See The Last Clouded Leopard: WildAid’s Wildlife Conservation Goes After The Poachers

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Outside Magazine May 2004

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See the Last Clouded Leopard. See the Last Clouded Leopard Die. See the Last Clouded Leopoard Skin in the Black Market. See a Pattern Here?
Steve Galster and his comrades at WildAid do–and they're taking drastic action: going undercover, busting the traffickers, and poaching the poachers. It's high time wildlife conservation started fighting mean and dirty. Can you handle that?

By Natasha Singer


	Sompong Prachopchan, an ex-tiger poacher who works for WildAid, burns some increasingly hard-to-find aloe wood. (James Nachtwey)

INSIDE ONE OF THE UBIQUITOUS GO-GO-BARS that line Soi Diamond Alley, in Pattaya, a seaside town 90 miles south of Bangkok, a handful of balding, potbellied foreigners are drooling over a dozen Thai girls strutting along the bar to the blare of disco music.

Sitting at a nearby table, under a revolving mirror ball, Steve Galster seems immune to such louche diversions. A clean-cut, six-foot-five native of Green Lake, Wisconsin, he looks like a generic American, dressed in standard-issue blue jeans and a long-sleeved oxford shirt. While the men around him pant, he chews his bubble gum, orders a beer, and waits.

A few minutes later, a young woman in a cleavage-baring black T-shirt walks up and kisses Galster on the cheek. A former go-go dancer who now works as his paid informant, she pulls a small Ziploc bag from her purse and slides it across the table. The bag contains aloe wood—an aromatic essence so highly valued that some Asian poachers have killed to obtain it. It's illegal to sell native aloe wood in Thailand, but the stuff is routinely smuggled out of the country anyway, because Middle Eastern consumers prize it as incense. The wood can wholesale for $1,000 per kilo.

"Fort Knox" is getting plundered: The global trade in illegal animal parts, pelts, and plants is driving hundreds of species to the brink of extinction.

Galster slowly opens the baggie and nods.

"The main aloe trader in Pattaya is from Iraq," the woman says. "He keeps some wood in his store, but there's no problem if you want more. The guy says he has a warehouse full of it."

That's all Galster needs to hear. He heads out the door and into Sin City—alleyways crowded with stores offering bootleg Viagra, cheap plastic surgery, and cheaper sex, not to mention crocodile purses with beady-eyed heads still attached, illegal pelts from endangered animals, and aphrodisiacs like tiger-penis wine. Despite his subdued midwestern manner, the 42-year-old Galster seems energized, clearly reveling in the hunt.

Before long he finds the small shop he's after. The window display includes a glass case full of fake Rolex watches and another stocked with aloe-wood oils in ornamental bottles. Galster walks up to the owner, a middle-aged Iraqi with a clipped rectangular mustache, and explains that he wants to export aloe wood to the United States. This sounds unlikely coming from a farang—the Thai term for a foreigner—but the trader doesn't hesitate. He pulls out a large white plastic box filled with wood chunks. Then he breaks off a tiny piece, drops it in a small metal urn, and lights it, dispersing the fragrant smoke with circular waves of his hand.

Galster inhales. "That's good," he says conspiratorially. "Like hashish."

"Good?" says the dealer. "It's the best! This little bag costs $2,500—more expensive than gold. There are only limited quantities left, and it is hard to get."

"Limited quantities" is one way of putting it. Even though it's against the law to remove aloe from national parks in Thailand and Malaysia—practically the only places where the wood can still be found in either country—poachers are busy chopping down trees. Traffic, a UK-based group that monitors worldwide trade in protected plant and animal species, warns that aloe wood may soon become commercially extinct due to overharvesting.

Galster lays down enough cash for a 12-gram baggie and leaves. Outside, he checks to see if the palm-size digital video camera he's been using is still recording. Then Galster—a man whom many wildlife experts consider the planet's most effective sleuth in the shadowy world of endangered-species smuggling—starts speculating about what he's just seen.

"I feel bad suspecting that guy, because he may just be an Iraqi shopkeeper trying to make a little money," he says. "But we saw the watches and the wood. They're both illegal businesses. And people in piracy often fund other illegal activities."

What Galster is suggesting is that this small-time crook may be tied into something bigger—namely, a black-market financial network that funds terrorism. "I just can't help wondering whether Iraqi aloe-wood dealers are raising money for something else, like Al Qaeda," he adds. "We'll have to keep looking into it."

That sounds like gonzo conspiracy theory—and, in fact, no connection between plant or animal trafficking and terrorism has been established—but it may not be too far-fetched. Two years ago, in a much-publicized story that broke half a world away from Galster's Asian beat, a gang of cigarette smugglers based in Charlotte, North Carolina, pleaded guilty to skimming $1.5 million and funneling a portion of it to Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Islamic terrorist group. William Wechsler, an expert on the financing of terrorism at the Council on Foreign Relations, in New York, points out that "local terrorist cells are supposed to support themselves, and they do that by committing everything from penny-ante financial crimes to credit card fraud. So animal trafficking, as an easy source of quick and illegal money, would not be unusual for terrorists to take advantage of."

Galster has spent the past two decades working as a political and environmental detective, often under cover, and during that time he has specialized in collating intelligence on the global flow of contraband—be it grenades, ganja, girls, or gorillas. Along the way he's made some unusual connections. He spent part of the late eighties embedded with the anti-Soviet mujahedeen in Afghanistan, where he watched the guerrillas routinely use opium profits to buy weapons. In the nineties, while helping Russian police and environmental officials break up a ring that was smuggling the pelts (and parts) of endangered Siberian tigers, he saw firsthand that the crooks were also involved in an entirely different enterprise—moving women into the sex-slavery trade in Japan.

Whether Galster is right or wrong about his Iraqi merchant, his investigative skills have definitely advanced the cause of animal protection. In recent years he's focused his energy on helping create and lead an innovative new group called WildAid, a lean, aggressive conservation outfit that's taking direct action against poachers and traffickers in species-rich but economically poor countries like Thailand, Cambodia, Ecuador, and Russia.

WildAid's mission is straightforward: training local law enforcement and wildlife officials to fight poachers, in an attempt to protect national parks, wildlife preserves, and other places that represent the last stand for many endangered species. Because modern wildlife crime is becoming increasingly complex, Galster believes the tried-and-true approach that conservation groups have followed for decades—raising money, funding scientific research, and using a worldwide bully pulpit to campaign against species destruction—is both passive and passé. He's convinced that only a strong, proactive approach to animal security can save species that are on the brink of extinction.

Given all this criminal activity, is it possible that Galster sometimes gets carried away imagining how the various bad guys might fit together? Maybe. But he's paid to think outside the box, and there's no denying that he's accomplished a lot by following up on his wildest ideas.

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Correspondent Natasha Singer wrote about adventure travel in Iceland in June 2002.

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