WILDLIFE SMUGGLING ON THE RISE : ILLEGAL TRAFFICKING COULD HASTEN EXTINCTION OF ENDANGERED SPECIES.

Byline: Angie Cannon Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

For the U.S. Customs agent at Orlando International Airport, the tip-off was this: Something was moving inside the hard-sided, blue suitcase.

An X-ray revealed the creepy, crawly - and very illegal - contents: 61 Madagascan tree boas and four spider tortoises.

Why would anyone travel all the way to Madagascar in the Indian Ocean to gather boas and tortoises? For the same reason some risk a slimy exchange of snakes in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria on New York's Park Avenue, or climb to the top of remote caves to snatch rare bird nests.

The answer, of course, is money.

Every year, as much as $5 billion in illegal profits is generated through worldwide wildlife trafficking - a growing black market that some experts believe is larger than illegal arms sales and second only to drugs.

``It's a dirty, disgusting, surprisingly sophisticated industry, and profit is the bottom line,'' said Dana West, a spokeswoman for the World Wildlife Fund, a private conservation organization.

Some international wildlife trade is legal. More than $10 billion a year is traded in declared shipments of birds, fish, raw coral and reptiles. But several federal laws, including a 1973 global trade treaty, forbid trading some endangered animals and strictly regulate other threatened animals. The laws also cover animal parts, and federal officials are taking them increasingly seriously.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has about 80 agents across the country working undercover to infiltrate smuggling rings. Every year, the Justice Department prosecutes about 160 wildlife smuggling cases, known colloquially as ``zoos in a suitcase.'' Increasingly, said John T. Webb, chief of the department's wildlife and marine resources section, those convicted are getting stiffer sentences, with a third of them serving a little over a year in prison.

Smuggled loot includes wild parrots, Peruvian butterflies, Mexican red-kneed tarantulas (which fetch $200 in the United States), frilled dragons (a model for ``Jurassic Park's'' spitting dinosaur) and rhino horns (worth more than gold).

Some smuggled critters are popular with hobbyists and collectors. Some are in demand as pets. Other items, such as tiger bone, bear bile and antelope horns, feed a growing Asian medicinal market. Some are considered luxuries or delicacies, such as furs, shark fins and caviar from Caspian Sea sturgeon.

If the list seems frivolous, wildlife experts note that smuggling endangered animals, or their parts, makes extinction more likely.

Rich Moulton of Hartford, Conn., a wildlife agent who often works undercover, once posed as a wealthy collector to trap a New York man for smuggling leopard skins from Pakistan. At a rest stop on Interstate 95, the man offered Moulton skins of the highly endangered snow leopard for $15,000 each.

``I bought six from him and there are only less than 2,000 left in the world,'' Moulton said ruefully.

Often, the animals being smuggled are used to smuggle drugs too. Several years ago, liquid cocaine was discovered in double plastic bags containing tropical fish in Los Angeles, and agents have discovered cocaine-filled condoms inside boas. The Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that more than one-third of all cocaine seized in one recent year was connected with wildlife imports.

But the hot smuggling trend is reptiles, especially snakes, according to law enforcement experts. Peruvian red-tailed boas. Green anacondas. Baby monocled cobras. South American Tegu lizards.

``Believe it or not, they are pretty easy to smuggle,'' said Webb, the federal prosecutor. ``They can handle some period of dormancy and they don't need much sophisticated care.''

One smuggler put snakes in panty hose and wrapped them around his body before boarding a plane to Los Angeles not too long ago. ``His clothes were lumpy,'' said Anne-Berry Wade, a spokeswoman for the Fish and Wildlife Service.

The front lines of wildlife smuggling can be a dangerous place. Moulton, part cop, part conservationist, part performer, knows that all too well.

The best way to break these smuggling rings, he said, is elaborate, months-long undercover operations in which agents pose as finicky buyers of exotic animals.

To look the part of a rich eccentric, Moulton - a jeans-and-sweaters guy - wore suits, drove a Corvette and sport utility vehicles and sometimes pretended another agent was his chauffeur. ``You become your alter ego. He thought I had more money than I know what to do with,'' Moulton said, laughing. ``I was thinking: `Right, I work for the government. I'm a G-12.' ''

``In our small way, hopefully we are helping and serve as a deterrent,'' said Moulton, 45, who has a degree in wildlife biology and has been an agent for 23 years. ``You are trying to save something or enlighten the world about this.''

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Photo

Photo: Fish and Wildlife agent Richard Moulton shows confiscated illegal skins of endangered snow leopards from Pakistan that he has encountered in his undercover work.

Knight-Ridder Tribune Photo Service