Jihadists to safety about 6 miles away. The book was a bestseller and josh is someone with a knife or some truly Great Stories and he has done it again with his new book falcon sees which recounts another true and gripping tale of adventure this one about wildlife smuggling. Josh is a journalist by trading and had a pretty adventurous globetrotting run himself working for newsweek over nearly two decades. He joined it newsweek in the late 1980s as a business and media writer but within a few years he was off to cover the rest of the world. And back here in the us in los angeles. For the past decade and a half he has continued to report and travel widely writing for a range of publications. Four years ago he 10 National Magazine award in reporting. That was a prizewinning story that told the story of aor physician who would lead the effort to control the ebola outbreak. In addition to the timbuktu josh wrote three other previous works were on about his younger brother who became a religious fundamentalist, another about the siege and 2002 of net of the nativity in bethlehem in the third about the deadly 1923 earthquake and fire that struck japan. Its been said of josh that he reports like a journalist and writes like a novelist and that is certainly the case with his work in the flacon theif. Its a wildlife smuggler who for years traveled the world stealing highly valued eggs of birds of prey selling them to theseus where falcons another raptors are used for sport. The other central character in the story is a detective from Britains NationalWildlife Crime unit named Andy Mcwilliams who specializes in ornithological crime and crime solving and was determined to catch lender of. The book is a thrilling fastpaced chronicle but its more than that. Its more than just a detective story set in a rarefied world filled with unusual characters. Its as one reviewer noted cautionary tale about how the love of natureut can go very wrg and what happens when precious wildlife becomes a status symbol on the planet where nature is increasingly in payroll. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming joshua hammer. [applause]. Think you. Great detailed introduction. Thank you. I think this it will always be my favorite bookstore and favorite venue to the talk about these thingsut, so thank you for coming out tonight. Im amazed anyone goes to book events at all so its always impressive okay, three quarters of you are my friends. Anyway, what i havee over the course of doing this particular talk now three or four times since i got to new york is to basically present a narrative without giving away the entire book in illustrating the narrative with pictures to a bring the story to life, but i will weakly start with an introduction about how this because i assume most of you have not seen the book so to answer the question of how i stumbled into this thing. Nt the librarian can mount 2016 and thats been a story that i had pretty much followed for many years beginning as a bureau chief for newsweek and made a couple trips to molly at once to 10 book two continued to visit over the years and got a couple smithsonian assignments so i was pretty wellversed in that story when the country was invaded and people i knew actually got caught up in the violence and the capturing of that entire two thirds of the country so it was sort of like a story i own, i dont know im mad certain amount of sense that the book would come out of this and this was something completely different, i mean, a total like act of desperation because i was looking for another project and i had thrown out some terrible ideas including one about the 1969 mets and i dont even want to go into that, but portion only one day in 2017 i was in london with my kids and have the pick up the london times and was sitting in a cafe reading and there was a very short article on about page 12 or so about this character named jeffrey land them in the headline was something the tabloids love those bad puns and this was a story all it said was this notorious thief known for helicopter reading and rappelling down cliffs to reach rare falcon eggs had vanished rearrested, sentenced to prove prison in brazil and was disappeared and now Wildlife Police were aligned he may be coming back that he may be back on the hunt. That was sort of enough to ignite my interest and i began investigating it further and further and deeper and deeper becoming obsessed with one drum Jeffrey Lendrum which i think is what a writer does, a nonfiction just plunging deeper and deeper into a subject and so without introduction i will tell you a bit about the story as it unfolds to give it some coherence without giving too much away. This story begins in a shower room in the emirates first and Business Class lounge in Birmingham International airport in the uk. A very vigilant to gender notices a middleaged white fellow nondescriptive character going into the washroom, the shower room with all of his baggage, three bags and disappears and therefore 20 minutes or to the janitor is waiting the placece. He doesnt know whats going on, spends 20 minutes in there and hes a very vigilant guide to begin with. Security moderate looking at hundreds of Close Caption 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 and everything is completely dry, towel still folded, seeing come about, toilet, nothing so hes immediately suspicious and starts rooting around and after five or 10 minutes of looking underneath powells he finds a he sees a diaper bin in the corner and opens it up and sees an egg carton at the bottom of the diaper bin with a single red painted red egg like an easter egg inside of it, which he figures was left by the kite in there so hes completely mystified and somewhat alarmed, what could this possibly mean. He thinks that probably has something to do with drugsba and to make a long story short the Counterterrorism Police are brought, they take him away and stripsearched him and find beneath his tshirt is hospital gauze wrapped tightly around his body and inside the hospital gauze are woolen socks and inside the woolen socks are 14 of these they dont know what they are, actually, these Counterterrorism Police are not tetrained at all in understandig what they are so they ask lendrum Jeffrey Lendrum theyve looked at his passport and establishes identity, irish national, what are these and he tells them they are duck eggs and they say okay. Would you mind telling us why you are carrying you know rod duck eggs attached it to your body, your belly and he explains his chiropractor has told him he needs to wear raw eggs wrapped around his body because it will prevent him from stoopingy and t lead to tightening of his lower back muscles l. [laughter] so, at this point they dont know what they have on their hands and its at that point that they summon andy make a phone call to Andy Mcwilliam and if any of you have seen the reviews of the book and there have been a few good ones, i mean, they tended to give it short shrift to andrey Andy Mcwilliam, this is a bad guy good guy story. Ad you have hero and antihero. Just ends up being the hero and andy is called as britains most famous Wildlife Policeman with a specialty in ornithological times. He hears the story and realizes its breeding season, sorry nesting season and realizes the guy carrying these eggs probably not to hide them but to keep them warm and from the description he instantly knows that they are peregrine eggs, eggs of the Peregrine Falcon and i actually had a better image of one but for some reason didnt download so this is a peregrine. Anyway, thats basically this is a highly protected bird, a raptor, the fastest bird on the planet and can go into a stupid died to kill another burden midair with speed up to 180 miles an hour. Mcwilliam knows that they are highly prized by arab falconers in particular especially the wealthy shakes, united arab emirates, but he has hes heard rumors about this black market to bring in protected raptors into into the emirates for these falconers. He believes from the very description off offered that he may have a smuggler on his hands so mcwilliam drives down from liverpoolil some of thiss out of order, but this is a portrait of Jeffrey Lendrum in 2010. May, 2010 in that picture tempering the us and thats back then so mcwilliam comes down and interviews the sky and he still is lying telling the same stories he told the Counterterrorism Police and mcwilliam pretty quickly lets him know hes not with an idiot that hes dealing with the raptor expert and he knows exactly what he has and finally gets him to admit that yes, he was stealing the eggs, but the eggs were dead and in fax the eggs were dead and he was only bringing them down to south africa for his private collection. That was story he gave in it mc williams was pretty sure he was lying anyway he also admitted he had been to the huge retrieve these eggs from cliffs in wales. This is up picture of the ronde valley, one of the greatest concentration of the Peregrine Falcons in the uk and possibly the world is found in this former call mining area noted for its cliffs, really a meaning landscapes in these legends that are sheltered from the wind. There are just howling wind at the top entries were cut down a century or more ago for coal mine to mind the incredible network of coal miness bowled over the centuries and is part of the uk, so this barren landscape with this fierce wind in these little rocky ledges protected from the window where the peregrines lay their eggs. They dont really create nests they just find these lenses ledges and put some stones around to protect them from rolling off, but imagine this vast landscape, huge wilderness area, i mean, w and lendrum somehow acquired 14 of these peregrine eggs so mcwilliam is pretty sure he has a professional on his hands. This is the trip i took a couple years, i mean, seven years later following in the footsteps of lendrum and thats Andy Mcwilliams. Let me give you a quick background sketch of mcwilliams, a liverpool cop, working gas workingclass family, father worked as a merchant marine and grew up really with no options m but the police. He didnt have barely finished school, but became a cop, a liverpool cop walking the beat and became really quite wellknown as an investigator and sort of a midlife crisis in his 40s and a decided he was tired of drugs, busting drug addicts and drug pushersg and hs suicides and murdered and wanted to get away from that. He was also a talented rugby player, fierce rugby player, one of the best police rugby players in england. Dropped that i became a bird watcher and the birdwatching he found he loved and led them let him into this hidden subterranean zero world the black market bird traders, killers of peregrine account falcons, people who loved trained pigeons and falcons are the mortal enemies of the pigeons, so exotic bird smugglers who actually stick birds inside to plastic tubes and send themur on 24 hour horrific journeys from thailand or the amazon to the uk to satisfy the hunger of these bird rare bird fanatics and also another odd little aspect of this is thedd egg collectorsa kind of very british phenomenon, Trained Spotter type guy, middleaged men who spend their time going off to some of the remote coowners of the uk, islands north of scotland, wales stealing eggs of rare birdssc, protected birds blowing out the embryo and mounting them in collection which they keep secret of a usually hide them in their attics and go up in their spare time and stare at their eggs. [laughter] mcwilliams found this whole subculture that very few knew existed and ended up pursuing these guys and almost regret singlehandedly operation easter, a major crackdown on these guys and by the time lendrum comes across his radar screen hes wellversed and knows almost as much about railbirds as lendrum does, so i go here to this is the market that mcwilliam knew existed and that lendrum suddenly presented a concrete image of. This is a picture taken in dubai , so falconry quickly its been around for at least 3000 years b. A lot of people believe it started in the arab world as a way of hunting and ideas to take these wild birds, they would trap these birds and pulled them out of the sky basicallyth and then train them to hunt, so they started out as hunters and essentially helpingnd people put food on their table even before the arrival of islam, its believed. Over the centuries this falconry developed and traders brought it to europe in china and around the worldna and he became more f a sport and recreational thing than a necessary way to feed yourself. Its essentially what the interaction almost mystical interaction between manan bird in which train a bird, may be some of you have read Helen Mcdonalds book and may know a bit about this, but it became even though it spread around the world it did kind of die out in the uk and europe. It never really expanded beyond a Certain Group of people. In the arab world it became closely identified with arab culture, the bedouin traditions and even though the desert was kind of pretty much wiped or seriously eroded over the course of the last 50 years with the discovery of oil. Falconry remained embedded in the culture. This is another trainer event peregrine and in a dubai desert Training Ground and this is the kind of passion that these the wealthiest falconers who tend to be members of the royal family have. This is that that very center for sheikhs, for the crown prince of dubai. The son of mohammed, seven billiondollar ruler of dubai essentially built this. Its the kind of intense they have the state of the art hospitals with the staff and veterinarians from all over the world that they pay huge salaries to to take care of the birds. In the last 20 years as the desert has gotten smaller and the natural prey of the birds has disappeared in the persian gulf with a new phenomenon called Falcon Racing where the wealthy sheikhs take their birds and even though their natural tendency is to drop up to 160 miles an hour, they now are trained using everything from little mini airplanes and rounds to handheld whatever to go horizontally and they gather these the sheikhs gather at these racetracks, falcon racetracks and the place bets and they have to call of the world to find the greatest birds that will participate in these races. This is an obsession to these guys. Your breeders basically since the 70s you cant trade almost every raptor in the world has fallen under very severe restrictions as far as the only kind of commercial trading of these birds taking of these birds out of nests, only a handful are allowed every year and you need a scientific proving your interest is scientific. Otherwise you are completely forbidden from touching these birds so to theater this great hunger for birds there is a captive breeding industry thats risen where they take birds and breathe them in artificial environments and incubate the eggs that its a huge trade worth millions of dollars, but the arabs, theres a Certain Group of arabs mostly wealthy sheikhs that believe these captive bred birds cant be compared to the wild ones that come out of nests because Natural Selection has bred these birds over centuries and millennia in the wilderness environment and these are the birds that they want and theyre willing to go to any length because they are loaded they are willing to go to any length and hire people who will provide these birds for them and will take great risk to get them. They only inhabit the most remote difficult to reach places of the world and one was Jeffrey Lendrum. So, i became very curious to find out as did andrey Andy Mcwilliams. Mcwilliams was able and figured immediately or pretty quickly he had a global smugglers hand and that if he let him go he would escape and go back and do this again bes so mcwilliam became fixated and had 36 hours to persuade a prosecutor to hold him for basically carrying bird eggs on his body. The Terrorism Police had no clue about the laws that jeffery lendrum was breaking so he was trying to persuade these people, he was an egg smuggler and to hold him without theyll. Mcwilliams succeeded in doing it and was able to keep him without bail while he began digging into the story as i did when i found my way to Jeffrey Lendrums life how does one become a egg smuggler, what led him to the arab world, it raises the question what in that background wave created this commerce that he engaged in, so he grew up in the second city of rhodesia and grip base of the, his father was a thirdgeneration white african , parents great grandparents from ireland and lendrum group within shouting distance of a National Park which is this magnificent geological phenomenon that has these amazing rock structures some of which rise thousands of feet in the thick vegetation that makes them perfect for raptors so this park has light the greatest concentration of eagles, hawks and falcons on the planet and this was basically lendrum backyard and he became involved with his father in he was born in 61, so in the late 70s he became involved in a ornithological survey of birds called the black eagle which is one of the strongest eagles in the world which is found in huge concentration in the park and pretty much nowhere else in the world so they went out in the field and surveyed and spent months observing the nasa mrs. Where lendrum learn to climb trees and rappelled down cliffs a and this is the scene, black eagle survey continues even now 50 years that later. They lay their eggs like the falcons do high up, 80, 200 feet up off the ground. This is how lendrum grew up getting steeped in this weird to step in this is the kind of formation you say providing this is just perfect kind of terrain for these creatures to thrive this is called the crown eagle, one of the rarest raptors in the world known for having these giant talons and occasionally sweeping small children off the ground. Ts been known to do that of two occasions in zimbabwe so this was lendrums world. At some point okay, so to sum up the story, basically lendrum was on an order of logical survey learning everything about birds and at the same time his father led to him while he was conducting the ornithological survey of learning the location of every nest inside the park they were secretly taking eggs even as a teenager putting them in their private collection at the same time, possibly selling them abroad so even as a 17 and 18year old whose fatherhe is kd of a leading him down and athletically challenged path ethically challenged path. They ended up being arrested. The consequence was that lendrum was disgraced. He had to flee the country and ended up in south africa and bit by bit was led into this Global Enterprise back at the very beginning and like the 90s when the sheikhs were gearing up to get their hands on the most Beautiful Oil money was flowing and falconry was flying and races were about to cancel there was a world 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 mission because so many of them we believe or Police Believe were never came to light, but i managed to find an accomplice of his and not only did he tell me about one of these missions, but he actually had the video to prove it. This particular mission wasio to the arctic to quebec to pursue this bird, the jar pure white, the ones that are most sought after are the pure white falcons and arabs love them because they are incredibly difficult to keep alive. Its a great challenge just to keep them alive in the middle east when they are used it to places likecu iceberg in greenld and the sub arctic and siberia so there was this growing desire for juror falcons among these crooked arab sheikhs. Really the only way to get her hands on was would be to send someone michael and durham up to the far north to embark on a crazed expedition to get these things off the cliff so how do you do that . Accompanist told me the whole story of mrs. From the video the accomplice shot of it Jeffrey Lendrum back in his prime in 2001 and his partner who was a Rhodesian Army crony in his and they stayed in touch over the years and became actually began working for the Sheriffs Department and a Northern California county, so he was a law man who lendrum enlisted to join him on this illegal egg rate in the north. Molen brought along the video and these guys never imagined one day the video would end up in the hands of the National Walleye crime unit in britain and in a bookne, but this is the guys they were given 100,000 by a sheikhs in the middle east who i wont give the whole story way how the connection was made, the suffices to say other acquaintances led him to the arab market and he was i mean, total selfstarter and he came up with the idea. This is before they head off to a village way up north near hudson bay and this is actually the helicopter perch near a cliff and what lender would do is they woods bought a falcon nests sometime a couple hundred feet above the ground and lendrum would tie a harness and roper ran himself and the pilot would then ascended to whatever a thousand feet near these clips and then lendrum would reach out and grab the eggs often nest so really just plundering this pristine environment, places like no one else had ever been. There was the video the plane ticket and the sound and everything to prove it. He had that was a very close relationship with a huge fight between the two men after a couple of years after this in which it evolved molens girlfriend at a cop located relationship stealing the girlfriend, custody fight with the huge falling out and molen was waiting for the opportunity to get even with lendrum as he said karma is a back. He became this incredible source of stories for me about lendrums life which just of that had never come to lifefo including as a credible exposition. This is actually one of the nest sites that he took a picture of. I think those chicks just hatched so they had to time it perfectly. You need to time it so you are right there when the eggs are viable which they are not during the first three weeks and they are still too early and they have to be kept absolutely the same temperature or a slight variation would kill them and at that point even turning the eggs slightly could kill them so you have to wait until they are somewhat viable, but also not wait too long so you dont run the risk of the egg actually hatching as you try to stick it through security, which has happened. Their ours lendrum is popular when doing this and it actually happened in the 1990s to it and exceed in the uk, for birds began hatching and tweeting in his underwear, so he was busted that way and it happened to lendrum many years later so it is an art form. Not only do you have to find the birds in this vast wilderness area and their territorial so there are huge areas. Coming all of i mean, all of this stuff was new to me. I just got myself more and more cotton up in the weirdness, i mean, these birds establish their territory like five or 10 miles so there may be a nest there and you have to sweep along another 5 miles looking along the cliffs until you spot something and then they would assess whether or not you could rappel down, land the helicopter on the cliff and rappel down or if it was so steep that lendrum would have to descend from a rope and they spent basically about 10 days doing this. They capture like 30 eggs which is significant part of the environmental bounty of this pristine part of the world so pretty bad stuff took it wasnt going to make the falcon extinct , but its nasty business and molen was consumed by guilt about it but he did it anyway and in fact he did at the next year also which a so to make a not a long story short and condense this because i dont want to give to much better away , basically lender them lendrum continues on this course getting sort of more reckless taking chances and eventually it leads to this 2010 Birmingham Airport incident where Andy Mcwilliam bus himhi and because Andy Mcwilliams tim without bail is able to dig up a lot of lendrums history and prove its no ordinary bird egg collector but someone with global reach whos been doing it for years who is a professional making money, plundering the environment probably with cronies in the middle east, so hes working the sand there is a trial, highly covered trial just because the british media cant resists these elements, ex Rhodesian Army guy, helicopter propelling, arab sheikhs, so lendrum forgive me for not knowing the details of my old book but i think its a two and a half Year Prison Sentence which is you know hes been doing this for 20 years already and hes been caught a couple times but manage to sneak out and get through with a fine and it happened in zimbabwe and again in quebec and hes always to kind of skate the thin ice and survive by paying off someone and keeping his name out of the papers. Is thanks to mcwilliams thisll guys all over the British Press, video of him dangling actually carrying the dvd in his carryon luggage and mcwilliams grabs that, i mean, everything is put up on youtube, i mean, everything is out there now and lendrum is imprisoned. Mcwilliam is helping at this point the guy has like its time and hes learned his lesson you know, jl and jail and Media Exposure will make it very difficult for him to continue along the lines of this lifes lead for 20 or 25 years. Basically, so lendrum does get out of jail and he does make this legitimate attempt to go straight, i think. There are people who are family members and friends willing to help him they find him work, normal life and he returns to south africa, keeps a low profile, but something about those eggs, he cannot he just cant stop, i mean, its just in his nature, so the next time we discovered lendrum hes arrested in brazil. Hes been stealing albino falcon eggs in chilean patagonia. I followed his trail down to this is a volcanic landscape with all these dead volcanoes and protected environment and also an absolute haven for raptors, and other weird distant part of the world where raptors congregate leading to discovery and this is the part of the story dont know how he found these volcanoes in the middle of nowhere, but and assess that they were likely spots for the albino falcons, but the problem now is that lendrum is a very wellknown character. His name is out there. Hes more more reckless drawing suspicion about ways ups to including like letting the hotel clerks see his incubators and climbing equipment in his hotel room, so the hotel clerk googles his name in the first thing he seizes this picture video of lendrum dangling from a rope in northern quebec and begins to read page after page of stories about this International Wildlife thief, by Andy Mcwilliams quoted as a master thief on a global scale to the hotel clerk is like what do we have here, so trap is laid and lendrum is eventually captured in brazil. Hes sentenced to four and half years in prison and a brazilian jail. Doesnt speak a word of portuguese and is facing a very difficult time. At that point,fa he escapes through the jungle to argentina and 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 lendrum and he had ducked me for many many months and i was intent on finding him and asking them why are you doing this still, what is the middle east connection, explained to me your life. He finally agreed to meet me in a Shopping Mall and we hooked up there and it lendrum again, i mean, it was a weird encounter. He i found him to be a likable , charming character and a complete unrepentant liar. It was kind of hard to have these two identities because by this point i knewr so much about his life and i could ask very specific detailed questions and get tea had an answer just like he had an answer to the counterterrorism guys about the chiropractor in the duck eggs. He had answers for turkey was fast if you didnt know anything about him you would come away convinced he was a victim, true conservationist who had been saving for birds time and time again and each time by taking theme from threatened positions or saving them from Pigeon Fanciers or ddt or whatever, he had a story behind every time and you would come away thinking maybe this guy really is this sort of victim who had this terrible miscarriage of justice, but if you really knew his story you realizedge it was a masterfl liar so at the same time you find yourself kind of liking him , you are also kind of repulsed by this just this incredible pattern of mendacity. At any rate, okay so my final words to lendrum that day were, jeff, are you going to go back to doing this because i found if i didnt challenge him and play along and acknowledge you are doing this for the sake of the birds, but are you going to continue to save the birds or are you out of thisut set this pointg. By this point he had had prostate cancer, bad car accident in johannesburg and could barely lift his arms and he said no, im out of this. You know, i can do this anymore, im too old and too tired and a too sick and im not going to tell you what happens at that point. I leave lendrum. We shake hands and go our separate ways. I will leave you with one final image. I will not tell you exactly where that picture was taken by the circumstances behind it. Because are fill like ive given away like we too much of the story, but anyway i will end this narrative there before i completely dissuade everyone from buying the book no, theres a lot more, obviously explores this whole whole crazy arab obsession in the world of egg collectors and Andy Mcwilliams life and i tried to do a lot of Different Things in the matter of my one of the writers i admire most of the world. Im happy to say a couple reviews have made the orchid thief comparison, so this took me as far away from the world of sort of International Terrorism and diplomacy that marked my last look to a certain extenttio i was happy to dive into what i thought was a great story s without any kind of larger geopolitical environmental implications, but perhaps t not geopolitical. On that note, im happy to open up the floor to the audience. Please take that microphone if you have any questions could anyone have a question or two to ask me . [applause]. Curious, the gyrfalcon thievery happened in Northern Canada from what you said. In this particular case. Did the canadian authorities charge him . The canadian did he get to be on interpol . This was in 2001 and they managed to get away in the own way we know about it is that accomplice betrayed him to did they went back the next year and got caught. They were not very careful, raised suspicion here they were charged they didnt have the evidence they were trying to smuggle them out of the country and they could only give i told you the guy skates on thin icetr and got away with a fine d was told never to step foot in canada again and at that Point Pall Mall and, his changed his name legally and i cant reveal his real name. Yeah, they did what they could. They hit him with 20000dollar fine and send them on their way. How much would he get on every so, its a really hard question because for instance, its been documented as some of these beautiful white gyrfalcon, pure white ones have been sold legally in the legal market for like twitter 75000, but with eggs its different because i understand and ive talked to some experts including some who tried to place a value in his 2010 trial because you have to assume may be a third of the eggs wont patch, destroyed in transport or whatever. The female file cones are worth more than the mail because the female falcons are bigger and better racers and they pay more for them, so he placed a value on the 14 total about 120,000 for all 14, but that was a calculation that a lot of people say was too low but it was like a month work for lendrum. 120,000 is not bad for several days ofat flying around the clis and the preparation involved. Are these birds protected under side ease with the Migratory Bird treaty act . Societiesy. There may be some overlapping legislation. It was always extremely confusing for me. I didnt even understand. The britz and European Union mds all of these laws and then there others, endangered species, i think they call them article one or indexed one birds appeared these are all appendix one, which means you can trade them or market them. You cant have them, the wild ones im talking about unless you have a license as a scientist to study them and thats really rare to get. Anyone else . Deborah. [inaudible] just one, but we did speak on the phone over the course of six months, yeah. When will this be a movie c . Thats a good question. Its in development. I dont have anything to do with it. I dont sit around waiting. Been in the business too long. Bobto. These eggs wrapped around him, i assumeth. Does that not show up when he goes through security . How you take plate eggs on an airplane . Some of the aspect of this, he would go through metal detectors and metal detectors often he had them obscured enough so they would not show ut , but this picture was taken as he was coming into the airport so he had already got through johannesburg airport with these presumably kept strapped to his stomach, but for various reasons like a said he was a guy who got more and more reckless as his career dragged on and just kept making more and more stupid mistakeses and was busted. Donatello. Going back to thehe transportation of these eggs, he was not taking Economy Class to london with those eggs on him was ak k . I think he had enough miles that he went Business Class. Because they werent in his bad. Remember he was on the amorous Business Class lounge in 2010 when he was busted so yeah, he and mullen travel Business Class a lot. Mullens first introduction to this clandestine life was when lendrum tried to bring to live lander falcons come i think before you really moved into the egg business stuffed in his pocket and placed in a backpack and put in a carryon of a Virgin Atlantic flight. Where they alive . They were alive and began screeching ever couple hours they would wake and screech and he would run and take them into the toilet and feed them liver and egg yolk mix and get them back to sleep and put them on top. This was a mullins first realization he was dealing with a very crazy person. Can you the psychology, i mean, why is he doing it connect very good question. There must be on obsession there. Its not a lot of money. Can you tell us aboutir your cye i mean why . Why would i spent two and half years of my life doing a story . [laughter] its all about obsession. Did you dream the past few years of stealing eggs . Theres a something there. Lendrum, look, i mean, this guy his father was a bit ethically challenged. His father and me not everyone in the lendrum family became criminals. His brother and sister are perfectly normal. Conventional people to some extent, but lendrum obviously was close to the father and they had similar interests they stole together. This appears to have been lendrums people who knew him growing up that he was always pushing the envelope, always challenging authority. Wanted to be different. About the sort of physical thrill of going after these birds and the bird nests going back to when he was 11 and 12 years old stealing eggs out of nass. It was a weird compulsion you find often with these wildlife criminals. For instance, these egg thieves that mcwilliams spent several years busting, these people that would collect eggs, literally thousands of eggs and stash them in their attic can go up and just gaze at them. This is a crazy obsession that lendrum i think suffered from, but also those egg collectors also do the same thing. They love the danger and the challenge of a climb. You talk to some of these peopls , the physical risk, but the fines of authority , they know its illegal and they just give a total charge out of it so there was a lot of similarity between lendrum in these egg collectors but lendrum took it to another level in that he had through connections that you will read about when you buy the bookne a, youll find out how he made that arab connection and so youd he just happened to be in the right place att the right time that way and was led into doing this for commercial reasons. Although, i think i said theres no indication he really got rich New York Times review called the Pablo Escobar of that illegal a good trade or Something Like that. Pablo escobar title he conferred upon himself to me ironically saying the first time i talk to him he sort of angrily said everyone makes me out to be the Pablo Escobar and egg trade and its crap. The British Press picked it up and suddenly he was always thee Pablo Escobar of the illegal egg trade even though it was said and complete sarcasm it became of the tests that he became known as so about me, why the story you ask pretty wanted general psychological portrait . [laughter] because i think that you know ive been a Foreign Correspondent for a lot of years and then i kind of my career morphed it and i became more interested in narrative long form, narrative nonfiction and i just like to find stories and that led me too the badass librarians timbuktu which was just a good yarn so i became sort of less i just i wanted to i think what worked about the the badass librarians timbuktu, it was about a hero and the antihero was morality placed said in a strange part of the world, exotic and allowed me too flex my writing muscles and develop characters and thats what i want it to do in the next book and this story somehow resonated, obviously a completely different story from the badass librarians timbuktu, but it had a lot of elements and potentially Great Central character as long as i could balance him with a good guy because i dont think you would want to just read 270 pages about a villain, so i was fortunate enough to have what i thought was a very appealingng Police Officer who had this weird fixation on bustingd bird to balance out couple people told me they liked lendrum moree and found mcwilliams to be an li, but thatve geek seems to be a rare view, i mean, people do seem to like the balance of the characters, so i dont know this story seem to have the elements that i like to i like telling stories in book form and i also like kind of penetrating subcultures and worlds i just dont know anything about and i really knew next to nothing about falconry or eggs, i mean, i love birds, but not in any sort of jonathan friends passionateor bird excessive gazing lambing i did it appreciate that and this actually this experience may be more appreciative. I wouldnt call myself a birder, but i do appreciate and love them more than i did previously, so yeah, i mean, i dont know. I also love environmental stuff and im a contributing writer to outside magazine in this struck me as having the opportunity if you follow the trail of this criminal and think of the amazing places you would go. I used it to cover war zones, but i dont want to go to war is war zones anymore. Desert of patagonia to look at raptors, i mean, that was an adventure, so for all of these reasons is slow to me in a way that all the other ideas i had before falling on this one did not. Anyone else . Yeah, kathleen, can you step up to the microphone . Sorry. Cspan is here i didnt even introduce them. This is why we areth doing this. Forgot about that. This relates really to an earlier question, but do you think in the course of the pretrial proceedings anyone did a psychiatric evaluation of lendrum . Not that im aware of, but you really dont get a lotwa out of these british cops. Its hard to get them to tell you anything and in this case it was over and done with so mcwilliams could give me some stuff, but it was hard i tried to get a hold of you know enter interrogation tapes, transcripts , i filed a freedom of information act request and it was all they told me they denied and said everything was destroyed. I got very little. I wanted the counterterrorism story and they would not talk to me, so what went on with psychology maybe he got a psychological evaluation, but its another one of those mysteries. Of mitch . Sorry, guys mitch . Given how lucrative this was either other lendrums out there . How extensive was this scheme . I dont think is all that for lendrum. He seemed to be more interested in in it for the thrill, but, i mean, i did some research into this. Its such a clandestine twirling you cant get anything out of the arabs, the sheikhs. Its really even tape to do i mean even breeders wont talk about it, but there appears to be t a mean they bust of vocational trapper in the wilderness of siberia or pakistan. There was a Tv Documentary in the uk in the 90s that sort of laid a trap for a guy actually posed as a producer and the host of the show posed as a arab sheikhs leeward out some middleman so we know the world exists, but its never been clearly outlined intangible as its been in the case of Jeffrey Lendrum. I think we are out of time. Yes . This is nonfiction. It reads like fiction. What . Not in the least, no. I try to be as faithful as i can to the truth. [applause]. Thank you. Thank you, josh. What a fascinating world you have led us into. His book is available at the track check out desk and he will be up there signing. Please help our stop by folding up your chairs. Thank you for coming. Pamela paul editor of the New York Times book review shared her thoughts on raising kids to become leaders. Heres a portion of her talk. You are not their teacher, so dont treat reading in the home like a chore. Treated like Something Special and i will give you just one example of practical test that we used in my home which is that we told our kids when they were growing up that well they are still growing up, they are 10, 13 and 14, but when they were younger we would set a bedtime about 7 00 p. M. And then we would say if you want to stay up in the bed quietly reading you can stay up until 7 30 p. M. That tells them reading is a privilege peer greediness something you get to do because you are older and went 7 30 p. M. Comes along they dont say can i stay up late, they say can i finish this chapter or this page , so you are sort of training them in a way to want to read to view reading in a positive light. To watch the rest of this Program Visit our website, book tv. Org and search for pamela paul using the box at the top of the page. Book tv is television for serious readers. Join us again next saturday beginning at 8 00 a. M. Eastern for the best in nonfiction books