A business that is worth two billion each year. For smuggling in Italy often only risk a fine, and so in our country are found the largest collections of wild species of
CORRADO ZUNINO La Repubblica August 27, 2010
ROME - Faithful Father was able to bring a vervet in the curve of Cosenza. In the midst of the ultras. Red and blue as the team's heart and the white muzzle, the religious nuance that did not care. Father Fedele Bisceglia missionary in the Congo basin withdrawals from the tropical forest monkey, arranged in a toolbox, the French customs jumped the start, the Italian customs upon landing, and on Sunday showed the vervet friends of Cosenza football. His trophy. He took, fast, a complaint for "illegal possession of protected species" by the Forestry Corps.
Father Fedele is an icon of Italian abroad, traveling in exotic lands. Curious, picks up animals, looting habitat. Italy, have found reports of international authorities state and non-governmental organizations, is a crucial hub of trafficking of exotic animals, rare, endangered, three million "dead parts" imported (skins, python, alligator and shark teeth), two thousand seizures of live animals year, 1,536 offenses charged, five arrests. The turnover of the brand "exotic animal" comes to two billion a year and is "growing exponentially," said Massimiliano Rocco, director of "Traffic" of the WWF.
Because Italy is considered a long time, a central country of the "wild market"? And how this culture of predation has been formed? The archive of impromptu Cites in Rome, which stands in the world indicates that the institution by protected species and we s'incardina the State Forestry Corps, reports that depart from Italy the most important serial killer leopards and polar bears, collectors of parrots and turtles protected by the dazzling colors. It is we who have trained a few of the most popular safari Raider: Giorgio Barbero, now 81 years old, born in Cuneo and wine entrepreneur living in Turin, he published a book of 576 pages full of photos to document the eighty safari organized in world, all illegal. In thirty years, showing his videos, has almost never fired, and had only reached the day after the sherpas hired to be photographed with the twisted horns seized from the Gaur Bos, Indian cattle that would be untouchable. Barbero's book, "My paths, and the incredible museum exhibitions that straw man in three decades held on Lake of the plug Pralormo, have become a damning indictment for his conviction (Court of Cassation ) for trafficking in protected species. Ten thousand euro fine and on, until the age of stands, to another predatory raids.
The Washington Convention. Since 1975, the Washington Convention defines the many species of animals "fully protected" and 36mila that can move - dead or alive, whole or in pieces - only with a certificate attached and in units defined. Italy has acceded to the Convention four years later, but turned it into a national law until 1992. The Wild Life trade, the trade in the wild worldwide is worth € 125 billion per year (equivalent to the estimated investment in clean technology over the next seven years, to understand, and not far from the charged drug trafficking). Well, according to the offices Cites Geneva 35 billion others are the result of illegal exports were banned, threatening the survival of entire species.
The two markets "wild life" - emerged and submerged - traveling together and merge with two other primary sectors of trade international transactions and the timber of drugs and parapharmaceuticals (often extracted from plants and rare untouchables). Here again our country is an engine, legal and illegal.
emerged and submerged. Italy is the first buyer in the world of reptile skins (become Gucci handbags, Versace, Prada) and the monopoly of the importation of South American wool (96% arrive in our ports of call). The Italian designers import quotas granted to them with certificates attached to each snake skin. But the latest investigation by the Forest Service has recommended a prosecution raider Senegal ready to ship parcel post in 2500 of illegal skins rock pythons and Nile monitor lizards. Wrapped in Dakar, landed in the clearing of Lonate Pozzolo, the Milanese, were withdrawn by immigrants unaware of the content and then taken by the intermediary, a real wholesaler illegal, large enterprises and the tannery of Prato Bolognese, producers, they, on behalf of major fashion designers. On the trip from Dakar atelier in Via Montenapoleone the value of the "piece" was a hundred times: that seizure has lined up three miles of illegally imported leather. Said wool, merchandise import crucial for national budgets. Even there, alongside the business encoded, travels the forbidden. A major producer of the Northwest, the world leader, had a stock of "shawls Shah" confiscated because it turned out, the wool was to show endangered Tibetan antelope.
What is the relationship between trade and travel of dead animals of protected species still alive? Again, there is a mingling of business legal and illegal business? The pattern is established: inside the big business is undermining a share - a significant - in fact illegal business, mostly in the skins, tusks of ivory, coral.
Macaques as a souvenir. Lateral to this, again, has grown a thriving market of live animals by destructive means of the eighties-nineties, the summer tourists who came back with macaques as a souvenir, it's been calibrated to the looting of collectors and dealers who often prefer to take educated eggs have not hatched. Our land bridge for trade of the species that go up from Africa in Northern Europe, has become the basis for global trade in South American birds of prey. In 2005 with 'Operation Condor ", the largest so far conducted on animals protected by our police, superintendents of Forestry Marco and Ivan Severoni Flowers intercepted a shipment of eggs to the port of Ancona and climbed to an Austrian citizen who had converted a hangar abandoned inland Brindisi on a ranch for the receipt of vultures and eagles Andes. I found two hundred and fifty. hangar Austrian registry changed the history of animals and, with the complicity of German officials, they initiated couples across Europe. Two were purchased around 30 000 €, from the record hang glider Angelo D'Arrigo: loved to fly with the birds overhead.
The interests of the mafia. mafias international in South East Asia and South America in particular, open new routes and provide logistics to trade wild. Even in Italy there were crosses between the passion of unscrupulous collectors and the Camorra. The findings of investigations and some wiretaps dated - the only date given at the beginning of the nineties - tell us that, often, Amazon parrots and reticulated pythons dangerous traveling in the substrate of cases that already conceal drugs. Organized crime controls, for example, the markets for the sale of turtles Campania leaked from the Nile and North Africa. And if Fabrizio De Andrè in "Don Raffaè" Cutolo told boss inspired by a councilor, "God forgive him, which he kept in the trailer mink, literature has clearly established that the rare bird used by the leaders of the underworld to status symbol: moluro pythons, the story of the middle of August, were put to guard loaves of heroin. A two-meter crocodile lived in semi-freedom in the garden of a drug dealer, allocated on a primary school in Naples. Then there are the two tigers Francesco "Sandokan" Schiavone, the historic leader of Casale.
The owner of a pub in Catania, to attract customers, the tables had hosted a dwarf crocodile, exotic iguanas, scorpions, tarantulas, then two geckos and a frog. Two South American chinchillas had them sealed in a glass case shaped like a coffin, which was served on the cheeseburger. The guards zoophilic Ente national security of the macabre zoo animals have stopped eating fast food. A Fourth Oggiaro the head of a ball python is overlooking the water of a bath, and this is news of early summer. In a house of Brunico have been bred for years, illegally more daring, 400 poisonous spiders. It did not help the seizure of the 2003 season at the airport of Malpensa: the Customs had intercepted a shipment of scorpions for collectors, among them was the Androctonus Australis, whose venom is more potent than that of a cobra. The discovery prompted the quick passage of a bill that would prohibit the keeping of dangerous animals, but after seven years on the forums of the major sites are offered aracnofilia ten euro each other's "Cyclosternum fasciatum" big spider in Central America by the stinging hairs, the Poecilotheria Regalis, "Indian ornamental tarantula" and Pterinochilus murinus, "unpredictable, fast, aggressive and with a poison to be reckoned with ". 70% of the ads of animals, networking, covers trade in rare animals and a French website which indicates the hunters are the only species discovered by scientists, and therefore more delicious to make out. The Italian Society of Veterinary exotic animals then estimated that in Italy there are twelve thousand holders of spiders. Who supplies them? And because we lack the controls? Earn Giovanni, head of the captivity of the ENP, noted: "Some collectors and organizers of exhibitions where he could then sell seized spiders were named as members of the ministerial committee that would draw up a list of dangerous animals."
Turtles in a suitcase. Fiumicino airport stopped monkeys froze to death from Nigeria, if the hold is not heated, it goes in the air at 50 degrees below zero. Then 277 hatchlings of the Nile in a suitcase crammed fuchsia, this was hand luggage. Amazon Parrots Finance airport discovers them asleep because they depart and arrive in force, after 12 hours and a couple of stops, awake and noisy. An Italian consular official in Congo, thanks to his uncontrollable case diplomatic channels, has for years imported to Rome raptors, eagles, hawks, kites, mixing and matching carpets and precious stones. When they stopped he protested: "In Brazzaville I bought them for a few dollars." It was also reported for maltreatment. And these days, in three different regions, have been reported "snapping turtles" in freedom. Hurt, and would be protected.
The last investigation of the Forest Service was founded by twenty photographs that have now made the rounds of the Internet: a morgue Italian exotic animals. Baby zebra and antelope stacked up and slaughtered. Pance smashed, big birds' heads off. In the pile there is a macabre chimpanzees. A lot of starchy foods comes from the province of Reggio Emilia, another fertilizer from Casertano. Those carcasses could be "remnants" of a zoo in difficulty, exotic animals sick and then killed. Investigations are ongoing. "To understand the Italian mentality of a predator, yet investigators Forestry," suffice it to say that our safari raider look illegality, the claim. In Alaska you can hunt polar bears in Siberia is prohibited. L 'Interpol has just announced the killing of two polar bears in Siberia were two Italians. "
