Delighted to have Joshua Hammer back with us at the p p and josh was here first last book about four years ago. Host that would of course was a bad librarian, timbuktu. And it told the riveting story of how an argument in timbuktu and manage with a very brave helper, this mobile more than three or 50000 historical manuscripts out from under militants to safety about 600 miles away. The book was a bestseller and establish josh, as someone for night for some really truly great stories. Any student again with his new book, the falcon thief which recounts another true and gripping tale of adventure and this one about wildlife. Josh is a journalist by trade and other pretty adventurous globetrotting run himself. He was working for newsweek over nearly two decades. He joined newsweek in the late 1980s as a Business Media writer, and within a few years he was off the cover the rest of the world on postings that make him in, nairobi, berlin, jerusalem, cape town and back here in the u. S. In los angeles. And for the past decade and a half, is continue to report and travel widely. Writing for of range of publications printed four years ago he won the National Magazine award and reporting where titled minors asserted and i dont know if im already infected. [laughter]. It was still priced winning story. And it told the story of a physician in sierra leone, and the effort to control the ebola right there. In addition to the timbuktu book, josh has written otherkt books, one about his younger brother who became a religious fundamentalist and another valve seat for 2002 of the church of nativity in bethlehem, and a story with 1923 earthquake and fire struck japan. It is been said of josh that he reports like a journalist and writes like a novelist. And that certainly the case with his work in the falcon thief. And in notorious wildlife smuggler who for years traveled the store looking for highly valued exit through the ferry and selling them. The acids for a falcons another rafters are used for support. The other essential. Joshs story is a detective from the National Wildlifeal crime ut named Andy Mcwilliams the specializes in crime solving and was determined to catch him. In the book is a thrilling fastpaced chronicle but it is more than that. It is more than just a detective story set in a rare world with unusual characters and standing birds. It is, as one reviewer noted, Cautionary Tales about how the love of nature and god or can go very wrong and what happens with precious wildlife because of the status symbol on the planet is increasingly in peril. And ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming joshua a hammer. [applause]. Joshua thank you for that great detailed introduction. I am humbled. This will always be my favorite bookstore in venue to talkor abt these things. So thank you everybody for coming out. Im amazed that anybody goes to book events at all. [laughter]. So okay, is recorded. [laughter]. Butuy anyway, flexible i have or the course of doing this particular talk now, three or four times since i got to new york, is to basically present the narrative without giving away the entire both in illustrating that narrative with pictures that i think help bring the story to life read unable very quickly start with an introduction about how, because i assume most of you have not yet seen the book so how to basically answer the question of how i stumbled into the same three vast library thinking that in 2016, and that is the story that i have treatment, followed for many years beginning for newsweek, i had made a couple of trips to mali and was to timbuktu and i continued to visit over the years and got a couple of smithsonian assignments to write about the great manuscripts of timbuktu so i was pretty well versed in that story when the al qaeda invaded the country people actually knew got caught up in the violence in the capturing of the entire two thirds of the country. So if Something Like a story that i ownedha felton away and made a certain amount of sense that the book would come out of it. This is something completely different. It was a solid like an act of desperation. Because i was looking for another project andas i had thrn out some just terrible ideas including one about the 1969 mess well i dont even want to go into them. [laughter]. But fortunately, in 2017, i was in living with my kids and it is happened to pick up the london times. I was just sitting in a cafe reading, there was a very short article about page 12 or so, about this character name jeffrey lindgren. And it was like terrible thief on the wing again. They love those terrible puns. All they said he was a notorious thief are known for teleconference repelling down clips to reach their falcon eggs and sell to shakes in dubai read they had vanished or sent to prison in brazil and had disappeared. And now the world of captivation world burgers around the world and Wildlife Police were alarmed that he might be coming back on hunt. It was sort of enough to ignite my interest investigating it further and becoming obsessed with landrum in a as he was about his eggs. I think it was sort of phonorecord us, or journalist, nonfiction just plunging 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 to try to give you this coherene without giving too much weight. The story against in shower room and efforts First Business class lounge. This was in Birmingham National airport in the uk. Where a very vigilant janitor notices middleaged white fellow nondescript character going into a washroom of the with all of his baggage. And disappears in there for 20 minutes. In the janitor is waiting to clean theit place. He doesnt know what is going on he had job security monitor looking at the close captioning of tvs in the shopping mall. But he was trained to observe. After 20 minutes, the sky comes out in the gender goes inside of the bathroom and shower bases absolutely nothing has been touched. Everything was completely dry, shower unused in towels still floated in trent printed so he immediately is suspicious and starts venting around. And underneath towels he finds a diaper. E opens it up in a season and cart at the bottom of the diaper bag with a single red painted red egg. Like an easter egg inside of it. Which he figures was left by the guy who was just in there so is completely mystified and some what alarmed. What could this possibly be. He think it probably has something to do with drugs and is not sure. To make a n long story short, te Counterterrorism Police were blotted and they take him away. They stripsearched him and they find beneath his tshirt, his hospital gauze wrapped tightly around his bodysp and inside because our woolen socks. And inside of the woolen socks are 14 of these. They dont know what they are. These karen tears him police are not trained at all in understanding what they are. So they asked him jeffrey lindgren, but the point he knew his name. They look to his passport and establishes identity irish and national. He said what is these. And he tells them they are duck eggs. And they say okay. Would you mind telling us why you are carrying raw duck eggs attached to your body. Your belly. And he explains that his chiropractor, has told him that he needs to where raw eggs wrapped around his body because it will prevent him from stooping and lead to the of his lower back muscles. [laughter]. Okay. So at this point, they just dont know what they have in the hands. And at that point, they summoned the enemy phone call to Andy Mcwilliams. If any of you have seen the reviews of this book, and there been a fewew good ones. Theyre really satisfying to read but the tent to give short shrift to Andy Mcwilliams who i want to emphasize from the very beginning, this is a bad guy. You have here on antihero, and any mcwilliams was called in the world, certainly britainss mot famous Wildlife Policeman with a specialty in ornithological crimes. So heres the story, he realizes that this may be because of reading season, maybe incubating the nesting. And he realizes the sky is probably carrying these on his body to keep them warm not hiding them and he h instantly knows that they are, the peregrine falcons eggs. And actually had a better image of one but for some reason it didnt download. That is basically a highly protected bird, the fastest bird on the planet, travels and voyages to dive to kill another bird in midair and speeds of up to 180 miles per hour. Mcwilliams knows that they are highly prized by arab falconers in particular especially the wealthy shakes of the united arab world people. Please never actually known the caesar rumors. The black market to bring in these protected rafters into the emirate. And for these falconers but so here he believes just from the very description offered him by the counter and terrorism cops that he may have a smuggler on hiss hands. So mcwilliams drives down from liverpool where he is from an by the way, so this is out of order. This is him and a portrait of him in 2010. Adult thanthats what he lookedk then. So mcwilliams comes down and interviews the sky and he is still, lying and telling the same story that he was telling the police. A pretty quickly lets him know these not dealing with an idiot, its a i wild life expert, referent expert. He finally gets him to admit that yes he was stealing them and they were those eggs and that they were dead and in fact, it was only bringing them down to south africa for a private collection. That was the store he gave them. Mcwilliams was pretty sure he was lying. He also admitted that he had been to and retrieved these eggs from cliffs and whale rated this is picture of rhondda valley, one of the greatest attractions the peregrine falcons in the uk and possibly the world is found in this former coal mining area noted for itsoa cliffs, for the amazing landscape in these ledges that are sheltered from the wind. The howling winds at the trees, the rocket down decades and even surgery more about for coal mining to basically line this incredible network of coal mines that were built over the centuries as part of the uk. The barren landscape with these fierce winds these little rocky ledges here protected from the winds were the programs laid their eggs printed out really nasty. They dont create, they just find these ledges and may be put a few stones and pebbles around it to protect them from rolling off. You have to imagine, this vast landscape, huge wilderness area. And somehow he was able to have acquired 14 of these eggs. So mcwilliams is pretty sure the scott a professional on his hands. So this is a trip that i took a couple of years ago. And later, seven years later following the footsteps of them. And thats any mcwilliams who was as ihe said, and let me give you a quick background sketch of mcwilliams. Hes a liverpool pop, working class family grandfather, he was world war i, his father was a merchant marine and het grew up with really watches but the police. He did not have any barely finished school. But he became a cop, a liverpool cop, walking the breach, and became really quite will known as an investigator and sort of a midlife crisis in his 40s he decided he was tired of the drug busting drug addicts and drug pushers and suicides and murders pretty wanted to get away from that. He was also very talented rugby player, a fierce rugby player one of the best police rugby players. He had injuries then and he dropped out pretty and then he found bird watching and it led him into this kind of incident sort of subterranean world. A black market, bird traders and killers of falcons, pigeon fanciers, and he killed falcons or destroy their eggs because falcons by the moral into enemy of the pigeon. So exotic birds smugglers, actually put them inside a plastic tubes and set t them ona 24 hour horrific journey from thailand to the amazon to be okay. To satisfy the hunger of these rare bird fanatics. And also another odd little aspect of this is the good collectors. Since the british phenomenon. Middleclass art sorry middle aged men, spending time going off to some of the remote corners of the uk, islands and northern scotland. Wales, stealing eggs of rare birds. Protected birds. Blowing outut the areas in the mounting them in collections. If their own collections which you have to keep secret, the usually guide them in the radix and they got there in his spare time and stare at their eggs printed mcwilliams, found this whole subculture that involved and very few people knew it even existed and he ended up pursuing these guys, hundreds of them and almost singlehandedly driving this, operation called operation keister in the major on these guys and this is his background. And this is by the time that linda comes across him. He is well versed in almost as if as much about rare birds and protected birds as linden does. So i go here to and this is the market mcwilliams knew existed and that landrum suddenly presented a concrete image of. And this is a picture taken into my. So just quickly is been around for at least 3000 years and a lot of people believed it started in the arab world and it was started in the desert with the whole idea that you take these wild birds theres migration over the deserts and they would trap these birds and pull them out of the sky basically. And it would train them to hunt so they started out as hunters. Essentially there helping people put food in the tables pretty even before the arrival of islam. And then over thehe centuries, lets welcome really developed and traders brought it to china and brought it over the world in the became a sport and recreational thing more than it did in necessary way to feed yourself. But its essentially the sort of interaction, mystical interaction between man and bird which trained bird, maybe he had beat some of you have read the book but this became a know it spread around the world, did kind of die out in the uk and europe really never will be on a Certain Group of people. In the arab world became very closely identified with arab culture. Even though the desert is kind pretty much wide or seriously eroded over the course of the last 50 years of the discovery of oil, balconies remained embedded in the culture. This is another trainer and a dubai training ground. This the kind of passion that these wealthiest falconers would tend to be members of the royal family have. This the Veterinary Center for the shake to the crown princes in dubai. The crown prince, full, the son of mohammed who 7 billiondollar roller of divine essentially built this megalopolis pretty this is an intense, only the stateoftheart hospitals where they would staff veterinarians from all of the world and that they paid huge salaries due to take care of the birds. In the last 20 years as the desert has gotten smaller and initial prey of the birds has disappeared in the persian gulf in a new phenomenon called thought racing where the wealthy shakes take the birds and even though their natural tendency is to drop straight drop as i said up to 16 oh miles per hour, they now are trained using everything from the many airplanes and drones to handheld debate whatever to go vertical or horizontally and they gather that shakes gather up with these falcon racetracks. In the place bets. They have to go all over the world to find the greatest birds that will participate in these races. This is an obsession for these guys. So basically you have readers basically since the 70s. You cannot trade. Its very severe restrictions as far as the only kind of commercials im a the trading of these birds are taking ofas thee birds out of nest, only a handful are allowed every year. And its only for scientific research. If youre not part of thehe scientific research, your completely forbidden for touching these birds. So this hunger for these parts, theres a whole industry that is resident where they take them and they breed them an artificial environment and incubate the eggs. Its a huge trade worth millions of dollars. But the arabs, Certain Group of arabs, mostly these wealthy shake to believe that the redbirds, just cannot be compared to the wild ones the compound of the debts because Natural Selection has for these birds over the centuries. One of them was jeffrey. Here we go, so, i became very curious to find out as did Andy Mcwilliams to find out mcwilliam was able he figured out pretty quickly and had a global smuggler on his hands. That if he let him go he would escape and go back to doing this again so mcwilliam became 36 hours to try to persuade a prosecutor to hold landrum for basically carrying bird eggs on his body which he knew, prosecutors like those Counterterrorism Police had no clue about these arcane wildlife laws that he was breaking. It was down to the wire trying to persuade these people that this was the guy they wanted to hold, and egg smuggler, to hold without bail was a difficult sell but mcwilliam succeeded in doing it and was able to keep them without bail while he began digging into his story. As i did when i found my way to jeffreys life. How does one become an egg smuggler . How does one become an egg thief . What led him to be arab world . Is such a sweet 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 that was then rhodesia and grub basically his father was a thirdgeneration white african. Parents had originally came from ireland. He grew up within shouting difference distance of this park called [inaudible] park in rhodesia which is this magnificent geological phenomenon that has the is amazing rock structures and some of which rise thousands of feet and then this thick vegetation that makes them absolutely perfect for raptors. This park has the greatest concentration of eagles mohawks and falcons on the planet. His backyard. Ally he became involved with his father in the, born in 61 so in the late 70s he became involved in a survey on ornithological survey called this black eagle bird which is one of the strongest eagles in the world and which is found in huge concentrations at this park pretty much nowhere else in the world. This became jeffrey and his father went to the field and surveyed spent months just observing the nest and this is where he learned to climb trees and to repel them cliffs and this is a scene of people, this is the black eagle survey continues even now, 50 years later. There are people looking at the black eagle and they lay their eggs like the falcons do high up, 8000200 feet off the ground t d difficult to spot their nests. This is how he grew up, getting steeped in thiss weird stuff. This is the formation you would see. This is perfect terrain for these creatures are to thrive. Another bird called the crowned eagle, this is one of the rarest raptors in the world known for having these highend talents and port occasionally sweeping small children off the ground and making off with them. Its been known to do that. On two occasions in zimbabwe i know of. This was jeffreys world. And at some point okay, so to make a to sum up that story jeffrey was on the ornithological survey in the park with his father learning to climb and learning everything about birds and at the same time his father led him while they were conducting this ornithological survey and learning the locations of every nest inside the park they were secretly taking eggs, even as a teenager and putting them in their own private collection and at the same time possibly never verified selling them abroad. Re even as a 17, 18 yearold his father was leading him down and ethically challenged bath. He ended up, he and his father ended up being arrested for illegal possession of eggs. Sihis trial was only [inaudible] this would have been some bobwhite in the early 80s but the consequence was the jeffreys disgrace and 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 like the 90s when the shakes were gearing up to get their hands on the most beautiful, oil money was flowing, falconry was thriving, races were about to begin so there was a real hunger to get their hands on the most beautiful in the world. Jeffrey, its kind of 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 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 had the video to prove it and this particular mission was to the arctic to the back to pursue this bird. Ic this is the pure white, not always pure white but the ones most sought after are these pure white specimens, the biggest falcons in the world and the arabs absolutely love them hebecause they are incredibly difficult to keep alive. His greatest challenge just to keep them alive in the middle east in a desert environment heen they are use to places like green icebergs in greenland and the subarctic in siberia so there was this growing desire for jury falcons among these crooked arab shakes and very hard to find even commercial breeders so the only way to get your hands on one would be to send somebody like landrum up to the far north to embarked on a crazed expedition to get these things off cliffs so how do you do that . The accomplice told me the whole story out of which a little bit i will give you here and this is from a video that the accomplice shot of jeff back in his prime and this is the 2001 and his partner who was a Rhodesian Army crony of his they stayed in touch over the years and became a began working for the Sheriffs Department in a Northern California county and was a long man who landrum enlisted to join him on this a grade in the north and they never imagined that one day this video would end up in the hand of the National Wildlife crime unit in britain and my hands in and of book. This is these guys as they were about given this hundred thousand dollars where he was given 100,000 by a shake in the middle east too and i will not get that whole story away how the connection was made but suffice it to say other acquaintances led him to the eire market and he was dispatched total self starter but he was one who came up with eddie who came in with the idea of selling this to the arabs and this is before they head off to the town of a village called [inaudible], inuit village near hudson bay and this is the helicopter perched near a cliff. What lendrum would do was spot a strflacon next couple hundred feet above the ground or through frozen lakes and jeffrey would tie or fasten a harness in a robe around himself and the pilot would then ascend to whatever thousand feet near these cliffs and then lendrum would reach out and grabbed the eggs off these nests. Really just plundering this environment and this pristine environment in places that i was no one else had ever been. Paul boland who you will meet in the book was my chronicler of all this and has the video and the plane ticket and the sound and everything to prove it that this was s not just to quicky get to that, that was a very close relationship and there was a huge fight between the two men after a couple of years after this in which involved his girlfriend and a comp gated relationship stealing the girlfriend and custody fights and 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 told mcwilliam about this and he said he became this incredible source of stories for me about lendrums life which stuff that had never come to light, including this incredible exhibition. This is one of the nests sites that mullen took a picture of that they were about to end those chicks have just been hatched. They timed it perfectly and you need to time it so that you t,arrive there when the eggs are viable but they are not during the first three weeks. They are still too early and they have to be kept in an absolutely same temperature or a slight variation will kill them. At that point even turning the eggs slightly could kill them they 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 are trying to stick it through security. Which, that has happened. Lendrum is not the only one doing the stuff and it happened in the 1990s to an egg thief in the uk. Four birds began hatching and tweeting in his underwear. [laughter] he was busted. It happened to lendrum many years later but its an art form but not only do you have to find these words in this vast wilderness area and they are territorial so they have huge areas, its not like their nests everywhere. The gyrflacon and all the stuff was new to me but i just found myself and as you could tell, more and more caught up in the weirdness of it all. These birds established the torah terry five, 10 miles so there may be a nest there and you are in your helicopter 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, landed a helicopter on top of the cliff and rappel down or whether it wasme so steep that they would have to descend from the robe and then they spent ten days doing this and captured Something Like 30 eggs. It is significant part of the environmental bounty of this pristine part of the world. Pretty bad stuff. It would not make the gyrflacon extinct but its nasty business. Mullen of course was consumed by guilt abouthe it but he did it anyway and in fact, he did it the next year to. [laughter] to make a long story short again, to condense this and again i dont want to get too much of it away but basically lendrum continues on this incredible course reckless, getting more reckless in taking more chances and eventually it leads to this 2010 birmingham incident where Andy Mcwilliam busts him. Because mcwilliams kept him without fail hes able to dig up a lot of tantrums history and prove this is no ordinary bird egg collector but somebody with global reach whos been doing it for years and who is a professional making money and plundering the environment, probably with cronies in the middle east so hes working this and theres a trial, highly covered trial because the british media cant resist these elements of x Rhodesian Army guy and helicopter repelling, arab sheiks, falcon eggs so lendrum ends up getting and forgive me for not knowing the details of my own book but as i think its a two and half year was in a sentence which is the first time hes ever hes been doing this for 20 years already and has been caught a couple of times but managed to sneak out and get through with a fine. It happened in zimbabwe and again in . And is always managed to escape or skate on thin ice and survived by paying off somebody and keeping his name out of the papers. Thanks to mcwilliams this guy is now all over the British Press and his video of him dangling as hes carrying the dvd in his carryon luggage and mcwilliams grab that and everything is put up on youtube. Everything is out there now and lendrum is in prison. Tumcwilliam is hoping that at ts point, the guy has time now. Hes learned his lesson. Jail and exposure, media exposure, will make it very difficult for him to continue along the lines of this life that he led for 20, 25 years. Basically, lendrum does get out of jail and does make this legitimate attempt to go straight. There are people that are family members, friends that were willing to help him and they work a normal life and they returned to south africa and keeps a low profile but something about those eggs he cannot stop and 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 in this places poly [inaudible] park in a harsh volcanic landscape with all these dead looking nose and protected environment and absolute haven for raptors and another weird distant parts of the world where raptors congregate in which lendrum discovered this is part of the story that i dont know and how he found these volcanoes in the middle of nowhere and assessed that they were likely spots for these albino falcons but the wiproblem now is lendrum is a wellknown character and his name is out there and hes more and more reckless and draws suspicion about what he is up to, including letting the hotel clerks see his incubators and climbing equipment in his hotel room so the hotel clerk googled his name in the first thing he sees is this picture of lendrum dangling from a robe in northern cool back. He gets to read page after page of stories about this interNational Wildlife thief called by Andy Mcwilliams as quoted as a master thief on a global scale and everyone is like what have we got here. The trap is laid and lendrum is eventually captured in brazil and he is sentenced to four and half years in prison in a brazilian jail and does not 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 lendrum. He ducked me for many months and i was intent on finding him and asking him why are you doing this still . What is the middle east connection . Explain to me your life. I had a lot of questions and he finally agreed to meet me in a shopping mall. E ti we hooked up their and lendrum again, it was a weird encounter and he was a i found him to be a likable, charming character and a complete unrepentant liar. It was hard to have these two identities by this point i knew so much about his life and i could ask very specific detailed questions andec yet he had an answer just like he had an answer for the counterterrorism side about the chiropractor and the duck eggs he had answers and was fast and if you did not know anything about him he would come away convinced he was the victim and a true conservationist would been out to save these poor birds, time and time again. Each time, by taking them from threatened positions or saving them from pigeon [inaudible], he had a story behind every heist. You would come away again maybe this guy is this victim and this terrible miscarriages of justice but if you knew his story he realized he was a masterful liar. Find yourselfme liking him you are also, you are repulsed by this justice incredible pattern of [inaudible]. At any rate, my final words to lendrum the day were jeffrey, you will go back to doing this because i found if i did not challenge him but played along and acknowledged yes, you are doing this for the sake of the birds but are you going to continue to save the birds or are youar out of this at this point . By this point he had had prostate cancer, a bad car accident in johannesburg and could barely lift his arms and he said the nerves in his neck and he said im gone and out of this and cant do this anymore. Im too old and im too tired and too sick. 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 circumstances behind it. So, i always feel like i have already given away too much of the story. Anyway, i will end the story and the narrative there before i completely dissuade everybody from buying the book but theres a lot more obviously it explores this whole crazy arab obsession in the world of a collectors and Andy Mcwilliams life and i tried to do a lot of Different Things in the manner of my one of the writers i admire most in the world. Im happy to say that a couple of reviews have made the comparison so this took me this far away from the world as International Terrorism and diplomacy and geopolitics that marked my last book to a certain extent so i was happy to just dive into what i thought was a great story without any larger geopolitical environmental implications but perhaps not geopolitical. On that note im happy to open up the floor to the audience and where are people please take that microphone if you have any questions. Anyone have a question or two to ask me . [applause] curious the gyrflacon thievery happened in Northern Canada from what you said. In this particular case, yes. Did the canadians authority charge him . [inaudible conversations] this was 2001 and they managed to get away. The only reason we know about that expedition is because the accomplish betrayed him print they went back the next year and got caught this time. There were not very careful and raised suspicions and they were charged and do not have the evidence that they were trying to smuggle them out of the country and they can only the guy skates and ice and got away with a fine and told them dont stop but in canada again but at that point paul mullin, his accomplice changed his name legally and i cant reveal his wrong name but i was told to call him by his old names and that name no longer exists. They did what they could they hit him with a 20000dollar fine and sent them on their way. How much we get on average . So, thats a really hard question. For instance its been documented that some of these beautiful white gyrflacon, pure white ones, have been sold legally in the legal market for two and 75000 that with its different because the one i understand eggs and ive talked to a couple experts and at the trial in 2010 because you have to assume that maybe a third of or destroyed hatch and transport or whatever but the female falcons are worth more than the male because the female falcons are bigger and better racers and they pay more for them and he placed the value of about 120,000 for all 14 but that was cannulation than a lot of people say it was way too low but still that was a months work for lendrum. Possibly more. That is not bad for several days of climbing around the cliffs of wales and of course the preparation that is involved in finding those areas in the world. Are these birds protected under [inaudible] or the Migratory Bird act . [inaudible], there may be overlapping legislation that was confusing for me and i didnt want to get too bogged down and i did not even understand it and the brits and the European Union have these laws and they have [inaudible] convention on International Trade in endangered species so these are all considered article one, index one birds. [inaudible conversations] you cantdi trade them or market them or have them and the wild ones i am talking about unless you have a license as a scientist to study them and that is really rare. Un so yeah, anyone else . [inaudible question] we didnt speak on the phone over the course of six months. When will this be a movie . Good question. [laughter] it is in development but i dont have anything to do with it. I dont sit around waiting. Bob. You have these eggs wrapped around them, i assume, this picture is but is that not showing up when he goes through security . How do you smuggle eggs onto an airplane . Some of the aspects of thi this he would go through metal detectors and metal detectors off and he had obscured enough so they would not show up but this is this picture was taken as he was coming into Heathrow Airport so he had already gotten through johannesburg airport with these presumably cap strapped to his stomach but for various reasons as he said his guy got more and more reckless as the career dragged on and just kept making more and more stupid mistakes and was busted. Donatella. Going back to the transportation of these eggs he wasnt taking Economy Class to london with those eggs on him was he . I think he had a enough miles accumulated [inaudible] [laughter] they werent in the back but i remember he was on the emirates Business Class lounge in 2010 when he was busted so 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 day old falcons and this was before he moved into the egg business, stuffed in his pocket and then placed in the backpack and put in a carryon of Virgin Atlantic flight. Where they alive . They were alive and began screeching every couple of hours they would wait and screech and he would have to run and take them into the toilet and feed them his liver and egg yolk mix and get them back to sleep and put them back on top. This was mullens first g intro into dealing with a crazy pers person. [inaudible] very good question. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible question] why spend two and half years of my life doing the story . [laughter] its all about obsession. [laughter] did you have a dream in the past two years . [inaudible conversations] so about lendrum, look, this is a guy whose father was a bit ethically challenged and his father was arrested with or let him, you know, not everybody in the family became criminals but his brother and sister were purposely normal, conventional people to some extent but lendrum obviously was closest to the father and the two had similar interests and they strolled together and researched eggs together and stole together and this appears to have been lendrums [inaudible] from an early age and people who knew him growing up and said he was always pushing the envelope and always Challenging Authority and wanted to be different and was doing it and loved the physical thrill of going after these birds and birds nests, going back to the time he was 11, 12 years old. He was stealing 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 who collect these eggs passionately, hundred thousand, thousands of eggs stash them in their attic to go up and gaze at them and this is a crazy obsession that lendrum suffered from but there was also those collectors did the same thing and lumped the danger and the challenge and you talk to some of these people in the physical risks and the defiance of authority and they know its illegal and they get a total charge out of it so theres similarity between lendrum and these egg collectors but lendrum took it to another throughd that he had connections that you will read about when you buy the book, you will find out how he made that era connection and so he happened to be in the right place at the right time in that way and let him to do this for commercial reasons. Although, as i think i said theres no indication he got rich from this and the New York Times review called the mate Pablo Escobar of the illegal egg trade or Something Like that that Pablo Escobar title he conferred upon himself to meer ironically saying my first time i talked to him he angrily said Everyone Wants to make me out to be this Pablo Escobar of the egg trade but its politics and cr crap. I think i publish that in the outside magazine peaks in the british prospected up and suddenly he was always Pablo Escobar of the illegal egg trade even though it was said in complete sarcasm and it became the evidence that he became known as. So why the story you asked me . What he wanted general psychological profile . [laughter] [inaudible question] because i have been a Foreign Correspondent for a lot of years and then i my career morphed and i became interested in narrati narrative, longform narrative but not fiction because i like to find stories and not let me to the librarians of timbuktu which was a good yarn and so i became unwanted to tell i think what worked about the bad ass librarians of timbuktu was and nheaded antihero in sat in the strange part of the world, exotic, allowed me to flex my writing muscles, develop characters and thats what i wanted to do with the next book. The story somehow resonated, obviously, completely different story from the bad ass librarians of timbuktu but had a lot of elements and potentially Great Central character as long as i could balance it in with the good guy because he dont take you want to just read 270 pages about a villain and so i was fortunate enough to have a whatpp i felt was a very appealg Police Officer who had this weird fixation on busting bird crimes to balance out a couple of people had told me that they liked lendrum more and found mcwilliam to be basically an administrative geek but that seems to be a rare view. People do seem to like the balance of characters so, i dont know. The story seem to have the elements that i liked to do and i like writing and the like telling stories in book form and i also like penetrating subcultures and worlds i dont know anything about and i knew next to nothing about falconry or eggs. I love birds. But not in any sort of jonathan [inaudible] and passionate bird obsessive gazing way. I did a appreciate that in this experience made me more appreciative and they would not, self particularly a birder but i do appreciate and love them more than i did previously so yeah, i dont know, i also love environmental stuff in them a good shooting writer to outside magazine and this struck me as having the opportunity to follow this trail, criminal and think of the amazing places he would go. I used two cover war zones but now i did not want to go to war zones anymore but going to the desert, the small volcanic desert of patagonia or the National Park in zimbabwe to look at raptors that was an adventure. For all these reasons it spoke to me in a way that all the other ideas i had did not, anyone else . Yes, kathleen, could you step up to the microphone . Sorry. Cspan is here and i did not even introduce cspan but this is like we are doing this. Go forgot about that. This relates really to an earlier question but do you think in the course of the pretrial proceedings that anyone did a psychiatric evaluation of lendrum . Mac not that i am aware of but you really dont get a lot out of these british cops. Its hard to get them to tell you anything. With this case but it was over and done with beforely mcwilliam could give me some stuff but it was hard. I tried to get a hold of interrogation tapes, transcrip transcripts, freedom of information act requests and it was they told me everything and they denied and they said it was destroyed and we have to keep it for five years and ensure everything so i got very little and wanted to get that counterterrorism story and it would not talk to me so what went on psychologyy but just another one of those mysteries, you know. Mitch. Sorry,. This is fascinating. Given how lucrative this was are there other lendrums out there and how expensive is this scheme . As i said it was not all that lucrative for lendrum. S ro t he seemed t to be more interestd in it for real but yeah, i did some research into this and in such a clandestine world and you cant get anything out of the arabs and the shakes the sheiks and its taboo. They wont talk about it but they busted occasional trappers up in the wilderness of siberia or pakistan and there was a Tv Documentary in the uk and in the 90s where a guy posed as a producer and the host of the show poses as a sheik and lures out these men so it does exist. But its never beenn as clearly outlined intangible as it has lien in the case. I think we are out of time and this is nonfiction. Im glad you think it reads like fiction. What . [inaudible question] not in the lease. I tried to be as faithful as again to the truth. [applause] thank you, thank you, josh. One of the fascinating world you have led us into. The book is available at the checkout desk. Please form a line to the right of the table and help our staff by folding up your chairs. 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