COMMERCE CITY, COLO. — At the National Wildlife Property Repository, only the imagination runs wild. Everything else is dead and lies on the crowded shelves of this warehouse outside Denver.
There's a Hartmann's mountain zebra, its hide a rifle case -- the souvenir of a safari to southern Africa.
There are the alligators whose skins adorn eight pairs of $2,000 Air Force 1s, the scheme of a hip-hop-inspired importer.
There are the black bears whose gallbladder bile was extracted and crystallized, a futile cure for hangovers and hemorrhoids.
Some deaths here, however, defy imagining -- like that of the orangutan, whose skull, carved with decorative swirls and lightning bolts, is all that remains; or the caimans, standing on hind legs and holding silver trays like butlers; or the cheetah, with the frozen snarl and teardrop eyes.
Domestic and international laws protect roughly 5,000 animals against exploitation and extinction, and the National Wildlife Property Repository is the endpoint for all that is caught and confiscated by federal agencies in this country.
Held for educational purposes, future undercover operations and possible use by the Smithsonian or other museums, the items in this building represent, in the words of one agent, nothing less than "the evil in mankind."
The federal government may give the repository a fancy name, but it is really a mausoleum, a tomb for nearly 1.5 million mammals, insects, reptiles, birds and assorted sea life, testimony to one of the largest illegal, if not creepiest, trades in the world -- third behind drugs and guns -- worth an estimated $20 billion annually.
Skinned, mounted, cut up and/or processed, the items arrive from U.S. Fish and Wildlife field offices around the country. Specialist Doni Sprague's job is to sort and document the pieces before wheeling them through the double doors and into a dusty oblivion.
On a recent day she was processing a shipment of antiques from Detroit: opera glasses, snuff boxes, ink wells, each tricked out with elephant ivory or sea turtle shell.
The seizure was nothing scandalous. An agent dropped in on an antiques store in the upscale suburb of Birmingham, Mich. He said he was a buyer, and he kept returning for the next few months until he learned that these particular items -- objets de vitrine as they're known in the antiques trade -- had been smuggled from England.
