Who would dare stuff 44 geckos in their underwear? Or 18 monkeys down their shirt? Or snakes inside their bra? Or 1,000 spiders in their suitcase? Animal smugglers, that’s who. After drugs and weapons, wildlife trafficking is one of the most profitable crimes in the world, worth an estimated $10 billion a year. Wild birds are the hottest commodity on the global black market, with two million to five million trafficked illegally each year. Avian abductees are joined by all manner of animal, from lions, tigers, and monkeys to turtles, snakes, and crocodiles. The rarer the species, the more it’s worth, which means a lot of endangered animals literally have a bounty on their heads. Wildlife smugglers will do all sorts of stupid stunts to sneak their feathered, scaled, and furry cargo across the border. And often they get caught. Here are 10 not-so-clever criminals who were busted.
Apparently animal stocking stuffers are popular among the smuggling set. In 2009 a man was arrested trying to slip into Norway with 14 pythons inside socks taped to his body. But that’s not all; he topped off his ensemble with a few boxes of geckos fastened to his legs.
A suitcase full of stuffed tiger toys wasn’t so entertaining when customs officials scanning checked baggage discovered one of the furry animals inside the luggage was a real live tiger cub. The owner of the bag, a 31-year-old Thai woman, was booked on a flight to Iran. Had her overweight baggage slipped through the x-ray machine without the tiger being noticed, the three-month-old cub, which was already suffering from major dehydration, might not have survived the flight. Luckily this smuggler was stopped in her tracks.
Caught on the Fly
Fellow travelers might have dismissed the feathers protruding from the man’s pant cuffs as some weird fashion trend, but the bird poop on his shoes must have helped give him away. Airport officials at LAX found 14 Asian songbirds, valued at around $1000 each, on the man’s legs.
Spider Man
A British pet shop owner was no Peter Parker when he decided to stash 1,000 live spiders from Brazil inside his checked baggage. You could say airport officials in Rio de Janiero caught him in his own web. Brazil is one of the biggest markets in the world for wildlife trafficking.
Chunky With Monkey
A 29-year-old American posing as a pregnant woman tried to pass a sedated rhesus monkey off as her baby bump when she returned from Thailand on a flight to the United States in 2008. She might have pulled it off, too, had she not bragged to a salesperson in a clothing shop about her monkey business.
Pigeon Legs
In 2009 cops at the Melbourne airport arrested an Australian man after finding bird eggs concealed in his vitamin case and two pigeons tucked inside a pair of tights he was wearing under his pants.
Crime by Corset
A man seen “behaving nervously” at Mexico City’s International airport was caught trying to smuggle 18 endangered titi monkeys that were stuffed inside socks and concealed in a girdle beneath his shirt. After hearing about his exploits, the media made a monkey out of him.
Gone Fishing
The tip-off was the slushy sounds her skirt was making when she walked through the airport. That’s because the woman’s skirt was concealing a specially designed apron filled with 51 tropical fish inside little plastic baggies. She surely made a splash down at the station house.
Under Where?
Some people like to get really close to their work. Case in point: a 58-year-old German reptile collector who stashed 44 geckos and skinks inside a hand-sewn pouch in his underwear. New Zealand airport officials were the ones who got to the bottom of this case. The man was jailed for 14 weeks and fined $3,540. Meanwhile in Stockholm, Sweden a woman seen repeatedly scratching her chest was found trying to wriggle through customs with snakes stashed in her bra. Now that’s twisted.