcwilliam is hoping that at this point the guy has time now and has learned his lesson in jail and exposure, Media Exposure will make him very difficult for him to continue along those lines in this life he is led for 20, 25 years. Basically lendrum does get out of jail and does make this legitimate attempt to go straight, i think, i think there are people who are family members, friends, find him work from a normal and returns to south africa, keeps a low profile but something about those eggs and he cannot, he just cant stop, its just in his nature. The next time we discover lendrum he is arrested in brazil and he has been stealing albino falcon eggs in chile and in patagonia where i followed his trial down and this is in its a harsh volcanic landscape with all the dead volcanoes and protected environment and also an absolute haven for raptors, another weird distance part of the world where raptors congregate and lendrum somehow discovered this is a part of the story i dont know how he found these volcanoes in the middle of nowhere and assessed they were likely spots for these albino falcons but the problem now is lendrum was a very wellknown character. His name is out there, hes more and more reckless and draw suspicion about what he is up to, including letting the hotel clerk see his incubators and climbing equipment in his motel room so the hotel clerk googles his name in the first thing he sees is this picture of or video of lendrum dangling from a robe in northern . , he gets to read page after page of stories about the International Wildlife called by Andy Mcwilliams quoted as a master thief on the global scale and its like who do we have here . A trap is laid in lendrum is eventually captured in brazil and is sentenced to five year, foreign half years in prison and a brazilian jail, doesnt speak a word of portuguese and is facing a very difficult time. At that point he escapes through the jungle to argentina and then back to south africa where i caught up with him in late 2017 where again, you know, this was a long search to get a hold of him. He ducked me for many months and i was intent upon finding him and asking him why are you doing this still . What is the middle east connection . Explained to meedd your life ani have a lot of questions and finally agreed to meet me in a Shopping Mall near [inaudible] and we hooked up there and lendrum again, it was a weird encounter, i found him to be a likable, charming character and a complete unrepentant liar. It was kind of hard to have these two identities, by this point i knew so much about his life and i could ask very specific detailed questions and yet he had an answer, just like he had an answer to the counterterrorism guys about the chiropractor and the duck eggs and he had answers and was fast and if he did not know anything would come away convinced that he was the victim and a true conservationist would been out to save these poor birds time and time again and each time by taking them from threatened positions or saving them from Pigeon Fanciers or from ddt or whatever but he had a story behind every heist and you would come away thinking maybe this guy really is this victim whos had this terrible miscarriages of justice and if you knew the story you would realize he was a masterful liar. At the same time you find yourself liking him you are also you are repulsed by this just this incredible pattern of the death of the period at any rate, okay, my final words to lendrum that day were jeff will you go back to doing this because i found if i did not challenge him but played along and acknowledge that yes, you are doing this for the birds but are you going to continue your crusade to save the birds or are you out of this at this point because by this point he had prostate cancer, bad car accident in johannesburg could barely lift his arms and the nurse andad his neck were bt he said no, im gone and out of this and i cant do this anymore and im too old and too tired and too sick and im not going to tell you what happens at that point. I leave lendrum and we shake hands and go our separate ways and i will leave you with one final image. [laughter] i will not tell you exactly where that picture was taken or the circumstance behind it. I already feel like a given away too much of the story. Anyway, i will end the story in the narrative there before i completely dissuade everybody from buying the book but no, theres a lot more obviously had the book is explores this creative air of obsession and this world of egg collectors and i tried to do a lot of Different Things because in the manner of my one of the writers i admire most of the world, susan orly, im happy to say that a couple of the reviews have made the comparison but this took me as far away from the world as International Terrorism and diplomacy and geopolitics that marked my last book to a certain extent so im happy to just dive into what i thought was a great story without any larger geopolitical and environmental implications and perhaps not geopolitical but on that note im happy to open up the floor to the audience and where are people please take that microphone if you have questions and anyone have a question or two to ask . [applause] curious, the gyrfalcon thievery happened in Northern Canada from what you said. In this particular case, yes that we know did that canadian authorities charge him . And did you get to be uninsurable . This was in 2001. They managed to get away and the only way00 we know about that expedition is because the accomplice betrayed him. They went back the next year and were caught that time. They were not careful, raised suspicions and they were charged but did not have the evidence that they were trying to smuggle them out of the country and they could only give them up this guy states that nathan got away with a fine and i told them dont ever set foot in canada again but at that Point Pall Mall and his accomplice changed his name legally and i cant reveal his real name but i was told not to come told i could call him by his old name because that no longer exists. They hit him with a 20000 fine and sent them on their way. How much would he get on average . So, its a really hard e question because for instance its been documented that some of these beautiful white gyrfalcon, pure white ones, have been sold legally in the legal market for 275,000 but with eggs is different because from what i understand i talked to a couple egg experts who tried to put the value on the 14 eggs and is 2010 trial because you have to assume a third of them were not hatch, destroyed in transport or whatever but the female falcons are, worth more than the male because the female falcons are bigger and better racers and they are paying more for them so he placed the value on the 14 total of about 120,000 for all 14 but that was a calculation that a lot of people say was way too low but that was a months work for lendrum, possibly more, thats not bad for several days of climbing around and of course, the preparation involved in finding those in the wilderness. Are these birdsds protected under the Migratory Bird treaty act . It is [inaudible] but there is a lot of overlapping legislation that was extremely confusing to me and i did not want to get bogged down because i did not even understand it. The brits and the European Union have all these logs laws and then you have the convention on International Trade of endangered species so these are considered article one or index one birds. [inaudible conversations] you cant market them, you cant have them, wild ones im talking about, unless you have a license as a scientist to study them and thats really rare to get. So yeah, anyone else . Deborah. [inaudible question] we did speak on the phone over thehe course of six months. When will this be a movie . Good question ass is in development and i dont have anything to do with it. I dont sit around waiting. Ive been in the business too long. Bob. They have these legs eggs wrapped around them and does that not show up on it goes through security . How do you smuggle eggs on an airplane . Some of the aspects of this were heber go through medical detectors and metal detectors off and he had them obscured enough so they would not show up but this picture was taken as e was coming into heathrow airport, he had already got through johannesburg airport with these presumably cap strapped to his stomach but for various reasons, as we said, he got more and more reckless as the career dragged on and just kept making more and more stupid mistakes and was busted for donatella. To theg back transportation of these eggs he wasnt taking Economy Class with those eggs on him was he . I think he had enough miles accumulated so that he didnt generally go in. [inaudible conversations] so yeah, he and mullen traveled Business Class a lot. Once mullens first introduction to his clandestine life was when lendrum tried to bring to live falcons, two dayold falcons, this was before he moved into the egg business stuffed in pockets and then placed in a backpack and put in carryon of Virgin Atlantic flight. Were they alive . They were alive and began screeching every couple hours but hee would have to run and take them into the toilet and feed them his little liver and egg yolk mix and get them back to sleep, put them back on top and this was mullens first real vision that he was dealing with a very crazy person. [laughter] could you tell us about the psychology of these gentlemen . Why is he doing it . Very good question. There must be an obsession there so thats my first question but second one is just as interesting. Could you tell us aboutue your psychology . Why . Why . By spent two and half years of my life doing the story . Is that what you said . [laughter] [inaudible conversations] there is something there. Look, this is a guy who obviously his father was ethically challenged and his father was arrested with let him, you know, not everybody in the lendrum family became criminals, his brother and sister are completely normal, conventional people to some extent but lendrums obviously was closest to the father and the two had very similar interests and stole together and researched egg together and this appears to have been lendrums [inaudible] from an early age and people who knew him growing up that he was always pushing the envelope and always Challenging Authority and wanted to be different and was doing it and love the physical thrill of going after these birds and going back to the time he was 11, 12 years old and he was doing this and doing eggs out of nests. It was a weird compulsion that you find often with these wildlife criminals for instance, these egg thieves that mcwilliam spent several years busting and people collect these aids, eggs passionately thousands of eggs and stash them in attics and they gaze at them. Its a crazy obsession that lendrum, i think, suffered from but there was also of course those egg collectors they love the danger and they love the challenge of the climb and you talk to some of these people that the physical risk and the defiance of authority and they know it is illegal and they get a total charge out of it. Theres a lot of similarity between lendrum and these egg collectors but lendrum took it to another level and g that he d through connections that when you buy the book you will find out how he made that arab connection and so you just happen to be in the right place at the rightco time and that wae and was led to doing this for commercial reasons for d as i think i said theres no indication he got rich from this. The new york f times review called meet the Pablo Escobar of the illegal egg trade or something and that is Pablo Escobar title he conferred upon himself to me ironically saying my first time i talked to him he angrily said Everyone Wants to make me out to be Pablo Escobar of the egg trade. Its politics. Its crap. I publish that in the British Press picked it up and he was the Pablo Escobar of the illegal egg trade even though it was said in complete sarcasm but it became the evidence that he became known as. Why this story or do you want a general psychological portrai portrait [laughter] well,au ive been a Foreign Correspondent for a lot of years and then i my career morphed a little bit and i became interested in narrative, nonfictionrrative and electrifying stories that led me to the s the badass librarian of timbuktu which was a good yarn and so i became i wanted to tell what worked about the badass librarian of timbuktu was it had a hero and the antihero was morality set in the strange part of the world,ce exotic and allowed me to flex my writing muscles, develop characters and thats what i wanted to do with the next booka the story somehow resonated and obviously it was a completely different story from the badass librarian of timbuktu but had a lot of elements and a great tetentially Great Central character as long as i could balance him as a good guy because you would not want to just read 270 pages about a villain and so i was fortunate enough to have a what i thought was very appealing Police Officer who had this p weird fixation on busting bird crimes to balance out but there were a couple people told me they liked lendrum more and found mcwilliam to basically be an administrative geek. Thats a rare view. People do seem to like the balance in character. The story just seemed to have all the elements and i like to do and i like writing and i like telling stories in book form. And i also like penetrating subcultures andre worlds i just dont know anything about and i knew next to nothing about falconry and i love birds. But not in any sort of jonathan [inaudible] passionate word obsessive gazing way. I did appreciate that in this experience made me more appreciative but i would not come myself particularly a birder but i do appreciate and love them more than i did previously so yeah i dont knowv i also love environmental stuff and ive always loved and that struck me as having the opportunity to follow this trail of criminals and think of all the amazing places you would go. I use to cover war zones but now i do not want to go to war zones but going to the desert, thert volcanic desert of patagonia or the National Park in zimbabwe to look at rafters that was an adventure. For all these reasons it spoke to me in a wayea that all the other ideas i had were falling on this one did not. Anyone else . Kathleen, could you step up to the microphone . Sorry. Cspan is here. I didnt even introduce them and this is why we are doing this. I forgot about that. This relates really to an earlier question but do you think in the course of theie pretrial proceedings that anyone did a psychiatric evaluation of lendrum . Not that i am aware of but you dont get a lot out of these british cops. Its really hard to get them to tell you anything. In this case, fortunately it was over and done with soap mcwilliam could give me some stuff but it was hard. I tried to get a hold of interrogation tapes, transcrip transcripts, i filed the freedom of information act request, itqu was all they told me everything and they denied and they said everything was destroyed and we are to keep it for five years and destroy everything. I got very little. I wanted to get theis counterterrorism story and they would not talk to me so what went on with psychology it may be that he got psychologically psychological evaluation but its a mystery. Sorry, guys,. Given how lucrative this was other other lendrums out there . How expensive is this scheme . As i said, i dont think was all that lucrative for lendrum. He didnt live a particularly extravagant lifestyle. It was more the thrill. But yeah, i did some research into this and at such a clandestine world that we dont get anything out of the arabs or the sheiks and its even taboo for most people even the breeders know about it but wont talk about it and they appear to be they busted occasionale trappers up in the wilderness of siberia or pakistan and there was a Tv Documentary in the uk in the 90s that laid a trap for a guy posed in the producer and host of the showdu poses asa arab sheik and lured out middlemen and egg collectors so we know this world exists but its never been as clearly outlined and tangible as it blspent in the case of Jeffrey Lendrum. I think we are out of time bu but this is nonfiction. It reads like fiction. What . [inaudible question] not in the lease. Ive tried to be as faithful as i can to the truth. An yes. [applause] thank you, thank you josh. Ho what a fascinating world you lead us into. T his book is available at the checkout desk. He will be a peer signing. Please form a line to the rights of the table. Please help our staff by folding up your tears. You are watching a special edition of book tv airing now during the week while members of congress are working in their districts because of the pandemic. Friday night after words, New York Times magazine contributor examines sexual culture in young male masculinity and then former Deputy National security advisor Katie Mcfarland details her time in the trump administration. Later, New York Times reporter jennifer [inaudible] chronicles the first year of the large class of women ever elected to congress. Please enjoy book tv and watch over the weekend on cspan2. Top of the page