Secret agents enter the battle against smugglers

MARK Davis loves to pretend he is a criminal. During a 30-year career as an FBI undercover agent, he posed as a cocaine smuggler, negotiated million-dollar deals with money launderers and showed up at a criminal rendezvous with $200000 in cash.

- JONATHAN FRANKLIN

He retired from the FBI in 2016 to work another beat. Today, he runs undercover assignments to help arrest rhino horn smugglers, jaguar skin dealers and spider monkey brokers.

Davis gathers evidence for international law enforcement agencies, working to take down smugglers profiting from the illegal trade in wildlife and endangered species.

In Bolivia, he secretly filmed meetings with jaguar traffickers and, in China, he negotiated the sale price for shark fin. In a McDonald's parking lot in Chula Vista, California, near the border with Tijuana, Davis surveilled the scene as a fellow informant set up a faux deal to sell a quarter of a million dollars worth of organs from the totoaba, an endangered Mexican fish so valuable that traffickers call it “The Cocaine of the Sea”.

As director of intelligence for Earth League International (Eli), a Los Angeles-based non-governmental organisation, Davis and his colleagues work to disrupt smuggling networks that move $23bn worth of wildlife products around the world every year.

Davis has witnessed wildlife trafficking migrate from an oddball hobby into a global market. In February, a campaign co-ordinated by Interpol and known as “Operation Thunder” included the seizure of 12427 birds, 5877 turtles, dozens of monkeys and several zoos worth of exotic animals. Most days, however, the wildlife traffickers don’t get caught. So many exotic fish, plants and animals are bought and sold online that the UN ranks this as the planet’s fourth-most lucrative smuggling market - after drugs, weapons and counterfeiting. As profits have soared, this illegal business has garnered the attention of organised criminal groups, from Chinese seafood smugglers to Mexican fentanyl producers.