Stolen World

by Jennie Erin Smith

  “I’m looking for Niumich,” Levy told the first person he saw, a young man about his own age.

  “That’s my brother,” the young man said. He introduced himself as Epineri. He called himself Epi. Together he and Levy walked the mile and a half home, to a village called Navuloa.

  Epi lived with his parents in a wooden house without electricity or plumbing, but by the standards of Navuloa, it was exceptionally well appointed. Within minutes after Levy arrived, he saw his first wild Fiji iguana, eating flowers in a tall tree. Epi scrambled up the tree and caught it.

  It did not take long for the youth of Navuloa to mobilize for Levy, and they climbed every tree for miles while Levy adjusted to the quiet rituals of the village, sleeping on a hard bed in the family house, watching Epi’s mother bake bread and weave palm-leaf mats to the sound of her transistor radio. He wore a sarong.

  Molt had provided Levy with muslin bags for the snakes and iguanas, and with the kids returning sometimes twice a day, he was accumulating more animals than he knew what to do with. Five dollars was a lot for anything in Fiji, and Levy had to refuse the kids arriving with more. He was running out of money. Every day he rinsed the bags of snake and lizard feces, dried them, repacked the animals, and waited for Molt, who was two weeks late and counting.

  Levy was unnerved by Molt’s absence, but also found himself dreading his arrival. He’d become attached to this family, helping them carry huge sacks of flour from the market and following them daily to the ocean, where the women netted shrimp. In the warm afternoons, he showered, surrounded by giggling children, under an outdoor spout.

  Another languid, idyllic week passed before Molt arrived, and by then, the sarong-wearing Levy was sad to see him. Molt was accompanied by an older man—Levy had not been briefed about Ed Allen, and this just made it worse.

  Molt, all business, was thrilled with Levy’s haul: forty-two iguanas, forty-six boas. They sought a carpenter and commissioned from him wooden boxes painted with the words “Natural History Specimens.”

  Epi, who was studying to be a policeman, secured the local police’s stamp for the boxes, making them look official enough to pass muster. Straight to Switzerland went the iguanas and boas, and Levy left Fiji heartsick. He promised to return, knowing that he never would.

  MOLT HAD departed Philadelphia with sixty-five dollars in his pocket, and some credit cards. A customer owed him thousands of dollars that he promised to wire Molt in Singapore, a few countries hence. Leaving home with sixty-five dollars was not a gamble Molt would likely have taken without Ed Allen by his side. Already, only one country into the trip, it was Allen who paid for the crates and shipping out of Fiji. Levy had already run through all his money, and his parents were wiring him more.

  The group took a plane from Fiji to Australia, where Molt and Allen met Stefan Schwarz, and Levy proceeded alone to New Guinea.

  Schwarz was still building his Cairns reptile compound, which amounted as yet to a patch of land with some bare wooden sheds and a tent where Schwarz slept. Molt and Allen slept in a tool-filled storage shed too low to stand in, and showered using a punctured bucket. For toilets, they dug holes in the ground. Allen didn’t mind at all. “He was fifty-seven but fit and tough as a thirty-five-year-old,” Molt said. “He loved that kind of shit.” Schwarz organized a hunt for amethystine pythons, and the three descended in a cold rain into a volcanic gorge, where they were plagued by leeches and mud wasps and had to boil tea in tin cans for warmth. Allen filmed them with his Super-8 camera. On Schwarz’s bare land they drafted a list of the specimens that Schwarz would hurry to collect, driving all over the country with his hooks and bags, before Molt and Allen’s return the next month. Allen fronted Schwarz $5,000. Molt gave him nothing.

  In Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, Levy checked in at the Civic Guest House. Molt loved the place, as had Karl Sorensen, but it terrified Levy. New Guinea was nothing like the gentle Fiji. Everything about it was mean, drunk, raucous.

  Levy’s mission was to collect anything he could in New Guinea, then sit around and wait for Molt and Allen again. Levy was on his own: there was no use appealing to Peter Shanahan in the Wau hills, and the New Guinea wildlife office would be more likely to arrest anyone connected to Hank Molt at this point than to help. Levy’s collecting efforts were hindered by weather: rain attracted the snakes to the roads, and this was the dry season. He scrounged up just a handful of frogs and snakes, and bought some baby crocodiles at a farm.

  Before departing on this trip, Levy had some understanding of the new wildlife laws, but it was only when Ed Allen arrived in Port Moresby and began packing Levy’s animals into a suitcase, Levy said, that he “sort of got the idea” that the venture was illegal. Allen and Levy would travel to Hong Kong next. Molt was already there.

  The trip was going just as Molt had envisioned it—the three weaving around one another, meeting and taking stock, working multiple countries simultaneously. Except Molt was supplying none of the money, and this was not endearing him to his companions. Molt possessed only his credit card, with which he picked up the rare hotel room or meal. He clung to the hope of a wire transfer in Singapore.

  Levy and the older man got on well, to their mutual surprise. At airport souvenir shops they chatted about cameras, bought suitcase stickers, and voiced their misgivings about Hank Molt.

  The unlikely allies left for Hong Kong.

  4 October 1974

  Dear Mme Schetty:

  I have obtained a very good collection of Australian specimens, actually the best single collection of my lifetime and this will come to Switzerland by special courier Oct 15. My other 2 traveling companions are due to meet me in Hong Kong tonight and I am hopeful of good results from their efforts in New Guinea.

  I am eagerly looking forward to my visit in Maggia and my opportunity to meet you after these many years.

  Very Best Regards,

  Henry A. Molt, Jr.

  FROM HONG KONG the three hopped over to Singapore, where Molt checked in frantically at the American Express office. Twice a day, for three days in a row, he was told no funds had been wired. His customer had stiffed him.

  Allen had by then sized up this collecting trip for what it was—ill-planned at best, an elaborate con at worst. Yet Allen believed, or chose to believe, that there were profits to be had if they journeyed on.

  They traveled to Bangkok, which was home to bustling wildlife markets and the biggest crocodile farm in the world, but Molt marshaled them straight to Lucy’s Tiger Den. He could show them a good time, even if he couldn’t pay for it.

  “We entertained prostitutes. That was one of the highlights of the trip as far as I was concerned,” Levy said. Molt was partially redeemed, even to Allen. “This was before AIDS, thank God,” said Molt.

  The fun finally wore off in Calcutta, where Allen, Molt, and Levy bunked in an elegant Victorian hotel, one of Molt’s favorites, with cool marble passages and vaulted ceilings. Surrounding the hotel day and night were hundreds of beggars, who pressed their wretched faces to the windows throughout the afternoon tea service. “Hank and I were upstairs in the room and Ed had gone outside with his eight-millimeter camera,” said Levy. “Hank grabbed a handful of change and threw it out at them. People clambered all over each other,” escalating into a near-riot around Allen. “Hank did it to create a scene, something pathetic for Ed to film.” The police arrived later at the hotel, looking for Allen. Levy remembered the episode as shameful. Molt recounted it merrily for years.

  MOLT DEPARTED for Karachi and Levy for Sri Lanka. Ed Allen flew to Sydney, bought three new blue hard-sided suitcases, and drove his rental car some 1,200 miles to northern Queensland, where Stefan Schwarz had the reptiles ready and organized in tree-shaded pits and cages. To anyone with the remotest appreciation for reptiles, this was, as Molt had boasted to Schetty, a collection of a lifetime: blue-tongued skinks, ridge-tailed monitors, black-headed pythons, frilled lizards, diamond pythons, and rare goannas whose range was restric
ted to a few square miles of the western desert or a patch of trees on the northern coast. One hundred and fifty specimens in total.

  Schwarz measured Allen’s suitcases and built thin fiberboard boxes to fit the reptiles inside them. His methods were time-consuming and pains-taking, but worthwhile. He separated all the animals, and never pushed a snake into its compartment, but allowed it to slide in and form its own coil before he sealed it. This reduced the stress on the snake, and it was thus more likely to arrive intact. People like Christopher Wee and Y. L. Koh took no such precautions, and a terrible number of their animals got crushed, cannibalized, or maimed en route.

  Schwarz’s box building and reptile packing took days, and Allen helped while Schwarz, always certain government goons were lurking around the corner, interrupted himself to peer anxiously into the trees with binoculars. Allen fiddled with his clothes so that they popped out ever so slightly from the closed cases. He made the grueling return drive to Sydney and flew, with the reptiles in his bags, to Zurich. Levy, returning from Sri Lanka, joined Allen at the Zurich Airport Holiday Inn. He had no money left.

  Molt was supposed to have greeted them both at the Holiday Inn and accompanied them to Schetty’s. But Molt had already come and gone.

  MOLT’S LAST collecting stop was so fruitless and miserable that he’d just given up. With Allen in Australia and Levy in Sri Lanka, Molt had flown to Karachi in search of a man named Arif, whose address label he had surreptitiously scraped off a crate at another animal dealer’s house nearly ten years earlier. India had recently passed a law banning all exports of its wildlife, like Australia—now the only way to get an Indian python was by laundering it through Pakistan. But Ramadan had emptied Karachi, and Arif would not be found. Molt possessed a credit card, but only six dollars in his pocket, and there was no possibility, given the holiday, of getting to any bank. Molt’s wife by then had no idea where he was. She called Ed Allen’s wife in tears, hoping for news, but even Ed Allen had no idea that Molt was walking around Karachi, hungry, with six dollars in his pocket. Nor, by that point, did Ed Allen care.

  Molt arrived at the Karachi airport with the handful of plane tickets he had left, pleading to be put on any plane flying west. On a twelve-hour flight to Paris, he ate everything on his tray, and begged other passengers for the uneaten food on their trays. From Paris, he flew to Zurich, got an advance on his credit card, and checked in at the airport Holiday Inn. The next day he left Zurich for Schetty’s.

  Molt’s train lurched into the Alps, where snow was already falling. In Maggia, the widow Schetty awaited her American friend, and received him warmly. Schetty was stooped at the shoulders and wore thick black shoes, but her eyes sparkled when she smiled. She spoke poor English, so her assistant Hermann Hücker interpreted for her, guiding Molt through the immaculate greenhouses that held her ever-changing collection.

  Schetty’s home was lovely: nearly four hundred years old, with walls of zoological books and bound articles, her voluminous stamp collection, ladders and lofts, and a waterfall propelling an ancient mill wheel outside. The Fiji iguanas chewed fruit in their ample cages, perched on twigs, content.

  Molt returned to Philadelphia, leaving Allen and Levy to deal with the rest.

  MOMENTS AFTER Allen and Levy were reunited at the Zurich Airport Holiday Inn, Levy opened one of his boxes from Sri Lanka, and a cobra popped out. This was not good. “We didn’t have anything to pin the snake’s head with,” Levy said. Allen pried a board from a neighboring box and after a tense, prolonged standoff with the snake, Levy managed to immobilize its head and force it back in as its body whipped about furiously. He then smoked a chain of cigarettes.

  Molt called from Philadelphia with instructions. Allen and Levy were to proceed to Maggia, Molt said. There they would repackage all the animals except the Australian reptiles, which, thanks to Schwarz’s box-building skills, could hold up in their suitcases for the flight home. The declared country of origin was to be Singapore. The suitcases would move as unaccompanied baggage into Kennedy Airport, and they would sign for the cargo boxes after five p.m., when the customs inspectors—the few who knew anything about wildlife, anyway—had gone home. They would deliver them straight to the Exotarium.

  Allen and Levy had an even better idea. They would do as Molt instructed, a full day earlier, and not bother with the Exotarium.

  By then they’d had it with Molt, and their mistrust ran so deep that as guests of Schetty’s Schlangenpark, they insulted their hosts by demanding a full accounting of every animal, living and dead. There were copious dead. The Manila shipment had come in mangled, and the big animals in Y. L. Koh’s boxes from Singapore seemed to have crushed the smaller ones.

  The counting process took forever and infuriated the Swiss, who may have been smugglers but certainly weren’t cheats. Allen and Levy apologized. It wasn’t them, they explained, it was Molt. For all they knew, he’d already sold some animals in Europe, or put the best of them in his own luggage and would claim that they died.

  Now, Allen and Levy planned to take every last reptile hostage until Molt paid them back.

  They arrived in New York in the early afternoon, and rested outside on the curb, waiting for five o’clock to roll around. Levy chain-smoked, and Allen called his wife. Finally, that evening, they walked to the customs building to claim their shipment. The large crates from Switzerland were cargo, and would have to be inspected, but the retrofitted suitcases had made it through as baggage. Just as Molt predicted, the night officers “opened the crates but didn’t have us open any bags. They didn’t examine a single specimen,” Levy said.

  All that was left was to value the cargo, nine boxes of it, and pay the taxes. The animals inside were worth $50,000, but Allen declared them for $1,000. Molt had forgotten to coach Allen on matters of import tariffs. Allen happened to have $40 in his pocket, just enough to cover the 3.5 percent duties on a $1,000 shipment, with five dollars left for coffee and doughnuts. A nine-box shipment of wildlife valued at only $1,000 was almost certain to arouse suspicion, but Allen was damned if he would spend another cent on Hank Molt’s reptiles.

  Allen’s wife collected her husband and Levy in a station wagon and drove them, reptiles and all, back to Newtown Square, Pennsylvania.

  ALLEN AND LEVY found they had no idea what to do with fifty thousand dollars’ worth of reptiles, most of them illegal, not to mention hungry, stressed, and in many cases dying. Allen knew nothing about keeping snakes and lizards. Levy knew a little bit, and owned some heat lamps and cages. They made for Levy’s parents’ house in Pittsburgh, and when they unpacked the animals they found that quite a few had died, including the New Guinea crocodiles and a fourteen-foot python. “We put all the dead stuff in a plastic garbage bag and my dad drove it to an incinerator,” Levy said.

  Molt owed Allen and Levy thousands of dollars, but the task of keeping three hundred rare reptiles alive, much less selling them off surreptitiously, forced the two to reconsider their hard stance. Here was Allen, a fifty-seven-year-old pillar of the community, stuck in a Pittsburgh basement with a college kid, the kid’s pissed-off parents, and nine crates and three suitcases full of snakes, lizards, and turtles.

  He drove home to Newtown Square and called his lawyer. Then he called Molt.

  It was not until Molt walked out of the elevator in a downtown Philadelphia building that he realized Allen’s “friend,” in whose office they would “meet for coffee,” was really Allen’s attorney. Waiting for Molt was Ed Allen, one Jack Briscoe, Esq., and no coffee. Allen had spent the morning with Steven Levy on the phone, working out the precise amounts all three were owed from the proceeds of the reptiles. They agreed that Molt would have to retrieve the animals, as Allen and Levy had neither the skills to keep them alive nor the contacts to sell them. Molt, according to Allen’s calculations, would garner 21.14 percent from all sales of the reptiles; Levy, 22.89 percent; and Allen, 55.97 percent.

  Clearly, Jack Briscoe, Esq., didn’t realize he had drafted
a contract to divide contraband. Molt cheerfully accepted the terms.

  “You can’t enforce an illegal contract,” Molt said. “You can’t sue me if I don’t deliver you your cocaine.”

  It was a Friday afternoon. Everyone shook hands. Molt would pick up Allen Sunday morning, and the two would drive to Pittsburgh to get their animals.

  But late Saturday night, Allen phoned Molt again. He and Levy had changed their minds, he said. They’d made a deal with another animal dealer, a marginal fellow who lived in a Philadelphia row house and sometimes imported monkeys. This dealer promised to come to Pittsburgh and buy their reptiles in one lump sum. Molt would still get his 21.14 percent, Allen promised—if he and Levy felt like giving it to him. They hadn’t quite decided.

  “Everybody was trying to fuck everybody else over by that point,” Molt said. “It was kind of fun.”

  Molt demanded that Allen accompany him to Pittsburgh, so that they could talk things through in the car. Allen agreed to ride along, and by the time they got to Levy’s parents’ house, “I was acting very threatening,” Molt said, “trying to tell them I was their only hope.” Reluctantly, Levy and Allen re-agreed to the original profit-sharing pact. Levy’s father typed it up and copied it.

  Molt slept that night on the Levys’ living room floor. “My parents were really mad at Hank,” Levy said.

  THE SAME month, a man named Frederik Zeehandelaar was convicted of violating the freshly passed Endangered Species Act. He had backdated some import papers pertaining to a tiger.

  At the time of his conviction, the Dutch-born Zeehandelaar was America’s largest broker of zoo animals, and a valued adviser to the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums. Zeehandelaar’s reputation was solid—not just as a businessman, but as one with real respect for wildlife. He had imported some fantastic creatures: pandas, penguins, Grévy’s zebras, a Central Asian goat that had cost the Bronx Zoo as much as a Rolls-Royce. The zoos considered him a hero for having marched, once, into the Australian Embassy in Washington and emerging with permits for kangaroos. Australian farmers were shooting them by the thousand then, yet zoos couldn’t legally obtain one. If he were a kangaroo, Zeehandelaar famously told the diplomats, he’d prefer life in a zoo to a bullet in the chest.