
Killing for Wood: The Timber Mafia's Brutal Business
Illegal logging generates up to 152 billion dollars a year, making environmental crime the world's third largest criminal sector after drugs and counterfeit goods. This DW Documentary film follows the people fighting it and the ones paying for that fight. In Romania, home to some of Europe's last primeval forest, Agent Green founder Gabriel Paun was almost beaten to death by timber mafia enforcers in 2015, and at least six forest rangers have been murdered there in the past decade despite EU warnings issued back in 2020. In Cambodia, where a third of forests have vanished in twenty years, German environmentalist Marcus Hardtke has spent thirty years confronting loggers with alleged ties to government officials. Interviews with rangers, activists, and investigators trace the timber's route from illegally felled trunks to European markets, ending at furniture and DIY stores in Germany, one of Romania's top timber buyers. The film asks whether German and EU policy is doing enough to stop the trade it keeps buying into.