Word: tradings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...trade could not continue on such a scale without the collusion of African officials. "So many of Africa's functionaries are corrupt," says K.T. Wang, one of Hong Kong's major ivory traders. "If they get money, they say it's legal ivory. If they don't get money, they say it's poached." Over the years, senior African officials, their spouses and close friends, and wildlife authorities have been implicated in ivory scandals...
Over the decade, traders outmaneuvered attempts to regulate the trade by taking their tusks through nations that had not yet signed the CITES accord. In 1985 CITES agreed to register previously undocumented tusks in countries that promised to comply with the rules in the future. Such arrangements were made with Singapore and Burundi, which together had more than 390 tons of ivory. Traders' ivory, once suspect because it lacked documentation, suddenly quadrupled in value. In countries intent on barring illegal ivory, customs agents have found thousands of tusks in crates marked BEESWAX, BONE MATERIAL, MARBLE and JEWELRY. But most illicit...
Hong Kong has long been the crossroads of the ivory trade. Government figures show 675 tons of ivory stockpiled in scores of factories and about 300 shops. Ten families or syndicates account for three-quarters of the ivory Hong Kong imports each year. One of those is headed by Poon Tat Hing, whose ivory network has extended from Africa to Dubai and Singapore, and into Japan. His shop, Tat Hing Ivory, displays 6-ft.-tall ivory figures that sell for $15,000 and up. When asked where the ivory comes from, salesmen simply say "Africa." The Lai family...
...Wang, 66, a businessman with silver hair and impeccable manners, is the dean of Hong Kong's ivory trade. He has never been to Africa, and the only elephant he has seen was in the Paris zoo. Yet he is a major conduit for ivory entering both Hong Kong and Japan. In February he helped Tokyo's largest trader, Koichiro Kitagawa, purchase nearly five tons of Sudanese ivory for $1 million from another Hong Kong dealer. In 1987 he engineered the purchase of 26 tons of Congo ivory by the Osaka trader Kageo Takaichi. The $3.5 million shipment contained...
...many as 30,000 Japanese draw their living from ivory -- as traders, carvers and merchants. But the import trade is controlled by a few. Two men, Takaichi in Osaka and Kitagawa in Tokyo, have accounted for as much as half the ivory entering Japan in recent years. Kitagawa, 47, is a stern man who presides over an industry in turmoil. He was twelve when he was introduced to what has been his family's business for nearly a century. His showroom, scanned by video cameras and kept moist by humidifiers, features a towering ivory pagoda and cases filled with ornate...