Stolen World

by Jennie Erin Smith

  Molt’s timing couldn’t have been better. Zoos were suddenly interested in reptiles, but weren’t particularly good at breeding or caring for them. Mortality was always high, and in a period when exhibits were expanding, a good dealer relationship helped. What if you walked into your jungle river one morning and found the crocodiles belly-up?

  THANKS TO Megot Schetty in Switzerland, Molt now had the Dumeril’s boas that had enraptured him in his final days at Kraft. Jonathan Leakey, son of the famous paleoanthropologists in Kenya, was sending him African dwarf adders. But the Australian animals were by far the most profitable, and Molt suddenly found himself with a serious supply glitch there.

  After a long silence from Melbourne, the zookeeper’s father sent Molt an obituary: His son had died, at only thirty-seven, of a heart attack brought on by obesity.

  Molt needed another Australian smuggler. The Australian animals had become Molt’s specialty, and if he didn’t keep them coming in, the zoos would find them elsewhere. He turned to the widow Schetty, who was always good for a contact.

  Schetty gave him a woman’s name: Gisela Szoke, of Perth. She didn’t know much about the woman, she confessed. Molt tapped out a letter.

  A man responded. His name was Henry, too—Henry Szoke, the brother of Gisela. Gisela didn’t deal in reptiles, it turned out; Henry did.

  Henry Molt and Henry Szoke corresponded for a year. They experimented with boxes of different materials and dimensions. Now and then they failed. A box of baby crocodiles was intercepted in Australia when an inspector felt air holes. A taipan mailed to Philadelphia in a cookie tin came in dead and rotten. Air holes had to be concealed, and cookie tins were out. When shipments were large, Szoke sent them in red shipping crates labeled “art.”

  Henry Szoke shared Molt’s interest in rare and obscure species, and had good smuggling techniques. Molt paid him cash, which he mailed in Hallmark cards. Almost everything Szoke sent arrived healthy. Molt barely missed the ill-fated zookeeper he had earlier depended on. Between price lists, Molt sent out bulletins of “specials,” whatever was fresh from Szoke. The Bronx Zoo emerged as a major buyer of Szoke’s New Guinea crocodiles. The Dallas Zoo had a thing for his Australian lizards.

  Without Henry Szoke, Henry Molt was nobody. “He was the steak,” Molt said. “Everyone else was pickles.”

  THANKFULLY, MOLT’S institutional clients seldom visited his retail shop, whose giant sign still said “Pet Emporium,” and whose shady frat-house atmosphere contrasted sharply with the scholarly tone of his mailings. Fellow reptile dealers, carny snake handlers, kids from the suburbs, small-time poachers with something to unload—all found a hangout there. In place of the kittens and puppies, which he’d expunged, Molt kept a hatchling snapping turtle in a glass jar by the register, feeding it and changing the water until, like a living ship in a bottle, the thing had grown so big it could not escape. At which point the “snappy in a jar” would be liberated with a hammer, and a new one would take its place.

  The apartment upstairs was occupied by an ex-convict named Bob Udell, a bearish young man in and out of mental institutions and jail, who would set police cars on fire, or shoplift large quantities of meat. Udell decorated his apartment with bead curtains and a naked mannequin lying in a coffin. He darkened his windows because it reminded him, in a comforting way, of jail. Udell was nonetheless very good with rare snakes, and became a constant presence in Molt’s shop, a quasi employee. “Udell had a talent with the animals. He could walk by a cage and see a snake not lying right, and sure enough the animal was dehydrated,” Molt said. “Plus you couldn’t make him go away—he would burn your house to the ground.” Udell minded the store and packed up the reptiles for deliveries. Molt, the only one around with any college, drove the boxes to zoos in a Volkswagen minibus, and did all the talking.

  A PECULIAR man phoned the Philadelphia Reptile Exchange one day. He sounded like a hillbilly, almost cartoonishly so, and yet he was on his way to Madagascar, he told Molt, “to get some lemurs.” He was thinking of picking up some snakes while he was there. “The problem is,” the man said, “I can’t tell one from the other.” He was on his way to Philadelphia, he said, right now.

  The hillbilly turned out to be a towering, freckled, elfin-eared man named Leon Leopard. He lived in Waco, Texas, on a street called Parrot Street. Leopard was new to the animal business. He owned a string of gas stations, and, like many station owners in an era of cheap gas, had resorted to gimmicks to boost sales. Leopard’s gimmick was live monkeys. So for a certain number of fill-ups you could have a free squirrel monkey.

  Leopard bought his monkeys from Miami’s biggest animal importer in those days, a man named Bill Chase, whose compound housed ostriches, tigers, all manner of parrots, venomous snakes, ponds filled with alligators and marine toads and tortoises soaking in the sun. Chase’s monkeys arrived on night flights from Peru, a thousand at a time. It occurred to Leopard, the first time he drove to Miami and saw Chase’s incredible, teeming place, that there might be money to be made in the animal business. What was the most valuable monkey of all? he asked Chase. Lemurs, Chase told him, which are not actually monkeys, he explained, but another sort of primate, found only in Madagascar. Leopard left Miami thinking about lemurs, and Madagascar. He checked in at the zoos, where the curators told Leopard that there were Madagascar snakes worth money, too. They handed him Molt’s price list.

  Leopard was impressed with Molt’s business, and Molt was impressed with Leopard. For a yokelish Texan who owned gas stations and spoke no French, Madagascar was not an easy trip. Besides being isolated, poor, and barely navigable, it was in the middle of a Marxist insurgency that would soon sever it from France. The country was literally burning—political points were made by torching thousands of hectares.

  Leopard left for Madagascar wearing a gas station uniform that he had converted into a zoo uniform with the addition of a few patches. He carried doctored stationery, too, with his own name printed under the Central Texas Zoo’s logo with the title “Director of Zoo Biology.” Leopard returned from Madagascar with the rarest of the rare—lemurs, boas, plowshare tortoises—all with stamped permits from the Ministère des Eaux et Forêts. Molt could barely contain his awe or his envy.

  Now Leopard wanted to fly to Papua New Guinea, where it had been only a decade since the Australians outlawed cannibalism. The populace was so notoriously hot-tempered that the American embassy advised visitors to keep driving if they hit someone’s dog on the road. Leopard urged Molt to come along. But Molt still owed the marines one weekend a month. If Molt couldn’t come and lend his knowledge, Leopard suggested, perhaps he could supply some cash.

  They agreed that Molt would put up $2,000, and that Leopard would go collect the elusive Boelen’s python, an iridescent black-and-white snake from the highlands. No one had ever returned from New Guinea with a live Boelen’s python, but the snakes had been studied sporadically since the 1930s, and a few sat pickled in museums. Molt scrutinized the jarred Boelen’s pythons at the Academy of Natural Sciences and studied a map of New Guinea, pinning it with locales from the museum labels. At least Leopard would know where to look. Molt and Leopard agreed to sell the animals together, and split any profits.

  Leopard readied his fake zoo stationery and his fake zoo uniforms. He carried Molt’s map.

  Leopard fared even better in New Guinea than he had in Madagascar. Wildlife officers found him a coffee farmer in the highlands who was also a government-licensed animal collector. The coffee farmer provided Leopard with not only Boelen’s pythons but also birds of paradise and oddball indigenous mammals. It took Molt and Leopard a whole year to sell everything; Molt had to run a two-for-one special on tree kangaroos, which he kept in dog kennels and tried to feed figs. “I was freaking out. I didn’t know how to take care of them,” he said, and he hated mammals, anyway. Molt and Leopard drove to the zoos in Leopard’s Cadillac, entertaining zoo directors at restaurants, where Leopard enraptured them like a country preacher
. “He had really good stories—probably many of them bullshit but they sounded good,” Molt said. “All we’d seen was Wild Kingdom and National Geographic. Here was a guy who’d been there.” Molt was increasingly enamored of the Texan, as were the zoos. “Leon made a very, very rapid rise,” said Robert Wagner, a longtime president of the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums. “He knew frightfully little about animals—he was for most of his life the equivalent of a used car salesman. But he just became fascinated with it.”

  THE MARINES cut Molt loose in the summer of 1970. In anticipation of this day, Molt solicited requests from the zoos, just the way Leopard had done. He purchased himself an around-the-world ticket: Philadelphia–London–Lagos–Accra–Johannesburg–Maputo–Antananarivo–Nairobi–Cairo–Istanbul–Frankfurt–Philadelphia. He carried new business cards stamped with the logo of the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums:

  HENRY A. MOLT, JR.

  ZOOLOGICAL EXPEDITION

  Authorized Agent for:

  LINCOLN PARK ZOO

  100 W. WEBSTER AVE.

  CHICAGO, ILL. U.S.A.

  The Lincoln Park Zoo, in its lust for lemurs, had furnished Molt with these nominal credentials. Its assistant director sent him a wish list: “At present we need a female White-fronted, female Red-fronted and male Fat-tailed Dwarf Lemur … we also want ruffed, either color phase, Black Lemurs and Crowned Lemurs … if you can come up with Gray Gentle Lemurs (Hapalemur) we’d be interested in those too.”

  Molt had no idea what he was doing. He had a map of Africa, a handful of contacts, and the vicarious experience of Leon Leopard to go on. If he could get lemurs, he would, but lemurs didn’t keep him up at night. What did was the Angolan python, deemed by the Guinness Book of World Records to be “the world’s rarest snake.” None of the zoo people had seen one alive, or even a decent photo of one; all Molt could find was a photo with a grainy image of a dead specimen in liquid, from an old German article in the Academy of Natural Sciences. He could barely make out its pattern.

  When he got to Accra, Molt headed for the university in search of snake people. He found some American graduate students and installed himself in their rental house. The authorized zoological expedition of the Lincoln Park Zoo then blasted through the cacao plantations of Ghana in a Land Rover, finding Gaboon vipers, Cameroon toads, and ropelike aggregations of army ants that could be lifted with a stick. Here and there they stopped to pull stunts on local people. They picked up a hitchhiker, but only after measuring his arms and legs; they explained that they were selling him to a shaman, laughing mercilessly as he fled the Land Rover into the darkening forest.

  The students shipped Molt’s snakes and toads back to Philadelphia. Molt flew to South Africa. To actually try to collect an Angolan python in its native range would be suicidal. The snakes occurred on the Namibian-Angolan border, a mined war zone patrolled by South African and Cuban troops and an independent faction of guerrillas. But an Afrikaner naturalist promised to find Molt four—his contacts were brave or desperate enough to cross minefields for snakes—and send them cash on delivery. Molt continued with confidence to Madagascar, where he stormed about the offices of the Ministère des Eaux et Forêts, acting the veteran zoo collector, seeking lemurs for his sponsors in Chicago. The officers were not budging: Duke University’s lemur experts had by then effected a ban on the collection of lemurs by anyone but themselves.

  Molt loudly invoked the name of Leon Leopard, director of zoo biology at the Central Texas Zoo. He worked very closely with Leopard, he told the bureaucrats, and Leopard would not be pleased to hear about his ill treatment.

  While Molt was trying to look indignant, a wiry man gestured to him from the hallway. It was Leon Leopard’s guide, Folo Emmanuel. Within days Emmanuel and Molt were in the Perinet national forest, stuffing reptiles into bags. They slept in Emmanuel’s smoke-filled hut, eating fish tails with Emmanuel’s children, an arrangement Molt could tolerate only briefly. He tried to sleep on the floor at a nearby train station, because that was more comfortable, until after a few days he gave up on the lemurs, and on Madagascar. He departed for Kenya with a single sack of Madagascar ground boas in his luggage. At the Nairobi Intercontinental he ordered room service.

  At noon the next day Molt gathered his snakes and his suitcase and rented a tiny Fiat. The man at the rental firm asked him if he had any plans to leave the city with it. This was not, he emphasized, a car that could be driven into the bush. “Hell, I know that,” Molt said, and started immediately toward the estate of Jonathan Leakey, two hundred miles to the north. As Molt drove, the pavement became dirt, the dirt became stones, and the stones grew grapefruit-sized, then pumpkin-sized, until finally one broke the Fiat’s manifold and killed it. In the early evening, somewhere on the high plain spanning Kenya and Ethiopia, Molt found himself alone with his snakes. A group of Masai shepherds passed. They regarded Molt with what may or may not have been pity, then moved on. Roger Conant had advised the teenage Molt to get far away from Philadelphia. This he had accomplished. “I figured I would be eaten by lions or hyenas or something,” Molt said.

  A few hours later, at dusk, Molt was rescued by some passing Kenyan soldiers. He jumped onto their Land Rover and waded with them through a chest-deep river, carrying his snakes and his bags above his head. The soldiers dropped him off at Leakey’s house. By then it was night, and Leakey was not home. A servant allowed Molt to rest on the couch and brought him tea, while Molt took in his elegant surroundings—terraces and gardens, oriental rugs and carvings, the frog calls from the lake’s edge, and the smell of teak furniture. The generator shut off, and it was dark. Molt tried to sleep, only to be roused by a growling in his face. A caracal, with tall, tufted ears, was investigating him.

  Jonathan Leakey ran a snake farm and a melon farm on this sprawling lakefront homestead, and unlike his famous parents and brother, he was more interested in money than in digging up fossil hominids. At twenty-nine, Molt’s age exactly, Leakey had a reputation already compromised by the frequent deaths of his employees, who got killed packing his poisonous snakes. Leakey was surprised to find Molt on his couch, but obligingly shuttled him around the lake, with its wading hippos and flocks of flamingos. He radioed to have Molt’s wreck of a Fiat repaired well enough for a return trip to Nairobi, where Molt left it parked in the rental lot, with a polite note and nonworking credit card number. He had a plane to catch. With him was his bag of Madagascar ground boas and some little horned vipers from Kenya, which he bagged and stuffed into a sneaker. He left for home, where a customs officer picked up Molt’s sneaker, and seemed poised to insert a probing hand into its toe, when he changed his mind and returned the sneaker to Molt’s suitcase, sparing himself an excruciating and noteworthy death.

  NOT MUCH could keep Molt at home after that. As a husband, he was indifferent on a good day. The Angolan pythons arrived from South Africa and turned out to be stunning after all, a beautiful caramel brown with rounded scales like beads and white, lightning-shaped markings on their sides. Yet the high Molt felt on opening a crate of the world’s rarest snakes quickly gave way to boredom and wanderlust. He let Bob Udell take over the pet shop while he retooled himself into the itinerant reptile collector he longed to be. Molt changed his business ads. Instead of classifieds for forty-dollar pythons in the Philadelphia Daily News, it was full columns in the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums directories. “SPECIAL COLLECTING TRIPS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD AT NO RISK TO YOU,” Molt now promised. “YOU PAY ONLY FOR RESULTS!!”

  In 1971, Molt and Leon Leopard fell out over shipments Leopard continued to receive from New Guinea. Molt had a feeling Leopard was getting more animals than he claimed, and not paying Molt his half. Molt phoned around to the zoos to see who had what animals, then billed them, ostensibly on the partnership’s behalf, pocketing $6,000. Just in case Leopard thought of trying the same, Molt sent the zoos an emergency bulletin: “Until further written notice, no person(s)
or business other than myself, Henry A. Molt, is authorized to represent PHILADELPHIA REPTILE EXCHANGE in any respect whatsoever.” Incidentally, he added on the bottom of the page, “I am planning to leave shortly on an extensive collecting trip to South East Asia and the Pacific.”

  After Africa, the world seemed smaller to Molt, and Leon Leopard’s achievements less extraordinary. New Guinea no longer sounded far or foreboding. Molt would fly there and seek Leopard’s coffee farmer in the highlands, undercutting Leopard. On the way he would stop over in Sydney to see Henry Szoke, purveyor of marvelous illegal Australian animals, whom Molt knew nothing about and was very curious to meet. Szoke told Molt he was welcome to visit, but he had something to confess, he said: He was not Henry Szoke.

  Henry Szoke did not exist. Henry Szoke was Stefan Schwarz, a German from Stuttgart. He would explain the rest when they met.

  STEFAN SCHWARZ was not tall, and he walked with a slight limp, but he was tan and handsome, a few years older than Molt. His German accent was barely detectable under his Australian one. Together Schwarz and Molt made an abbreviated tour of Sydney—the still-uncompleted Opera House, the harbor, and the botanical gardens.

  “Within hours he had told me his whole life story,” Molt said.

  Schwarz had been born in Stuttgart to a family of academics. Most of them still lived there, except his sister Gisela, who had also emigrated to Australia, and was married to a Hungarian named Szoke.