犯罪现场：美国的动物法医实验室

犯罪现场：美国的动物法医实验室

At about 12:45 A.M. on April 10, 2013, a man named Song Shen Zhen entered the United States from Mexico at the border crossing in downtown Calexico, Calif. Zhen, a 73-year-old resident of Calexico, told inspectors that he had nothing to declare, but when a customs officer looked in Zhen’s car, he noticed an unusual bulge on the vehicle’s rear floor. The officer removed the floor mats and discovered two plastic grocery bags stuffed with more than two dozen pieces of what appeared to be dehydrated fish. Zhen was permitted to leave the port of entry, but Homeland Security agents kept him under surveillance, tailing him to his house, which they eventually obtained a warrant to search. Inside, on floors covered with cardboard, they found hundreds of pieces of fish like the ones Zhen had carried across the border, lined up in neat rows to dry, with electric fans arranged to blow air across them. According to the criminal complaint filed against Zhen in United States District Court, Southern District of California, the residence “appeared to be set up as a . . . factory,” a smuggling drop-house dedicated to the drying and packaging of valuable contraband: the swim bladders of a fish called the totoaba.

2013年4月10日，大约凌晨12:45，一个名叫郑松深(音译)的人穿过加州卡莱克西科市中心的边境，从墨西哥进入美国。郑73岁，是卡莱克西科的居民，他告诉检查员自己没有需要申报的物品，但一个海关官员向他的车中看去，注意到后座地板上有一个异常的突起。这位官员拿掉后座地毯，发现了两个塑料食品袋，里面塞满脱水鱼干之类的东西，大约有20多个。郑被允许离开口岸，但国土安全部的特工对他进行了密切监视，尾随他到家，最后终于得到搜查许可证。他家地上堆满纸板箱，特工们找到了几百条类似郑携过边境的鱼，排列得整整齐齐，等待脱水，还有电扇用来通风。根据美国联邦地区法院对郑提起的刑事起诉书，他“显然是以开办工厂为业”，它是一个走私据点，专门用来风干和包装一种贵重的走私物品：石首鱼的鱼鳔。

The totoaba macdonaldi is a marine fish found only in the Gulf of California in Mexico. It can grow to lengths of more than six feet and weigh as much as 220 pounds. It’s the largest species within the family Sciaenidae, commonly called “drums” or “croakers” because of the vibrations produced by muscles surrounding their swim bladders, gas-filled sacs that regulate the fishes’ buoyancy.

加利福尼亚湾石首鱼(totoaba macdonaldi)是一种海鱼，只出产于墨西哥的加利福尼亚湾。它可以生长到六英尺以上，220磅重。是石首鱼科中最大的一种，因为它的鱼鳔(鱼类的体内用来调节它们在水中升降的气囊)周围的肌肉会震动，所以经常被人叫做“鼓鱼”或者“哇鱼”。

Swim bladders are also a highly prized delicacy. In China, dried swim bladders are known as fish maw, the main ingredient in soups and stews reputed to aid fertility, improve circulation and eradicate skin conditions. Commercial totoaba fishing in the Gulf of California peaked in the mid-1940s, after the arrival of Chinese immigrant field laborers in the border city of Mexicali opened a boom market for fish maw. Often, fishermen would slice open the totoaba, remove the swim bladders, and leave the carcasses in heaping piles to rot on the seashore. Overfishing contributed to a dramatic decline in the totoaba population, and in 1976, the fish was added to the list of most protected species covered by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), an agreement signed by 180 nations, including the United States and Mexico.

鱼鳔也是一种非常珍稀的佳肴。在中国，干鱼鳔是若干汤类和炖菜的主料，被认为能促进生殖能力，改善循环系统，消除皮肤问题。20世纪40年代，随着中国移民工人从边境城市莫西利卡到来，市场上对鱼鳔的需要顿时激增，加利福尼亚湾的石首鱼商业捕捞也到达了顶峰。通常渔民会切开石首鱼，取下鱼鳔，把尸体弃在海滩上等待腐烂。过度捕鱼导致石首鱼数量急剧下降，到1976年，这种鱼被濒危野生动植物种国际贸易公约(CITES)列为最受保护的物种之一，该公约有180个国家签署，美国和墨西哥也在其列。

But a black market in totoaba swim bladders has flourished. Today, the trade is largely transnational: Poachers catch the fish in Mexico and smuggle the bladders into the United States, where they can be ferried on direct flights to the Far East. In China, a single totoaba swim bladder can fetch as much as $10,000. The 240 bladders seized from the Calexico house, if sold abroad, “could conservatively be worth $3.6 million,” according to agents. Zhen’s intention, they say, was to send the valuable haul into China and Hong Kong.

但石首鱼鱼鳔的黑市仍然繁荣昌盛。如今，这在很大程度上是一个跨国贸易：偷猎者在墨西哥捕鱼，将其运到美国，之后通过直航运到远东。在中国，一个石首鱼鳔可以卖到一万美元。在卡莱克西科缴获的240个鱼鳔如果卖到海外，“保守估计，价值360万美元，”探员说。他们说，郑的目的正是将这些珍贵的物品运往中国和香港。

Instead, the bladders were placed in ice-packed coolers and overnighted 900 miles north to the loading dock of a building just east of downtown Ashland, Ore. From the outside, the place doesn’t look like much. It’s a low-slung glass and concrete pile, set back from the road behind some drab landscaping. It could be mistaken for a small office park, or an administrative building at the neighboring Southern Oregon University. In fact, it’s home to one of the most unique law enforcement institutions in the United States, or anywhere else: the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Forensics Laboratory, the world’s only full-service science lab devoted to crimes against wildlife.

如今，这些鱼鳔被放在冰柜里，连夜向北走了900英里，来到俄勒冈州阿什兰市中心以东的一座建筑。从外面看上去，这个地方并不起眼，是一栋低矮的玻璃水泥建筑，位于道路旁边若干土褐色的自然景观之后。它离南俄勒冈大学不远，可能会被误认为一处小型办公园区，或是一栋办公楼。事实上，它是美国乃至全世界独一无二的一处执法机构——美国鱼类与野生动物法医服务实验室，这是世界上唯一一处专门全职处理野生动物相关犯罪行为的科学实验室。

The lab has been described as “Scotland Yard for animals” and “ ‘CSI’ meets ‘Doctor Dolittle.’ ” A more accurate comparison might be to the midcentury Bell Labs or to the Sandia National Laboratories. It is a hotbed of research, discovery and innovation. It’s a center of cutting-edge science that does double duty as a makeshift natural history museum. It’s also a crime lab — the place to turn to when you’ve collared a perp whose victims are Mexican fish. “We’re proud of what we’ve got going here,” said Ken Goddard, the lab’s director. “It’s a pretty neat little operation.”

这个实验室被称为“动物苏格兰场”或“CSI外加怪医杜立德(Doctor Dolittle)。”其实更准确的是应当将它与上世纪中叶的贝尔实验室或桑迪亚国家实验室相提并论。它是研究、发现与创新的温床。是前沿科学中心，也充当临时的自然历史博物馆。它还是一个法医实验室——如果你逮捕了一个罪犯，他的犯罪对象是墨西哥的鱼类，那么你就要向这里求助。“我们为这里做的事情感到骄傲，”实验室主管肯·戈达德(Ken Goddard)说，“这是个很不错的小机构。”

The building sprawls out across 40,000 square feet of office space and laboratories, which are divided into five units: chemistry, criminalistics, genetics, morphology and pathology. The lab boasts 29 full-time em-ployees, 19 of them scientists, and lots of state-of-the-art machines. There are electron microscopes and mass spectrometers. There is a vacuum metal deposition chamber: a barrel-shaped contraption that reveals negative-image fingerprints. The criminalistics unit has a test-fire tank, an 8-foot-long container filled with water, into which bullets are fired and retrieved for ballistics research. Behind the tank are a series of three free-standing walls — made of Kevlar, brick and stainless steel — that are designed to stop an errant gunshot. “You’ve gotta be paranoid,” said Goddard. “Every crime lab I’ve been to, their ballistics test-fire room has at least one bullet hole in the wall.”

这栋建筑占地四万平方英尺，包括办公与实验区域，实验区分为五部分：化学、犯罪学、基因学、动植物形态学与病理学，拥有29名全职雇员，其中19位是科学家，这里还拥有很多代表目前最先进水平的仪器，包括电子显微镜和大型分光仪。这里有一个真空金属镀膜室：一个圆筒形的装置上显示出指纹的负像。犯罪学实验区内有一个试射槽，是一个八英尺长的容器，里面装着水，研究者向里面射击子弹，以便进行弹道学研究。在水槽后面有三堵独立的墙，分别用凯夫拉纤维、砖和不锈钢制成，用来阻止错射的流弹。“你可能会有点妄想狂，”戈达德说，“我去过的所有法医实验室，他们的弹道测试屋的墙壁上都至少有一个弹孔。”

It was an afternoon in late May. Goddard led a visitor past a row of genetics labs where more than 60,000 DNA samples are stored. He stopped in a narrow corridor, opening the door to a walk-in freezer where containers sat on rows of storage shelving. The signs on the boxes said: “Caution: Venomous snakes!” “Herps ready for tanning,” “Small critters ready for bugs.” Across the hall from the freezer, in a sealed room visible through a picture window, insects could be seen swarming over heaps of flesh and bone contained in plexiglass chambers. It was the domain of the lab’s most prodigious workers: a colony of dermestids, flesh-eating beetles that are deployed to “skeletonize” bird and mammal carcasses, so the bones can be examined as evidence or added to the lab’s standards collection. “They’re Mother Nature’s cleanup crew,” Goddard said.

那是五月底的一个下午。戈达德带着参观者走过一排基因学实验室，里面存储着六万多个DNA样本。他站在一个狭窄的过道前面，打开一个冷冻间的门，里面成排的货架上放着冰柜。冰柜上的标签写着“当心：毒蛇!”“待制革的爬虫”、“等着被虫吃的小动物”。走过冷冻间大厅，可以通过落地玻璃窗看到一个被密封的屋子内部，里面用树脂玻璃柜盛放着尸体，成群结队的昆虫在上面爬。这里属于实验室最奇异的员工：一群皮蠹虫，它们是专吃尸体的甲虫，用来给鸟类和哺乳类动物的尸体“做骨骼标本”，这样骨骼就可以用来当做证据，或者成为实验室的收藏品。“它们是大自然母亲的清洁工，”戈达德说。

Goddard, 68, began his career in Southern California, working as a crime-scene investigator. In the late 1970s, Fish and Wildlife Service agents realized they needed a laboratory to analyze their evidence. (“F.B.I. wouldn’t do it,” Goddard recalled. “They said, ‘Be serious. We’re gonna work a deer case?’ ”) Goddard was hired to get the operation off the ground. After years of bureaucratic haggling, the lab opened in July 1989.

戈达德今年68岁，他的事业生涯从南加州开始，最早是担任犯罪现场调查员。70年代末，鱼类和野生动物服务组织的工作人员发现他们需要一个实验室来分析证据(“联邦调查局不愿管，”戈达德回忆。“他们说，‘严肃点，让我们办野鹿的案子?’”)戈达德被雇来，从零开始地开展这项工作。经过多年官僚主义的来回扯皮，实验室于1989年7月开张了。

Ashland is an unlikely spot for a federal crime lab. It’s a small city tucked in amid the rolling foothills and orchards of southern Oregon wine country, about 15 miles north of the California border. Ashland is known for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and for the whiff of patchouli that hangs over its picturesque streets. On the main drag, there are vegan-friendly eateries and stores like Soundpeace, which sells crystals, tarot cards and other “spirited gifts.” The town is home to some 20,000 residents and, it seems reasonable to surmise, exactly twice that many Birkenstock sandals. “Ashland’s very hippie, very liberal, so we’re a bit of an oddity,” says Ed Espinoza, a chemist and the F.W.S. Forensics Lab’s deputy director. “We’re law enforcement, straight down the line. But we’re law enforcement for a good cause, as the community here would see it. The bad guys that we’re chasing are damaging the environment.”

阿什兰并不像是个开设联邦犯罪实验室的好地方。它是个小城市，隐藏在绵延的山麓以及南俄勒冈造酒之乡的果园中，位于加利福尼亚边界以北15英里。阿什兰以俄勒冈莎士比亚节而闻名，还有风景如画的街头飘荡的广藿香气。主要干道有素食餐馆和“Soundpeace”这样的商店，贩卖水晶、塔罗牌和其他 “灵性物品”。这里住着两万居民，似乎有理由推测他们都穿勃肯鞋。“阿什兰很嬉皮，很自由，所以我们都有点像怪人，”化学家兼鱼类与野生动物法医服务实验室的副主任艾德·依斯宾诺扎(Ed Espinoza)说。“我们完全是执法机构，但我们也是从事正义事业的执法机构，社区能够看到这一点。我们抓的坏人在破坏环境。”

Wildlife crime has grown to a $19 billion dollar annual global trade, according to a report released last year by the International Fund for Animal Welfare, a conservation nonprofit. The black market in wildlife parts and products is the fourth-largest illegal industry worldwide, behind narcotics, counterfeiting and human trafficking, and it may well outstrip other illicit enterprises in terms of the variety of crimes and the complexities they pose for law enforcement. The wildlife trade encompasses culinary delicacies and Asian medicines, pets and hunting trophies, clothing and jewelry. It takes in commodities such as elephant ivory, rhinoceros horn, bushmeat, the shells of giant tortoises, the pelts of big-game cats. The environmental and social costs of the trade are grave. Wildlife crime is contributing to the erosion of natural resources and the spread of infectious diseases; it is providing robust new revenue streams for criminal syndicates and even terrorists. In a July 2013 executive order enhancing United States government coordination to combat wildlife crime, President Obama deemed the surge in poaching and trafficking an “international crisis” that is “fueling instability and undermining security.”

根据环保非营利组织国际动物福利基金会去年的报道，涉及野生动植物犯罪的年度全球贸易额已经增长到190亿美元。野生动植物及制品的黑市贸易是全世界第四大非法工业，位居毒品、造假和贩卖人口之后。对于执法机构来说，野生动植物犯罪形式的多样化和复杂化甚至有可能超过其他不法行为。野生动植物贸易涉及美食、亚洲医药、宠物、狩猎、服饰和珠宝业，包括象牙、犀牛角、丛林肉、大型龟壳、大型猫科动物的皮毛等物品。这类贸易的环境与社会成本非常巨大。野生动植物犯罪损害自然资源，会导致传染疾病的传播;它还为大型犯罪团伙甚至恐怖主义者提供稳定的收入来源。2013年7月，在一则旨在提高美国政府应对野生动植物犯罪中的协调能力的行政命令中，奥巴马总统指出，野生动植物偷猎与贩运的增长是“国际危机”，“导致不稳定，破坏安全。”

The Ashland lab occupies a front line in this global struggle. Over the years, its researchers have done groundbreaking work, advancing science while arming law enforcement with crucial crime-fighting tools. Scientists at the lab discovered ways of extracting DNA from the leather in a handbag; they’ve successfully lifted fingerprints from objects that have been submerged in saltwater. In the 1990s, the lab pioneered a method of obtaining genetic information from a single fish egg, an innovation that helped foil caviar smugglers. It developed new techniques in ivory morphology to combat traffickers of elephant tusks. The impact of this work has reverberated far from Ashland. Bureaucratically, the lab is an oddity. It is a United States federal government institution; it’s also the official crime lab for the 180 nations that are parties to the CITES agreement. Effectively, it is the world’s wildlife forensics lab.

阿什兰的实验室便位于这场全球斗争的前沿。多年来，这里的研究者们从事开创性的工作，推进科技发展，令执法机构有了与犯罪斗争的关键武器。这里的科学家们发现了从手袋的皮料中提取DNA的方法;还成功地从被浸泡在盐水中的物品上提取指纹。90年代，实验室开创了一种从一粒鱼籽中提取基因信息的方法，这是用来打击鱼子酱走私者的。它还发明了全新的象牙形态学技术，以此打击象牙贩运者。这项工作的成果在阿什兰以外的地方获得了强烈反响。在官僚体系中，这家实验室是个异数。它是一家美国联邦政府机构，也是180个签署了CITES协议的国家的官方犯罪实验室。事实上，它是一家世界性的野生动植物法医学实验室。

The scope of the lab’s reach is on view in the place where the casework begins: the evidence control area. Each day, the mail is unpacked by the lab’s evidence handlers, and they have seen just about everything: poisoned bald eagles; a panther riddled with bullet wounds; 78 elephant tusks, poached in Africa and seized in Singapore; a rotting python corpse, coiled like a firehose and folded into a cooler. Two shipments in the spring of 2010 brought more than 200 pelicans: victims of the BP oil spill. The lab treated all the pelicans as separate homicide cases, extracting fluid from each bird’s lungs, which was matched by United States Coast Guard investigators to the oil that gushed from a well drilled by BP’s ill-fated Deepwater Horizon rig.

实验室的业务范围是在案件起始的地方——证据控制领域。每一天，实验室的证据处理者都会拆开邮包，他们什么都见识过：被毒死的秃鹫、满身弹孔的豹子、在非洲被偷猎并于新加坡被缴获的78根象牙、腐烂的蟒蛇尸体像水龙一样盘卷着，被塞在冷藏箱里。2010年春天，有人用两个海运箱子送来了200多只鹈鹕尸体，它们死于英国石油公司漏油事件。实验室把每只鹈鹕都列为一项单独的杀害案，从每只鸟儿的肺中提取液体，配合美国海岸警卫队对于英国石油公司倒霉的深海垂直钻井漏油事故调查。

On a recent morning, a cooler arrived bearing the frozen remains of a Mexican gray wolf. The badly decomposed carcass was thawed out and then placed on the slab in the pathology unit, where a necropsy was conducted by Rebecca Kagan, a veterinary pathologist. “It’s been maggot-scavenged, there’s not much left in there,” Kagan said. “But here’s a hole, a bloody hole. And here’s another nice little wound path going all the way through.” X-rays showed trace metal in the wolf’s chest — bullet fragments, in all likelihood — which Kagan dug out to pass along to the criminalistics unit for analysis.

最近的一个早晨，实验室收到一个冷藏箱，里面装着一具冷冻的墨西哥灰狼尸体。他们将这具严重腐烂的尸体化冻，然后放在病理学实验室的搁板上，资深病理学家丽贝卡·卡根(Rebecca Kagan)主持了验尸。“它被蛆虫侵蚀过，已经不剩什么东西了，”卡根说。“但是这里有一个洞，一个血洞。这儿还有一个小伤痕，是完全一致的。”X光检查出这头狼胸口中的金属痕迹——十有八九是弹片——卡根把它取出来，送到犯罪学实验室进行解析。

The wolf case was straightforward. But wildlife crime brings novel challenges to the work of forensics. The task of forensic scientists is to examine evidence in an effort to connect victim, crime scene and suspect. A traditional forensic investigation begins with a classic question: Whodunit? At the Ashland lab, the mystery is often more fundamental: What is it? Evidence in wildlife cases frequently appears in states of decay or in unidentified parts. The first step is to make the ID: to determine what exactly the evidence is and if it belongs to a species that is protected by law.

这头狼的案子很简单。但野生动植物犯罪对法医学提出了新奇的挑战。法医学科学家的任务是检视证据，把受害者、犯罪现场和疑犯联系起来。传统法医学调查以一个经典问题开始：谁干的?而在阿什兰的实验室，谜团要更加基本：这是什么?野生动植物案件中的证据经常处于腐烂或难以辨认的状态。第一步就是要弄清对象的身份：搞清楚这证据到底是什么东西，它是否属于受法律保护的物种。

The swim bladders seized in the Calexico raid are a case in point. To a specialist’s trained eye, a totoaba bladder is easy to spot: It has distinctive curled tubules running along its base. But smugglers have learned to disguise the evidence, trimming away the tubules to pass off totoaba bladders as those of a non-CITES-protected fish. At the Ashland lab, researchers have developed a mitochondrial genetic sequence for the totoaba — a DNA pattern that distinguishes the fish from the next closest species. When the bladders in the Zhen case arrived in Ashland, scientists snipped off small pieces of tissue and “busted open” their cells to extract the mitochondrial DNA. The tests confirmed that the swim bladders were indeed from totoaba: smoking gun evidence for the prosecution of Song Shen Zhen.

在卡莱克西科缴获的鱼鳔就是一例。在专家受过训练的眼中看来，石首鱼的鱼鳔很容易辨认：它的底部有一种特殊的弯曲小管。但走私者也学会了隐藏证据，他们切除这些小管，把石首鱼的鱼鳔伪装成不受CITES公约保护的鱼类的鱼鳔。在阿什兰实验室，研究者们研究出了石首鱼的线粒体基因序列，这是一种DNA 模式，能把这种鱼同相近的种类区分开来。这起案件的鱼鳔来到阿什兰后，科学家们从鱼鳔组织上剪下小片，“打开”它们的细胞，提取线粒体DNA。测试证实这些鱼鳔的确属于石首鱼：控告郑松深的起诉书上有了铁证。

Not all cases can be made with genetics, though. The CITES treaty accords endangered or threatened status to more than 35,000 animals and plant species, and the lab’s morphology unit has assembled a massive collection of standards, samples of protected species to use as points of comparison in casework. The goal is comprehensiveness: to build a storehouse, Goddard said drily, of “everything on the planet.”

不过不是所有案子都和基因有关。CITES公约包括超过3.5万种濒危或受威胁的动植物，实验室的形态学部门收集有大量受保护物种的标本和样本，用来在案件中进行对比。他们的目标非常宏大，戈达德一本正经地说，是要建立一个仓库，储存“这个星球上的万事万物”。

The collection isn’t there yet. But the Ashland lab is something to behold: a gigantic curiosity cabinet that might have been art-directed by Wes Anderson. Shelves and glass cases hold an improbable array of bones, feathers, horns, hides. There are narwhal tusks and emu feet and monkey paws; there are drawers filled with severed heads of antelopes and the rainbow plumage of tropical birds. Everywhere, there’s taxidermy: stuffed birds and reptiles and jungle cats, with faces frozen in fierce grimaces. On one cabinet, a lab worker has stuck a pink Post-it note with a message scrawled in black marker: “Lions only please. Tigers in cabinet below.”

他们的收藏还远未达到目标。但阿什兰实验室的收藏也非常可观：他们有一个巨大的古董柜，有点像在韦斯·安德森指导下布置的。架子和玻璃容器里装着惊人的一排排骨头、羽毛、角和皮肤。其中有独角鲸的角、鸸鹋的脚和猴子的爪子;抽屉里放满了色调简朴的羚羊头，还有热带鸟类的七彩羽毛。到处都是动物标本：鸟儿、爬虫和丛林猫科动物;面孔被定格为狰狞的表情。一个柜子上贴着粉色即时贴，上面用黑色记号笔写着“只用来放狮子，老虎放在下面的柜子里。”

It’s an eye-popping spectacle. It’s also depressing, a reminder of the recklessness and ruthlessness with which humankind exercises dominion over nature. Displayed in various corners of the morphology unit are the lab’s “shop of horrors,” macabre trophies fashioned from animal parts. Goddard pointed out cowboy boots crowned with cobra heads, a ceramic mug that sits atop two goose feet, a cane toad that has been converted into a change purse, with a zipper running the length of its body. Sitting nearby was Pepper Trail, the lab’s senior ornithologist. “Birders keep ‘life lists’ of all the birds they’ve seen in their life,” Trail said. “I’m in the melancholy position of having a ‘death list’ of all the birds I’ve identified dead. It’s over 600 species.”

这真是令人大开眼界的奇观。但也非常令人沮丧，令人想起人类对待大自然有多么轻率和粗暴。形态学的若干个展示角堪称实验室的“恐怖小店”，陈列着可怕的动物残体。戈达德指点着用眼镜蛇头做装饰的牛仔靴、用两只鹅脚做底座的陶罐、一只蔗蟾蜍被做成了零钱包，整个身体上贯穿着一道拉链。实验室的资深鸟类学家佩珀·特莱尔(Pepper Trail)坐在旁边，他说：“鸟类学家们都有自己的‘生命名单’，记录他们一生所见过的鸟儿。我却不幸拥有一个‘死亡名单’，记录我鉴别过的死去的鸟儿，已经有600多种了。”

Once, wildlife crime was a marginal issue. As recently as a decade ago, the wildlife police blotter was dominated by crimes of opportunity and one-offs: by hunters who would gun down elks so they could hang antlers in the den. Today, wildlife trafficking is a sophisticated international enterprise, with low risks and high profits drawing in organized crime: Russian mobsters, Irish crime families, extremist organizations like Darfur’s janjaweed militias and Somalia’s Al Shabab, a terror group with ties to Al Qaeda.

野生动植物犯罪一度是一个边缘话题。十年前，野生动植物相关的案件主要都是投机犯罪和一次性犯罪——猎人为了在家中炫耀鹿角，打死了麋鹿之类。如今，野生动植物贩运是非常复杂的国际性事业，对于俄罗斯黑帮和爱尔兰犯罪家族等犯罪团伙来说是低风险，高回报的勾当，还有达尔富尔的贾贾威德民兵组织和索马里青年党等极端组织也参与其中，后者是一个同基地组织有联系的恐怖组织。

These developments are putting wildlife crime on the agendas of policymakers and adding urgency to the efforts of the Ashland scientists. Recently, Ed Espinoza has been spending a lot of time thinking about wood. The illicit timber trade — the logging and trafficking of precious hardwoods from forests in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America — is a multibillion dollar industry. The huge profits have attracted violent criminal gangs, who are destabilizing the already precarious rule of law in developing countries. For law enforcement, the timber trade poses a vexing problem. Smugglers typically ship timber after it’s been milled, a process that obliterates morphological markers. How can illegal logging be stymied if the authorities are unable to distinguish legitimate wood products from contraband?

这些发展令野生动物犯罪进入了政策制定者的议程，也为阿什兰的科学家们的工作增加了迫切性。最近，艾德·依斯宾诺扎花了很多时间思考木材方面的问题。非法木材贸易——非洲、东南亚与拉丁美洲森林内珍贵硬木的砍伐与贩运——是一项涉及数十亿美元的大产业。巨额利润吸引着暴力犯罪团伙，他们正在打破发展中国家本来就岌岌可危的保护法律。对于执法机构来说，木材贸易是个令人恼火的问题。走私者通常贩运经碾碎的木材，抹去它们本来的形态学特征。 如果官方不能分辨合法木制品与走私品，又要怎样阻止非法砍伐行为呢?