Collector bought horns for $50,000
By Tom Hays
Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) — An Irishman linked to a criminal Gypsy clan pleaded guilty Tuesday to charges he used forged documents to sell horns from endangered black rhinos to a New York collector for $50,000.
Michael Slattery wept, rubbed his face and waved his arms before entering the plea in federal court in Manhattan, prompting U.S. District Judge John Gleeson to comment, “You look like a nervous wreck.”
Slattery, 23, told the judge he barely knows how to read but understood the trafficking charges.
“I knew I was doing wrong,” the defendant said.
Asked later by Gleeson how he was doing in jail, Slattery claimed that one inmate had threated to “spin my head off,” and that he’d overheard conversations about how a murder suspect “wanted me to sleep with him.”
Prosecutors have identified Slattery as a member of Ireland’s Gypsy minority, known there as travelers. They cited a letter from Irish authorities linking him to an Irish Gypsy criminal network based in the County Limerick village of Rathkeale that’s suspected in dozens of thefts of rhino horns across Europe.
In Rathkeale, the travelers have purchased “most of the real estate in this town in recent years and shown incredible signs of wealth,” the letter said.
U.S. authorities alleged that Slattery traveled from London to Houston in 2010 to try to buy two horns at a taxidermy auction house. Learning that he needed to be a resident of Texas to make the purchase, he recruited a day laborer to be a straw buyer. He and other unidentified suspects gave the straw buyer $18,000 in $100 bills to complete the deal, a complaint said.
Slattery was arrested in September at New Jersey’s Newark Liberty Airport while boarding a flight to London. He faces a maximum term of about 2 1/2 years at sentencing early next year, followed by deportation.
