Slaughter and I politely declined the drink offer. We sat down on the couch and began asking general questions about the monitor lizard. During the conversation, a jet black house cat was playing with one of my boot laces. “We received a report that you recently acquired a leopard, Mr. Milton.” I tried to pull my foot away, but the cat was quite insistent. “Can you tell us about that?”
“I had a leopard for a few days,” Milton said, “but I shipped it back east. I wanted to get a permit and have a cage built.”
Before either Slaughter or I could respond, Milton began asking a series of hypothetical questions, each one beginning with, “Answer me this, Lieutenant Callan.” Animal Welfare regulations required a certain amount of interpretation by the officers enforcing them. It became obvious that Milton was trying to pin me into a corner on requirements for the possession of big cats. I tried to interpret the regulations fairly and as they were intended, but deep down I deplored the idea of private individuals keeping these magnificent wild animals in backyard cages.
Milton droned on for five or ten more minutes before I noticed something unusual about his kitty—its extremely large paws. The determined little feline was still busy chewing on my right boot.
“Wait a minute!” I said, interrupting Milton in the middle of a sentence. “I think we’ve found our leopard.” John and I had been looking for a typical yellow and black animal, not one in the melanistic black phase. We hadn’t paid much attention to the playful little kitten on the floor. Upon closer examination, we realized that this little black kitty with the oversized paws was actually a very young black leopard cub.
Milton had purposely kept the shades closed, so there was very little light in the room. I picked up the cat and carried it to the window. When I pulled the shades back, the light poured in and exposed the characteristic leopard spots through the animal’s shiny black fur. We might have been concerned about Milton lying to us, but John and I were a little embarrassed about not recognizing the leopard in the first place.
Charges were filed against Milton for unlawful possession and importation of a prohibited species. No zoos or legitimate facilities were willing to take the leopard so it was eventually shipped back east to its original owner.
V
The most ferocious felines I ever came across were inside a small cage at the Los Angeles International Airport. I was working with Warden Lon Whiteside that day, a metro warden in the truest sense of the word. Whiteside was a tall, thirty-six-year-old lateral from state police with fifteen years of law enforcement experience under his belt. His previous experience dealing with hardened criminals and big city problems served him well in his Los Angeles area patrol district.
There was no hunting activity in Warden Whiteside’s district and freshwater fishing was limited to a couple urban reservoirs. Lon seldom had the time or the inclination to work these inner city mud holes and I really didn’t blame him. Most of the adult fishermen chose to buy beer and cigarettes rather than the required fishing license. If a warden pulled into the parking lot, word quickly spread and everyone scattered.
Although Warden Whiteside’s patrol district was about as urban as it could get, his daily work schedule could be quite interesting. It generally involved airports, pet shops, wild animal facilities and arrest warrants. Our first stop was Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). Wild animals from all over the world were commonly shipped in and out of this massive facility.
Strict regulations governed the importation of exotic species. The law required that each shipment container be accurately labeled. Sometimes boxes and containers were intentionally mislabeled, making the job of an inspector hazardous and possibly life-threatening: An unsuspecting enforcement officer could open a crate of parakeets and find himself face to face with a spitting cobra or a black mamba.
In this instance, two bobcat kittens had been unlawfully shipped from the southern United States. No bigger than your average house cat kittens, these little guys had the dispositions of full-grown wild animals. As Lon and I approached their small cage, both kittens began growling and aggressively hurling their bodies in our direction. Whoever named them wildcats knew what he was talking about.
Warden Whiteside contacted the addressee by phone and advised him that his package had arrived and was ready for pick-up. When the suspect arrived and took possession of the cats, we came from around the corner and confronted him. As was usually the case, this person did not have a permit to import or possess the animals. He was issued a notice to appear in court and the kittens were shipped back to their point of origin.
After saying goodbye to those sweet little kitties, we began checking a series of downtown pet shops. Armed with legal justification, we methodically searched every aquarium, terrarium and bird cage. It didn’t take me long to figure out which shops were more likely to be in violation; without exception, it was the smelly ones. The cleaner the shop, the less likely it was to contain prohibited species.
Warden Whiteside drove our patrol car into a seedy-looking area in the heart of downtown LA. I noticed bars on all the shop windows and graffiti spray painted on most of the walls.
“This is a nice area,” I said, facetiously.
“There’s a little pet shop on the next block that I have been meaning to check out for some time,” said Whiteside. “I want to surprise ’em, so we’ll park here and walk up.”
“Will the car still be here when we come back?” I asked. Whiteside shrugged.
As we stepped inside the shop, a tiny bell hanging from the front door announced our presence. The shop was small and dimly lit, with terrariums and fish tanks stacked in rows near the entrance. Parakeets were chirping in back and the unpleasant odor of rodent urine and wet sawdust filled the air.
We began slowly walking through the display room, looking for clawed frogs, snakeheads, piranhas, native reptiles or any number of other species that were illegal to possess or sell. A thin, gray-haired little man with a cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth came around the corner.
“Can I help you gentlemen?” he said.
“We’re just conducting a routine inspection,” said Warden Whiteside, peering into a terrarium filled with green iguanas.
“I’m the owner and you won’t find anything illegal here.”
The phone rang and the shop owner left for a few minutes. “If this guy isn’t dirty, I’ll buy you lunch,” I said.
We reached the rear of the shop and still hadn’t found anything illegal or suspicious.
“I told you guys you wouldn’t find anything,” said the shop owner, reappearing from the cash register area.
“What’s in that room?” I asked, pointing to a closed door.
“That’s the store room,” said the shop owner. “Nothing in there but empty aquariums, bird seed and cardboard boxes.”
If the shop owner had been clever enough to say the door led to his living quarters, Whiteside and I might have had problems. Instead he told us the truth—half the truth, that is: the store room also contained an aquarium filled with twenty-three six-inch alligator gars. These voracious fish from the southern United States can reach over eight feet in length and weigh as much as three hundred pounds. Should they become established in California waters, they could wreak havoc with game fish populations. All of the gars were seized into evidence and the store manager was issued a citation for unlawful possession and sale of prohibited species.
The furious shop owner claimed that the gars were not for sale—that’s why they were in the back room. I pointed out that gars were also illegal to possess and if he had not intended to sell them, why did he have a ($19.95 each) price tag pasted to the side of the aquarium?
That afternoon we managed one Animal Welfare inspection before attempting to serve an arrest warrant that Whiteside had been working on for some time. The permittee owned a large, gray, timber wolf, which he maintained inside a two-hundred-square-foot chain-link cage. I admired this magnificent animal’s long legs, oversize
d paws, huge head and piercing yellow eyes. In spite of being born and bred in captivity, these restless canines remain wild in spirit. This one never stopped pacing back and forth the entire time we were there.
Our last stop of the day was in Baldwin Park. Baldwin Park is just one of many communities that occupy the Los Angeles basin. To me they were all the same—cars, houses, shopping centers, industrial parks, factories and that foul, gray stuff that everyone calls smog.
Arrest warrants from all over California were sent to Warden Whiteside for service. It was his job to locate Los Angeles area residents who had received hunting or fishing citations elsewhere in the state and had failed to pay their fines or appear in court. It took a considerable amount of investigative skill to track some of these people down, but Warden Whiteside had become quite proficient at it.
Whiteside had been searching for a particular individual for several months and had recently obtained a new address from one of his many information sources. Upon arrival we found, parked in front of the house, a car registered to the person named on the warrant. Warden Whiteside went to the front door and I walked around back. As he knocked on the front door, the man we were after climbed out one of the rear windows. “Here, let me help you,” I said, as I slapped the cuffs on him.
VI
Oak Glen is one of the nicer areas of San Bernardino County. In the seventies it was a small, lower elevation mountain community where citizens of San Bernardino and Riverside could go to buy a box of farm-raised apples or just escape from the hustle and bustle of city life.
Warden John Slaughter and I were patrolling through Oak Glen one day, in 1978, when Slaughter said he had someone he wanted me to meet. He pulled into a long driveway, leading up to a beautiful, rustic, A-frame house. The front deck had been built around a giant oak tree and every architectural feature of the house was designed to blend in with its oak woodland surroundings.
Slaughter and I climbed out of the patrol truck and were immediately greeted by an avian orchestra: cranes, swans, geese and ducks from all over the world were squawking in unison. A fifty-five-year-old man with a butch haircut and wearing a white T-shirt walked out to greet us. Slaughter introduced me to his long-time acquaintance, Ray Farber. Farber invited us up to the deck, where we sat and talked for some time. I must have had a puzzled look on my face. Before I could ask about the bird sanctuary on the lower half of the property, Warden Slaughter told me that Farber did have a Domesticated Game Breeder’s License. He had worked with wild animals for most of his life. Years earlier, Farber had been a wild animal handler for some of the early true-life adventure features.
Over the next two years, I would drop by Ray Farber’s ranch whenever I was in the area, partly because of my interest in the many bird species this man possessed, but mostly because he was a wealth of information. I was particularly interested in his previous relationship with a man named Glen Steele. Having made every effort to protect a small band of desert bighorn sheep during my three and a half years in the desert, I wanted to learn everything I could about the 1970 criminal conspiracy case against Steele and his associates. Farber and Steele had apparently been partners in a private museum, located just south of Farber’s Oak Glen ranch. According to Farber, Glen Steele was an exceptional taxidermist and his work was on display in the museum.
One day when I dropped by to see a new pair of fulvous tree ducks, Farber already had a visitor at the ranch. He introduced me to a Native American woman named Rose. As the three of us sat on Farber’s deck, the conversation got around to the infamous bighorn sheep case. Unknown to me, Rose had worked for Glen Steele at the time of the bighorn sheep investigation and was prosecuted along with Steele and his other associates.
I asked Rose how she got involved in that mess. She said she had worked in Steele’s taxidermy shop and was a professional skinner. “You wouldn’t believe how fast Rose could skin an animal,” Farber interjected.
“Rose, did you go on any of the illegal bighorn sheep hunts with Steele and his rich clients?” I asked.
“Lots of ’em,” Rose replied.
“What was your role?” I asked.
“I skinned out the rams the clients killed,” replied Rose.
“Where did they find all of those trophy rams?”
“Most of them were killed in the park.”
“What park was that?”
“You mean you don’t know? Anza-Borrego.”
“The sheep were killed inside Anza-Borrego State Park?”
“Most were killed in the park. A few out by the Mexican border.”
Anza-Borrego is the largest state park in California. I asked if they had been concerned about being caught by the park rangers. Rose laughed.
“That park is huge! You could drive all day and not run into anybody.”
According to Rose, Glen knew where all the sheep were—from his work on the guzzlers he had helped install there. Guzzlers are man-made structures that capture water from rainfall. He and his associates would drive the clients out in the park, walk a distance to the sheep and simply tell their customers which ones to shoot.
“Kinda like shootin’ fish in a barrel?” I asked.
“We could skin out a ram head and cape in a few minutes and be on our way,” Rose said.
I asked, a second time, if they were concerned about running into the rangers. Rose said they did have one close encounter. “We were driving out on this dirt road and saw a park truck coming toward us. The horns and cape of a sheep we had just killed were on the front floorboard, under the client’s legs. I was sitting in the middle of the front seat, between the client and Glen. We pulled up alongside the ranger’s truck and spoke to him for about five minutes, through the window. He never got out of his truck.”
Rose’s story bothered me. What did the ranger think these three people were doing, miles out in the park, in one hundred and fifteen degree heat?
Rose described another interesting encounter that occurred about a year before Steele and his gang were caught. She and Glen were working in the taxidermy shop when the local game warden showed up unexpectedly. According to Rose, Glen was working on one of the bighorn ram heads at the time. He shoved it under the work bench just before the warden came in the door. The warden stood there and talked with Glen for twenty minutes, then left.
“He never even looked around,” said Rose. “Another ram head was buried in the salt pile on the floor.”
I learned a great deal from the Steele Bighorn Sheep Case, particularly about taxidermists. Over the next twenty-three years I would inspect dozens of taxidermy shops; some taxidermists were honest and others were opportunists, just like Steele. Money, after all, is what got this once respected taxidermist and businessman into trouble. Faced with wealthy hunters willing to pay big money for trophy desert bighorns, he saw his conservation ethic go right out the window. Steele and his associates could rationalize all day about the need to cull the old rams, but their motivation for breaking the law and depriving California’s public of the sight of those magnificent animals was unquestionably money.
Chapter Eight
Sidewinders
I
As a kid growing up in San Diego, I had spent much of my time exploring the nearby canyon and catching snakes and lizards. I appreciated how interesting and beautiful these creatures were and learned to identify every species.
Unlike birds and mammals, reptiles tend to be out of sight and out of mind. As Southern California’s human population has grown, more desert lands, canyons, hillsides and open spaces have been buried under asphalt, houses and shopping centers. Much of the limited reptile habitat that remains has been exploited by individuals wildlife protection officers refer to as “herpers”—taken from herpetology, the study of reptiles and amphibians. These were the reptile collectors, whose main purpose in life was to find snakes and lizards to sell, trade or add to their personal collections.
Some collectors began with native species, like rosy boas and mountain ki
ng snakes, and graduated to exotics, like pythons and giant monitor lizards. The real screwballs kept poisonous snakes, most of which were illegal. Of the dozen or so species of rattlesnakes found in the western United States, some—particularly the small Arizona species—are quite rare. A serious herper might go to great lengths to add a rare species to his collection.
II
My first experience dealing with herpers came in 1978. West of Palm Springs, near a place called White Water, the Mohave Desert transitions into a Southern California chaparral and chamise—both types of evergreen shrub—landscape. This transition zone was occupied by a significant variety of reptile species, particularly snakes. Sometime in the early seventies, a housing development was planned in this area; a whole labyrinth of roads, with street signs included, was paved and laid out. Apparently the developer ran out of money because that was as far as he got. Some herper discovered that these paved streets were magnets for reptiles trying to maintain their body heat on cool nights. The word got out and collectors came from all over the country to pillage this fragile resource.
One fall evening, Warden John Slaughter and I were on stakeout a short distance from the unfinished development near White Water. From our vantage point, we could see the headlights of any vehicle working the roads.
Shortly after 10:00 p.m., two cars headed into the collecting area; they appeared to be working together at first, then split off and traveled in different directions. It was clear what they were up to because each vehicle was driving slowly and making periodic stops in the middle of the road. Every time they stopped, dome lights came on and doors opened and closed.
“Let’s give these people time to hang themselves,” I suggested. “We’ll catch them coming out.” As the two suspect vehicles worked their way up the hillside, Slaughter and I slowly headed toward the entrance to the development. Our headlights were turned off and the switch on Warden Slaughter’s patrol vehicle was set so the brake and backup lights would not come on.
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