Italian entrepreneur and director of Earth League International Andrea Crosta has always been interested in wildlife protection. In school, he majored in Zoology and National Sciences but after his mother passed he was drawn to study business. He worked over a decade

as an international consultant to companies and governmental agencies on high-end security technologies & services, homeland security, anti-piracy, investigations, and risk management before he co-founded ELI, a non-profit dedicated to fight environmental, animal, and human crimes. His endeavors have been the subject of two documentaries executive produced by Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Richard Ladkani, The Ivory Game and Sea of Shadows.

Crosta told HFPA journalist Silvia Bizio that a major production company is developing a documentary and a fiction series about his life. “It all started like ten years ago when I was in Kenya. At that time, I was working as an international consultant on intelligence investigation technologies, I was working with African politicians, also very complex work. And it was right in the middle of the elephant poaching crisis when we were losing 40,000 to 45,000 elephants per year because of the ivory trade. I was there, a witness to everything, I went out in the bush with the rangers several times and witnessed those tragic scenes of an entire family of elephants slaughtered for the ivory.”

He already had a very exciting job but he was a bit unhappy about it. “I felt that I had to go back to my original passion, which is nature and wildlife protection, but I was looking for a way to do it. Those tragic events in Kenya led me to create, to drop my work and create a new and very unique nonprofit organization.” 

His idea was to create the first intelligence agency for Earth. “We don’t have that, it doesn’t exist, an intelligence agency for Earth. We have the CIA and many others, but they don’t, their responsibility is not the Earth, it’s not the environment, of course, they have other responsibilities. But the more I started researching the environmental crime, the complexity behind the environmental crime, the role of international trafficking networks and organized crime and terrorist groups and corrupt officials, it was clear that we needed a different approach, a different organization. So again, I dropped everything and I created this unique agency to defend earth.”

He started recruiting former FBI, former CIA, crime analysts, jail special intelligence experts, and undercover operatives from different nationalities.

“I managed to have a fantastic team that is still with me. We launched different operations around the world so we used a lot of, we did a lot of undercover work, we infiltrated those networks of traffickers and organized crime.”

Who would he like to play himself in fictional series? “I’m sending a message to Matt Damon just to consider the story at least.”

Listen to the podcast and hear what he discovered about ivory trafficking; how he filmed dangerous scenes and what kind of dangerous situations he has been in; how Leonardo DiCaprio helped him make the documentary Sea of Shadows