Librarian singing timbuktu which told a riveting story of how timbuktu in northern probably managed with very brave helpers smuggled more than 350,000 historical manuscripts out from under militant to safety about 600 miles away. The book was a bestseller established as someone for truly, a great story. And hes done it again with his new book which recounts another to tail of adventure. This one about wildlife. Josh is a journalist by trade and hannah, a pretty adventurous globetrotting run himself, working for newsweek over nearly two decades. He joins this week in the late 1980s in the business and cleanup writer, is off to cover the rest of the world on postings that based him in berlin, jerusalem and back here in the u. S. In los angeles. For the past decade and a half, hes continue to report and travel widely, a range of publications. Four years ago, he won the National Magazine award and reported for peace title, nurses are dead and i dont know if im already infected. [laughter] it was still a prizewinning story. Told a story of a physician who led the effort to control the ebola outbreak. In addition to the timbuktu book, hes written three other previous works, one about his younger brother who became originalist religion fundamentalist. A nativity in bethlehem. Ive heard about the deadly 1923 earthquake and fire in japan. Its been said, he reports like a journalist and right like a novelist. That is certainly the case with his work in the falcon place. The book describes jeffrey flynn, notorious wildlife lover who for years, stole highly valued birds of prey and selling them to enthusiasts where falcons and other rafters are used for sports. The other central character in joshs story is a detective from the Wildlife Crime unit, Andy Mcwilliams. Specializes in mythological crime solving. And was determined to catch one. The book is a thrilling fastpaced chronicle but more than that. Its more than just a detective story set in a rare world filled with unusual characters and astounding birds. As one reviewer noted, its a cautionary tale about the love of nature can go very wrong. What happens when precious wildlife becomes a status symbol on the planet where nature is increasingly in peril. Welcome joshua. [applause] great detailed introduction. Thank you. I think this will always be my favorite bookstore and venue to talk about these things. Thanks everybody for coming out tonight, im amazed anybody goes to book events at all. Okay, its recorded. [laughter] anyway. Over the course of doing this particular talk now, three or four times since i got to new york, basically present a narrative without giving away the entire book. Illustrating cap narrative with pictures that i think help bring that story to life. I will very quickly start with an introduction how this, i presume most of you have not seen the book, how i stumbled into this thing. It came out in 2016 and its been a story that i followed for many years, beginning is achieved for newsweek, i made a couple of chips to timbuktu and continue to visit over the years and i got a couple of assignments to write about the assignment of timbuktu. I was briefed in that story when al qaeda invaded the country and people i know caught up in the violent of the capturing of the entire two thirds of the country. It was a story that i owned, i felt in way and it made sense that the book would come out of it. This is something completely different. Its like an act of desperation. I was looking for im of the product and i had thrown it out, terrible ideas including one about the, or even want to go into them. [laughter] fortunately, one day in 2017, i was with my kids and i picked up a london times and it was sitting in a cafe and there was a short article, about page 12 or so about this character named jeffrey, Something Like fief on the wing again. They love those bad ones. This was a story, all it said was this guy, a notorious thief known for helicopter ring and repelling down cliffs to reach rare falcon eggs dubai and it vanished and rearrested to prison in brazil and disappeared. Now the world, conservation world and Wildlife Police were alarmed. He might be coming back on the hunt. That was enough to ignite my interest and i began investigating it further and further and deeper and deeper. Coming obsessed in a way with the eggs. Which is sort of what a writer, a journalist does. Fiction, nonfiction, plunging deeper and deeper into a subject so without introduction, i will tell you a bit about the story as it unfolds in the books with some coherence. Without giving too much away. This story begins in a shower, emirates First Business class lounge at the International Airport in the uk. Where a very vigilant manager janitor notices a middle age white fellow, under script character coming into the washroom, the child all of his baggage, three thanks. Disappears in there for 20 minutes. Good janitor is waiting to keenly the place, he doesnt know whats going on. Security monitor looking at hundreds of closed captions in a Shopping Mall so he was trained to observed. After 20 minutes, the janitor goes inside the bathroom and sees absolutely nothing has been touched. Everything is completely dry, unused. Towels still folded. Toilet, nothing. So immediately he got suspicious. He starts rooting around and after five or ten minutes of looking through Ceiling Tiles and whatever, he finds a diaper, he sees a diaper in the corner of the room and opened it up and sees an egg at the bottom of the diaper with a single red painted red egg. Like an easter egg inside. He figured it was left by the guy just enough so hes completely mystified and somewhat alarmed. What could this possibly mean . Its probably something to do with drugs, hes not sure. Long story short, the Counterterrorism Police came to the scene, they take him away and stripsearched him and find beneath his tshirt, a hospital cost wrapped tightly around his body and inside the gauze are woolen socks. Inside the socks are 14 of these. They dont know what they are. The Counterterrorism Police are not trained at all in understanding what they are so they asked jeffrey, they looked at his passport and establish his identity. What are these . He tells them, they are duck eggs. They say okay, what you mind telling us why you are carrying raw duck eggs attached to your body . Your belly. He explains that his chiropractor told him he needs to where raw eggs wrapped around his body because it will prevent him from stooping and lead to tightening of his lower back muscles. [laughter] okay so they just dont know what theyve got on hand. [laughter] it at that time that they summ summon, they make a phone call to Andy Mcwilliams, if any of you have seen the reviews of this book, there have been a few good ones, they are satisfying to read but they tend to give short shrift to annick mcwilliam, this is a bad guy, good guy, hero and antihero. Any mcwilliam, might call him britains most famous Wildlife Police with a specialty in ornithological crime. He heres the story, realizes it may, breeding season. Incubating, nesting season. He realized the guy carrying eggs on his body, probably not to hide them but to keep them warm from the description, he instantly knows they are parent falcon. I had a better if an inch of one but some reason it didnt download. This is anyway, thats basical basically, this is a highly protected bird, a raptor, the fastest bird on the planet, it can going to a stupid dive to kill another bird in mid air. At the speed of up to 180 miles an hour. Mcwilliams knows they are highly prized by falconers in particular, especially the wealthy shapes of the united arab but hes never actually, hes heard rumors about this market, this black market to bring in these protected raptors into the emirates. He believes from a description, counterterrorism crops you may have a smuggler on his hand. So he derived drove down to where hes from, this is jeffrey, a portrait of him in 2010. This was in may 2010. Thats what he looked like back then. He comes down and interviews this guy, he still flying and telling the same story he told the Counterterrorism Police. He pretty quickly lets him know hes not dealing with an idiot. All wildlife expert, raptor expert, he knows exactly what hes doing. He finally gets him to admit that yes, he was stealing from. He took them but the eggs were dead. The eggs were dead and he was only bring them down to south africa for his private collection. He was pretty sure he was lying. He also admitted he had been, he retrieved these eggs from cliffs and whales. This is up picture of the vall valley, one of the greatest concentrations of falcons in the uk and possibly the world, this former coal mining area known for its cliffs, amazing landscape and these ledges that are sheltered from the wind. Howling winds at the top of the trees and cut down decades and even a century or more ago. Basically find this incredible network and coal mines built over the centuries as part of the uk. His parents landscape and fierce wind and these ledges here, protected from the wind where they lay their eggs. That really messed or create nest, they just find ledges and maybe put a few stones and pebbles around it to protect it from rolling off and you have to imagine this landscape, a huge wilderness area. Youre able to have acquired 14 of these eggs. Hes got a professional one. This was taken a couple of years later, seven years later following the footsteps, fact Andy Mcwilliams. I may give you a quick background sketch. Hes a liverpool cop, working class family, grandfathered in world war i. Father worked at a marine, grew up with no options but the police, he didnt have, he barely finished school but he became a cop, a liverpool cop, really quite well known investigator in a midlife crisis, he decided he was tired of drug busting, drug addicts and drug pushers and suicide and murder, he wanted to get away from that. It was a very talented rugby, fierce rugby player. He gave out because of injuries, he became a birdwatcher and he found that he loved that and it led him to this hidden subterranean world, blackmarket bird trader, killers of peregrine falcons, people who loved pigeons and killed falcons or destroyed their eggs because falcons on the mortal enemy of the kitchen. So exotic birds, smugglers stick birds inside tubes and sent them on a 24 hour horrific journey to the amazon to the uk to satisfy the hunger of these birds, rare birds. Also another odd little activists from egg collectors. Very british phenomenon, middleclass men, middleaged men, sorry who spend their time going off to some remark corners of the uk, northern scotland, wales, stealing eggs of rare birds, protected birds. Blowing up embryos and mounting them in the collection. Their own collection. They have to keep them secret, they hide them in their addicts and go up there and spare the eggs. Mcwilliams found this whole subculture, and ended up basically pursuing these guys, hundreds of them. Almost singlehandedly driving this, operation easter, is a major crackdown on these guys. This is his background. By the time he comes across separate hes well first and he knows almost all most as much about protected birds as he does. This is the market mcwilliams knew existed and he suddenly presented a concrete image of. This is a picture taken in dubai so falconry has been around for at least 3000 years. A lot of people believe it started in the arab world. Migration over the desert, they trap the birds, pull them out of the sky basically and train them to hunt. They started out as hunters essentially helping them put food on the table. Even before the arrival of islam. And over the centuries, this falconry developed and traders brought it to europe and china and all around the world and become more of a sport and recreational thank them unnecessary way to feed yourself. Its essentially this interaction between man and bird and train a bird, maybe some of you have read the book, you probably know a bit about this but this became, even though it spread around the world, it did kind of die out in the uk and europe, and never really expanded beyond a Certain Group of people. In the arab world, it became closely identified with arab culture. Even though the desert was kind of pretty much seriously eroded over the course of the last 50 years in the discovery of oil, falconry remained embedded in the culture. This is our trainer and a dubai desert training ground. This is the passion the wealthiest falconers had. This is the Veterinary Center for the crown princes dubai. The son of mohammed, a billiondollar ruler essentially built this. The state of the art hospitals with staff and veterinarians all over the world that they paid huge salaries to take care of their birds. In the last 20 years, the desert has gotten smaller natural prey of the birds has disappeared and you have this new phenomenon called falcon racing, even though your natural tendency is to drop, up to 160 miles an hour, they are trained using everything from little mini airplanes and drowned drowned to go horizontally and a gather at these racetracks, falcon racetracks and they place bets,y hundred are all over the world to find the greatest birds that will participate in these races. Its an obsession for these guys. You have breeders since the 70s, you cant trade almost every doctor in the world has fallen under severe restrictions as far as the only kind of commercial trading of these birds, only a handful allowed every year. Proving its scientific. If youre not part of a scientific group, you are forbidden from touching the groups. To see this great hunger for the birds, a breeding industry written up reading them in artificial environments, huge trade worth millions of dollars but the arabs, theres a Certain Group of arabs, wealthy ones who believe these captive birds cant be compared to the wild ones because Natural Selection read the birds over the centuries and millennia and wilderness environment and these are the birds they want. They are willing to go to any length because they are loaded with money. They will provide that and willing to take great risks to get them out. They only inhabit the most remote, difficult to reach places in the world. One of them was jeffrey. Here we go. I became very curious to find out, as did Andy Mcwilliams to find out, he figured immediately or pretty quickly he had a global smuggler on his hands. If he let him go, he would go back. He became excited, 36 hours to persuade the prosecutor to hold him for basically carrying bird eggs on his body. He knew prosecutors had no clue about these wildlife birds. It was down to the wire trying to persuade these people, and egg smuggler to hold without bail. It is difficult to sell. He succeeded in doing it and kept him without bail while digging into his story. As i did when i found my way to jeffreys life. How does one become an egg smuggler . What led him to the arab world . It does raise the question of, what a background would have been to create this. He grew up in the second city of rhodesia. He grew up basically, his father was a thirdgeneration white african, parent from ireland. He grew up within shouting distance of this National Park. Is this magnificent geological phenomena and has these amazing rock structures, and this vegetation that makes it perfect for practice. This particular part, his greatest concentration of eagle, hawks and falcons on the planet. This was basically his backyard. He became involved with his father, he was born in 61 of the late 70s, he became involved in a survey of this bird called a black eagle which is one of the strongest eagles in the world which is found in huge concentration at this particular park and nowhere else in the world. They went on the field and they surveyed and spent months observing, this is where he learned to climb trees. And repelled down clips and this is a scene from a black eagle survey continued even now 60 years later. A black eagle, they lay eggs like the falcons do, high up, 80 to 200 feet off the ground. This is how he grew up, weird stuff. This is the kind of information you see. Perfect terrain for these creatures to thrive. Another bird, this is a crown eagle. The rarest raptor in the world, its known for having a giant talent, occasionally sweeping small children off the ground and making off with them. There are a few occasions that i know of. This was his world. At some. Okay, to sum up that story, a survey in the park with his father, learning everything about birds. At the same time, his father led him while he was there conducting this survey and burning for location by the park, they were secretly taking eggs, even as a team, putting them in their private collection, possibly never verified, selling them abroad. Even as a 17 and 18yearold, his father was leading him down and ethically challenged path. As he ends up being arrested for illegal possession of eggs, interests, it would have been zimbabwe in the early 80s. The consequence was was disgraced, flee the country, ends up in south africa and was led in to this Global Enterprise back at the very beginning, like the 90s when they were curing up to get their hands on the most beautiful, oil money was flowing. Falconry was thriving. The braces were about to begin. Theres a real hunger to get their hands on the most beautiful birds in the world. Its kind of hard to chronicle exactly what he did on his missions because so many of them, we believe they were, they never came to light. I found a compass of his who told me, not only did he tell me about one of these missions they were on together but he actually has a video to prove it. This particular mission went back to pursue this bird, doctor falcon, pure white not only. White by a pure white specimen, the biggest falcon in the world. They are incredibly difficult to keep alive. As a great challenge just to keep them alive in the middle east in the desert environment when they are used to places like green iceberg agreement and the subarctic and siberia. There was this growing desire among these crooked arab men. Very kind to find commercial breeders so the only way to get your hands on one was to send somebody like landrum up to embark up there, to get them off the cliffs. How do you do that . The accomplice told me the whole story, i will give you a little bit here. This is some video a shot of jeffrey back in his prime in 2001. His partner, a Rhodesian Army man, they stayed in touch over the years and became, began working for the Sheriffs Department in a Northern California county so he was a long man. He enlisted to join him on this illegal grade in the north. He brought along the video, i never imagined they would end up in the hands of the crime unit. And in the book. They were given 100,000 by i shake in the middle east, not going to give the whole story away. How the connection was made. Other acquaintances in the market and he was the one who came up with the idea of going after them and sold them. Its his before he goes off to a village way up north your hudson bay and this is the helicopter perched near a cliff. They would stop a falcon, sometimes a couple of hundred feet above the ground or above frozen lakes and a harness and a rope around himself and ascend to whatever, 1000 feet near the cliffs and he would reach out and grab eggs off the nest. Just plundering this environment, pristine environment. Places almost no one else had ever been. Youll meet him in the book, he has a video and plane tickets and the sound and everything to prevent. Was a very close relationship. There is a huge fight between them a couple of years after this which it involved his girlfriend in a complicated relationship, stealing the refund. Custody fights, they had a huge falling out. He was waiting for the opportunity to get even with him. He told me, was a bit. He came forward and told me about this he became this incredible source of stories for me about his life, stuff that had never come to light including this incredible expedition. This is one of the sites he took a picture of. The chicks had just been hatched. They had to time it perfectly. You need to time it so you arrive there when the eggs are viable, which they are not during the first few weeks. Its still too early may have to be kept absolutely the same temperature or a slight variation will kill them. You have to wait until they are somewhat viable but also not wait too long so you dont run the risk of the egg hatching as you are trying to think through security, which has happened. There are a couple of egg thieves, theyre not the only ones doing this. It happened in 1990s when a thief in the uk, four birds began hatching and tweeting in his underwear. [laughter] he was busted. Anyway, this vast wilderness area, they are territory there. They have a huge area, its not like their nests everywhere. All this stuff was new to me but i found myself more and more caught up in the weirdness of it all. These birds established their territory five or 10 miles. When youre in your helicopter and you have to sweep along another 5 miles, looking along the cliffs until you start something they would assess whether or not you could propel down, claimed helicopter on top of the cliff and repelled down or whether it was so steep they would have to descend from a rope and they spent basically about ten days doing this. They capture Something Like 30 eggs. Its a significant part, the environmental pristine part of the world, pretty bad stuff, i think. Wasnt going to make them extinct but it was nasty business. He was consumed by guilt about it but he did it anyway. The next year, to so to make a long story short, to invent, i dont want to get too much of it away, basically lender continues on this incredible course, getting more reckless, taking more chances, eventually it leads to this 2010 airport incident where Andy Mcwilliams bus him. Because he kept it and without bail, hes able to dig up a lot of history and proof that theres no ordinary bird egg collector but somebody with global reach, whos been doing it for years, whos a professional making money plundering the environment, probably in the middle east so hes working and theres a trial, highly covered trial because the british media cant resist these elements of x Rhodesian Army guy, helicopter repelling, top falcon eggs so he ends up getting, forgive me for not knowing the details of my own book but i think two and a half year prison sentence, the first time, hes been doing this 20 years already and hes been caught a couple times but he gets through with a fine and it happened in zimbabwe and again in quebec. He always managed to escape the thin ice and survived by paying off somebody, keeping his name out of the papers. Mcwilliams was all over the british press, this video is dangling, hes carrying a dvd in his carryon luggage. Mcwilliams grabbed that. Its put up on youtube, everything is out there now. It lands him in prison. Mcwilliams is hoping this time, hes learned his lesson. Jail and exposure, media exposure, its going to think it very difficult to continue along those lines in this life hes led 420, 25 years. Basically he does get out of jail and he does make this legitimate attempt to go straight, i think there are people who are family members, friends who are willing to help them, they find him working on normal life. He returns to south africa, keeps a low profile but something about the eggs, you just cant stop, its just in his nature. So the next time we discover h him, hes arrested in brazil. Hes been stealing albino falcon eggs in patagonia. A National Park where i follow his trail down. This is a harsh volcanic landscape with all of these that volcanoes and also, an absolute hate for raptors. Another weird distant part of the world which he discovered. Part of the story that i dont know how he found these volcanoes in the middle of nowhere and that they were likely boxed with the falcons but the problem now, the lender was a very well known character. His name is, hes more and more reckless, a lot of suspicion about what hes up to including letting the hotel clerks see his incubators and climbing equipment in his hotel room. The hotel clerk takes his name in the first thing he sees is this picture and video of him dangling from a rope in northern quebec. He reads page after page and stories about these International Wildlife thief followed by mcwilliams quoted, a master thief on a global scale. Hes like well, help what have we got here . So hes eventually captured in brazil, he sentenced to four and a half years in prison and a brazilian jail. Hes facing a very difficult time. At that time, he escapes to the jungle to argentina and back to south africa where i caught up with him in late 2017 where again, this was a long search to get a hold of him. Its been many, many months and i was intent on finding him and asking him are you doing this still . The middle east connection . Explained to me your life. I had a lot of questions that he finally agreed to meet me at a Shopping Mall and we hooked up there. It was a weird encounter, i found him to be a likable, charming character. And complete unrepented wire. This kind of hard to have these two identities. I knew so much about his life at this time. I could ask very specific detailed questions and he knew how to answer just like he had an answer to the counterterrorism, the chiropractor and the duck eggs, he had answers, he was fast and didnt know anything about it. He is convinced is a victim, heres a true conservationist and out to save these birds time and time again. Each time taking them and saving them from pigeons or whatever. Another story behind everything. We would come away thinking well, maybe he really is a victim. But you realize he was just a masterful fire. You find if you you find yourself liking him, then you are repulsed by this incredible pattern. At any rate, okay so, my final words that day were are you going to go back to doing this . I didnt challenge him but played along and acknowledged, we are doing this for the sake of the birds, are you going to save the birds or are you out of it at this time . He had prostate cancer, a bad car accident, he could barely lift his arms. His neck, he said hes gone from out of this. I cant do this anymore. Im too old and too tired and im too sick. Im not going to tell you what happened at that time. I leave him, we shake hands and go our separate ways. I will leave you with one final image. [laughter] i will not tell you exactly where the picture was taken or the circumstances behind it. I already feel like i have given away way too much of the story but anyway, im going to end the story and narrow it down before i completely dissuade everybody from buying the book but theres a lot more obviously. I explores this whole crazy obsession and the world of egg collectors in his life and i tried to do a lot of different things. Matter of my favorite writers, im happy to say a couple of reviews have made the comparison but this took me as far away from the world and International Terrorism and diplomacy and geopolitics that marked my last book to a certain extent. I was happy for this great story without a larger geopolitical environmental education. On that note, im happy to open up to the audience, please take that microphone if you have a question. Anybody have a question . [applause] curious, the falcons happened in Northern Canada from what you said. In this particular case, yes. Does the canadians authorities charge him . This was 2001, they managed to get away. The only way they know about it is because the accomplice betrayed him. They went back the next year end got caught this time. They were not very careful, they had suspicions, they were charged, didnt have any evidence they were trying to smuggle them out of the country, they could only give them from he got away with a fine. Dont ever set foot in canada again but paul mullen, his accomplish change his name legally. I cant reveal his real name but i could call him by his own name since it doesnt exist anymore. They did what they could, 20000 fine and sent them on their way. How much would they get . Thats a hard question. Its been documented some of these beautiful falcons, pure white ones had been sold legally in the legal market for like 275,000 but with eggs, its a little different because eggs are, experts including the place of value in a 2010 trial, maybe a third of them are not going to hatch, the female falcons are worth more than the male because the female falcons are bigger and better racers. They pay more for them. They placed the value about 120,000 for all 14 but that was a calculation a lot of people said was too low. That was like a months worth, possibly more. Not bad for several years days around wales and the preparation involved in finding those areas. Are they protected . Its societies. A lot of overlapping legislation, its always extremely confusing. I didnt want to get too bogged down because i dont even understand. European union has all these laws and site fees and International Trade in endangered species. Their considered article one or index one birds. These are all appendix one. You cant trade them, you cant market them or have them. A license as a scientist to study them. Thats really rare to get to. Anyone else . [inaudible question] we didnt speak on the phone over the course of six months. When is this going to be a movie . [laughter] its in development. All right we are just waiting, i just dont have anything to do with it. I assume this picture, does not not show up when it comes to security . How do you get eggs on an airplane . Some of the aspects of this, he would go through metal detectors and metal detectors, often you have them secure enough that they would not show up. But this picture was taken as he was coming into the airport. He had already gone through johannesburg airport these strapped to his stomach but for various reasons, he got more and more reckless as his career dragged on. Kept making more and more stupid mistakes and was busted. Going back to the transportation of these eggs, he wasnt taking Economy Class to london with the eggs on him, because he . I think he had enough miles accumulated. [laughter] i remember he was on the Business Class lounge in 2010 so yeah, they traveled Business Class a lot. His first introduction was when he tried to bring live falcons, to dayold falcons, before he moved into the egg business, he placed them in a backpack and put them on a carryon in an atlantic flight. Were they alive . They were alive and began squeaking every couple of hours, they would wake him discreet and he would have to run and take them into the toilet and feed them liver and egg yolks mix, put them back on top and get them back to sleep. I was his first realization he was dealing with a crazy person. Why was he doing it . [inaudible question] the second question, can you tell us about your psychology . [laughter] why . Why do this story . [laughter] is all about obsession. [laughter] [inaudible] all right, this is a guy whose father was a bit ethically challenged, his father was arrested, not everybody in the family became criminals his mother and sister are perfectly normal. [laughter] conventional people, he obviously was closest to his father, he had more interest, based altogether. This appears to have been from an early age. People who knew him growing up said he was always pushing the envelope. It is always challenging authority, wanted to be different, was doing it for a physical thrill of going after these birds, going back to the time when his 11 and 12 years old during this period stealing eggs out of mess. It was a weird compulsion combined often with wildlife criminals. They were busting please, they were busting please eggs passionately. Literally thousands of eggs, they stashed them in the attics and gaze at him. Its a crazy obsession that i think he suffered from but also the egg collectors, they slept the danger the challenge of the time, you talk to some of the people, the physical risk and the defiance of authority, they know its illegal, they get a charge out of it. Theres a lot of similarity between him and the egg collectors but he took her to the other level through connections you will read about when you buy the book, youll find out how he made that connection so he happened to be in the right place at the right time and was led into doing this for commercial reasons. I think i said, theres no indication he got rid of it, the New York Times review was the Pablo Escobar of this. Pablo escobar title, he referred back to me my first time i talked to him, he angrily said everybody wants to make me out to be Pablo Escobar of the ache world. Its crab. I published that on the outside magazine and suppress picked it up and suddenly he was always Pablo Escobar of the illegal trade he said it was complete sarcasm and he became known as that. So why this story . You want a general psychological evaluation . [laughter] ive been a correspondent a lot of years in a kind of the month my career kind of morphed a little bit and this narrative, longform narrative, i liked the stories and it let me to timbuktu but i became, i wanted i think it had a hero and immorality place, a strange part of the world, exotic and allowed me to develop characters and thats what i want to do in the next book. This story somehow resonated and obviously a completely different story but i had a lot of element, potentially Great Central character as long as i could balance him with a good guy. I dont think you would just want to read 270 pages about of billing. So i was fortunate enough to have what i thought was very appealing Police Officer who had this weird fixation on busting bird crime to balance out, a couple people told me they liked him more and found william to be an administrative geek, that seems to be a rare feel. They do seem to like the balance of characters. The story seemed to have all of the elements that i liked, i like writing, i like telling stories in book form. I also like kind of penetrating subcultures in a world that i dont know anything about. I knew nothing about falconry or eggs. I love birds, not in any sort of passionate bird obsessive way, i mean, i did appreciate that and this made me more appreciative, i wouldnt particularly call myself a bird lover but i love them more than i did previously so yeah. I dont know. I also love environmental stuff, a contributor writer of magazines and follow the trail of these amazing places you would go, i used to cover war zones but now, i dont want to go to war zones anymore. Like the desert, volcanic deserts of patagonia National Park in zimbabwe to look at raptors, that was an adventure. For all of these reasons, it spoke to me in a way the other ideas i had before going on before this, did not. Anyone else . Cspan is here. I didnt even introduce you. This is why we are doing this. Forgot about that. This is related to an earlier question but do you think in the pretrial proceedings that anyone did a psychiatric evaluation . Cap im aware of but you dont get really a lot out of these british cops. Its hard to get them to tell you anything. This was over and done with and he gave me some stuff but it was hard. I tried to get a hold of the interrogation tapes, transcrip transcripts, the freedom of information act requests and they told me everything, they said everything was denied and destroyed. I got very little. I wanted the counterterrorism story, they wouldnt talk to me. What went on with psychology, maybe he did but its another one of those mysteries. Mitch. Even the breeders, they know about it and want to talk about it. They busted occasional choppers up in the wilderness of siberia, pakistan, a Tv Documentary in the uk in the 90s that laid a trap where a guy posed as an arab shake and the word out some of these middlemen. So we know the world exists. But it is never been as clearly outlined intangible as its been in this case. I think we are out of time. This is nonfiction. It reads like fiction. Not in the least. No, i tried to be as faithful as i can to the truth. [applause] what a fascinating world he led us into. His book is available at the checkout desk, he will be out here signing please form a line to the right of the table and please for the pure chairs. Thanks again for coming. You are watching the tv on cspan2, every weekend its 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books, hears programs to watch out for this weekend. Tomorrow live with author and White House Correspondent april ryan, she will answer your questions about the coverage of the lost for u. S. President s. Also this weekend colonist kale thomas offers his thoughts on whether the United States will remain a superpower. And megan nelson looks at how the super war will impact the midwest. And david and rick takes a critical look at the history and Current Business practices of germanys deutsche bank, ticker Program Guide or visit online for more information. Please welcome