By the fall of 2006, Ngobobo's campaign against the charcoal poachers was beginning to gain traction. Then, out on patrol, he and seven rangers were attacked by Congolese and FDLR soldiers. Ngobobo and his rangers hid in the forest until late into the night, then escaped. The following morning he went directly to the colonel at the military camp in Rutshuru to lodge a complaint.

"That was the beginning of the end," Goma-based attorney Matthieu Cingoro told me. Cingoro, 52, is a clean-cut gentleman who has the quiet dignity of someone with enormous responsibility. After the gorilla killings, unesco and the World Conservation Union (IUCN) started an investigation, which, though never made public, created pressure on the ICCN to instigate its own investigation. The wildlife agency hired Cingoro and his firm to pursue the case, and he has been working it ever since.

"Paulin, one man, was now going up against a system of corruption that has existed in the Congo for 50 years. Naturally, he was immediately arrested. It is very dangerous to be a principled man in the Congo."

Faint starlight is bouncing off Lake Kivu. It is after midnight when Ngobobo recounts what happened.

"It was raining. The colonel's bodyguard took me outside and stripped me. The colonel had spoken to Honore Mashagiro, and Mashagiro had said that I was undisciplined and needed correction and I must be given 75 lashes."

In the course of trying to stop the charcoal poaching, Ngobobo had come to believe that his own boss, the chief warden of Virunga National Park and the ICCN provincial director for North Kivu, was the kingpin of the charcoal trade. He had uncovered cooked books, faked records, protection schemes, payoffs, and charcoal "taxes." Cingoro says the evidence showed that Mashagiro had been earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from the trade.

"The guard removed my jacket and my belt and my boots and made me lie facedown in the mud," says Ngobobo. "He counted, one, two, three, as he was whipping me."

As he speaks, I search Ngobobo's face, but he is too stoic to allow more than a wince, as though he can still feel the whip. He says his scars have healed, but not his psychic wounds.

"Anyone that is a victim of violence, all they ever want is justice. The worst part for me was that my beating had actually been ordered by my superior."

A leading ICCN officer who spoke only on condition that he not be named, confirms Ngobobo's account. "The provincial director was doing everything possible to try and disrupt the investigation and have Paulin removed from Rumangabo."

But it didn't work. Ngobobo went right back to dismantling the charcoal network. In June 2007 Ngobobo arrested six top rangers for participating in charcoal trafficking, but Mashagiro overruled the arrest and reinstated the rangers. On June 8 a female gorilla from the Kabirizi family was executed.

"I immediately began an investigation into the killing," Ngobobo says, slowly shaking his head. "I identified one of the six rangers I had arrested as the likely suspect. However, my inves- tigations were prematurely terminated."

Mashagiro canceled Ngobobo's investigations. According to Ngobobo and sources within the conservation community, he also accused Ngobobo himself of killing the gorillas and prevailed upon the North Kivu governor to have him arrested.

"When rangers on patrol could not arrest people directly involved in the charcoal trade, it was because Mashagiro himself was protecting them," says a field officer with WildlifeDirect.

"I was thrown into prison in Goma for one night and one day," Ngobobo says. "After that, I was allowed to go home at night, but had to go to prison every day and stay until dark without moving, without talking."

The second night Ngobobo was allowed to go home was July 22. The next morning, the first of the six gorillas was found dead.