A Malaysian man who sold a dozen black rhino and white rhino horns to a confidential source was sentenced to a year and a half in a U.S. prison Tuesday, federal prosecutors in New York said. Teo Boon Ching, known as the "Godfather," had pleaded guilty to a count of conspiracy to commit wildlife trafficking, the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan said in a statement.
"As long as you have cash, I can give you the goods in 1-2 days," Ching, 58, told the confidential source during a meeting in Malaysia in 2019, according to prosecutors.
The Malaysia meetings lasted for two days, and during that time, Ching described himself as a "middleman" who buys rhino horns poached by co-conspirators in Africa and ships them to customers around the world, according to prosecutors. Ching also sent the source photos of rhino horns that were for sale.
Later that year, authorities directed the source to buy 12 rhino horns from Ching, which were delivered to the source in a suitcase. A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lab confirmed two of the horns were from a black rhino, which the World Wildlife Fund considers to be critically endangered, and the other 10 horns were from white rhinos, which are not considered to be endangered but are instead "near threatened," according to the group.
Ching was arrested in Thailand in 2022 and eventually extradited to the U.S. According to prosecutors, he conspired to traffic approximately 480 pounds of poached rhino horns worth about $2.1 million.
Poaching endangered species is abhorrent and I have little sympathy for whatever happens to those who drive those species towards extinction for personal gain.
That said, nothing in this article (or another one I read) makes it sound like this guy is a US citizen, ever visited the US, or even shipped illegal products into the US. Shouldn't Thailand or some world court be prosecuting him? This makes us sound like we think the US has jurisdiction over anyone in the world who would break our laws.
The CNN article says that he was selling horns to people in Manhattan. Jurisdiction for international crimes is complicated and I don't know anything about it really, but my guess is that even if he never personally visited the States, he's still considered to have committed crimes there -- if a drug smuggler used a catapult to launch packages of drugs across the border, it would make sense for them to be charged in the US even if they didn't ever step foot on American soil.
Fair enough. That is definitely different in my eyes. If he's knowingly sending illegal goods into the US, he is definitely breaking US law. It is far more reasonable to ask an extradition partner to scoop him up.