Former Secret Agents Enter the Battle Against Wildlife Smugglers Backed by Drug Cartels
As profits for poachers have soared, drawing more organized criminal groups into the trade, an "intelligence agency for Earth" is tracking the operation across borders.
Mexican spider monkeys, victims of the illegal wildlife trade, have found a home at Brookfield Zoo Chicago.
Source: Brookfield Zoo ChicagoMark Davis loves to pretend he is a criminal. During a 30-year career working undercover for the FBI as a special agent, Davis posed as a cocaine smuggler, negotiated million-dollar deals with money launderers and showed up at a criminal rendezvous with $200,000 in cash. Davis 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 specializes in gathering 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.”