In late June 2002, the container ship MOL Independence docked at a Singapore port after a voyage of almost a month from Durban in South Africa. On board was a consignment which had been on a far longer journey. Beginning in an industrial area on the outskirts of Lilongwe, the capital of landlocked Malawi in southern Africa, the container was taken by road to the port of Beira in neighboring Mozambique and loaded onto a feeder vessel to Durban. According to the Bill of Lading, its contents were stone sculptures. Acting on a tip-off from my organization, London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), Singapore customs officers inspected the container and discovered more than 6.2 tons of elephant ivory. At the time, it was the largest seizure of its kind since the international ban on the ivory trade had come into force in 1989 and the lessons learned from it would change the way the illegal wildlife trade was investigated and tackled, evolving from simple seizures and the arrests of any low-ranking criminals to much wider-reaching investigations led by gathered intelligence. Unfortunately, the abject failure by authorities at both the source and destination countries to properly investigate and prosecute the case allowed the transnational wildlife trafficking syndicate behind the shipment to emerge largely unscathed. It was able to regroup and, through various incarnations, continued to use Malawi as its base of operations for another two decades. There are, however, grounds for optimism. A 14-year jail sentence handed down by a court in Malawi in September 2021 to Chinese national Lin Yunhua, the latest kingpin of the syndicate, for dealing in rhino horns and money laundering, marks the end of a major wildlife crime group which has profited from the slaughter of African wildlife for three decades.