A Border Force officer has told of the part he played capturing a prolific smuggler of endangered bird species dubbed the ‘Pablo Escobar of eggs’.
Jeffrey Lendrum, 63, was intercepted at Heathrow in 2018 with 19 hawk, eagle and vulture eggs strapped to his chest – two of which had already hatched.
The former Rhodesian SAS member had gathered the eggs illegally in South Africa, and a year later he was jailed for three years for wildlife crimes in a London court.
Lee Grigg, a higher officer at Border Force who now specialises in animal and plant smuggling, was on duty in Terminal 2 when Lendrum landed on June 27, 2018.
He told about the role he played in catching the prolific smuggler, describing the moment he took off Lendrum’s clothes to reveal the sling of eggs as ‘the most surreal strip search ever’.
Border Force had been aware Lendrum was about to land in the country, so he was promptly taken aside by officers.
Mr Grigg and his colleagues recovered £100,000 worth of vulture, eagle and sparrowhawk eggs that the joint Zimbabwe-Irish passport holder had illegally gathered in South Africa.
‘I don’t know if you’ve seen the bit from Friends where Joey wears all of Chandler’s clothes, but it was a bit like that,’ the officer recalled to .
‘It was warm and he had all these layers of clothes on so you could tell it didn’t look right.’
Lendrum insisted he brought the eggs into the country to protect the birds because their natural habitat was being destroyed by tree felling, his trial heard.
Mr Grigg continued: ‘He disclosed he had bird eggs and claimed he had rescued them from trees that were being chopped down. He said he was going to hand them over to us when he was in the UK.
‘He had 19 eggs on his body. He was acting as a human incubator, and as they were coming off him at least one was starting to hatch.
‘We then found videos of him illegally collecting eggs, which blew his story out of the water. ‘
The eggs were successfully raised into chicks at a rescue centre in Gloucestershire and Lendrum was jailed in 2019 for three years and one month after pleading guilty to four wildlife offences.
The smuggler was a serial offender who was previously jailed for 30 months in 2010 for trying to board a flight to Dubai with 14 peregrine falcon eggs taped to his stomach.
He was also caught in Brazil with four albino falcon eggs stolen from Patagonia and jailed for four-and-a-half-years in October 2015.
Lendrum fled Brazil when he was released on bail to appeal against his sentence.
He has always vainly insisted that he was motivated by compassion and once told author Joshua Hammer: ‘The whole media has portrayed me as the Pablo Escobar of the falcon-egg trade.’
However, prosecutors have insisted Lendrum was motivated by greed and hoped to make a fortune selling the hatched birds.
Mr Grigg spoke to during an exclusive tour of a storeroom near Heathrow where illegally imported wildlife products are housed.
The items were seized by Border Force under Cites, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.
This 1975 treaty covers 35,000 animals and plants, some of which cannot be traded at all, while the rest require specific permits.