That April, O’Kane and Mellon packed their suitcases. They shared a handsome itinerary: Philadelphia–San Francisco–Honolulu–Fiji–Sydney–Port Moresby–Solomon Islands–Singapore–Manila–Hong Kong–Bangkok–Colombo–Bonn–Zurich–Philadelphia. They would complete this travel in six weeks, and for a tidy $5,000 apiece, according to O’Kane’s hopeful math.
O’Kane took his service revolver because he suffered separation anxiety without it. But this was mostly fact-finding. O’Kane and Mellon suspected, by now, that much of the evidence gleaned from Molt’s filing cabinets would be thrown out by a judge for O’Kane’s failure to secure warrants the first time. The upside was that nobody but Molt would have immunity from that illicit search; if Molt’s tapes, maps, letters, and ledgers couldn’t be used against Molt, they could nonetheless be used against dozens of others, even zoos. O’Kane wanted to go higher up the chain, and then higher still. Who were the suppliers of all this wildlife—who made the real money?
“Had Joe gone in with the warrants, it probably would have been prosecuted as a fraud case,” Mellon said. “We had no idea of the scale of endangered species smuggling. By having to look at everything else,” he continued, “we began to realize the enormity of it all.”
It didn’t matter to Mellon that Molt dealt in relatively small numbers of animals. Molt, as far as Mellon was concerned, was part of a global menace, one narrow tendril of which had curled into his jurisdiction.
Molt, Mellon concluded, was an agent of extinction.
PETER SHANAHAN’S coffee farm in Wau, Papua New Guinea, had gone to swamp, and its crop had withered. The old plantation house stood derelict.
Shanahan had emigrated from New Guinea reluctantly. Shanahan’s image of America comprised “black-and-white movies, guys with guns, dark cities.” He’d lived in Eureka, California, less than two years before O’Kane and his men drove up in a long black car, carrying guns. They showed Shanahan a photo of Karl Sorensen. Hank Molt had tried to kill him, they explained. Shanahan was aghast, and promised to share whatever he knew about Molt. Shanahan’s wife rummaged up her old Leon Leopard files, full of doctored documents and fishy permits, and handed them over, too.
It had only been a matter of years since Shanahan had last seen Molt and Leopard, but they belonged, he now thought, to the same lost world as he did. “They hankered for adventures that could only be experienced, by their time, in a handful of isolated places,” Shanahan said. “The Wau coffee plantation was once among those places.”
O’Kane and Mellon promised Shanahan he’d be hearing from them again. They had several stops to make first.
MOLT HAD no idea that Mellon and O’Kane were retracing his steps. It was May 1976 and by now they’d solemnly photographed the tree in Navuloa, Fiji, that a young man named Epineri had climbed for Steven Levy. The tree matched, to the branch, one in a photo Levy took the day he arrived. The worn nine-seat plane to the island “looked like something from World War II,” O’Kane said, and may well have been the same one Levy had flown in on.
O’Kane had canvassed the Asian embassies before leaving, collecting assurances that he and Mellon would be aided by their counterparts on foreign soil. Yet official cooperation, after all the formalities and niceties, proved “tepid at best,” said Mellon. The Vietnam War had only ended the year before, and Southeast Asians remained wary of Americans on innocuous-sounding missions. “No one believed we were on a wildlife case. They all thought we were working with the CIA on some covert operation,” O’Kane said. Even the CIA seemed to assume as much. The U.S. Embassy in New Guinea assigned O’Kane and Mellon a mysterious attaché, a small man with thick glasses who “took us to a secret compound in the jungle. It had these fancy villas and a swimming pool and restaurant. I don’t know why they took us there except to find out exactly what we were doing,” said O’Kane.
The attaché was of little aid to O’Kane, and the locals even less. Port Moresby, O’Kane said, “was a scary, scary place. One hour in New Guinea is more than anyone really needs. Their idea of a good time is standing around throwing beer bottles at each other’s bare feet.”
Australia was friendlier, at least on the surface, with cooperative wildlife officers who drove for hundreds of miles with the Americans. Mellon and O’Kane had watched Ed Allen’s home movies of a python hunt in a rainy gorge—they knew what Stefan Schwarz looked like. With the Australian agents, they drove to Cairns, only to be told Schwarz was out of the country. “In those days, several of the wildlife rangers and customs officers were also Germans who had emigrated and were in cahoots with the bad guys,” O’Kane said. When O’Kane and Mellon returned to Australia weeks later, they were again told that Schwarz was out of the country.
In Singapore they had better luck—not because the government was any help, but because the Chinese animal traders were eager to snitch on anyone who owed them money, and each other. Y. L. Koh, the bird baron of Singapore, not only granted O’Kane an audience but handed over records, for Hank Molt hadn’t reimbursed him on the shipping from Singapore to Schetty’s. Koh informed O’Kane that Christopher Wee smuggled not only reptiles but also horses and heroin and jewels. Christopher Wee told O’Kane that Koh ran a cockatoo ring through Qantas Airlines. They didn’t care what they told O’Kane—Singapore wasn’t going to touch either of them. “Those guys were so comfortable in their environments,” O’Kane said.
The farther O’Kane traveled, meeting men like Koh and Wee, the smaller Hank Molt seemed to him. For Mellon, it was the opposite. He couldn’t get over the ugliness of the open-air animal markets of Bangkok and Manila—the vast, noisy alleys of parrots, the bars of their cages caked with down and feces; buckets of turtles; sad-faced primates; and next to all these, piles of skins. This was what Mellon felt himself up against, the larger world of cruelty and exploitation that Hank Molt was part of. “This was a lot bigger than we realized,” Mellon said.
The Swiss were not helpful to Mellon and O’Kane, either. Only one official offered them any sort of aid—directions to Megot Schetty’s Schlangenpark. The town of Maggia “was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen,” O’Kane said. “A postcard.” But the widow herself eluded him. Everywhere she promised to be, she wasn’t. Schetty, despite her advanced age, “kept running away from us, literally,” O’Kane said. “She was a wily old bird,” he concluded.
O’Kane and Mellon headed home.
MOLT LOOKED forward to the First Annual Symposium on the Captive Propagation and Husbandry of Reptiles and Amphibians.
Zoo people and dealers had long attended annual conferences of the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles, but they didn’t really fit in. The society, started in the 1950s, was made up of university and museum scientists, and the science presented at their conferences was dry. Dealers and keepers napped through talks like “Erythrocyte Count, Hematocrit and Hemoglobin Content in the Lizard Liolaemus multiformis.” The dealers and keepers shared two basic interests: how to find more reptiles, and how to breed them. So they decided to start their own, looser sort of symposium. Peer review would consist of nodding and clapping, and there would be beer. People like Molt’s old Hungarian friend Joe Laszlo, now a well-regarded reptile curator himself, would be there. The whole spectrum of snake guys—from maniacs like Bob Udell to prigs like John Behler—would be there. Molt hadn’t seen Behler’s face since January 1975, when he was assiduously seizing Molt’s animals; now it was July 1976, and Molt had done his best, in the interim, to broadcast to the zoo community that Behler was a fink. Molt’s campaign was effective: “I was basically looked at as a pariah,” Behler said. Other curators had cooled to Molt, for obvious reasons, but they weren’t about to go breaking into people’s offices with federal agents, either.
The symposium was hosted by a small college in Maryland, and Molt and Behler found themselves in the same auditorium. “Behler and his friend were sitting toward the front,” Molt said. “I walked down the aisle and sat behind him. I put my foot on my leg and
made sure the toe of my shoe just rested on the shoulder pad of his blazer. Everybody was watching. He did nothing.”
Behler could live with the insult, for, unlike Molt, he had an inkling of the government’s plans.
MELLON AND O’KANE thought about indicting the zoos. By now they’d sifted through 15,000 documents, including seemingly every letter ever sent or received by Molt: It was clear that zoos in Philadelphia; Brownsville, Texas; and Washington, D.C., had conspired with Molt to secure false permits.
In grand jury hearings, Mellon interviewed the curators of the Philadelphia and National zoos, who confirmed what he already knew.
“Were you fully aware of the fact that you did not have nor did Henry Molt have the requisite papers required for securing the protected species either from the country of origin or this country?” Mellon asked Philadelphia’s reptile curator, Kevin Bowler.
“Yes,” Bowler said.
“And what is your explanation for that?”
“I guess as a zoologist and curator I thought that the law perhaps didn’t apply to somebody that was supposed to be interested in wildlife, such as myself, and that I guess I was above the law.”
Above the law. Mellon and O’Kane loved it. They had hard evidence on a dozen zoos, and every intention of using it.
When their superiors heard this, they balked. No one minded an indictment against a zoo in Rochester, New York, but the National Zoo—that was too much. Going after the National Zoo “almost got us all fired,” O’Kane said. They cooled their rhetoric. They might indict the zoos, they said. Mellon and O’Kane summoned Robert Wagner, director of the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums, to Philadelphia. Wagner was not under oath—they just wanted to scare him.
“Supposedly, a maximum number of 11 zoo people will be indicted,” a shaken Wagner wrote to his board in May 1977. “Mr. Mellon is of the opinion that the evidence against these 11 and the other more than 20 persons involved is overwhelming.”
Yet Mellon’s boss, the U.S. attorney in Philadelphia, had already barred Mellon from indicting the zoo people. “He was the jerk of the century for that,” O’Kane said.
IN MAY 1977, Molt pulled the Exotarium sign out of his window and changed the name of his business to Herpetofauna International. He announced this with a sunny yellow price list. The name “Herpetofauna” had been rolling around in Molt’s head a long time. The Philadelphia Reptile Exchange had begun as a fake business, without much thought given to its name. “As the years went by, that started to sound a little parochial,” Molt said.
After a yearlong depression, and a subsequent course of medication, “a little more optimism was creeping into my life,” Molt said, “an optimism not born of any reason, but chemical,” and highly inappropriate in light of a recent Newsweek article titled “The Snake Smugglers.” In it, Thomas Mellon had leaked his whole game plan for Molt: “As many as 35 indictments are likely to be handed down within the next few weeks. The case involves a variety of traffickers, but is based mainly on one remarkable round-the-world reptile caper.”
On August 4, 1977, six envelopes landed on Molt’s parents’ doorstep. Each contained an indictment. Molt expected one—after all, he’d read about it in Newsweek—but here were six separate cases, all naming Molt.
Molt, Udell, Karl Sorensen, and Christopher Wee were targeted over Fiji iguanas and New Guinea pythons. Another indictment named Jonathan Leakey, of Kenya, citing phony invoices and Tariff Act violations. Then came an assortment of smuggling and Lacey Act charges against Molt, Levy, Ed Allen, and Y. L. Koh. One whole case involved the Nile crocodile John Behler had confiscated back in January 1975. “There was no reason for Mellon not to wrap everything into one,” Molt said. “It was an intimidation tactic, to make me buckle under the pressure.”
Mellon had been barred from indicting zoos, but his office made sure to malign them in the press. REPTILE RING CRACKED, ran the front page of the Philadelphia Daily News. WE DON’T BUY HOT SNAKES, ZOO SAYS. Joe O’Kane was photographed for the story, holding an enormous liquid-filled jar. In it floated one of Ed Allen’s formerly frozen crocodiles from the Pine Barrens, reconstituted in alcohol. The rest had been consigned to the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences.
Mellon’s boss, United States Attorney David Marsten, told United Press International that the Molt indictments would “break the back of a multimillion-dollar reptile smuggling ring.” O’Kane did Marsten one better. With rare reptiles, O’Kane informed the Philadelphia Inquirer, “the profits are greater than smuggling heroin.”
Henry Molt, alleged head of a multimillion-dollar reptile smuggling ring more profitable than heroin, wore his best suit to the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia. He carried a fine-grain leather briefcase. “Where’s your client?” they asked him. “I’m not an attorney,” Molt said, but it pleased him to be mistaken for one. They took his mug shot and he entered six separate pleas, not guilty to all.
STEVEN LEVY woke up to find his photo on the front page of a Pittsburgh paper. Ed Allen’s reputation suffered gravely in Newtown Square.
Molt’s lawyer filed to suppress all the evidence O’Kane had collected from Molt’s shop, contending that the searches were illegal. Not long afterward, Molt was hospitalized with an ulcer.
Molt’s father retired in early 1978 from his job as a chemist and bought a local plumbing-supply business. “Like every man, my dad always wanted his own business,” Molt said. Molt quit the siding firm, stopped sending out his reptile lists, shuttered the former Exotarium, and attempted to manage the new company for his father.
Soon afterward, Molt’s father had a stroke. Molt’s wife had a nervous breakdown.
Molt’s mother expressed regret that he had ever quit Kraft Foods.
ROBERT WAGNER, head of the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums, suspected that the government would leave the zoos alone, but no one could be sure. “The Molt case really caused us to sit up and take notice,” Wagner said. “We got lawyers after that.”
The zoos’ new public relations strategy, largely of Wagner’s design, was to emphasize their captive breeding and conservation programs. For now, this served to distract from the zoos’ more or less constant consumption of wild animals—“a lot of zoos today would be very embarrassed by what they did in the seventies,” Wagner said—but Wagner was hopeful that within a matter of years, zoos could end their reliance on animal dealers. Zoos would breed their own animals if it killed them.
Wagner nonetheless maintained close personal ties to the aging lords of the animal trade. Fred Zeehandelaar had willed his fortune to the association; Leon Leopard, another dear friend of Wagner’s, was not only dying of cancer, but was being harassed by Joseph O’Kane, who in November 1977 had flown to Texas to find him.
Leopard received the agent coolly. He’d been in and out of the hospital, and his normally lean and angular look bordered on gaunt. O’Kane threatened Leopard with conspiracy charges, but both men knew Leopard would be dead before any of it mattered. Leopard waived his rights and told him all about his fake zoo uniforms, fake permits from Papua New Guinea, and secret arrangements with zoos to deceive foreign governments.
Leopard recalled O’Kane’s visit in a bitter letter to Robert Wagner. This whole mess, as far as he could tell, was started by “an unfriendly person” at the Bronx Zoo, and the government was in over its head, he wrote. “I personally believe O’Kane has been grasping at straws trying to justify his bumbling of the Molt case and the large amount of money and time he has spent on this investigation … We had all better get our act together and start looking for ways to countersue these dirty S.O.B.’s.”
He omitted the fact that he’d agreed to rat out the zoos. But it didn’t matter; Leopard’s grand jury testimony was postponed by further hospitalizations. Finally it was canceled. The zoo men would remember Leopard as one of their own, whose like would probably never be seen again.
KARL SORENSEN pleaded guilty, receiving probation and a $5,00
0 fine. Steven Levy pleaded guilty and received probation. Edward Allen pleaded guilty, received probation, and paid $10,000.
Bob Udell went to trial, but behaved so strangely in court that the judge dismissed his case. Udell had shown up high on quaaludes and taunted Joe O’Kane with sexual remarks about his school-age daughter, whose name he had somehow learned. “That’s a pretty big breach of etiquette,” Mellon said. “Even the drug dealers and Mafia people don’t mess around that way.” Outside the courthouse, O’Kane lost his cool and pointed a gun at Udell.
Christopher Wee of Singapore was arrested in California. But then Wee was released without explanation. O’Kane would not explain what had happened, except to imply, a bit dubiously, that Wee was under the protection of the CIA.
Y. L. Koh and Jonathan Leakey canceled whatever American vacation plans they might have had, but otherwise went on with their lives.
Megot Schetty and Hermann Hücker died—Schetty of old age, Hücker of cancer.
By the summer of 1979, Molt was the only one still fighting.
5
The Kingpin
From the beginning, Mellon and his people had described Molt as a “kingpin of a multimillion-dollar reptile smuggling ring,” who, if that wasn’t bad enough, was “engaged in the business of extinction.” That was standard prosecutorial slur, and it played well in the newspapers. Privately, Mellon had found Molt sympathetic to a point, “like an art smuggler,” Mellon said, “who smuggles because he loves art.”
But after hearing upon hearing, Mellon saw someone different. Molt denied ever having read the customs statutes O’Kane had showed him the night of the first search and claimed never to have consented to the searches in the first place; it all sounded weirdly sincere. “We went from thinking of Molt as a victim of his own naïveté and enthusiasm to someone much more calculating,” said Mellon.
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