It was a rainy smuggling Saturday and butterflies were my target. That’s where Winged Obsession by Jessica Speart comes in. I am drawn to the idea of destruction for possession of beauty (and drawn to challenging that mentality). I am fascinated by the convoluted paths that connect totally different worlds.
I’m interested in the motivation and the obsession of collectors of these things, the justifications of intermediaries and dealers, the impact on the ground at source. Obviously I study antiquities smuggling (ticks all the boxes), but I see so many parallels with other ‘weird stuff’ smuggling that I can’t resist those worlds as well.
The rarer, the stranger, the more elite the commodity the better. In such conditions there is little that I enjoy more than lounging in bed all day with warm music playing, sipping coffee and reading a book about some sort of weird smuggling. Of course that all came crashing down on Saturday with torrents of rain. Not a drop for a good week: light, blue sky, sun-burnt Scots. At 170 days of rainfall per year, we beat all the other sodding wet sods in this famously wet country. I live in Glasgow, “ raining champion of the UK“. What she didn't know was that this cagey smuggler was planning to turn the tables and use her as a patsy for continuing his illegal butterfly trade.Winged Obsession: The Pursuit of the World’s Most Notorious Butterfly Smuggler by Jessica Speart Like Newcomer, she was going to betray Kojima. Working under-cover to research this book, Jessica Speart befriended Kojima as well. This obsession, along with his continued mania for butterflies, could finally spell the downfall of the untouchable smuggler.īut the story doesn't end there. Somewhere in the hunt, Kojima had become obsessed with the agent. Just when it seemed Kojima was out of reach, Newcomer was given one last chance to reel him in. But twice the agent's inexperience allowed this criminal, with a nearly supernatural sense of survival and an overwhelming sense of paranoia, to get away. Fish and Wildlife Agent Ed Newcomer became close to the smuggler, posing as a young apprentice eager to learn the smuggling trade. One of the world's most beautiful endangered species, butterflies are as lucrative as gorillas, pandas, and rhinos on the black market.Īnd in this cutthroat $200 million business, no one made more money than-or posed as great an ecological danger as-Yoshi Kojima, the kingpin of butterfly smugglers.ĭetermined to capture Kojima, rookie U.S. The Pursuit of the World's Most Notorious Butterfly Smuggler
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