Targeting Irish Rovers

Adam Higginbotham goes on the trail of the Traveller gang behind Europe’s rhino horn theft epidemic.

WHEN the phone rang at about 3am on Apr 18, Nigel Monaghan was asleep on the floor in his office in Dublin, tangled in a sleeping bag. In his job as keeper of the National Museum of Ireland’s natural history section, he was overseeing filming of the latest episode of a children’s TV special, Sleepover Safari. Ten children, their parents, and a film crew were spending the night in the museum, known locally as the Dead Zoo, surrounded by Ireland’s foremost collection of taxidermy.

The call was from the museum’s central security office. Four stuffed rhino heads — ones Monaghan had sent away for safekeeping a year earlier — had been stolen from the museum’s storage facility near the airport. At 10.40pm, three masked men forced their way in, tied up the guard on duty, and found the shelves where the heads were kept.