Car crash ends the life of notorious smuggler

By ANNE BESTON

New Zealand's most notorious wildlife smuggler has been killed in a car crash.

Frederick Robert Angell, 43, died instantly when his Mitsubishi collided with another car at Pukerau, near Gore, on Thursday afternoon, ending a long and infamous career as one of the country's most determined wildlife smugglers.

It began in the late 1980s, when Angell was convicted of bird smuggling in Australia. By 1990, he was acting as middleman, with two others, in a kea smuggling ring.

Angell admitted taking the kea from the Fiordland and Arthurs Pass National Parks so they could later be injected with valium, stuffed into PVC tubing and put into suitcases to be carried out of the country. Each bird was worth up to $35,000 on the international black market.

Before his sentencing for the kea smuggling, and while he was on the run from police and conservation officers, Angell phoned the Holmes show to protest at being portrayed as a mafia-like criminal when he was only smuggling birds.

He believed laws banning the international bird trade were wrong and were not a deterrent to smuggling.

He was sentenced to six months' prison, but two years later was back before the courts, this time for masterminding a tuatara smuggling operation.

He got two years' jail for attempting to export a live tuatara and being in possession of two more - stolen from Southland Museum.

In 1995 he was back again, this time for trying to smuggle 42 Australian lizards, a skink and a turtle into New Zealand. The animals were to pass through customs before being sold.

Concealed in pillow cases stuffed into the false bottom of wooden crates, 18 of the lizards died in transit and the survivors, without food or water, began to eat each other.

Angell was sentenced to 18 months' jail.

In 1997 he received another jail term, this time for illegally taking four tuatara from the Marlborough Sounds wildlife sanctuary, Stephens Island.

Angell was linked to the wildlife smuggling "godfather" Keng Liang Wong, then reputed to be the biggest illegal reptile dealer in the world.

Angell's mother once said international "hit men" had been given a contract to kill her son.