Incredible story of how a Brit exposed multi-million pound crime wave of mobsters raiding museums fo

IN a multi-million-pound crime wave that swept Britain, mobsters plundered small museums in the hunt for one of the world’s most valuable substances.

But it wasn’t precious jewels or gold they were after ­— it was rhino horn.

And new Sky documentary The Great Rhino Robbery reveals how a key figure in exposing the illegal trade was a humble museum curator here in Britain.

Paolo Viscardi was one of the first to notice a series of raids on small locations in the UK, which featured displays of the magnificent creatures.

After criminals discovered how easy it was to steal horns from small museums — as well as other products made from the substance — the scourge then spread across Europe.

Paulo — who at the time was working as Deputy Keeper of Natural History at the Horniman Museum in South East London — said: “Generally, nothing majorly exciting happens when working in a museum. There’s not a lot of drama when it comes to the job — of course, until this.

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‘Heads going for £150k’

“I started to hear chatter about the thefts, and the auction price of rhino horns going up — some heads were going up for £150,000.

“So I started compiling information about where was being hit by thefts in the hope I could warn people about it or that I could do something, because the natural sciences museum community is so close-knit.

“But even quicker than I could work out there was a pattern forming — thieves were coming in, looking at the material, checking out the security, making a plan before coming back for one thing — the horns.

“By the third or fourth theft I saw, it was glaringly obvious that this was something much bigger than I first imagined — and something much darker must have been going on.”

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The rhino horns were traced all the way to the black market in South East Asia — where they were being ground up and sold for consumption by a rich elite.

The horns have long been used in ancient Chinese medicine.

But after false information was spread that it could cure cancer, the substance was suddenly in huge demand as worried families stockpiled it to try and save the lives of their loved ones.

Others in Vietnam and Thailand believed rhino horn to be an aphrodisiac, as well as a treatment for fevers, infections and even mental illness, so it was ground down into pastes and powders.

Investigators found that the powder was even being added to alcoholic drinks at bars in South East Asia — with shots including it flogged for £130.

In the three-part documentary, anti-trafficking expert Steve Galster explains: “I’ve seen a lot of natural products being traded and used, but I’d never seen anything as crazy as this.

“The rhino horn had become a trendy thing for the nouveau riche to pull out at parties, you know, like throw it in your wine or mix with your drugs, and let the party begin.”

Paolo, who currently works as Keeper of Natural History at the National Museum of Ireland, adds: “You see celebrities going on weird fad diets, you see people always trying to find the next big, weird and wonderful things — it’s fashionable, it’s a status symbol.

“And there have always been these niche, high-value natural products — from bird’s nest soup to shark fin and elephant ivory. They vary over time, but they are all peculiar and hard to get hold of, and therefore exclusive and expensive.

“Now rhino horn is filling that same niche that cocaine filled 30 or 40 years ago, but the difference is, the horns have no effect, at least not in any meaningful way.

“It’s all founded on hearsay and placebo effect, and the excitement of doing something illegal and illicit. If you’re wealthy and powerful, people look for these kinds of things to do.”

It was this that drove up the price of the horns from a few thousand pounds to a whopping £50,000 a kilo — with one horn worth nearly half a million pounds, making it more valuable than gold.

And with increasingly tough hunting laws across South Africa, where the majority of the world’s surviving 27,000 rhinos live, and harsher rules brought in by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, ­museums became an easier target.

Little or no security

Essex auctioneers Sworders were the first to be hit by thieves in February 2011.

The criminals got away with a wall-mounted rhino head — then thought to be worth a few thousand pounds — in a targeted attack.

Months later, Haslemere Educational Museum in Surrey was plundered for its horns and thefts of rhino artefacts followed in Colchester, Ipswich, East Sussex, Norwich and Cambridge.

The thieves were targeting locations with little or no security to hinder them — in contrast to locations like London’s Natural History Museum, which is heavily guarded with alarms.

Thieves would scout the museums posing as punters with a keen interest in rhinos, before returning at night and breaking down doors or knocking through walls and smashing glass cases to get to the horns.

Some entire stuffed rhino heads were stolen on their wall mounts, while others had the horns sawn off with knives, much like poachers have been known to do with the animals in the wild.

And after criminals swiped all they could in the UK, the thefts then started happening in Germany, Italy, Portugal, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands from 2012.

Paolo and his colleagues traced the thefts and alerted museums around the world with the help of their internal communications networks, but it would be up to trafficking experts to take the next step.

It was these experts that traced a number of the robberies back to a gang operating in Ireland, known as the Rathkeale Rovers — who had been jailed previously for petty money-making schemes.

Working in 16 European nations, alongside South African poachers and smugglers in the United States, the thieves raided museums in the UK, stealing goods worth £57million.

Jailing 14 members of the gang, from Country Limerick, in 2016 was just the start of the operation for the anti-trafficking teams, who, working across the UK and America, were led back to one Thai mobster.

Most of the horns trafficked out of the British museums ended up in Laos in the store rooms of Vixay Keosavang — a former senior military officer dubbed the “Pablo Escobar of wildlife trafficking”.

He and his team, which included sex-worker smugglers and prolific animal traders, were moving between one and ten tonnes of natural products a week, worth up to £750,000 a day.

Sky-high price

The sex workers would fly to South Africa, purchase a licence and kill one rhino each.

They then brought back the horns as stock for Keosavang’s black market trade and were paid off with huge lump sums.

Plus to drive the price of their prized horns sky-high, the wildlife crime kingpin hired rhino hunter Chumlong Lemtongthai to shoot as many rhinos as he could, and bring back the horns as an extra supply.

At the time, it was legal for individuals to apply to shoot one rhino a year — a practice that has now changed. Lemtongthai would hire dozens of people to take part, before taking their trophy horns.

Paolo continues: “The more rare the rhino horn becomes, and the fewer rhinos there are out there, the more desirable it becomes to the rich ­customers buying and trading it.

“Rhino horns in museums have been removed from display — many of them are now not the real ones, to stop them from being nicked, though sometimes break-ins have seen these replicas stolen too.

“But I am sure there are stockpiles in warehouses in South East Asia where these people are waiting for the rhino population to be wiped out, and then they can set whatever price they like.”

Lemtongthai was eventually caught by authorities and sentenced to 40 years’ imprisonment in 2012, but only served four.

Ringleader Keosavang has been on the run since 2013.

Paolo concludes: “There’s plenty of people out there who would rather see the end of a beautiful species like the rhino to make money and to own something rare and exciting.

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“We’re hoping that this trend burns itself out and, like many other high-priced substances, something else — non-harmful, sustainable and that doesn’t involve wiping out rhinos — takes its place.”

• The Great Rhino Robbery airs tonight on Sky Showcase at 9pm and is available to stream on Now.

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