Im bradley graham, coowner of the store along with my life and we are delighted to have Joshua Hammer back with us at pmp. Josh was here for his last book about four years ago and matt was the bad ass librarians of timbuktu which told the riveting story of how an archivist in timbuktu managed with some very brave helpers to smuggle more than 350,000 historical manuscripts out from under militant jihadist to safety about 600 miles away and the book was a bestseller and established at joshs someone for a night with an eye for really truly read story. Hes done it again with his new book, the falcon thief which recounts another true and gripping tale of adventure. This one, about wildlife. E t josh is a journalist by training and had a pretty adventurous globetrotting run himselfgl working for newsweek over nearly two decades. He joined newsweek and the late 1980s as a business and media writer but within a few years he was off to cover the rest of the world on postings that paste them in nairobi, brandis andres, berlin, jerusalem, cape town and back here in the u. S. In los angeles. For the past decade and a half hes continued to report and travel widely writing for a range of publications. Four years ago he won the National Magazine award in reporting for a piece titled, my nurses are dead and i dont know if im i already infected. Still a prizewinning story. [laughter] the told the story of a physician in sierra leone who led the effort to control the Ebola Outbreak in there. In addition to the timbuktu book josh has written three other previous works, one about his younger brother who became a religious fundamentalist, another about the siege in 2002 of the church of the tivoli in bethlehem, and a third about the deadly 1923 earthquake and fire that struck japan. It has been said of josh that he reports like a journalist and writes like a novelist. That certainly is the case with his work in the falcon thief. The book describes the exploits of Jeffrey Lendrum, notorious wildlife smuggler who for years traveled the world stealing highly valued eggs and birds of prey and selling them to enthusiasts in the uae where falcons and other raptors are used for sport. The other central character in joshs story is the detective from Britains NationalWildlife Crime unit named Andy Mcwilliam who specializes in ornithological crime solving and was determined to catch lendrum. The book is a thrilling, fastpaced chronicle but more than that and its more than just a detective story set in a rarefied world filled with unusual characters and astounding birds. It is, as one reviewer noted, cautionary tale about how the love of nature can go very wrong and what happens when precious wildlife becomes a status symbol on a planet when nature is increasingly imperiled. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Joshua Hammer. [applause] great detailed introduction. Duam humbled. My favorite, i think this is always be my favorite bookstore and my favorite venue to talk about these things. So, thanks everybody for coming out tonight. Im amazed that anyone goes to book events at all. Its always impressive. [inaudible] [laughter] anyway,r] over the course of dog this particular talk now three, four times since i got to new york in the states is to basically present a narrative without giving away the entire book and illustrating that narrative with pictures i think bring the story to life. N i will very quickly start with an introduction about how thi this i assume most of you have not seen the book so basically how to answer the question of how i stumbled into this thing. The badass librarian of timbukd that was a story that i had pretty much followed for many years and i had a beginning in Africa Bureau chiefur for newswk and made a couple trips to molly and wants to timbuktu and continue to visit and over the years and got a couple of smithsonian assignments to write about the great manuscripts of to about two stars pretty well versed in that mill you and that story will kino invaded the country and people i know got caught up in the violence and the capturing of the entire two thirds of the country so it was a story that i owned, i felt, in a way and made a certain amount of sense that the book would come out of it. It was something completely different and a total, an act of desperation because i was looking for another project and had thrown out some terrible ideas including one about the 1969 i wont even go into it but fortunately then one day in 2017 i was in london with my kids and i just happened to pick up the london times and was sitting in a cafe reading and there was an article, a very short article on the about page 12 or so about this character named Jeffrey Lendrum and the headline was Something Like pair again thief on the wing again because the tabloids love those bad puns and this was a story about all it said was the sky notorious thief known for helicopter ring and repelling down cliffs to reach rare falcon eggs to sell to the sheiks in d dubai and united emirates and had been rearrested, sentenced to prison and brazil and had disappeared and nowzi the World Conservation world and bird around the world, Wildlife Police, were alarmed that heor might be coming back to or back on the hunt. That was enough to ignite my interest and i began investigating it further and further and deeper and deeper and becoming, as obsessed with lendrum in a way that he was about his eggs which i think is what a writer does, a journali journalist, and nonfiction but deeper and deeper into a subject and so with that introduction i will tell you a bit about the story as it unfolds in the book so you can get have some coherence without giving too much away. This story begins in a shower room in the emirates First Business class lounge in Birmingham International airport in the ukla where a very vigilat janitor notices a middleaged white fellow, nondescript character, going into the washroom, the shower room with all his baggage, three bags and disappears and therefore 20 minutes. Janitor is waiting to clean the place and he does not know what is going on and spent 20 minutes and there and is a vigilance guy to begin with, job at security monitor looking at closed captions, hundreds of closedcaptioned ccp tvs in a Shopping Mall so he was trained to observe. After 20 minutes the guy comes out in the janitor goes inside the bathroom, shower room and sees absolutely nothing has been touched. Everything is completely dry, shower unused, towels still folded sink, bath toilet, lything so he merely is suspicious and routes around and ends up after five, ten minutes of looking to the Ceiling Tiles or whatever underneath towels he finds in a or sees a diaper been in the corner of the room and goes over to it, opens it up and sees an egg carton in the bottom of the diapermp been otherwise empty diaper bent with a single red, painted red egg like an easter egg inside it. He figures was left by the guy who is just in here so hes completely mystified and somewhat alarmed. [laughter] what could this mean . He thanks is probably got something to do with drugs but not sure its make a long story wort the Counterterrorism Police are brought to the scene and they take him away and stripsearched him, they find beneath his tshirt is a hospital gauze wrapped tightly around his body and inside the hospital because our woolen socks and inside the woolen socks are 14 o of these they dot know what these are actually these counterterrorism pleas are not trained at all in understanding what they are so they asked lendrum what, Jeffrey Lendrum, by that point i looked at his passport and establish his identity and his irish national, what are these and he tells them they are duck eggs and they say okay and would you mind telling us why you are carrying raw duck eggs attached to your body and your belly andm he explains that his chiropractor has told him that he needs to wear raw eggsun wrapped around his body because it will vent him from stooping and lead to tightening of his lower back muscle. [laughter] okay, so at this point they just dont know what they got on their hands and it is at that make ahat they summon phone call to Andy Mcwilliam whn reviews of this book and there have been a few good ones and theyre not always satisfying to read but they tend to give short shrift to Andy Mcwilliam or want to say from the beginning this is a bad guy good guy story. You have a hero in antihero. Jeff lendrum being the hero antihero and Andy Mcwilliam was certainly the most famous Wildlife Police man, his specialty in ornithological crime. So heres the story and realizes it may and briefing season or incubating nesting season so he realizes the guy carrying these eggs on his body probably not to hide them but to keep them warm from the description he instantly knows that they are peregrine eggs. Peregrine falcon is the bird. I have a better image of wantor but for some reason it did not download so this is a hooded Peregrine Falcon but anyway, basically this is a highly productive bird, a raptor, the fastest bird on the planet travels can go into a stoop dive to kill another bird in midair at speeds of up to 180 miles an hour. Mcwilliam knows that they are highly prized by arab falconers in particular, especially the wealthy sheiks of the United Arab Emirates but hes never actually he has sued rumors about this market, this black markets, to bring in these protected raptors into the emirates for these falconers. Here he believes just from the very description offered by the counterterrorism cops that he may have a smuggler on his hands. Ilmcwilliam drives down from liverpool where he is from, this by the way, some of this is out of order but this is Jeffrey Lendrum, portrait of him in 2010. I dont think i told you when his first happen but in may 2010. That picture is timber radius. Mcwilliam comes down and interviews this guy and he is still lying and telling the same story that he told the Counterterrorism Police and mcwilliam pretty quickly lets him know hes not dealing with an idiot and that hes dealing with a wildlife expert, raptor expert and knows exactly what hes got that he puts he finally gets lendrum to admit that yes,as he was still stealig peregrine eggs but the eggs were dead and in fact the eggs were dead and he was only bringing them down to south africa for his private collection and i was the story he gave. Mcwilliam was pretty sure he was lying. Anyway, he also admitted that he had been to or retrieve these eggs from cliffs and whales and this is a picture of the rhondd. Valley, one of the greatest concentrations of Peregrine Falcons in the uk, possibly the world is found in this former coal mining area noted for its cliffs, really amazing landscape in these ledges that are sheltered from the wind. You have howling winds up at the top of the thing and the trees were all cut down decades and even a century or more ago because for coal mining toco basically lined this incrediblee network of coal mines that were built over the century in this part of the uk. This barren landscape with fierce winds and little rocky ledges here, protected from the wins for the peregrine lay their eggs and they dont really create nests but they find these ledges and maybe put a fuse stones or couples around it to protect them from rolling off and but you have to imagine this vast landscape. Huge wilderness area and lendrum somehow was able to have acquired 14 of these peregrine eggs. William is pretty sure hes got a professional on his hands. This is a trip i took a couple of years later or seven years later following the footsteps and that is Andy Mcwilliam who is, as i said, let me give you a quick background sketch of william. Liverpool cop o working class family, grandfather gast in world war i, father worked as a merchant marine grew up with no options but the police and he did not barely finished school but became a cop, liverpool cop, walking the bea beach, driving the beat, became quite well known as investigator and had a midlife crisis in his 40s decided he was tired of drug busting, drug addicts and drug pushers and suicides and murders and wanted to get away from that and he was also a very talented rugby player, fierce rugby player, one of the best police rugby players in england and gave that a series of injuries drove him to drop thatn it became a birdwatcher in the birdwatching that he found he absolutely loved to lead him into this hidden subterranean world,in blackmarket bird trads killers of Peregrine Falcons like pigeon fancies and people who trained pigeons or train falcons to kill pigeons because their mortal enemies and exotic bird smugglers who stick birds inside two plastic tubes and send them on 24 hour horrific journeys to from thailand to the uk to satisfy the hunger of these rare bird fanatics. Also another odd little aspect of this is the egg collectors, these are the very british phenomenon, Trained Spotter guys, middleaged men who spend their time going off to some of the remote corners of the uk, islands north of scotland, wales, stealing eggs of rare birds, protected birds, blowing out the embryos and mounting them in collections, their own collections what they have to keep secret and usually hide them in their addicts k and they go up and spare time and stare at their eggs. Mcwilliam found this whole subculture that very few people. New existed ended up basically pursuing these guys, hundreds of them and almost singlehandedly driving this involved in operation called operation easter it was a major crackdown on these guys and drove them out of business so this is his background by the time lendrum comes across his radar screen. Wellversed and knows almost as much about rare birds protected birds as lendrum does. I go here to this is the market that mcwilliam knew existed and that lendrum suddenly presented a concrete image of and this is a scene picture taken in dubain so falconry, quickly, falconry has been around for at least 3000 years and a lot of people believe it started in the our arab world, bedouins started in the desert as a way to hunt you take these wild birds and there was a migration over the desert and they would trap these birds, pulled him of the sky basically using various strategies and train them to hunt so they would start out as hunters and essentially helping bedouins put food on their table. We are talking even before the arrival of islam f and then over the century this falconry developed and traders brought it to europe and china and all around the world and it became more of a sport and recreational thing vented a necessary way to feed yourself but its essentially was this interaction almost mystical interaction between man and bird in which you train a bird and maybe some of you have read Helen Mcdonald book so you probably know a bit about this thing but it became, even though its better on the world it did die out in the uk u and europe in the states and never really e expanded beyond a Certain Group of people. In the arab world and became very closely identified with arab culture, the bedouin traditions and even though the desert was pretty much wiped or seriously eroded over the course of the last 50 years with the discovery of oil falconry remains really intensely embedded in the culture and this is another trainer of a peregrine and in a dubai desert Training Ground and this is the kind of passion that theseer wealthiest falconers who tend to be members of the royal family have and this is the Veterinary Center for the crown prince of dubai crown prince, [inaudible] sorry, the son of mohammed [inaudible] the 7 billiondollar ruler of dubai essentially built this megalopolis and this is the intense dash they have these stateoftheart hospitals where the staff and veterinarians from all over the world pay huge salaries to two take care of their birds and in the last 20 years as the desert has gotten smaller and the natural prey of the birds has disappeared in the persian gulf you have this new phenomenon called falcon raising where the wealthy sheiks take their birds and even though their natural tendency is to drop the straight drop up to 16n fly or are trained using everything from little mini airplanes and drones to handheld bait to go vertical or horizontally and they gatherer, the sheiks gather in these racetracks, falcon racetracks and they place bets but to prepare they have to go all over the world to find the greatest birds that will participate in these races and its an obsession for these guys. You have breeders basically since the 70s and you cant trade on most every raptor in the world falls under this very severe restrictions as far as the only kind of commercial or trading of these birds taking on these birds out of nests and only a handful are allowed every year and have to have a certificate of proving that your interest is scientific. If youre not, youre completely forbidden to touch these birds. To see this great hunger for birds theres a whole captive reading industry that has risen up where they take birds and bury them in artificial environments to incubate the eggs and huge trade worth millions of dollars but the arabs theres a Certain Group of arabs, mostly these wealthy sheiks who believe thatta captie bred birds can be compared to the wild ones that come out of nests because Natural Selection has bred these birds over the centuries or melania in these wilderness environmentsel and these are the birds that they want and willing to go to any length because they are all loaded and willing to go to any length to hire people who will provide these birds for them and willing to take great risks to get them because they only inhabit