Thread by @DrEricDing

🐘Smuggling elephant trophies & nonprofit corruption—LaPierres’ called for the elephants’ four front feet to be turned into “stools,” an “umbrella stand,” and a “trash can.” They deleted their names, shipped to a taxidermist, who trophied it for “free”. 🧵
newyorker.com/news/news-desk…

2) “Susan wrote back with a request: the shipment should have no clear links to the LaPierres. She told the shipping company to use the name of a taxidermist as “the consignee” for the items, and further requested that the company “not use our names anywhere if at all possible.”

3) “Susan noted that the couple also expected to receive, along with the elephant trophies, an assortment of skulls and skins from warthogs, impalas, a zebra, and a hyena.

4) “Once the animal parts arrived in the States, the taxidermist would turn them into decorations for the couple’s home in Virginia, and prepare the elephant skins so they could be used to make personal accessories, such as handbags

5) Footage of their safari, recently published by The Trace and The New Yorker, shows that Wayne had struggled to kill an elephant at close range, while Susan felled hers with a single shot and cut off its tail in jubilation. newyorker.com/news/news-desk…

6) “Records obtained by The Trace and The New Yorker show that Susan leveraged the LaPierres’ status to secretly ship animal trophies from their safari to the U.S., where the couple received free taxidermy work.

7) “New York Attorney General Letitia James, who has regulatory authority over the N.R.A., is currently seeking to dissolve the nonprofit for a range of alleged abuses, including a disregard for internal controls designed to prevent self-dealing and corruption by its executives.

8) In a complaint filed last August, James’s office asserted that trophy fees and taxidermy work “constituted private benefits and gifts in excess of authorized amounts pursuant to NRA policy to LaPierre and his wife.” The new records appear to confirm those allegations.

9) “At their request, tusks were mounted, skulls were preserved, and the hyena became a rug. The episode represents a rare instance in which the gun group’s embattled chief executive is captured, on paper, unambiguously violating N.R.A. rules”

10) “the e-mails show that Susan directed the process while Makris’s company, Under Wild Skies Inc., which received millions of dollars from the N.R.A., picked up the tab.” ➡️ sounds like maybe also some straight up laundering / theft from NRA donated funds.