“While the pace of the
slaughter has quickened, the
demand in Asia for illicit
animal parts is nothing new”
accommodations
to South African
lion-bone dealers when
they were in town. Galster says it
also contains a back room that has
played host to Hydra’s meetings,
making the operation the Nakhon
Phanom equivalent of Satriale’s
Pork Store in Th e Sopranos. ‘A l l
the Hydra players own hotels
and resorts,’ said Galster. ‘ ey’re
money-laundering machines.’
Just down the street stands a bar
owned until recently by Bach.
A short drive from the centre of
town is the police station where a
surveillance team observed Bach’s
suspected bagman, making regular
drop-o s in a zipped canvas sack.
e milieu is a natural one for
Galster, who has spent his career
investigating the illicit trade of
drugs, arms, wildlife and human
beings. Raised in America, Galster
attended George Washington
University in the ’80s and became
interested in the Soviet war with
Afghanistan. A er graduation,
he landed a job with an NGO that
took him to the front, where he
documented soldiers and Afghan
mujahideen selling heroin to nance
weapons purchases. Galster realised
that opportunities abounded for
a guy looking to mix high ideals
with a taste for adventure.
In the early ’90s, he went
undercover and joined Christian
fundamentalists who were ying
guns and bibles to a rebel group in
Mozambique. e dissidents were
backed by the apartheid South
African government, which was
trying at the time to reopen the
ivory trade. But the intelligence
gathered by Galster and a colleague
helped to derail the e ort. If there
were cartels threatening to wipe
out animals, Galster made it his
business to stop them.
In ailand, in 2003, he met the
turncoat poachers who showed
him how the elaborate business
worked, tracing the supply lines
that led into Laos, and then
onward to Vietnam and China.
‘It was a free-for-all,’ says Galster.
‘ e attitude among tra ckers was
“Get it to Laos and we’ll be ne”.’
at was the rst time that
Galster ever heard of Keosavang,the former military o cer thought
to be running Hydra. He quickly
learnt that the operation wasn’t
just relying on parts shipped from
places like Africa. One of Hydra’s
suppliers, Galster discovered
through informants, was the Tiger
Temple, a zoo and meditation
centre near the famed bridge over
the River Kwai in Kanchanaburi,
ailand. Western tourists ocked
to the zoo to pet tiger cubs, learn
mindfulness techniques, and
walk along footpaths through the
woods. Meanwhile, the Buddhist
monks in charge were secretly
spiriting live big cats to Laos.
When ai authorities shut down
the Tiger Temple in 2016, they
reportedly seized around 150 live
tigers, the thawed carcasses of
40 dead cubs, 20 cubs in jars of
formaldehyde, two tiger pelts,
and 1 500 tiger-skin amulets.
He learnt that rhino horn,
hard as a block of wood, can be
own in suitcases or backpacks –
travelling either intact or chopped
into pieces that are wrapped in
tinfoil or bubble wrap and then
surrounded by shampoo bottles or
deodorant to mask the foul odour.
Some of the contraband reaches
ailand by cargo ship before
journeying to Laos and onward to
points north. To get it across the
ai border, the product is either
hauled by truck across the handful
of bridges on the Mekong River
or packed onto what Galster calls
“banana boats”, wooden longboats
with a single outboard motor, and
ferried through darkness.
‘ is is the mother ship of the
zoos,’ Galster tells me as we pull into
the parking lot of the Sriracha Tiger
Zoo, a popular tourist attraction and
reputed big-cat-laundering centre.
We’re two hours south of Bangkok,
near the seaside city of Pattaya, a
favoured hangout for the Hydra gang.
For years, the Sriracha Tiger
Zoo has appalled Galster. He
claims that sources familiar withwhat goes on inside have painted
a harrowing picture of slaughter.
He says he was told that a er
tigers outlived their usefulness,
butchers routinely knocked out
the beasts with powerful drugs,
slit their throats and dismembered
them, then packed the pieces into
vehicles for transport to Laos. e
zoo always kept around 500 tigers
on hand, one source told him, so
that nobody would notice if a few
went missing. Galster suspects the
zoo may still be laundering tigers.
Demand for tiger parts remains
strong in Vietnam and China;
the hottest new product on the
market is a supposed aphrodisiac,
extracted from the bones and sold
in capsule form for R4 000 per pill.
We follow walkways lined
with owering trees, past throngs
of tourists, almost all of them
Chinese. e scene is degrading
and depressing: tourists dangle
raw chickens from shing poles
over another bleak pen containing
a dozen more of the huge,
beautiful animals. To the delight
of their tormentors, the cats snarl
and ght one another for the
food. Undercover investigations
by wildlife advocates, here and
at a similar zoo in ailand,
have produced videos that show
what tourists apparently come to
experience: chained tigers being
forced to roar for photos, cubs
separated from their mothers
being bottle-fed by visitors.
Such zoos have been able to
ourish in ailand because of
the wealth and political in uence
of those who run them – and the
hopelessness of the public. ‘You
don’t have people power here,’
Galster tells me. ‘You’ve got corrupt
rich people getting away with it.’
Nobody knows exactly how many
tiger “sanctuaries” exist in the
country, and it took a massive media
campaign, including an investigative
article in National Geographic, to
prod the government to shut downthe Tiger Temple in 2016.
A er cops hauled Bach o to jail
in 2018, Hydra appeared derailed.
Conservationists around the
world cheered the development.
Bach faced charges of rhino-horn
tra cking and was eyeing four
years in prison if convicted.
As the trial began last year in
a provincial courtroom in Samut
Prakan, Bach’s lawyers insisted
that their client was a victim
of mistaken identity, Galster
recalls. When it came time for
the prosecutions star witness,
Wongprajan, to identify the head
of the organisation, he refused
to point at Bach, seated in the
defendant’s chair. Maybe he was
thrown o by Bach’s changed
appearance – he had let his hair
grow out and wore glasses. But it
might have been out of pure fear.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said nervously.
‘I don’t know who this guy is.’ On
29 January 2019, as Galster and
Poolsub looked on in dismay, the
judge dismissed all the charges.
e suspected Hydra boss was
immediately hustled out of the
courtroom by two escorts.
A er that, Bach disappeared
from circulation. Meanwhile,
Wongprajan was returned to a jail
cell to await his own trial for his
role in the rhino-horn scheme.
Galster wasn’t shocked. ‘ ey
either threatened Wongprajan or
promised him money,’ he says.
Galster is still chasing Bach. But
he’s refraining, for now, from trying
to put him behind bars. Instead,
he’s testing a new approach – a Hail
Mary attempt born of frustration.
During our stopover in Nakhon
Phanom, Galster wrote a message
to Bach on a Freeland letterhead.
e note, a quixotic appeal to the
smuggler’s conscience, invited him
to contribute to Project Recover,
an initiative recently put together
by Freeland and IBM. It aims
to use con scated funds from
tra ckers to set up programs that
help beleaguered populations of
elephants, tigers, rhinos and other
wildlife recover from poaching.
‘We would like you to consider
joining this program,’ Galster wrote
in ai. ‘Here is a chance to be on
the right side.’
Galster dropped the letter with a
clerk at the reception desk at Bach’s
apartments on our way to Nakhon
Phanom airport. ree months
photography by FrEEland Foundation later, he’s still waiting for a reply.