Stolen World

by Jennie Erin Smith

  Copyright © 2011 by Jennie Erin Smith

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Photograph Credits

  This page: Roy B. Ripley; This page: Bill Love/Blue Chameleon Ventures

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Smith, Jennie Erin, 1973–

  Stolen world : a tale of reptiles, smugglers, and skulduggery / Jennie Erin Smith.

  p. cm.

  1. Reptile trade—United States—Anecdotes. 2. Wildlife smuggling—United States—Anecdotes. 3. Animal dealers—United States—Anecdotes. 4. Snakes—United States—

  Anecdotes. I. Title.

  SK593.R47S65 2011

  364.1′33670973—dc22 2010009548

  eISBN: 978-0-307-72026-9

  Illustrations by John Burgoyne

  v3.1

  For my late grandfather Joseph McGrath, the most devout reader I have ever known and whose Times clippings we still miss. And for my late grandmother Frances Smith, who liked her stories a little on the rough side.

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  1. I Fly Around the World

  2. Willow Grove

  3. Pine Barrens

  4. O’Kane and Mellon Fly Around the World

  5. The Kingpin

  6. I Search for Adventure

  7. Golden Pythons

  8. Herpetological Research Associates of Papua New Guinea

  9. Fijis

  10. Colette

  11. Conservation thru Commercialization

  12. Waffle House Days

  13. United States v. Tommy Edward Crutchfield, et al.

  14. Chambers Not So Distant

  15. Sanzinia

  16. Belize

  17. Anson and Friends

  18. Whatever Happened to the Plowshare Tortoises?

  19. The Hurricane

  20. Curse of the Bitis parviocula

  21. The Partial Rehabilitation of Tom Crutchfield

  22. The Blue-Rattled Rattler

  23. Parviocula Venom

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Bibliography

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  This book is derived from interviews, court records, and published and unpublished documents. Nearly all quotations derive from interviews; a very small number are derived from sworn testimony. All names are real save for three: Benjamin Bucks, Stefan Schwarz, and Karl Sorensen, which are pseudonyms.

  Part I

  The Kraftsman

  The reptile vendors stood at their convention tables and kept watch over their stacks of deli cups—the same clear, covered plastic containers used at grocery stores to dole out olives or cream cheese. The cups were punched neatly through with air holes, and each contained a baby snake or lizard.

  It was August 1996, and the National Reptile Breeders’ Expo had just opened. Spread out through several ballrooms of an Orlando hotel, vendors displayed their deli cups under canvas signs bearing curious, vaguely propagandistic slogans: “Conservation thru Commercialization,” “Assured Survival Through Applied Scientific Economics.” Almost all were men; at least half of them wore a tattoo, a ponytail, or a T-shirt bearing a reptile design, and some had all of the above.

  The hobby of keeping reptiles, once obscure, was growing very fast, and it had a new name: “herpetoculture.” It sounded like “herpetology,” but you needed a Ph.D. to be a herpetologist. If you woke up to find your pet snake had laid eggs, you were a herpetoculturist. The vendors were breeding reptiles for unusual colors, or mutations like albinism, and such manipulations only increased the animals’ value. Years before, the vendors said, they had relied on importers and smugglers to bring them rare and wonderful reptiles from abroad. Now, thanks to herpetoculture, they simply created their rarities at home, reptiles that were just as valuable, yet perfectly legal. Better still, they said, they’d by now bred so many species that they were saving endangered reptiles from extinction.

  It was all very noble sounding, except that only a few weeks before, the New York Times had run a front-page story about plowshare tortoises, a species said to be on the very precipice of extinction, stolen from a special breeding facility in Madagascar that had been set up to save them. The story implied that some of the missing tortoises could turn up at this expo in Orlando. And three days before the expo, federal wildlife agents had arrested a German for possessing sixty-one smuggled snakes and four tortoises, not plowshares but Madagascar species nonetheless, at a diner in Bushnell, Florida, an hour away.

  Who was the German supposed to meet in Bushnell? The agents wouldn’t say, but the reptile vendors all knew.

  Only one reptile dealer lived in Bushnell, Florida. His name was Tom Crutchfield. At the expo, Crutchfield had the showiest booth and the slickest signs and some of the best animals. Next to his table were two albino iguanas—handsome, motionless ghosts—priced at $75,000 for the pair. Crutchfield was short, thickly built, and mustachioed, and looked extraordinarily testy.

  The U.S. Fish and Wildlife agents were closing in on something larger than a single German, and everyone seemed to know it.

  The owner of the expo, a Florida native named Wayne Hill, was in good spirits despite the fuss, and invited me up to his penthouse suite to talk. Flanked by half a dozen of his associates, Hill reclined on the couch and pontificated about the reptile business, and how it had gotten so big.

  Wayne Hill was a retired petroleum engineer, and had spent some years in Saudi Arabia. He was an oil man, but above all a reptile man, and there in the desert, he said, he’d had a vision—like Jesus and Moses before him.

  This speech had the marks of one delivered many, many times, but Hill’s friends leaned in anyway. In the desert, Hill said, he envisioned a forum where reptile breeders could freely trade their live animals. Before the first of his reptile expos, he explained, the reptile dealers had been confined to selling their animals at zoo and science symposiums, until a backlash against the animal trade caused them to feel unwelcome. Hill encouraged the animal dealers to abandon these conventions, and he started one just for them, in 1990, at a Howard Johnson’s in Orlando. And now, six years later, here we were. At a much bigger hotel. Why did the New York Times think the plowshare tortoises would show up here? I asked Hill. Now Hill sounded mad. Someone hostile to the trade must have planted the idea, he said, a zoo person or an “animal-rights Nazi.” After that, I didn’t bother asking Hill about the German or Tom Crutchfield, or why this brave new reptile-breeding industry, where snakes emerged from sterile containers like Aldous Huxley’s fetuses, would have any more use for smugglers.

  But then, weirdly, Hill pointed me to a smuggler he said he was very fond of, a smuggler without whom, he said, a great many of these species wouldn’t be in Orlando at all.

  I found Hank Molt a day later, just where Wayne Hill said he’d be, alone at a table by the pool. It was late afternoon. I can’t remember if Molt had a Heineken in his hand, but in the years that followed I would seldom see him in such settings without one.

  He was in his mid-fifties then, tall and lean. He seemed delighted by what was happening to Tom Crutchfield. Like Crutchfield, Molt eschewed the whole tattoo-and-ponytail aesthetic for a clean, almost soldierly look—brush cut, cargo pants. He had the quick, bulging eyes of someone very smart and easily unhinged. Molt said he was annoyed that someone beat him to the plowshare tortoises, a heist he’d been pondering for
years, though he would have taken only a few animals, he said, not the seventy-five that were stolen.

  Molt had no sign at the reptile expo, no slogan, no table of his own, no animals.

  To him this thing called herpetoculture, with its genetic mutations and deli cups and pretensions to science, held limited appeal. He lived for the natural animals, he said, for their rarity and beauty and where you had to go to get them. Now, he complained, the animals have lost their stories.

  In the years when Molt styled himself not as a shameless veteran smuggler but as a “specialist dealer in rare fauna,” he would arrive at the zoos, fresh from the world, with snakes and lizards in his knotted cloth sacks.

  He would open the bags one at a time and let the animal crawl out as he told its story. This was not the most efficient way to sell animals. It was theater, and it took hours.

  “It was the romance of the snake,” Molt said. And what a terrible, twisted romance it would turn out to be.

  1

  I Fly Around the World

  In 1965, Henry A. Molt, Jr., took a sales job at Kraft Foods, where he was given the use of a company station wagon and an exurb of Philadelphia as his territory. Molt hated everything about the job except the station wagon, which he would commandeer on weekends to visit zoos. Molt had been collecting reptiles since the age of six, when he carried a sickly king snake around school in a knotted sack; as he grew older, he sought reptiles more far-flung and dangerous. Now, at twenty-five, he kept cobras, rattlesnakes, Gila monsters, and pythons in the basement of his parents’ home.

  Kraft Foods was proud of its eccentric young salesman, and mere months after hiring Molt it put a drawing of a cobra—erect, hooded, and ready for action—on the cover of its employee magazine, The Kraftsman. Tucked next to a recipe for salmon loaf with cheddar sauce was an article about Molt. Kraft Foods had dispatched a reporter to learn all he could about Molt and his unusual hobby, which, Molt was happy to imply, involved the occasional illegality:

  Molt next showed me what he considered to be his most valuable specimen. It was a beautiful Diamond python which had come from Australia and for which he had paid $90. Molt says the Diamond python is found only in Australia and New Guinea and is fast becoming extinct. For this reason Australian authorities have forbidden its exportation.

  “How did you get yours smuggled out?” I asked. Molt gave me a sly glance but said nothing.

  When Molt’s workdays of counting mayonnaise jars and issuing credits for moldy cheese ended, he would retreat to his bedroom at his parents’ house and write letters to foreign animal dealers, whose addresses he’d found in “The Animal People’s Directory,” a booklet that circulated in those days to zoos and film studios. Molt wanted only the rare animals, reptiles even the zoos couldn’t get, so he sought out dealers in countries that restricted, or banned, the export of wildlife to the United States: Australia, Mexico, Communist states. “I would follow the most obscure lead,” Molt said. “If I saw a picture in National Geographic of a missionary holding a snake, I would try to write him, too. Most of the letters probably never reached their destinations.”

  BEFORE RESIGNING himself to a career at Kraft, Molt had presented Roger Conant, the Philadelphia Zoo’s curator of reptiles, with a gift of some Mexican pit vipers. Molt hoped to curry favor with Conant and land a job at the zoo, but Conant only thanked Molt for the snakes. Molt had majored in English in college, not any sort of science, had spent most of his time in a fraternity house, and, anticipating his graduation draft notice, had enlisted in the marines, calculating correctly that they would be less likely than the army to send him to Vietnam. He still owed the marine reserves a weekend a month, and would for quite some time.

  Molt’s tedium was broken by the monthly lectures of the Philadelphia Herpetological Society, at the Academy of Natural Sciences. The academy was one of Molt’s favorite places; by twenty-five he had already spent hundreds of hours in its library, reading snake articles amid its ancient leathery smells and glass cabinets. There Molt met Joe Laszlo, a Hungarian who had escaped the Soviet invasion in a hay wagon bound for Austria, then emigrated to Philadelphia, where he maintained multitudes of lab rodents for the Albert Einstein Hospital. Laszlo was tired of mice; all he’d ever wanted was to work in a zoo, with snakes.

  After his experience with Roger Conant, Molt doubted his chances with the zoos, but even a bad zoo job would trump Kraft, so Molt and Laszlo synchronized their meager vacation time and drove the Kraft station wagon to zoos in Columbus, Ohio; Atlanta; and Fort Worth, Texas, all of which were building new reptile houses.

  The moneyed old northern zoos, like those in Philadelphia and the Bronx, had long maintained reptile houses with interesting foreign species, but at most zoos, “reptile house” traditionally meant a cement floor scattered with half-starved local rattlesnakes that died every winter and were replaced in the spring. By the mid-1960s, though, the smaller zoos in the South and the West were talking about hundreds of species, climate control, skylights, indoor jungles, and curving cages with nonreflective glass. The new reptile buildings housed the aspirations of a crop of freshly minted reptile curators, men weaned on the snake books of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, books by writers like Frank “Bring ’Em Back Alive” Buck; Raymond L. Ditmars, the Bronx Zoo’s first reptile curator; Carl Kauffeld of the Staten Island Zoo, a rattlesnake hunter; Clifford Pope of the American Museum of Natural History, with his fondness for giant pythons and boas and anacondas; and poor Karl Schmidt of Chicago’s Field Museum, who loved African snakes and then died from one’s bite. The reptile curators at the emerging zoos were only a generation removed from these snake writers, and they scrambled for rarities, competing fiercely with one another. “Everybody wanted to get something somebody else didn’t have,” said Wayne King, the Bronx Zoo’s curator of reptiles at the time.

  MOLT AND LASZLO had no luck finding jobs in the new, high-tech zoos. They returned to Philadelphia.

  If they couldn’t work for zoos, they could buy and sell reptiles, they decided. Together, they shipped a box of rattlesnakes to a laboratory in Hungary, a deal for which they created a business name and an onionskin letterhead. They called their fake firm the Philadelphia Reptile Exchange, just to call it something. When Laszlo was eventually hired by a zoo, Molt hung on to the stationery, on which he sent out more letters seeking reptiles. Every so often, someone responded.

  A man wrote from Holland, offering to sell Molt some Australian reptiles. He was acting as an intermediary for his son, he said, who lived in Australia.

  Splendid, unique reptiles—straw-colored pythons with ebony heads, bright green snakes that coiled elegantly over branches, river turtles with piglike snouts—were tantalizingly abundant in Australia and New Guinea, but very hard to get. Australia had some of the strictest wildlife laws in the world, a result of its bad experiences with alien species. Rabbits, introduced by hunters in the nineteenth century, had made a crumbled moonscape out of its vast grasslands. Cane toads, native to South America, had been introduced to eat beetles that plagued the continent’s sugarcane fields, but they didn’t jump high enough to do even that; instead, they swelled to the size of Chihuahuas, and their poison skin killed native predators. Foreign species had done so much damage in such a short time that Australia responded in the 1960s with a blanket ban: no foreign animals or plants in, no native ones out, and the same went for its protectorates, like Papua New Guinea. Only government zoos could send their representatives to Australia or New Guinea and expect to return with animals, and even they had a tough time of it.

  Australian zoos were equally frustrated in obtaining foreign species, which meant that any Australian zookeeper had the potential to become a smuggling partner, and this Dutchman’s son turned out, to Molt’s surprise, to be head keeper of the Melbourne Zoo. In 1965 he began shipping Molt diamond pythons and carpet pythons in crates marked “china” and “glassware.”

  Just as this connection started to bear fruit, Molt received a lett
er from Megot Schetty, the owner of Schlangenpark Maggia, a private snake zoo on the Swiss-Italian border. Schetty was a widow of indeterminate age, small and gray. Her scientist husband had been killed by a swarm of bees in Africa. In her lush greenhouses, Schetty kept species Molt coveted: giant hog-nosed snakes from Madagascar, vipers from Israel and Jordan. Schetty sent Molt whatever animals he asked for. In return Schetty wanted what every European snake fancier wanted: rare dwarf rattlesnakes from Arizona and Mexico, maroon-and-orange-patterned corn snakes from the Carolinas, the black, lustrous indigo snakes of Florida.

  All this exchange was leaving Molt with a reptile collection of impressive variety and value. In May 1966, Molt married and moved into an apartment, but returned daily to his parents’ basement to feed his bushmasters and fix the heat lamps on his Palestine vipers. His Kraft job became harder to bear. “We’d have these regional sales meetings where the managers would say, ‘Okay, tigers, go out and get ’em!’ ” he said, “and they’d make us growl like tigers as we went down the stairs—grrrrr!” At the company’s annual convention in Chicago that year, the vice presidents dressed as cowboys, exhorting the team to “shoot for higher sales.” Molt had just about had it. He spent the Sunday of the convention alone at the zoo, where he saw alive, for the first time, a Dumeril’s boa from Madagascar. There is nothing particularly spectacular about a Dumeril’s boa—it is brown, it is not too big, it hides in the leaf litter. But the sight of one ignited something in Molt, who was by then fairly combustible.

  On the plane back to Philadelphia, Molt sat next to an executive from IBM, fresh out of a similar convention. The man asked Molt what kind of business he was in.

  “I fly all around the world collecting animals for zoos,” Molt answered. Somehow, it sounded more natural than the truth.