Want to listen to a terrorist talk shop in your own back yard? If you’re in New York, hop on the 4 train, get off at City Hall and make your way into the federal courthouse at 40 Centre Street.
For much of the next year, downtown Manhattan will be ground zero for America’s latest salvo in its low-grade war against alleged terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden, the Saudi exile presumed to be camped somewhere inside Afghanistan, under the protection of the Taliban.
After a three-year, multimillion-dollar investigation, the federal government opened its case last week against four Bin Laden associates, accusing them of criminal acts in connection with the bombing of two American embassies in East Africa on Aug. 7, 1998. That morning 224 people died and thousands were wounded in almost-simultaneous car bomb attacks in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
On Tuesday, inside Room 318 of the Federal District Courthouse, a Sudanese man with a light beard and a skullcap named Jamel Ahmed Al-Fadl spent the day recalling his former life as an Islamic warrior with Osama Bin Laden. Al-Fadl’s English was poor and he spoke in nervous bursts, but sometimes his words were devastatingly clear. At one point, prosecutors mentioned the U.S. military involvement in Somalia in 1993 and asked Al-Fadl to tell jurors Bin Laden’s take on it. “The snake is America,” he recalled Bin Laden saying. “We have to cut their head and stop them. Right here, in the horn of Africa.’”
The 1998 embassy bombings were the stated reason for President Clinton’s decision to launch cruise missile strikes into Afghanistan and Sudan six weeks later. None of the 70-odd missiles managed to take out Bin Laden, although they did manage to destroy a pharmaceutical plant outside Khartoum, as well as further erode Clinton’s already strained credibility, coming as they did just three days after he told the nation that he had deceived everyone about “that woman.”
More recently, officials suspect Bin Laden was involved in last year’s bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. Last month, his name was mentioned after the U.S. Embassy in Rome closed for two days in response to threats of a terrorist attack. And Wednesday, CIA Director George Tenet visited Capitol Hill and called Bin Laden’s group, Al Qaeda, the No. 1 challenge to America’s security. “Osama Bin Laden and his global network of lieutenants and associates remain the most immediate and serious threat,” Tenet told senators. “His organization is continuing to place emphasis on developing surrogates to carry out attacks in an effort to avoid detection, blame and retaliation.”
Now America is turning to a jury of 12 New Yorkers to apportion at least some of the blame and to deliver judicial retaliation for what is said to have been Al Qaeda’s most deadly day of terrorism yet. The case, appropriately enough, is named U.S. vs. Bin Laden, yet the alleged leader himself, along with 16 others named in the indictment, is not in the dock on trial. This time, at least, the U.S. is trying an eclectic group of mid-level operatives: two alleged bombers, Bin Laden’s personal secretary and another member of Al Qaeda with no direct connection to the bombings.
In that sense, at least from the outset, this embassy bombing trial has the look and feel of the recently completed Lockerbie trial. In the Netherlands, two Libyans stood trial for a terrorist act that court testimony demonstrated could not have been the act of two individuals acting alone. The case ended with one conviction and one acquittal, and it left victims’ families and some observers dissatisfied, questioning the capacity of such trials to truly deliver justice and contribute in any meaningful way to a decrease in terrorism.
In his opening statement last Monday, prosecutor Paul Butler evoked the sights and sounds around the embassies before and immediately after the bombings. But he also placed the attacks in the broadest possible context in order to fulfil the sweeping scope of the indictment. “The evidence will show that these two bombings were the latest strike in an ongoing worldwide terrorist effort against the United States,” he said. “These bombings,” Butler told jurors, “were neither the beginning, nor the end of that plot.”
Yet the two defendants who face the death penalty in this case — the first people to confront that fate in a Manhattan federal courtroom in almost 50 years — are small-time operators accused of participating directly in the embassy bombings. On the surface, the case against both 27-year-old Tanzanian Khalfan Khamis Mohamed and 24-year-old Saudi Mohamed Rashed Dauod al-’Owhali seems fairly solid and unextraordinary. Both men allegedly confessed committing the crimes to American investigators in Kenya. Their attorneys appealed to Judge Sand to throw out those statements, arguing that their clients’ Miranda rights had been violated because they had not been offered the opportunity to contact attorneys before making their confessions. In a ruling last week that is almost certain to form one ground for any appeal, Sand allowed the statements to be admitted into evidence, as well as statements made by a third defendant, arguing that the government deserved leniency since the interrogation took place on foreign soil.
As a result of that ruling, the two defendants seem destined to all but concede their guilt. Al-’Owhali made no opening statement while Jeremy Schneider, counsel for Mohammed, used his opening remarks to acknowledge that the prosecution would prove his client’s connection to the Tanzanian bomb. He dusted off the Nuremberg defense, portraying his client as a functionary, on trial for actions planned by others; he called his client a “pawn” twice. “He’s a nobody, he’s a nothing,” Schneider said.
Meanwhile, the other two defendants — Wadih El-Hage, 40, a naturalized American from Lebanon and Mohammed Saddiq Odeh, a 35-year-old Jordanian — could face life sentences if they are convicted of broader conspiracy charges. In their opening statements, lawyers for El-Hage and Odeh did not distance their clients from Bin Laden, but they did argue that the men were not involved in his criminal activity.
The government’s claim to prove a vast conspiracy seemed a bit grandiose until the first witness, Al-Fadl, took the stand on Tuesday. Dressed in a short-sleeve shirt and jeans, Al-Fadl leaned forward in his chair with his hands fixed to his knees and told the court about his time with Bin Laden.
Al-Fadl said he joined up with Bin Laden in 1988, just as Al Qaeda was forming. He testified about the group and the scope of its operations over the next nine years, giving the jury as well observers a peak into life as a terrorist. It cost $1,500 for Bin Laden to send fighters to support the group’s base in Chechnya, he testified. He recalled needing to buy 50 camels to smuggle Kalishnikov rifles from the Sudan into Egypt. Then there was the time when, he claimed, he acted as a go-between on a deal for some uranium from South Africa. (Al-Fadl told the court he did not know whether the purchase, for $1.5 million, ever occurred.) When travelling on airplanes, Al-Fadl testified, he always carried perfume and tobacco and avoided talking about religion to keep immigration officials from getting suspicious.
But, as jurors learned Wednesday morning, Al-Fadl was also stealing from Bin Laden, siphoning off $110,000 to buy four pieces of land and a car. When he was confronted by associates he denied it, but he eventually acknowledged his deceptions in a one-on-one meeting with Bin Laden. According to Al-Fadl’s testimony, Bin Laden viewed the infraction the way many other bosses might. “I don’t care about the money but I care about you because you start this from the beginning,” Osama Bin Laden allegedly told Al-Fadl. “If you need money, you should come speak to me.”
Instead, he fled, Al-Fadl testified, ending up on a visa line at an American embassy in an undisclosed country, offering to trade information for protection. Five years later, he is living in America in the federal witness protection program with his Sudanese wife and children and a $20,000 loan from the government. In a Thursday interview with an Arab newspaper, a spokesman for Bin Laden denied any connection between Al-Fadl and the Al Qaeda organization.
Al-Fadl’s testimony makes great theater and it may well go a long way toward proving the conspiracy that the government alleges. But neither Bin Laden nor his associates are likely to be impressed by America’s careful attempt to document and judge his alleged actions. At least one of the defendants allegedly expected to die the day of the bombing, and now all four are poised to become martyrs. The families of the victims, who filtered in for every session this week, may have the satisfaction of seeing men convicted for the embassy bombings, but they’ll also learn just how many other people it took to get the job done — and that may not be so comforting.
While President Clinton took a break from his legacy-building efforts at Camp David to sign a historic trade deal with Vietnam, the former spokesman of vanquished presidential accuser Ken Starr sat as a defendant in U.S. District Court in Washington.
Charles Bakaly III, Starr’s former spokesman and senior counsel to the independent counsel, faces a contempt-of-court charge for allegedly submitting a false declaration to a federal judge investigating leaks in Starr’s office. If prosecutors succeed in their case against Bakaly (who once wrote to Salon to complain about investigative reporter Murray Waas’ efforts to obtain sources within his office), he will become the first federal convict to emerge from the Monica Lewinsky case.
In an ironic twist, Bakaly, a longtime Republican Washington insider, faces a prosecution that is relying on tortured logic similar to that which Starr employed against Clinton: He’s not on trial for allegations that he leaked information; he stands accused of lying about being the source of the leak.
“This case is about Mr. Bakaly’s efforts to conceal or cover up his involvement” in a New York Times article about Starr’s office, prosecutor John Griffith said Thursday morning in his opening statement to Chief U.S. District Judge Norma Holloway Johnson, who is acting as both judge and jury in the trial.
Under the headline “Starr Is Weighing Whether to Indict Sitting President,” Don Van Natta Jr. reported on Jan. 31, 1999, during the height of Clinton’s Senate impeachment trial, that Starr had recently concluded that he had the constitutional authority to seek a grand jury indictment of a sitting president, according to “several associates of Mr. Starr.” The explosive Page 1 story noted, however, that Bakaly “declined to discuss the matter.”
Van Natta’s report drew an immediate call for an investigation by the president’s personal lawyer, David Kendall, who accused Starr’s office of having “engaged in illegal and partisan leaking” and asked Johnson to launch an inquiry.
Starr immediately distanced himself from the ill-timed article. “This office has no desire to inject itself into the constitutional process under way in the Senate,” the independent counsel wrote in a statement at the time. But the leak scandal as reported on the cable networks and newspapers eclipsed the anger it wrought inside Starr’s office.
The public first learned of the magnitude of the article’s impact in Thursday’s testimony. Starr’s entire office had had a meeting on Jan. 27, just days before the article’s publication, to discuss various options for indicting the president. Donald Bucklin, an attorney who worked for Starr at the time, told the court he was “outraged” by the article.
Solomon Weisenberg, then a staff attorney for the independent counsel, shared his similar reaction on the stand. “I thought we would be severely damaged by it, pummeled by it,” Weisenberg said. “People would see it as a rather ham-handed effort” by Starr’s office to influence the outcome of the Senate trial.
Bucklin, who had the unenviable task of responding to Judge Johnson’s inquiry, said Bakaly initially told him he was not one of the “associates” named in the article. He helped Bakaly draft a declaration to the court stating that Bakaly had refused to discuss “nonpublic” matters with Van Natta.
The allegations of leaks within Starr’s office had mounted to the point that Starr had no choice but to act — inaction would have created the appearance of complicity in the leaks — so he asked the FBI to investigate. Though much of the investigators’ work remains under seal, it is known that numerous interviews with Bakaly ended with his admission that he may have “inadvertently confirmed” parts of Van Natta’s story to the reporter.
When Bucklin read Bakaly’s FBI statement, he concluded Bakaly had discussed nonpublic matters in the case. He withdrew Bakaly’s original declaration to the court, and told Judge Johnson that Starr’s office could no longer say that it had not assisted Van Natta.
Bakaly resigned soon after the alleged discrepancy was discovered.
In her probe, Judge Johnson concluded that the Times story presented material suitable for a grand jury, and she sought to prosecute both Bakaly and Starr’s office on charges of criminal contempt. But a federal appeals court didn’t buy it, and overturned Johnson’s ruling last September, deciding that Bakaly hadn’t committed a crime by confirming Van Natta’s story. The rebuffed Judge Johnson then evidently changed her tune, and the Justice Department then went after the former spokesman for allegedly lying.
In her opening statement Thursday, defense attorney Michelle Roberts sought to downplay Bakaly’s shifting stories and maintained that her client had done nothing more than his job. “As spokesperson for the office of independent counsel, Mr. Bakaly’s job was to interface with the public in general and the media in particular,” Roberts told the court.
As the court records and the first day’s testimony demonstrate, Bakaly was hardly a fountain of information for Van Natta. By all accounts, the Times reporter received almost all of the juicy details from other sources.
During his time on the stand, Bucklin told the court that Bakaly had speculated about the leakers’ identity. He mentioned Bruce Udolf, a former prosecutor in Starr’s office, and Ronald Rotunda, a law professor at the University of Illinois who consulted for Starr — two people who could rightly be considered “associates of Mr. Starr.”
Long before America ever heard the name Monica Lewinsky, and long before Bakaly went to work for Starr, Clinton’s defenders were complaining about leaks coming out of the independent counsel’s office — which seemed only to increase after the Lewinsky story broke. Indeed, the first effective response by the White House to the Lewinsky affair was the release of a letter from Clinton attorney Kendall to Starr outlining a number of early leaks in the case.
Of course, the White House emphasized those leaks because it couldn’t talk about anything else at that point.
“We could not answer with the facts,” then White House spinmeister Lanny Davis told Steven Brill in Brill’s Pressgate story, the definitive chronicle of leaks from Starr’s office, which appeared in the premiere issue of Brill’s Content. (Disclosure: I was a writer at that magazine at the time and remain a contributing editor.) “So we answered with a fight about the process,” Davis continued.
Indeed, the fight over Starr’s investigation has outlasted the fight over the facts of the Lewinsky case.
Leaving the courthouse, Bakaly had no comment on the day’s events. His trial is expected to conclude Friday.
The Straight Talk Express, which served
href="/politics2000/directory/candidates/john_mccai
n/index.html">Sen. John McCain so well in the early
primary states, wont do him much good anymore. McCain has less than two
weeks to pitch his campaign to voters across the country, in
delegate-rich and geographically expansive states such as California and New
York. If you happen to live in a state with an upcoming primary, theres a
slim chance that youll see McCains cruiser coming down your street. But
theres a good chance youll see a McCain advertisement like “Courage” on
your television set.
“Courage” is one of those gauzy ads that presents McCain in the soft,
sentimental light that has helped his insurgent candidacy flourish. But when
I first saw “Courage,” at a Virginia post-production house a couple of weeks
ago, it was lifeless. The images and the words were there, but the emotion
was missing. That’s because Todd Hahn, a man most voters have never heard of,
hadn’t gotten his hands on “Courage” yet.
Hahn, who was watching the spot for the first time
that day, too, is a Juilliard-trained composer who
is considered a genius for his ability to inject
emotion into political advertising. Recently, he’s
been working to make McCain’s advertisements look
and feel like 30-second Hollywood epics. “I know
when Todd has hit a home run,” says John Marcus,
who has produced some of McCain’s ads, “because I
walk out with a tear in my eye.”
Music has been a staple of television political
advertisements for a long time, but until recently
most of it has been, as Hahn calls it, “needle
drop” stuff, canned ditties imported from a music
library. But with the rise of digital sampling, a
professional composer can produce an original score
with a computer and a keyboard that can fit
comfortably inside campaign budget
constraints.
Hahn can deliver a score in 30 minutes. That speed
and his creativity have made him one of
the hottest political composers in the business. He
isn’t hired for his political acumen, however — he
flunked his government course in high school, and
he hasn’t made much of an effort to understand
politics since then.
Hahn is 36, has a trim red goatee that matches his
red face and bright blue eyes. He was born in
Akron, Ohio, and is one of those hopelessly sincere
Midwesterners who drifts across the Appalachians and
ends up on the East Coast. Most imports start
talking like city folks soon enough, but 10 years
after arriving in Washington, Hahn still makes
exclamations like “gosh” and “dawgonnit” without a
hint of irony. He was calling me “buddy” before he
ever set eyes on me.
When I caught up with him, Hahn was watching
“Courage” in a cramped temporary studio while his
main space is fitted for a grand piano. As a
narrator recites the highlights of McCain’s
biography, the viewer sees grainy black-and-white
images of McCain as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
That footage dissolves into video of a vigorous
handshake with Ronald Reagan in front of the White
House. Then we see candidate McCain talking with
real folks at his town hall meetings this year.
Hahn is staring up at the monitor intently, hands
resting on the keyboard. Twice through the ad and
he’s done. He won’t listen to the scripted ad
closely again until he’s finished with a rough cut
of his score.
Hahn begins by laying down a pad of strings from
the synthesizer — it’s an electronic hodgepodge of
violins, violas and cellos — that he uses to
create the emotional glue of his piece. “Courage”
will be scored in the key of D flat. D flat is a strong, powerful chord
that Hahn used a lot when he did work for Bob Dole
in 1996. As for the tempo, Hahn wants it as slow as
possible. The main goal in scoring a short
advertisement, says Hahn, is to make it feel longer
than it is.
Hahn says he has met the candidate only once, but
that as a composer he is drawn to the latent drama
of McCain’s story. “For a guy like McCain,”
he says, “I can’t help but write something that has
a heroic theme.”
Although his last two presidential subjects have
been Republicans, Hahn
works for both sides of the political aisle. In
1992, for instance,
he scored ads for Bill Clinton’s campaign. In the
heat of the fall
election season, Hahn will turn out 12 or 13
original scores every day,
many for congressional and gubernatorial
candidates. Sometimes, he ends
up scoring ads for two candidates running against
each other. “I have on
a shelf here literally hundreds and hundreds of DAT
tapes of his 30-second commercials,” says Mark
Puttnam, a Democratic consultant. “He
must have written more melodies than the Beatles
and Mozart combined.”
French horn, medium bore, is the next addition to
the “Courage” score.
Hahn says it adds a “‘Right Stuff’-ish kind of feel.”
Before the end of
the piece, Hahn will add another French horn and
the tinny fluegelhorn.
Of the fluegelhorn, he says, “It’s like the ghost
of fallen comrades.” It’s an
auditory reminder, Hahn says, of McCain’s military
heritage.
On his next couple of passes, Hahn adds a piano
(“fills in the weight”)
and a single cello (“more bottom weight”). Hahn
says he tends to score a
fuller, more orchestral sound for Republicans. The
bigger sound seems to
capture the emotional core of Republican campaign
themes such as patriotism
and love of country. When he’s working for
Democrats, he tends to create
a more humble, grass-roots sound. Hahn is more
likely to feature a
lonely guitar or a plain piano in a Democratic ad.
“I’ll stay away from
a big ensemble of horns. Maybe one French
horn.”
After about 20 minutes, the basic score is
finished. Now, Hahn
places the icing on the cake, sprinkling his
creation with a few final
touches. The POW footage at the beginning gets a
slow, reverberating
snare drum. “You hear it and you think military
right off the bat,” he
says. Then he makes a pass through with a cymbal,
placing a lusty crash
directly on McCain’s handshake with Ronald Reagan.
“Gipper always gets a
crash.”
By the end, Hahn has transformed a stale 30-second
video rehash of
McCain’s biography into a small-scale “Saving
Private Ryan.” He declares
it a “pretty spot.” Greg Stevens, McCain’s chief
media consultant,
passes through a few minutes later and signs off
without any changes.
Hahn once viewed the political work as just a way
to pay the bills, but
now he’s grown to love his role in American
democracy. “I try to write
the music to follow my own hopes for America,” says
Hahn, “and I hope
the American public will pick up on that.”
When environmental activist Gary Appelson logged onto eBay and typed in the words “tortoise shell” at the search prompt earlier this month, he was shocked by what he found. More than 50 auctions were listed — featuring sea turtle shell hair ornaments, glasses, cases and even a guitar pick — and most of them were illegal.
After making the discovery, Appelson — who works for the Caribbean Conservation Corp. in Gainesville, Fla., — contacted eBay and Bob Snow, a special agent with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife office near San Francisco.
“Quite frankly, we weren’t aware of the volume of turtle products,” says Snow, who is one of the two agents responsible for investigating wildlife smuggling in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the past year, Snow has spent an increasing amount of his time at work surfing eBay, identifying or investigating roughly 300 auctions involving items prohibited by the Endangered Species Act.
Small as that figure may seem, Snow sees evidence that the problem is growing: a leopard skin here, a black rhino foot there.
Perhaps the most unseemly item that has surfaced was posted on April 12 with the subject line: “frozen baby white tiger.” The description posted by the seller reported that the tiger in question was a stillborn offspring from the brood of Las Vegas entertainers Siegfried and Roy, who incorporate endangered white tigers of India into their nightly act at the Mirage. (The tiger actually came from a Las Vegas breeder with no connection to the famous illusionists, according to federal authorities.) The tiger sold for $750 to a buyer in Little Rock, Ark., before an agent from U.S. Fish and Wildlife intervened.
EBay has already banned all trade in wildlife on its site, and it is anxious to stop these illicit auctions — many of which are prohibited under the 1973 Endangered Species Act, which forbids the sale of listed species across state lines. But those efforts may be complicated by the company’s desire to remain a laissez-faire virtual flea market.
At any given time, eBay hosts approximately three million auctions, with roughly 400,000 new items and $8 million in trades executed every day. EBay makes no effort to screen those new auctions in advance. With 7.7 million registered users, the eBay community has a population larger than New York.
The site benefits from its hands-off approach in two ways. First, because the auctioneer doesn’t vouch for any of the items on the site and doesn’t knowingly participate in any sale, it’s hard to hold eBay responsible for any criminal traffic that might make its way onto the site. Second, this strategy allows eBay to sell far more items than it could if each sale was authenticated and scrutinized. And why would a company like eBay want to apply the brakes to a gravy train that delivers roughly $500,000 in commissions every day?
That doesn’t mean eBay isn’t concerned about wildlife trafficking, says Rob Chestnut, a former federal prosecutor hired by eBay to crack down on illegal auctions and reduce fraud on the site. “It’s bad for business,” he says, arguing that the publicity damage to the publicly traded company far outweighs the money eBay receives in commissions on auctions involving illegal booty. (The total estimated bidding value of the Jan. 6 turtle cache, for example, was only $4,000.)
And this isn’t the first brush the San Jose, Calif., company has had with bad publicity. EBay received a lot of press last September when it stopped an auction involving a human kidney that was set to be sold for $5.7 million. But the recent discovery of the sea turtle and tiger sales underscores a continuing problem for the Internet’s premiere bazaar: The site has become a popular refuge for illegal wildlife transactions.
As a result, eBay has made a number of efforts to decrease traffic in criminal goods on its site. It has prohibited sales of everything from firearms to fireworks to postage meters. EBay’s efforts to enforce its own laws range from the democratic (through user education and community policing) to the Orwellian (sporadic site monitoring and cozy relations with law enforcement officials).
But these earnest efforts, especially the site monitoring, may be tempered by the knowledge that the more eBay does to clean up illegal traffic, the higher the likelihood it will be held liable for auctions gone bad in the future.
If an illegal good were sold through eBay and it ended up harming someone, a plaintiff’s lawyer could point out that eBay had procedures in place to cut down on illegal traffic that did not adequately protect the client, according to Lee Levine, a Washington attorney and an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center.
The good news for eBay is that many of the violations of the Endangered Species Act are the product of ignorance, not criminal intent, according to investigator Snow. Indeed, many aren’t aware that selling that old grizzly bear rug in the attic, or leopard skin coat in the closet, is a violation of federal law. But if the government can prove that there was intent to commit a crime and the seller gets convicted, he can face up to one year in prison and $100,000 in criminal fines. That’s why Snow praises eBay’s efforts to educate its users with a section on the site dedicated to describing prohibited items.
Only a fraction of the traffic in wildlife involves individuals who know exactly what they are doing, says Snow, and therein lies the problem. “For persons who wanted to sell illegal wildlife,” he says, “it provides them an avenue to do it.”
Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between the ignorant and the criminal. Take Michael Moore, the man who was caught selling the frozen white tiger — a gift, he says, from a breeder. (He was also busted for selling a leopard skin.) Moore, a licensed taxidermist, admits that he should have known the applicable laws but pleads ignorance anyway. At the time, he says, he thought there was some exception for a taxidermist selling excess inventory. “I didn’t think it was a problem,” he says.
Neil Mendelsohn, the agent who caught Moore after stumbling upon the auctions in eBay’s taxidermy section, won’t comment on Moore’s protestations of ignorance, but he did fine Moore $1,500 for the two auctions and confiscated the items. He points out that auctioning an item like the frozen baby tiger creates a market for endangered species. “Just about everybody will tell you they didn’t know it was illegal,” says Mendelsohn. “There is a burden on the seller to research the law.” (A judge apparently didn’t agree. He reduced Moore’s fine to a paltry $50.)
When Turtlegate broke, Snow tossed a tortoise shell in his car and drove down to eBay’s headquarters in San Jose. Snow says the government doesn’t have the resources to monitor eBay and the other Internet auction sites adequately, so he focuses instead on educating the auctioneer. He conducted the hands-on demonstration so that Chestnut could teach himself and the staff how to identify illegal turtle products. Not an easy task. The law is complex and the examination occurs via a computer screen.
Chestnut himself couldn’t even find the turtle auctions on eBay when he was first alerted. The problem? He was typing “sea turtle” instead of “tortoise shell.” And though an extended description of prohibited sea turtles items appeared on the site this week, Chestnut has declared his limits. “We can’t have a staff of sea turtle experts,” he says.
Because eBay’s methods are self-consciously reactive, the problem will endure. A spot check Thursday morning revealed no frozen baby white tigers available at auction, but there was one leopard skin, which the seller declared was real. The auction on that item (under the evasive subject line “leopard skin”) began four days ago.
Sellers, intentionally or not, have a habit of staying one step ahead of the investigators. And just because one auction is shut down doesn’t mean others won’t begin. Indeed, even as eBay started shutting down sea turtle auctions, new ones started popping up, according to Appelson, who says eBay should start screening its auctions.
So what will eBay do if it is lucky enough to see its phenomenal growth continue? Chestnut puts his faith in the community. He says increased site traffic will make it harder for people to conduct illegal business on eBay. “The more we grow,” he says, “The more people are watching.”
