They continued to New Guinea. In Port Moresby, Molt didn’t bother to check in with the wildlife department. Three months before, it had rejected the Philadelphia Zoo’s bid to use Molt as its agent. Molt and Leon Leopard were now recognized for what they were—commercial wildlife dealers, personae non gratae in Papua New Guinea.
Molt offered the Philadelphia Zoo a handy solution—to authorize Peter Shanahan as its agent. Molt would go pick up the animals, and hopefully persuade Shanahan to throw in a few extra for him. Philadelphia wrote New Guinea, which agreed to the arrangement.
Molt and Sorensen stayed a few nights at the rough-and-tumble Civic Guest House before heading to Wau, where Peter Shanahan had the zoo’s nine reptiles packed and ready, with nothing extra for Molt. While Molt lolled around Shanahan’s, enjoying a colonial society soon to be purged from its tranquil mountain homesteads, the mail plane came. The wildlife department demanded that Molt report to Port Moresby for a chat. Shanahan, weary of slick American animal dealers, had phoned them.
Molt returned with Sorensen to the capital, but before checking in at the wildlife office, he sent the kid out to find snakes. Sorensen found eighteen, including a rare Papuan olive python—a thick, blunt-headed constrictor, slate-colored on top, brown on its belly, that was hotly desired by zoos. There was no question whose baggage the snakes would travel in. Sorensen “did not balk at it a bit,” Molt said. “He did not hesitate a second.”
In the wildlife department, Molt noticed a map of New Guinea on the wall behind the officer’s desk. It was stuck with pushpins, and each pushpin pierced a name impressed on rigid label tape: Henry Molt. Leon Leopard. Molt recognized the name of a third collector, a German. Leon Leopard’s pin was in the distant ocean. Hank Molt’s was in Wau.
The officer sent Molt away, and told him to return after lunch. When he did, he saw his pin had been moved to Port Moresby.
Papua New Guinea and Henry Molt smoothed things over. Molt was a good talker. Good enough that the wildlife department not only shipped Molt’s nine animals to Philadelphia for him, they threw in three rare Fly River turtles as a gift to the zoo. That Karl Sorensen was by then on a plane to Hong Kong with eighteen New Guinea snakes, one lizard, and four crocodiles in his luggage, Molt did not bring to their attention.
AGAIN THEY separated. Molt chose to skip Australia, not wanting Sorensen to get too close to Stefan Schwarz. The kid was too crafty, and Schwarz was too important.
Mme Schetty was expecting the pair, and her Fiji iguanas, to show up any day in Switzerland. Molt had written her from New Guinea, boasting of their successes and their imminent arrival. Mysteriously, though, he failed to appear in Maggia. “Up to this day I have waited and waited for your visit … please be so kind and answer earliest and write what you have for me,” she pleaded. Her letter lay unopened in Philadelphia.
Sorensen flew to Singapore and Molt to Manila. They reconvened in Singapore, whose wildlife traders operated on a scale unlike anything in the West. The Singapore traders were ethnic Chinese, some of them third- or fourth-generation animal dealers, and their reach extended far—into Cambodia and Irian Jaya and even Bangladesh, where the rural poor carried animals to collection points. The Singapore traders sold slow lorises for twelve dollars and wild leopards for thirty-five, and listed 150 species of snake on a single onionskin price list. In one of their hangarlike warehouses might be ten thousand parrots, crated and labeled for a KLM flight to Amsterdam. So lucrative were the Asians’ shipping contracts that the airlines entertained them at Raffles and the Shangri-La. They maintained memberships at colonial-era social clubs, where their mistresses were always welcome.
Molt was friendly with an animal dealer named Y. L. Koh, and a second Singapore dealer, Christopher Wee. The two were avowed enemies—Koh older and soft-spoken, Wee younger and brasher. Both packed animals in frequently lethal ways. Wee had already been convicted for wildlife offenses in Australia, and employed the Indonesian army to net black palm cockatoos in their roosts. He had once, notoriously, dyed a young orangutan black with Miss Clairol, so that American customs officers would mistake it for a monkey.
Neither Wee nor Koh thought anything of laundering a shipment for a customer—it was common courtesy. Wee treated Molt and Sorensen to a sumptuous dinner, sold them four crates of reptiles, and mixed their New Guinea hoard into the boxes, which they forwarded to Philadelphia.
This collecting trip was coming together smoothly. Specimens were in the air, and some already had arrived at the Philadelphia Zoo. Molt and Sorensen’s frequent personality clashes were the only real problem. The kid was taciturn and always buying stuff. Molt was chiding and controlling. At a bird farm in Thailand, Sorensen decided he fancied some hornbills. He ordered them killed and mounted, annoying Molt to no end, and stuffed them in his luggage along with his newest hatchets and daggers. To make room for these treasures, he threw out all his clothes.
Sorensen was quick to find drugs in Thailand, and Molt could do nothing about it. While Molt kicked back with soldiers and mercenaries and the pretty prostitutes at Lucy’s Tiger Den, Sorensen scrounged for opium. After a tense few days in Bangkok, Sorensen surprised Molt with a knife to the throat. “I was lying in bed in our hotel room, about to fall asleep,” Molt said. “I couldn’t tell if he was fucking with me or not.” To be on the safe side, Molt assumed he was not.
They continued, unhappily, toward India. “He had a suitcase filled with knives and dead birds and LSD,” Molt said of Sorensen. “I wouldn’t go through the airport with him.” In Calcutta, Molt ventured out to buy gavials, returning to his hotel room to find Sorensen “with guys in turbans cutting hashish the size of a placemat. He was always a pain in the ass,” Molt said. “I put up with him because I was using him.”
“DEAR MME Schetty,” wrote Molt. “Thank you for your 2 letters and I apologize for not stopping by in Switzerland on my way home but we ran out of time and by the time I reached Europe I received word of an illness in my family and proceeded direct home.”
There was no illness in Molt’s family, but Molt was quite sick of Sorensen, and their tensions did not subside in Philadelphia. After their August 1973 return, they faced the daunting task of selling their cache of 150 rare reptiles equitably. Molt did nothing equitably, but it took Sorensen months to realize it.
Udell had done a fine job maintaining the animals he’d received, as had the Sacramento Zoo. Philadelphia’s order arrived in good shape, and Molt charged them a thousand dollars apiece for the Fly River turtles meant as a gift from New Guinea. Dallas, Sacramento, and Rochester all got their Fiji iguanas. The National Zoo took four. Molt wrote to offer some iguanas to Mme Schetty, who confirmed that she would buy them—but then Molt did not respond. He had sold out. It sickened him to remember the night he and Sorensen had let loose eight iguanas behind the airport in Fiji, where they were certain not to survive.
Sorensen had yet to see profits from this immensely profitable trip. Fall became winter, and Molt hoarded in the Exotarium all the reptiles they had left. Sorensen demanded the remainder to sell on his own. Molt refused him. “I was gonna rip him off,” Molt said. “Absolutely.”
MOLT WAS still packing iguanas for the St. Louis and Memphis zoos when President Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act of 1973.
“At a time when Americans are more concerned than ever with conserving our natural resources,” Nixon declared, “this legislation provides the Federal Government with the needed authority to protect an irreplaceable part of our national heritage: threatened wildlife.”
The new Endangered Species Act also aimed to curb what the public was starting to view as a distasteful commerce in exotic animals, a trade that, it was said, was contributing to extinction. It came with a list of species, including foreign ones, barred from commercial trade. A few years before, the Lacey Act had been resurrected and reinvigorated, also in the hope of slowing trade. The Lacey Act now prohibited illegal imports not just of game animals, but of nearly every form of animal
in an effort to stem, its sponsors in Congress said, “an accelerating rate of extermination of many of our planet’s unique forms of life.” The Lacey Act’s penalties, formerly misdemeanors, became felonies.
Earlier in 1973, the United States had signed on to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. CITES, as the treaty was known, would create a global list of species whose trade was banned or restricted, and this list, like the domestic one, was certain to grow. CITES aimed to curb the huge, often terrifically damaging commerce in timber and animal products—ivory, sea turtle shells, rhinoceros horns, bear bile, crocodile skins—but it made no exceptions for live plants or animals. By the end of that year, eighty nations had joined CITES, and Geneva was chosen as its administrative headquarters. The handy loophole Molt used to launder animals through Switzerland would close when the treaty took effect, in 1975.
Faced with this imposing new trinity of laws—the Lacey Act, the Endangered Species Act, and CITES—many wildlife dealers chose to get out of the business entirely. Molt saw only opportunity.
3
Pine Barrens
The New Year began auspiciously.
A fresh batch of Fiji iguanas refreshed Molt’s reputation in the zoo world. In January 1974, the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums forgave him for stealing its logo and not paying dues, and sent him an invitation to its annual conference, to which Molt showed up in a safari suit.
Wish lists arrived in the mail. The director of the Knoxville Zoo, which was opening its own new “reptile complex” in the fall, demanded from Molt forty-three species, including half a dozen already on the U.S. endangered species list, the usual smattering of Australian animals, and sixteen reptiles newly proposed for CITES listing. There was no mention of permits.
Molt had big ambitions for his next trip.
Karl Sorensen was out, obviously. His new kid would be Steven Levy, a doctor’s son from Pittsburgh. Levy was a serious, personable eighteen-year-old, neither a druggie nor the type to put a knife to your throat. Weeks after Molt and Sorensen returned from their trip, Levy had arrived at the Exotarium with a baby alligator and a ragtag bunch of snakes to sell. He was moving out of his parents’ house and into a dormitory, he explained.
Levy, like Molt and the rest, possessed the gene that had caused him to chase after reptiles since he could walk, and the memory of the Fiji iguanas, olive pythons, and New Guinea crocodiles he’d seen at Molt’s shop haunted Levy his whole first semester at Allegheny College. He wrote Molt a letter, asking if there was some way he could help.
Sure there was, Molt wrote back. It would require a passport, a round-the-world plane ticket, and $3,000.
“He said we’d be leaving around Christmas,” Levy said. “Then Christmas became spring.” Levy took a semester off from Allegheny College, only to be told the trip was delayed until summer. “My parents thought Molt was nuts,” Levy said, until Molt took Levy’s father to dinner. “I dressed really well and was driving a brand-new Oldsmobile station wagon,” Molt said. “I believe I impressed him as upstanding.”
Some Karl Sorensen drama was responsible for Molt’s delays. By now Sorensen had figured out he’d been stiffed, that Molt had no intention of cutting him his share of earnings from their trip, nor so much as returning his original $3,000 investment, though Molt’s check from the Philadelphia Zoo alone would have covered it twice over.
And suddenly the Exotarium was burglarized. All the leftover snakes from New Guinea were stolen, along with some baby crocodiles from Thailand and a couple of cobras from Singapore. The burglary “had all the earmarks” of Sorensen, Molt said. “He was able to lift these storm doors over the sidewalk and descend into the basement and enter the shop.” Yet Molt could not resist sending hundreds of his customers, zoos included, a juicy bulletin: “During the night of April 8, 1974, thieves broke into our shop and stole the following live reptiles.” He described each stolen specimen down to its “nice wavy dorsal pattern” or “few faint old scars.” He offered a thousand-dollar reward.
Barely had Molt’s bulletins gone out when Bob Udell arrived at the Exotarium with a bulletin of his own: The party responsible—not that there was ever much doubt who it was—demanded a ransom. Sorensen would return all the animals for his $3,000 back, and be done with it. For his negotiating services, Udell demanded a fee of $300.
Molt drove to Udell’s place, where the kid was waiting. Molt flashed the money, and a silent Sorensen loaded the animals into Molt’s car. Sorensen’s own was parked several blocks away.
“I gave him the cash and I asked him if he wanted a ride over,” Molt said. “He was stupid enough to get in my car. In my left hand I grabbed the gear shift and put it from drive into park. In my right I grabbed his ponytail and pulled his head back. I started choking him as hard as I could. It was broad daylight but no one was noticing.
“He was clenching the money. The door was open and his leg was pushing against the pavement. He had a huge Adam’s apple and I squeezed and squeezed it until he released the money. He got out and slammed the door hard. There was the money laying on the floor of my car. He had clenched it so hard some of the bills were stuck together.”
Molt never saw Sorensen again. Udell kept his fee.
A FEW factors distinguished Molt’s 1974 trip from his previous three. It would be an intentionally criminal venture. The quantities of reptiles would be much larger. More money and people would be needed to carry it off.
Steven Levy would do fine as a bag boy, but Molt needed substantial financing and a second body. On one of his frequent trips to the bank, wearing his favorite olive twill safari jacket—an understated number without too many pockets—he met someone who fulfilled both requirements.
Edward Allen was the only other customer at the Bala Cynwyd branch of the Central Pennsylvania Bank who bought travelers’ checks in $500 denominations. Allen, too, was an adventurer, a big-game hunter who had been to the North Pole and the Congo. Not too many of those lived in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Allen stood in line behind Molt. The teller introduced them with satisfaction. Molt, she informed Allen, travels all around the world collecting animals for zoos.
Molt and Allen retreated to a lunch counter in the bank building, where Allen also worked. A generation older than Molt, Allen was an investment banker, half of a firm called Allen & Rogers. His résumé was lustrous, all-American fare: a hot-air balloonist, U. Penn grad, and Chicago Bears fullback for half a season in 1947, until a Steeler ripped up his knee. He was a nondrinker and nonsmoker, with a loyal wife and four strapping sons. He zipped about town in a Mercedes convertible. Yet for all his trappings, Allen was restless. He hated his job; he was trying to sell the firm to his partner.
Over lunch, Allen learned about Stefan Schwarz’s jungle compound, the copious profits from Molt’s New Guinea trip, and the cute whores and the guns on the wall at Lucy’s Tiger Den.
It helped that Molt, for all his jungle talk, hailed from reassuringly familiar circles. Molt’s sister, it turned out, was friendly with Allen’s sister. Molt drove a new Oldsmobile and maintained a healthy line of credit at the bank. The tailoring on his safari jacket was fine. Allen invited Molt to his home in the wealthy suburb of Newtown Square. In a barn behind his house, Allen had built an enormous den for his custom rifles and hunting trophies—a polar bear, kudus, impalas. “It was all very impressive,” Molt said. “He was a man’s man. A he-man.”
Allen hadn’t hunted Africa in years, and he’d never been to Southeast Asia. He had little pressing business while the firm’s sale was pending; he was all but retired. Reptiles held no interest for Allen at all, but what he could really use about now, he told Molt, was a good, old-fashioned jungle quest.
“I said, ‘Well, we’re doing a trip in a couple months,’ but then I said ‘I don’t know, this is a pretty rough trip. We’re going into Fiji …’ It’s the negative takeaway. You dangle something and then take it away.”
Allen insisted he was m
ore than up to it.
STEVEN LEVY landed in Fiji on September 1, 1974. He’d taken another semester’s leave from Allegheny College and was quite unaware of how his predecessor had ended up.
Levy’s job was identical to Karl Sorensen’s—go to Fiji, get iguanas and boas, wait for Molt, move on. He’d spent the summer waiting for Molt to give him the word while he studied maps and got coached in the selection of Fiji iguanas—no missing toes, no missing tails, collect male and female specimens equally.
The only difference was that Levy was to collect five times as many animals. And they were going through Schetty in Switzerland this time, which was easier and safer than shipping them straight home.
“Best greetings to you after a long, long time!!!!!!” Molt wrote Schetty that July. “This year I am finally coming to Switzerland on my way home for a visit. The purpose of my letter is to find out whether you would be willing to accept some shipments from Fiji, New Guinea and Philippines during my trip … of course I would be willing to make available a good portion of the specimens to you.” Schetty forgave Molt his lengthy and mysterious silences. For Fiji iguanas, much could be excused.
Now Levy, nineteen years old, stood in the Nadi, Fiji, airport, with a hard-sided Samsonite suitcase and a slip of paper. Molt had assured Levy that you can find anyone in the third world with just one name, and one name was all he had: Niumich. Molt told him to take a ferry to the island of Ovalau and ask for Niumich; Levy instead took a plane and landed on a gravel strip next to what appeared to be a wooden lean-to. This was the Ovalau airport. The Fijians awaited the plane in ripped shirts and sarongs.
Stolen World Page 5