How Traffickers Got Away with the Biggest Rosewood Heist in History

Rosewood can be worth as much as $1.5 million per cubic meter, according to a recent United Nations report. It is one of the precious woods of antiquity, in the same rarified class as ebony, sandalwood, and lignum vitae. Prized for its density, stability, and beauty, it has long been used to make musical instruments, tool handles, and most of all, traditional Chinese furniture; the name for an entire category of design, hongmu, means, simply, “red wood.” During the Cultural Revolution, most existing hongmufurniture was destroyed, but by the mid-2000s, the swelling Chinese middle class had reacquired the taste. With Southeast Asia’s native stocks of slow-growing rosewood depleted, lumber suppliers turned their sights elsewhere — especially to Madagascar, which has more species of rosewood than anywhere else in the world.

The island is home to staggering biodiversity, containing more species of plants than the entire Congo Basin, although it is just one-fifth the size. The vast majority of its plant and animal life are endemic, occurring only there. This biodiversity is an enormous trove of unique genetic material, of evolutionary history and potential. But rare and beautiful species like rosewood are also a concrete source of money in an impoverished country. Since Madagascar’s independence in 1960, its population has ballooned from 5 million to more than 30 million people, roughly four-fifths of whom live in poverty.

In 2009, protesters supported by the Malagasy army overthrew the government. In the chaos that followed, organized crime — what its opponents describe as “the Rosewood Mafia” — finally had the opportunity to take full advantage of the surging demand. Boomtowns sprang up in the island’s far northeast, including in the rainforests of the Atsinanana, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Whole forests of rosewood logs floated down rivers to the sea, where exporters loaded them onto ships bound for Southeast Asia — by one estimate, more than a thousand shipping containers full of rosewood logs left the island that year. What had long been a trickle of precious wood from Madagascar had become a flood.

Horrified by the destruction, a small group of scientists and environmentalists working in Madagascar began a campaign to expose the timber barons and the politicians behind them. “Our approach was to name and shame,” says Lucienne Wilmé, a biogeographer and research associate with the Missouri Botanical Garden in Madagascar. Working with an army of Malagasy informants, the group published reports in scientific journals, decried international shipping companies for their complicity, and eventually succeeded in catching the attention of the international media. In 2013, Madagascar’s transitional government bowed to rising international pressure and agreed to list all Malagasy rosewoods under Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), a 1975 treaty that limits trade in such species. For the group, the listing was a major success. But CITES must rely on member countries for enforcement — a significant weakness.

Soon after, the MV Oriental Pridearrived in Singapore, its hold piled high with rosewood logs.

According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, wildlife trafficking is the world’s fourth largest organized crime, behind drug trafficking, counterfeiting, and human trafficking. Siew Hong Wong, a Singaporean lawyer and private investigator who spent much of his career chasing counterfeiters, says these crimes naturally go together. “It’s transferable,” he says. “It’s the same skill set.”

Wong joined Rakotoson in the case against the trafficker, the Singapore-based company Kong Hoo and its managing director, Wong Wee Keong. The run-up to the trial was marked by a series of baffling events. First, the defendants produced several letters signed by various employees of the Malagasy Ministry for Environment and Forestry authorizing Wong Wee Keong and a Malagasy partner, Zakaria Soilihi, to export 5,000 tons of rosewood. But Wong and Rakotoson discovered that the letters were doctored versions of much older documents authorizing exports of smaller quantities of pine, not rosewood.

Then, Singaporean authorities received an email addressed from Madagascar’s director general of forests, stating that the rosewood exports were authorized and that the importers “should not encounter any problems.” But when an enforcement officer with the United Nations’ CITES Secretariat followed up, the director general wrote back that his account had been hacked, and that the authorization documents were fake. Wong and Rakotoson found that the bill of lading, too, was falsified. It stated that Oriental Pridehad disembarked from the Malagasy port of Toamasina, on its eastern coast, but port authorities had no record of the ship, and satellite imagery suggested that it had departed instead from Madagascar’s northeast, source of most of the island’s prized rosewood.

Then, the Malagasy government stopped cooperating altogether — perhaps, the lawyers suggested, because some of its members also had financial stakes in the rosewood business. Madagascar is consistently ranked among the top fifth of the world’s most corrupt countries by watchdog groups like Transparency International. “The correlation between election cycles and rosewood trafficking intensity seems to be… an important factor to take into account to understand the current state of play in Madagascar,” wrote the Environmental Investigation Agency, a U.K.-based nonprofit, in a recent report. It pointed to the example of Erick Lambert Besoa, whom the agency’s sources said was one of the top timber barons responsible for the unprecedented deforestation following the 2009 coup. In 2021, Madagascar’s president nominated Besoa as a senator, then vice president of the country’s senate.

Without the support of the Malagasy government, the case against the rosewood traffickers turned not on whether or not the rosewood was illegally harvested or trafficked, but on whether or not the traffickers intended Singapore as the logs’ final destination. It appeared that the traffickers intended to use one of Singapore’s port-side warehouses to package the logs, which were loose in the Oriental Pride’s hold, into easier-to-handle shipping containers. Indeed, one of the prosecution’s witnesses testified that he’d booked 30 shipping containers for the logs on a Hong Kong-bound vessel. So long as the logs remained “in transit,” they legally weren’t in Singapore, and therefore weren’t subject to seizure under Singapore’s Endangered Species Act.

In 2015, a judge acquitted the defendants, ruling that the rosewood shipment legally remained in transit, and had not been imported. On appeal, a High Court judge overturned the ruling, sending it back to the lower court. Again, the lower court acquitted the defendants. On a second appeal, a High Court judge overturned the acquittal, finding the defendants guilty of illegally importing rosewood into Singapore. He sentenced Wong Wee Keong to three months in jail and ordered him to pay a fine of 500,000 Singapore dollars. But then, in 2019, a five-judge panel at the Singapore Court of Appeal overturned the conviction and ordered the logs to be released to the traffickers.

The saga of the Malagasy rosewood seized in Singapore is a small part of a much bigger story. While in the popular imagination trafficking in endangered species involves elephant ivory and rhino horns and tiger parts, rosewood is just as fitting a posterchild. A 2020 report from the U.N. estimated that rosewoods comprise more than 40 percent of the value of trafficked species seized between 2014 and 2018, more than elephants, rhinos, and big cats combined. During that same period, so-called forest crimes, which include not only poaching protected trees, but also illegal logging, were worth between $30 billion and $100 billion, according to another U.N. report; as much as a third of the “legal” global timber trade involved illegally harvested wood, the report’s authors wrote.

To conservationists focused on saving rare and endangered plants, it is a familiar problem. “They’re not emblematic big mammals that we can all feel sorry for and hug and love,” says Pete Lowry. “This massive part of the illegal trade is simply not on anybody’s radar screen.” Lowry is a botanist and taxonomist with the Missouri Botanical Garden and was part of the group that helped expose the destruction of Madagascar’s rosewood forests following the 2009 coup.

One of the difficulties in conserving threatened tree species is the distance between the living organism and the lumber it produces. “Rosewood,” for instance, is a description of a product, Lowry says, not of a single species or even a genus of tree. Along with the Malagasy and Southeast Asian rosewoods, there are also rosewoods native to mainland Africa and Central and South America. Some are related to Malagasy rosewoods, which belong to the genus Dalbergia, but others are barely cousins.

Conservation laws and treaties tend to focus on individual species, which can lead to a kind of conservation Whac-A-Mole. In 2018, the CITES Standing Committee recommended a halt to trade in Nigerian “kosso,” a tree known in the lumber trade as “African rosewood” and taxonomically as Pterocarpus erinaceus, after an investigation found that Nigeria was permitting the export of far more of the CITES-listed tree than was likely sustainable. But lumber exporters from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Congo, and Mozambique helped take up the slack with a tree called “mukula,” or Pterocarpus tinctorius, also sold under the name “African rosewood.” In 2019, that species was also listed under CITES.

Even after a species is listed under CITES or national conservation laws, the gap between organism and product remains a problem. Botanists typically identify species based on foliage and flowers, not logs or sawn lumber, criteria that conservationists say have often allowed traffickers to profess ignorance of the protected status of their wares. The challenge of wood identification is compounded by underlying taxonomic uncertainty.

Conservationists pushed Madagascar to take the unusual step of listing all Malagasy members of Dalbergia under CITES, rather than individual species, simply because taxonomists had not yet described all of the species. Over the last several years, Lowry and other scientists embarked on an effort to fill that taxonomic gap, traveling across Madagascar to collect samples, eventually describing dozens of new species. The number of Malagasy rosewood species now stands at more than 80, up from just a couple dozen before the effort.

Tendro Radanielina and Jenny Tahinarizaka Rakotonirina, botanists at the University of Antananarivo in Madagascar, are among a group of researchers now working to create a database that would allow rapid identification of Malagasy rosewoods based on either anatomical, chemical, or genetic traits. “The goal is to help Madagascar to have the tools of control,” Radanielina says.

There remains the puzzle of what to do with existing stocks of rosewood logs and lumber. Stockpiles of rosewood logs are scattered across Madagascar, containing as many as 2.26 million logs, according to the Environmental Investigation Agency. The Malagasy government has declared its possession of about a tenth of these stockpiles; the rest are undeclared or in the hands of the timber barons. In 2021, Madagascar announced that it planned to allow the domestic use of rosewood lumber from declared stockpiles, both in restoration and infrastructure projects, and by artisans, whose handiworks would be sold to international tourists. These tourists would be allowed to return home with as much as 10 kilograms, or roughly 22 pounds, of rosewood handiworks.

Conservationists and anti-corruption organizations protested. Mark Roberts, an environmental lawyer who worked on the 2014 seizure case, says that a Malagasy domestic rosewood market could hurt conservation efforts far beyond Madagascar. “What if the southern African countries all of the sudden decide they’re going to have domestic trade in ivory or rhino horn?” he says. “Or China, which has tiger farms of endangered tigers, decides that they’re going to start a domestic trade in tiger skins? Permitting domestic trade of highly prized rare and endangered species could completely undermine CITES’ conservation efforts.” He suggested that Chinese furniture makers might even set up factories in Madagascar, making hongmufurniture components, which could be exported 10 kilograms at a time and assembled later.

Colmán Ó Criodáin, a botanist and wildlife policy manager at the World Wildlife Fund, agreed. “People might say, ‘Well, there’s an awful lot of poor people in Madagascar. Why can’t it help with that?’” But he says both the history of CITES-sanctioned ivory auctions, which occurred in 1999 and 2009, and of Madagascar’s rosewood trade suggest that any money earned would be concentrated in the hands of the wealthy. WWF’s position, he says, is that “under no circumstances, even domestically, should private individuals, be they government employees or anybody else, be able to profit from the domestic trade in this timber.”

The fate of one particular stockpile — the logs seized in 2014 — remains in question. Singaporean law stipulates that since those logs legally remain “in transit,” once repossessed by the traffickers, they may remain in port only for 14 days. But to leave, they would need to provide Singaporean authorities with a CITES import permit from the receiving country, and CITES export documentation from Madagascar — unlikely, Rakotoson wrote in a memo, “because the wood was illegally smuggled out of Madagascar.” China’s government has announced that it would not accept the logs. The CITES Secretariat, meanwhile, issued a memo instructing its 184 signatory countries to seize the logs, leaving just a handful of countries as potential destinations.

For now at least, the logs are stuck. Roberts, the environmental lawyer, says he heard that someone had recently inspected the logs, still sitting in the port-side warehouse, and that they were starting to attract termites. “On the one hand, it’s kind of, ‘Yay!” he says. “That’s kind of like burning the ivory. But on the other hand, if all of that wood is destroyed, that’s just that much more pressure to cut down the few remaining Malagasy rosewood trees.”