Dee Dee Manera is a slight woman with a long face and straight blond hair. Today, when she takes her seat in a federal courtroom in lower Manhattan, she is wearing brown slacks and a beige turtleneck.

Manera is a Senior Special Agent at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, where she spends her days cracking international smuggling rings. It’s big-time stuff: multi-million dollar hauls of poached elephant ivory, carved rhino horn Libation cups that fetch $200,000 a piece, international wire fraud. The sort of cases Hollywood drools over.

Manera is in court today for a case that started, in some ways, over five years ago. In 2012, The Fish and Wildlife Service embarked on what would come to be known as The Take Down: a raid conducted by agents across the country over two days in February that resulted in the arrest of eight major players and disrupted smuggling networks in the United States.

This was the beginning of what the Service dubbed Operation Crash--“crash” being slang for a herd of rhinos, the animals whose lives they were seeking to save. It was ambitious: a collaboration between numerous federal agencies in the United States and Canada aimed at putting a dent in the illegal wildlife trade, which, despite concerted efforts over the years, had stubbornly refused to disappear.

In the five years since The Take Down, Operation Crash has brought at least 37 cases to court. Manera was at the Second District Court on a warm day in February for one of those cases: United States v. Cyril D’Souza, Defendant.

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D’Souza and Manera met in May of 2014, via email. According to her testimony in the case, which was filed on in New York on January 12th, 2017, Manera contacted him on behalf of a client in China who wanted something that she thought D’Souza might have: black rhino horns.

They spoke over the phone, and D’Souza said that he did indeed have the horns, and that they were good--“fresh” horns “taken right off the animal.” He was at a camp in Timbavati, South Africa, and had “got a beautiful rhino” that day.

Rhino horns have been prized for centuries, and, unlike elephant tusks, can grow back if they are cut properly. (They usually aren’t. Poachers will often shoot an animal in the spine to paralyze it and save bullets while they hack the horns off.) But it is only recently that the trade in rhino horns has started to catch up with that of elephant ivory, which has long dominated world markets and began again in earnest in 2008. The killing of elephants in Africa peaked around

2011, when upwards of 40,000 animals a year were being shot and the horns sawn off their faces (the animals were lucky if they were dead before the sawing started).

But the level of killing was unsustainable. Herds were decimated so badly that it began to take longer and longer to amass a stockpile worth shipping. And ivory bans passed in the United States and China aimed at closing loopholes in previous laws have effectively shut down most of the market (although enforcement at ports remains a problem). So poachers and dealers started looking elsewhere for beautiful things to carve into cash. And they found it in the horn of the rhinoceros.

Cyril D’Souza explained to Manera over the phone that he couldn’t technically sell her the rhino horns, but he could “donate” them to her--in exchange for cash or wire transfer to a bank in Hong Kong. Two horns would be $90,000.

“...It’s good to have the money in cash or wire transfer the money to Hong Kong, so you can’t tell. Cash is best,” D’Souza said.

The price D’Souza quoted is pretty much average for a rhino horn these days, says Science Magazine, which did the math in 2013. “Rhino horn is now worth more, per unit weight, than gold, diamonds or cocaine,” fetching (on the conservative end) $65,000 per kilogram ($29,545 a pound). Most horns weigh between one and a half to four kilograms; white rhino horns are heaviest. But black rhino horns are rarer, and prices often jump accordingly.

That kind of money has proved irresistible to poachers in Africa, where poverty continues to be rife. And although educational programs have increased in recent years, many communities are still largely unaware of the threat facing the animals around them.

Thabit Ally works for Robin Hurt Safaris in Tanzania, where he attended the African College of Wildlife Management. During the dry season from July to September, Ally spends his days with wealthy clients, roaming the county’s sunny grasslands, looking for animals to shoot.

Tanzania, one of Africa’s poaching hotspots, allows trophy hunting by those willing to pay-- sometimes upwards of $100,000--for the privilege. Hunters are required to get a permit and a licensed guide. Permit money goes directly to the government (although not necessarily earmarked for conservation), and companies are free to charge what they want on top of that. Baboon hunting permits are cheapest--$200 each--and elephants the most expensive, ranging from $10,000 to $22,500, depending on the size and before taking into account guide fees. Ally couldn’t provide concrete numbers, but Tanzania Adventures Inc., which runs a similar outfit, lists rates starting at $16,890 and topping out at $105,950 for a one-on-one elephant hunting safari. The minimum cost to hunt an elephant? $85,150, no frills or airfare included.

Ally stresses that hunts are tightly regulated, with clients only taking mature bulls past mating age. “So basically we go for the better trophies, the bigger ones.” He argues that the money raised from taking wealthy clients into the field goes toward educational programs that have increased cooperation with villagers, who call him when there’s a poacher around. But many conservationists are against any sort of trophy hunting, regardless of where the money winds up. “The practice is unethical, cruel, harmful and unsustainable,” says the Human Society.

And despite their best efforts and recent international crackdowns on the illegal wildlife trade, Robin Hurt and their band of merry hunters are struggling. Seizures of ivory have slowed in recent years (partly, experts think, due to dwindling numbers of elephants), but rhino horn continues to flow into ports across the world, including onto the streets of the biggest smuggling hubs in the United States: New York City.

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Dee Dee Manera wired the money from a government account to Hong Kong’s Mountain Tops International Inc. Ltd. in two installments $45,000 each. D’Souza wrapped the horns in plastic, packed them in liquid foam, and had his “boys” ship them overnight to New York, where Manera picked them up on June 20, 2014.

Manera unwrapped the horns from their packaging at a Fish and Wildlife office in New Jersey, and immediately smelled a rat-- “a strong odor resembling paint thinner.” The horns were fake. Manera called D’Souza, who was purportedly in Africa, to tell him so. The call dropped, and D’Souza, claiming bad cell reception, texted that he would call her later.

Four days later Manera got a text message:

“Had an accident mauled by a lion in hospitL cannot talk or leave sat phone on because if sensitive equipment around will be here for three weeks...”

Except, according a manger at a UPS store in Ontario who confirmed his identity from a photograph, D’Souza wasn’t in Africa. He was in Canada--where, it needn't be pointed out, the lion population is decidedly nonexistent.

A federal court in New York indicted D’Souza on one count of wire fraud and he was brought to the United States, where he is free on $150,000 bail.

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Operation Crash isn’t limited to rhinos. The undertaking has resulted in prosecutions for leopard skin, polar bear hides, elvers, and major hauls of elephant ivory, including the largest in New York City’s history: $4.5 million of carved figurines and raw tusks seized by agents from Manhattan Fine Arts & Antiques this past September.

But the real market, say agents, isn't in New York or San Francisco, which trade places as the top hubs for illegal wildlife smuggling. Rather, the cities are used as a transit point to China and Vietnam, where demand for pieces is the highest.

Hong Kong is also often a transit point, where thousands of talented artisans turn raw ivory or horns into exquisite carved pieces that can be sold to auction houses in Europe. Sometimes, agents say, the original owners will buy the pieces back to establish a paper trail--larger auction houses won't buy pieces that don’t have a documented history, and that's where the real money is. But once a piece has enough documentation behind it to look legitimate, places like Sotheby’s turn them around for eye-popping prices: in October of 2016, a single cup “Inscribed Rhinoceros Horn ‘River Landscape’; 17th Century” from an American collection sold at auction for $381,633.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently got a new boss in the form of Ryan Zinke, President Trump's pick for Secretary of the Interior. Trump has proposed a ten percent cut to the agency's budget, and although there are few details, there is a possibility Operation Crash could come under the knife. But in the meantime Crash will soldier on, one rhino at a time.