Rhino horn trafficker pleads guilty in Brooklyn Federal Court
Michael Slattery, Jr., a 25-year-old Irish national charged with fraudulently purchasing a set of black rhinoceros horns in Texas and then traveling to New York to sell the horns for $50,000, pleaded guilty on Tuesday.
According to the complaint filed on Sept. 14, in 2010 Slattery traveled from England to Texas to acquire black rhinoceros horns. Slattery and others then used a day laborer with a Texas driver’s license as a straw buyer to purchase two horns from an auction house in Austin. The complaint charges that Slattery and his group then traveled to New York, where they presented a fraudulent Endangered Species Bill of Sale, and sold those two and two other horns to an individual for $50,000.
Rhinoceroses are an herbivore species of prehistoric origin and one of the largest remaining mega-fauna on earth. They have no known predators other than humans.