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As her statement sank in, they all began talking at once. Finally, Laurie held up her hands for silence, then said, “According to Interpol, human beings do about ten billion dollars a year in the international wildlife trade. About five billion of that is illegal. In California, the illegal trade in bear parts alone is valued at about a hundred million dollars. Do you know where that puts this stuff?”
When everyone shook their heads, Laurie said, “It generates more profit than illegal arms sales and comes in second only to the narcotics trade. But you’re ten times more likely to find someone walking down the street with wildlife on their person in the form of wallets, shoe, or belts, than drugs. Think about it.”
“If that’s so, then why do we all have it?”
“Because,” Laurie answered, “it’s not illegal to possess wildlife. You could enter a parade with a panda bear—one of the most endangered species in the world—and nothing would happen to you. Try that with a machine gun or heroin and you’re looking at serious jail time. But as you know, David, we prosecute when we can.”
“The snails?”
“Right, but other cases, too. We had a case a couple of years ago involving bear bile. I don’t know if you were here then. Customs opens some guy’s bag at LAX and they find pills, vials, things that look like little turds. Turns out the perp has about eleven pounds of bear bile, worth about one million dollars in those days. The rest was various compounds, mostly harmless, but it was enough to get a conviction. Twenty-one months.”
“Go back to what you said earlier about the triads,” David urged Laurie. “Where do they fit in?”
“Haven’t you been listening?” she responded irritably. “This stuff is profitable. There’s practically no competition. The market is growing. And the risk is negligible. You don’t have a DEA agent hiding behind every corner, informants in every shadow, no competitors trying to take you out. And, if you’re caught, instead of twenty years in the federal penitentiary, you get a slap on the wrist. But it’s not just the triads. We’re seeing lots of different organized crime groups getting involved.”
“Like?”
“The white supremacists, the Freemen, the Vipers—all those nuts up in Montana and Idaho. Poaching American black bears and selling their gallbladders and paws is one of the primary fund-raisers for the militia groups. A dealer then sells the stuff in Koreatowns and Chinatowns around the country, as well as exporting it to Asia.”
“Billy and Henglai must have been buying fresh gallbladders from the cowboys,” Hulan said.
But David wasn’t so sure. “What if you aren’t a white supremacist?” he asked Laurie. “Might regular people still shoot bears to earn money?”
“Where have you been?” Laurie retorted. “We kill about forty thousand bears in this country each year, and most of them are killed legally—with permits and all. Even a weekend hunter can be tempted to earn back his license fees and gas money.”
“What kind of money are we talking about?”
“For a fresh gallbladder? I’ve heard a low of two thousand dollars to as high as eighty thousand,” Laurie answered.
“That’s a lot of money in Montana,” David said.
“That’s a lot of money anywhere,” Hulan amended.
“That’s why we’re finding bear carcasses around the world with nothing taken but their gallbladders,” Laurie continued. “In China, bag a bear, sell its gallbladder—or sell it live to a bear farm—for about five hundred dollars U.S.; that’s more than a year’s salary. A damn good incentive, if you ask me, except for one thing. China has the stiffest penalties in the world because its bears are under a greater threat of extinction than anywhere else. The sun bear, the Asiatic black bear, the panda—all of them are on the CITES I list, meaning they’re threatened by extinction. Kill a panda bear—which, by the way, doesn’t secrete the right kind of bile because it isn’t a true bear—you get the death sentence. Kill a moon bear, you’re looking at making sneakers in some prison factory for the next hundred years or so. Farming and selling bear bile? Totally illegal, but it’s happening in China.”
“What are bear farms?” Hulan asked.
“You don’t know? Scientists in your country have figured out some way to extract the bile without killing the bear. But other than that, we don’t know that much about them either,” Laurie co
nfessed.
Laurie stood and walked over to the window. Turning to the group, she held her arms out wide. “The world market for medicinal herbs—I’m talking the whole shebang now, the herbs, the animal derivatives, the roots, the patents, the raw drugs—is huge. In the U.S., between the people interested in holistic medicine and the Asian population, we’re spending like crazy. This stuff is cheap compared to Western medicine, and it seems to work in a lot of cases. But see, that’s what’s hard for us. We can go out and educate people not to wear fur coats or jewelry made from ivory, but how do you tell parents whose kid is dying from a strange form of liver cancer that they shouldn’t take a chance on bear bile? How do you ask a doctor—sworn to protect human life—not to prescribe rhino horn if he thinks it will save his patient?”
A hush fell over the conversation as David, Hulan, Jack Campbell, and Peter Sun tried to absorb all they’d heard.
“Our government has other concerns as well,” Laurie went on. “The Chinese manufacture thousands of different patent medicines. This stuff comes over here and shows up in Chinese herb shops, in acupuncturists’ offices, in health-food stores, in the Save-on down the street. Basically, they’re sold everywhere over the counter and they’re supposed to cure everything—headache, flu, the common cold, backache, cancer.”
“So what’s the problem?” David asked.
“Say a mother in Brentwood buys some Chinese cough syrup for her kid. The directions say one teaspoon twice a day. She thinks, Why not four times a day? Better yet, I’ll make it every four hours like Robitussin. She gives it to the kid and he goes into convulsions and almost dies. We send the syrup to the forensics lab and we get a call back that it has whatever herbs and minerals are advertised on the package, as well as arsenic or mercury. We’re talking about products with serious poisons in them that you can just buy over the counter.”
“David, this is starting to make sense,” Hulan said slowly.
He looked doubtful.
“We’ve got the cowboys and the bears up in Montana, right?”
He nodded.
