As Crosta clicked through images of a rhino-horn trafficker in Vietnam, orphaned orangutans in Thailand, and illegal timber in Gabon, he explained how ELI works: “We put together a team of former F.B.I. and former C.I.A. undercover operators to infiltrate the most important wildlife-trafficking groups in the world. Twelve undercovers of different nationalities, and their work is to identify these people and become their friend. We never buy anything illegal, we are not armed—we are just really good at becoming your friend.” This overview was somewhat misleading: though ELI has used operatives from Taiwan, South Africa, and Colombia, it typically fields just two or three undercovers at a time, and none of them are former agency members. (One ex-C.I.A. operative has said he’d join up once Crosta could afford him.) And ELI does sometimes participate in buys on behalf of law enforcement: in 2021, at the request of federal agents, Billy and Larry spent hours in a U-Haul parked outside a McDonald’s in San Diego, negotiating the purchase of totoaba bladders from a trafficker.

Crosta’s fibs and elisions derived in part from sheepishness—“I’m almost ashamed to say how small we are”—and in part from a need to protect his team. During the U-Haul buy, the trafficker brought along a countersurveillance squad from a drug cartel. Crosta told me, “We did a ton of work for that buy, but we can’t take any public credit, because the cartel is a danger to us.”

At Villa Theos, Rebecca De Mornay told Demetriades, “It’s thrilling! It’s so important it should be a movie.” He nodded vigorously: “This is NASA—it’s the future!” But many in the crowd remained unconvinced by Crosta’s approach. Two guests suggested to ELI team members that, instead of empathizing with poachers, they should go to Africa and kill them.

Donors like direct action, and they like feeling that their donation is fixing the problem. So N.G.O.s display photos of rescued animals and skim over measurable outcomes. Jane Goodall told me, “Facts, facts, facts—people don’t care.” In Crosta’s situation, she said, “I’d show video of someone pulling a scale off a live pangolin. Then I’d jump to footage of a big, fat, complacent kingpin eating pangolin flesh and tiger bones—make the people watching hate, because there’s no end to the lengths that people will go to get their beastly way. And then I’d show a pangolin recovering in a sanctuary. You must end on a positive note.”

As the benefit wound down, Demetriades invited the Earth League team and a dozen other lingerers to his underground bunker, which contained a wine cellar, a bowling alley, a disco, and a shooting range. Hunting guns gleamed on the walls. Demetriades brought out Cuban cigars from a humidor and poured 2005 Château Smith Haut Lafitte. For some, the night got a little woozy. When everyone emerged, an hour or two later, the technician who’d wired Crosta’s A.V. system limped up the driveway, having just been bitten by one of Demetriades’s dogs. (Demetriades denies this.) When the partygoers shone their phone lights on the technician’s shin and exclaimed at the blood, someone offered to shoot the dog. “It’s time to go,” Crosta muttered. “It’s really time to go now.”

By Crosta’s calculus, ELI could shut down trafficking in much of the world with an endowment of ten million dollars. The event had raised eleven thousand five hundred dollars. Driving home, he kept shaking his head. “This is why I hate hope,” he said. “Hope is just a commodity, selling you beautiful words and pictures. People at these fund-raisers want to enjoy themselves, to forget, maybe because they feel guilty that they haven’t done enough for Earth.” Wealthy donors, he said, are “like the little puppy that is focussed on a flower—and then a butterfly goes by, and they follow that.”

In November, a Cambodian man named Masphal Kry was arrested at J.F.K., for his role in allegedly trafficking two thousand six hundred and thirty-four long-tailed macaques to U.S. pharma companies, to be used as test subjects. Kry was the deputy director of his country’s Department of Wildlife and Biodiversity, on his way to a CITES conference in Panama; his boss was also indicted. Many of those charged with protecting their country’s resources end up exploiting them. Malaysia’s former minister of planning and resource management enabled the destruction of the Sarawak rain forest. Burundi’s ivory stockpile was repeatedly plundered, despite being stored at a military compound.

Because so many countries facilitate wildlife crime, N.G.O.s have tried to fill the enforcement void. For decades, they underwrote military-style training of rangers across Africa, an approach known as “fortress conservation.” When the paleontologist Richard Leakey was appointed to run Kenya’s wildlife service, in 1989, he instituted a policy of shooting poachers on sight, which soon spread through the continent’s parks and beyond. At one preserve in India, the rule was simply “Kill the unwanted.”

Poachers, too, could be indiscriminate. They sometimes killed elephants using oranges spiked with strychnine or pesticides—which had the additional effect of killing vultures, whose circling might otherwise alert wardens to a dead elephant. But the policy of vigilante justice eventually inspired moral revulsion. “Many N.G.O.s aren’t comfortable anymore with ‘shoot to kill’ policies, with funding a paramilitary institution,” Brighton Kumchedwa, Malawi’s director of parks and wildlife, told me. Fortress conservation also proved to be inescapably neocolonial: creating Africa’s parks entailed the forcible removal of the Maasai and Wameru people, among many others.

From 2015 to 2017, Damien Mander, a former commando from Australia, helped wage what he calls a “ground-level offensive against the local population” to stop poaching in South Africa’s Kruger National Park. “We had one hundred and sixty-five personnel, helicopters, drones, canine attack teams,” he told me. “We were essentially an occupying force.” Realizing that the result was at best a Pyrrhic victory, he started a program that deploys female rangers in four African countries. “You have zero corruption with women, they naturally de-escalate situations, and they bring more money back to their communities, so the communities buy in,” Mander said. “You’re on a continent that’s going to have two billion people by 2040—sustained conflict with the local population is not the way to go.” Ultimately, fortress conservation is predicated on a landscape devoid of people.

The biggest problem with fortress conservation, though, is that it doesn’t work. “Every rhino has its own security detail,” Rikkert Reijnen, of IFAW, said, exaggerating only slightly—the last two northern white rhinos live under twenty-four-hour protection in Kenya. “And still they’re getting poached.”

As a teen-ager, in Milan, Andrea Crosta used earplugs to sleep, because his bedroom was so noisy. It housed an African gray parrot; softshell and red-eared turtles; an aquarium filled with angelfish, tetras, guppies, barbs, and a red-tailed shark; a python; and his cat, Goccia. “I got more happiness from the animals than from my human interactions,” he told me. His parents got divorced when he was seven. “I think that day destroyed my ability to trust, or to want to have children,” he said. “Not to mention that my mother later killed herself with gas in the car—that she left me doubly. I still wonder, What if I had been watching TV the day they told me about the divorce, like my brother”—Nicola was eighteen months younger—“and he had been the one they told? Because he is married twenty years now, and has three children.”

While Crosta was at the University of Milan, studying zoology, he worked at an endangered-species breeding center. He hoped to continue there after graduating, but the center couldn’t pay him. So he served a stint as a military policeman, worked in crisis P.R., and then started an online-shopping company called Think Italy, which was briefly worth eight million euros, until the dot-com crash of 2000. Still restless, he became a security consultant. The work, which entailed collaborating with Italy’s antiterrorism police unit and with entrepreneurs who’d come out of Israel’s élite cyber squad, versed him in a variety of threats.

In 2011, when he was in Kenya, advising a security team for the former Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi, Crosta came upon the group of elephants slaughtered with AK-47s. He knew that in different circumstances he’d have committed the same crime: “Of course I’d be a poacher, if shooting one elephant got me four years of salary to feed my family. If I offered people here in L.A. four years of salary, they’d bring me their mother.”

He and an Israeli colleague, Nir Kalron, began raising money to train rangers. But Crosta grew increasingly aware that poaching was inseparable from financial and political networks that extended around the globe. The U.S. intelligence community had already begun to understand wildlife trafficking as both a cause and an effect of instability. Rod Schoonover, a State Department analyst at that time, told me, “Biodiversity loss started to become a concern in national security. It has security consequences—water stress, food stress, civil unrest, deep corruption.”

Working for Gedi, Crosta and Kalron had heard that Al-Shabaab, the terrorist organization that controlled much of Somalia, was exporting ivory to China. They investigated, somewhat clumsily—their surreptitious videos often showcased an orange-juice glass or a hotel-room curtain—and spoke with a dozen sources. In 2013, they completed a study that said Al-Shabaab was trafficking up to three tons of ivory a month.

They launched an N.G.O. called Elephant Action League, and posted a summary of the study on their Web site, but no one picked it up. Then Al-Shabaab attacked the Westgate mall in Nairobi, leaving seventy-one people dead. Crosta tweeted, “Elephant poaching helped fund Kenya attack,” and the Times and other papers mentioned E.A.L.’s findings. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that there was growing evidence that Al-Shabaab “fund their terrorist activities to a great extent from ivory trafficking.”

The international outcry about the attack contributed to China’s decision, in 2017, to ban ivory entirely. Yet Crosta and Kalron’s study angered some conservation N.G.O.s, which believed that they’d embellished their data. Rosaleen Duffy, a political ecologist, argued in a paper written with colleagues that the study was “poorly evidenced” and “based on false assumptions.” She also claimed that it advanced the U.S.’s global agenda, by making wildlife preservation a mere by-product of mitigating security risks.