An Irishman used forged documents to sell horns from endangered black rhinos to a New York collector for $50,000 (€59,347), prosecutors said yesterday.
Michael Slattery was arrested on Saturday at New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport where he was waiting to board a flight to London.
A judge ordered that Mr Slattery be held without bail during an appearance yesterday in federal court in Brooklyn.
A criminal complaint alleges that in 2010 Mr Slattery travelled from London to Houston to try to buy two horns at a taxidermy auction house.
Learning that he needed to be a resident of Texas to make the purchase, Mr Slattery recruited someone to do it on his behalf, known as a “straw buyer”, the complaint says.
Mr Slattery and unidentified suspects gave the straw buyer $18,000 in $100 bills to complete the deal, the complaint says.
Later that year, Mr Slattery met a Chinese buyer in Queens and sold four horns using endangered-species bills of sale with fake Fish and Wildlife Service logos on them, the complaint says.
It is unclear where he got the additional two horns, it says.
Three of the five species of rhinoceros in Africa and South Asia have been hunted to the verge of extinction because their horns command exceptionally high prices for use in traditional Asian medicine chiefly in China and Vietnam, where the powdered horn is marketed as an aphrodisiac and even as a cure for cancer.
The horns are made of keratin, a fibrous protein that is the building block for skin and hair. It has no documented medicinal value.