The birds

An organized crime group spent years smuggling rare exotic birds from South America and Asia to collectors across Europe. Now, one of their former couriers ...

They confirmed that Guth did discuss the purchase of birds with a person known as “Marko Vukovic” in 2018, but said he never went through with the sale because a bird tested positive for herpes. He said the second case, involving birds of paradise, resulted in a conviction against Huzhivichus for racketeering, but by then the erstwhile smuggler was long gone. The legal case against him was split in two — one for the rare palm cockatoos he was bootlegging, and one for the less rare birds of paradise. In the late 1980s he fled to West Germany and worked in a pet shop, but was sentenced to prison for an array of crimes in 1995, 1996, and again in 2009, including several counts of fraud, extortion and kidnapping. The Australian government sent more than 200 native parrots to ACTP in 2017, and accepted a $200,000 donation from the association for one of its conservation programs. On the day of his first courier trip in September 2017, Huzhiavichus arrived at a nondescript office building in London with four birds of paradise. The few times in his career that Huzhiavichus was stopped, he presented a handful of permits. In his journal, he kept a meticulous record of the animals he sold, plus detailed menu plans for what they liked to eat. That evening a man calling himself “Konstantin Nikolaevich” called for an interview, asking about the birds Huzhiavichus had nursed back to health in his childhood, his studies, and his internship at Kyiv zoo. He said he convinced his boss to let him install ventilation and start feeding the birds a more varied diet. Today, he runs a small shelter for birds out of his family’s house in Kropyvnytskyi, a small city in central Ukraine where Soviet Ladas and luxury SUVs share the streets. The carcasses of birds that perished were dumped in the trash.