Before leaving for Australia, Schwarz had been a keeper at the Stuttgart Zoo. The Germans, along with the Belgians and the Dutch, possessed some of the finest and oldest zoos in the world, and skilled keepers like Schwarz fanned out to guide new zoos as they sprung up on other continents. In Sydney, Schwarz became general curator of the Australian Reptile Park, which had emerged in the 1950s from a venom-extracting operation just like those common then in the American South—except that instead of rattlesnakes, the Australians milked the insanely deadly and fast-moving tai-pans. Schwarz continued to maintain his ties to zoos in Europe, and in 1964 he finessed for the reptile park Australia’s last big legal importation of foreign reptiles, a huge sampling from dealers and zoos in Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium, which arrived in Australia on a Dutch freighter. Schwarz accompanied the reptiles for the ten-thousand-mile journey, changing dirty snake bags and administering live rodents. When an Amazon tree boa died toward the end, only a few miles offshore of Melbourne, Schwarz blithely tossed it overboard. A young man found it on the beach and toted it to the National Museum, whose head herpetologist embarrassed himself with wild hypotheses of how the snake had crossed the Pacific.
Years later, when he was settled in Sydney, Schwarz took it upon himself to return the European zoos’ generosity. He boarded a plane to Stuttgart with a Tasmanian devil in his hand luggage. He collected monitors and snakes in Australia and New Zealand, sending them to Europe in his red boxes labeled “art.”
When Molt came to visit, Schwarz was in the process of divorcing his German-born wife. He was leaving Sydney and the zoo, moving north to a property in Cairns. There he would build a private collection of reptiles in pits and wooden cages, and expand his side business in cane toads. Schwarz collected the monstrous invasive toads and sold them, dead and preserved, for dissection and novelty wallets. He was finished with zoos; now, for the foreseeable future, it would be cane toads and smuggling.
Schwarz and Molt got on like brothers. They visited the zoos and forests of New South Wales and slept under the stars. They sensed, even then, that they would be working together a long time.
IN PORT Moresby, Papua New Guinea, Molt boarded at the Civic Guest House, a hostel run by an Australian widow who fed her guests in a common mess. The Civic Guest House was Molt’s type of place—a frat house. He drank away the thick humid nights with American servicemen and a guy hunting for downed Japanese warplanes. Already, he liked New Guinea. It was, in its way, crazier than Africa. The roads around Port Moresby teemed at night with snakes, and Molt would enlist the Americans to pile into his rental car and go hunting. They drove in heavy rains along the Brown River, packing a rifle and machetes and a case of South Pacific lager, taking pains not to hit any dogs.
Unfortunately no Boelen’s pythons lived along the Brown River. These Molt would have to get from the highlands. Leon Leopard had been the first to bring them back alive, which annoyed Molt. He would just have to bring back more.
All Molt knew of Leopard’s coffee farmer was that he lived in a place called Wau. Two flights a week left Port Moresby for the Wau airstrip, and Molt boarded a plane so small that passengers had to be weighed before boarding. Its wing had been bandaged with what appeared to be duct tape.
Pilots in Papua New Guinea were mostly Australians who shuttled mail into the mines and plantations of the highlands. They knew where everyone lived. And so Molt found himself, without extraordinary effort, a guest of Peter Shanahan, Leon Leopard’s supplier and the biggest coffee farmer in Wau. Shanahan lived with his American wife in a plantation home on a grassy hill, where thick fogs blocked the sun for days at a time. They were attended to by tenant farmers and servants who called Shanahan “master,” which simultaneously creeped Molt out and thrilled him.
Shanahan was a third-generation New Guinean, thirty-one years old. His maternal grandfather, a German, had planted the country’s first coffee farm with seeds smuggled from Jamaica. Shanahan’s parents had sent him to boarding school in Sydney, but he was called back before college—family fortunes, once huge from gold mining, were flagging, reduced to the coffee plots. Shanahan’s dreams of becoming a biologist were shelved to save them. Yet Shanahan ended up a skilled and sought-after animal collector even as he farmed coffee. He netted butterflies for the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, and birds of paradise for the Rotterdam Zoo.
Shanahan had seen his first Boelen’s python only a few years before, in the mountains above Wau. It was sunning itself in a tree, its skin shimmering like taffeta. Finding a python at that altitude, Shanahan said, “was like, ‘What the heck?’ It was a snake I hadn’t seen before, very pretty. I made a big pole and hooked it. When I looked around they were quite common.” Shanahan collected several. He did not know what to call them.
When Leon Leopard arrived in Wau one day, wearing his ersatz zoo uniform, he showed Shanahan photos of the very same snake. “Leon Leopard. Central Texas Zoo,” the Texan announced, extending his hand.
“That shook me up,” Shanahan said. “I had never heard an accent like that before.”
Shanahan didn’t know what to make of Leopard, except that “he had a big opinion of himself and was full of stories. And he lived on Parrot Street, which was weird.” Leopard didn’t seem to know much about wildlife, which was odd for a zoo man—“but back then there weren’t the books,” Shanahan said. “Even the common species, we didn’t know what they were. Libraries didn’t exist in Wau.”
Up in the Wau hills, any white visitor was accommodated—people were bored, and reflexively gracious in the colonial fashion. Leopard also came equipped with the approval of the wildlife department in Port Moresby, and as a licensed collector it was Shanahan’s job to provide. Shanahan’s wife, though, quietly made copies of Leopard’s documents. The Texan was, in her estimation, “a spiv, a cheat,” and maybe not a zoo man at all.
Now, only a year or so since Leopard’s visit, here was Hank Molt: younger, far more knowledgeable, and every bit as suspect. “Hank worked on impressing,” Shanahan said. “He was Mr. Sophisticated. He knew his stuff, that was pretty obvious—not birds and mammals, but reptiles.” He wondered whether Molt had really fallen out with Leopard, as Molt had claimed, or whether the two were setting him up. “I was just a hick,” said Shanahan. “We could handle crocodiles and cyclones but these boys from the city were something else.”
Shanahan was sitting on tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of animals Leopard had ordered, “a spectacular collection,” Shanahan said, but Leopard had delayed so long in arriving that Shanahan had become panicked. He would dump it for a pittance if he had to, just to cover his costs. And now here was Molt. It certainly seemed like a setup.
Molt offered to buy all the animals, to get Shanahan out of a bind. “Hank actually took out his checkbook,” Shanahan said. “Right then and there.” But Shanahan said he would have to wait for Leopard. And then Leopard called.
Molt said he’d like to stick around awhile longer.
MOLT SAT on Shanahan’s porch, staring at the hills, drinking a South Pacific lager. He had come to New Guinea hoping to make $250,000. He would be lucky, now, if he broke even. It was a failure, but failure can be mitigated by small reprisals, and Molt had one in mind.
A nervous Shanahan had driven off in his old Land Rover that morning to collect Leon Leopard at the airport in Port Moresby. This would have been a relief to Shanahan, but then, there was Molt still drinking beer on his porch, for reasons that were not clear to him, and Molt had insisted that Shanahan say nothing to Leopard about him. “That whole situation caused me so much angst and trouble,” Shanahan said. “I never knew how to handle these guys. I just figured I had to bring them together.”
It was evening when the Land Rover returned. Shanahan’s servants were relaxing on the grass, chatting and picking lice from one another’s hair. Molt waved from the porch. Leopard had to squint, shut the car door, then amble closer on his long, slender legs.
The entire reason Molt had remained i
n Wau was to savor Leon Leopard’s expression. It was a stricken one, just as he’d hoped: wide-eyed, pale, a hint of bile rising to the throat.
“Mercy, mercy,” said Leopard. That was enough for Molt.
AN INVIGORATED Molt flew on to Fiji. He introduced himself to museum officials as a zoologist.
The museum men, expatriate Britons, directed Molt to the island of Ovalau, where children followed him wherever he wandered. He drank kava in a thatched hut with two kindly brothers, who taught him the words for the two species he sought—the Fiji banded iguana was voiki, and the Fiji boa nanka. Both were seriously coveted by zoos. In the United States, only the San Diego Zoo had ever exhibited Fiji iguanas—demure, emerald-colored creatures, the males bearing stripes of robin’s-egg blue, that are by some unexplained phenomenon related to the iguanas of Central America and the Caribbean, seven thousand miles away. Leon Leopard and Molt, in happier days, had made a pilgrimage to San Diego to view a pair of Fijis. They were taken aback by the iguanas’ diminutive size, their alert red eyes, and their jewel colors.
On Ovalau, the brothers assembled some kids to catch Molt’s nankas and voikis. To Molt’s dismay, the kids set the trees on fire, raining reptiles to the ground and charring them in the process. Giant tree-dwelling crabs had nipped off the boas’ tails, so they were stubby as well as charred. Molt climbed a tree after a Fiji iguana, to demonstrate its proper capture. He fell from the treetop into a brook, then rose from the water with one lizard triumphantly in hand. Molt returned to Philadelphia with a crate of them.
When Molt delivered his iguanas to the zoos, he made sure to tell a story, like Leon Leopard before him.
There were four or five women on the base of this tree all pointing up and yelling “voiki! voiki!” Finally I saw it—it was a solid green female. I started climbing the tree, pursuing this thing from branch to branch. Higher and higher it went onto smaller and smaller branches, eluding me at a deliberate pace. All of a sudden it’s about to hop over to the next tree! I lunge my body forward so I go crashing out of the tree right into a stream of water six feet deep. But the iguana is in my hand and I rise slowly from the water, wielding it above my head, like the Statue of fucking Liberty.
He sold them all.
2
Willow Grove
Molt’s new retail store, a brick storefront in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, did much to discourage casual shoppers. His old store, the Pet Emporium, had been cursed with a metal sign the size of a truck—there was no way to remove it, and therefore no way to curtail the incessant foot traffic. Police were constantly coming around, too, looking for Bob Udell. So Molt decided to move. He discouraged Udell from following.
In Willow Grove, Molt covered the windows in bamboo mats and marked the shop with a small, simple sign:
The Exotarium
IMPORTERS
EXPORTERS
Artifacts, Natural History Specimens
The effect was perfectly forbidding.
MOLT HAD just about recovered from his South Pacific trip the year before. He’d lost $20,000, and though he’d enjoyed spooking Leon Leopard in the Wau hills, the reality was that Leopard wrote thousand-dollar checks to the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums and lived in a lush Texas compound with apes and gazelles, while Molt’s own membership to the AAZPA had been canceled for his failure to pay a hundred dollars in dues, and the association wrote him a cease-and-desist letter for using its logo on his stationery. More than once, his electricity was shut off.
All Molt had, really, were his connections overseas. After their meeting in Sydney, Molt and Stefan Schwarz took boyish glee in encrypting their correspondence. They established a numerical code for dozens of species and memorized it, never committing the key to paper. If Molt wanted a shingleback skink, he’d send a yellow carbon paper requesting a “no. 17.” Molt signed off as “Junior,” Schwarz as “Vegemite.” Molt took charge of the bookkeeping, as Schwarz burned anything that could incriminate him. Australian penalties for wildlife crimes were stiff and getting stiffer, so even on the phone, Schwarz spoke to Molt in code. “The photos looked good, but one of the children’s pictures was blurry” might mean a Children’s python came in dead; “It’s sunny out, I think I’ll have a schnapps” meant Molt’s cash had arrived.
Molt and the Swiss widow Schetty, after eight years’ correspondence, dropped all pretenses that their dealings were legal, and Schetty’s aid was invaluable to Molt, for Switzerland had no statute like the Lacey Act, and no endangered species list. Any foreign animal that reached Switzerland was home free, and could be reexported to the United States. Molt advised Schetty not to label her boxes in too much detail, and, in a pinch, to call everything a venomous snake, discouraging close inspection. Molt asked Schetty for Komodo dragons, gavials, whatever she could get, and had no qualms about peddling to her marked-up Australian reptiles from Stefan Schwarz, the contact she had provided Molt years before.
Molt had upset Schetty by returning from the South Pacific with nothing left for her, particularly the Fiji iguanas she so badly wanted. He’d shipped the bulk of his Fiji animals to the Dallas Zoo, and the rest to Atlanta.
He promised to go back. “This fall I return to Fiji, Solomon Islands and New Guinea and Philippines,” Molt wrote Schetty in the Tarzan-speak he deemed suited to her English. “This time I send you stuff direct from there. Last time was first trip to area. I have learned a lot, have good contacts.”
IN THE spring of 1972, a teenager wandered into the Exotarium, dressed in military surplus and a belt hung with survival tools. Karl Sorensen found Molt the way all the snake fanatics seemed to—“like flies attracted to dead fish,” Molt said. Sorensen was a rugged type, an outdoorsman, and into psychedelic drugs. Already he’d traveled to Mexico and back, shrooming and snake-hunting. Sorensen was the son of schoolteachers, and had a scrubbed, Scandinavian look, but there was something unstable about him. He barely spoke, and when he did it was in sort of a whisper. He enjoyed knives.
Sorensen didn’t like to work, but he liked to be out in the woods, and Molt was starting to see potential in this young adventurer, who hankered to return to Mexico and catch more snakes. “Think bigger,” Molt told him—think, say, Southeast Asia.
Molt had begun to see the young Karl Sorensen the way, he guessed, Leon Leopard had seen him just a few years before. Sorensen was no innocent—he dug up graves for fun, and had burglarized Princeton University’s natural history museum. That the kid was a druggie Molt regarded as an advantage, something to use against him as needed.
MOLT HAD to delay his return to Asia by a year. His wife had become pregnant.
Nine months later, Megot Schetty wrote Molt excitedly to congratulate him. “My wife had a nice little baby girl born on 22 January thank you for your kind wishes,” he replied, then got on to some business about dead Mauritanian vipers.
Molt retreated to the Exotarium for much of the winter. He composed price lists, which, though not issued with much regularity, were painstakingly designed in whatever fonts and inks caught his eye. His envelopes got tattooed all over with “Urgent” and “First Class” stamps. Every transaction resulted in a paper trail; if someone wrote Molt just to call him a cheat, he copied the letter and filed it in three places. Frequent infusions of drama relieved a landlocked Molt’s boredom. “There was always some crisis or confrontation, crazy people coming around,” he said. Bob Udell was a free agent now, roaming back and forth to Florida, returning with trash cans full of indigo snakes that he kept in his apartment. He hired kids to break into Molt’s shop for animals, certain he’d been cheated by Molt. Molt hired Sorensen to break into Udell’s place.
At thirty-three, Molt could not call himself rich or even solvent. He nonetheless had the pleasure of being treated as a colleague by his childhood idols. Roger Conant summoned Molt to the Philadelphia Zoo to help unload mambas into the new reptile house. The National Zoo’s reptile curator popped by the Exotarium to talk shop, braving the rogues’
gallery of regulars. Molt made frequent deliveries to the Bronx Zoo, where the curator Wayne King added to his collection of New Guinea crocodiles.
When King’s underling, a young reptile keeper named John Behler, refused to provide Molt some Gaboon viper babies from a pair Molt had sold the zoo—such kickbacks were expected in those days—Molt went straight to its famous director, William Conway, and made a stink.
“I was used to being treated like a king,” he said.
MOLT ALWAYS made the zoo rounds before a big trip. He enjoyed the whole tap dance, meeting and tantalizing the curators. Fiji iguanas were an easy sell, as they made for beautiful displays. Molt sent around notices that promised not just pairs but “true sexual pairs in perfect condition with a 30 day live guarantee,” collected with great difficulty from “the remote outer islands in the Fiji group.” Washington, Memphis, Dallas, Sacramento, and St. Louis all placed orders. The Philadelphia Zoo authorized Molt to act as its agent in New Guinea, supplying him with a letter of introduction and a litany of its turtle and python needs.
Molt’s plan was to send Sorensen as an advance man to Fiji, where he would collect the iguanas and boas. Molt would follow to Fiji and pick the best among them, then send shipments from the airport. The two would repeat this pattern of parting and reuniting through Fiji, the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, and India. Sorensen would have to invest $3,000 and pay his own airfare, but any profits would be split, and there would certainly, Molt assured him, be profits.
On June 7, 1973, Sorensen landed in Fiji with a piece of paper bearing the names of two brothers and one island—no phone numbers, no addresses. Two weeks later, Molt arrived at the Nadi, Fiji, airport in the middle of the night, to find Sorensen waiting with thirty iguanas and boas tied up neatly in muslin bags. The iguanas were unscathed and well colored; the boas’ tails were intact, not crab-chewed. Except there were too many, and Molt and Sorensen were forced to release some in the dark field behind the airport.
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