Once the materials for the box had been paid for, and the shipping costs set aside, Molt and Celebucki were penniless. They camouflaged their rental car under bushes and branches, since Celebucki had paid for it with a dud Visa card, and the rental firm was searching for them. They dined at country clubs and left without paying. “We were trying to spiv everyone we could by that point,” Molt said. When a hotel locked their luggage in their room for nonpayment, Molt and Celebucki staged a fight in the hotel lobby. “We pretended to be strangers—that Ed had let me stay and that they locked my stuff in his room,” Molt said. The alarmed staff released the bags just to be rid of them.
Celebucki and Steve Cutlack began construction on the box, while Molt “sat there drinking beer as usual,” Celebucki said. Molt wasn’t taking on much of the legal risk, either. It was Celebucki’s name on the permits, and Celebucki who would accompany the box home. When Molt tired of watching Cutlack and Celebucki hammer and sand, he made his way to the University of Papua New Guinea, chatting with the secretaries in the biology department and photocopying his scientific paper.
The finished box was a marvel—furniture quality, wide as a queen-size mattress, but still compact enough to plausibly contain only thirty-odd large snakes. The Knoxville Zoo would get its share—maybe five or six of each species. The rest would be the discreetly held property of Herpetological Research Associates, Inc. “The plan was to take the crate to Knoxville, unload it, and take the crate back with the false bottom,” Celebucki said. “Knoxville was greedy. They were getting these snakes for nothing—what did they think we were gonna do?”
Wishing to avoid another three-hour inspection in Los Angeles, Molt and Celebucki had studied the arrivals at the Los Angeles airport, and concluded that a Friday afternoon, between three and six, was the ideal time for Celebucki to land. “There were so many flights, so many passengers then,” Molt said, that inspectors would be overwhelmed. “I just hoped they would look at the numbers, look at a few snakes, and rubber-stamp it,” Celebucki said. Molt left for Los Angeles a day early; Celebucki would follow with the box.
Before leaving Port Moresby, Celebucki presented Steve Cutlack with an extravagant gift. Cutlack at first refused, but Celebucki insisted. Cutlack had never taken money from Molt or Celebucki, nor did he want any. “I was helping Ed out,” Cutlack said. “I befriended him because of his interest in reptiles.” Now Cutlack had a gleaming gold Rolex to show for his friendship. Cutlack was deeply touched, for a day or so. Then a friend of his inspected it closely. “A fake bloody Rolex! I have never been so insulted in my life,” Cutlack said.
“It was Hank’s idea and Hank’s watch,” said Celebucki, though Molt would years later insist that the idea was Celebucki’s, even if the watch was his. They would agree, at any rate, that it was not the smartest thing they’d ever tried.
“Always use a real Rolex,” said Molt.
“OUR STUFF looked good, we had the permits and the papers,” Molt said. Celebucki landed in Los Angeles at five p.m. When he went to pick up his box, however, “it was the same officer who had been a dick on my previous trip,” Celebucki said. “He decided he’d seize the shipment pending verification and send it to the L.A. Zoo.” But it was the weekend, and no one in New Guinea would be answering phones until Monday. Herpetological Research Associates, Inc., cooped themselves up in a dank hotel room at the airport, coughing up strategy after futile strategy. “The whole time, our animals were languishing at the L.A. Zoo—it was one of the worst zoos in the country then,” Molt said. Celebucki phoned ministers at their homes in New Guinea, begging them to cover for him when U.S. Fish and Wildlife called. “Ed was telling him he changed the permits but he was under a lot of stress because his mother died. That was always the excuse he used when he had nothing else. Ed’s mother died, like twenty times,” Molt said. But the officials were in no mood to help. Steve Cutlack was not an option either, for Celebucki’s wife reported to him that Cutlack had already called Cleveland, in a rage. He had flung his gift into the Brown River.
At midnight, Molt and Celebucki took a taxi to the Los Angeles Zoo, searching for its garbage pile. If their box had been tossed out intact, some snakes would still be inside its secret compartments. But “we found the crate in pieces,” Celebucki said.
Molt and Celebucki knew that whenever Fish and Wildlife and Papua New Guinea compared notes, the results would not be good, but they clung to the hope that Los Angeles would forward the snakes to Knoxville before then.
After four wearying days, Molt flew back to Philadelphia. He knew better than his younger friend when a mission was beyond salvaging. Celebucki waited in Los Angeles awhile longer, still hoping for a miracle. “I just wanted to see how it would pan out with the zoo,” he said. “I knew I was screwed when it was on the TV news.”
The Los Angeles Zoo is said to have used the wrong deworming treatment on the pythons, killing all eighteen.
9
Fijis
By 1988, Tommy Crutchfield’s Herpetofauna, Inc., had been through five managers and was grossing close to $2 million annually. Zoos and private collectors counted on Crutchfield for rarities, and the pet store chains for the common, crowd-pleasing baby iguanas and Burmese pythons that he imported by the thousand. Crutchfield turned golden-brown by the side of his pool, read weight-lifting magazines, and accumulated collections of Haitian folk art and expensive, custom-made Randall knives.
Crutchfield liked the word “prosperous”—it had a nice tone to it, something Oriental and gentlemanly. He used it all the time on price lists, as in “We wish you a happy and prosperous New Year,” or in letters to his contacts in Bali and Bangkok: “I hope you and your family are prosperous and well.” But Crutchfield’s ego, already formidable, had swollen with his prosperity, so much that he felt free to belittle federal wildlife inspectors at the Miami airport when they threatened to cause him grief. “Your problem is when five o’clock rolls around, you’re gonna check your Timex watch and start your Toyota, while I’ll be looking at my Rolex and driving my Mercedes,” he told one. “You’re gonna go back to your apartment, while I relax in my pool, and you know it.” His longtime acquaintances, accustomed to his fits, were nonetheless taken aback by this sort of display. “ ‘Failure’ was not in his vocabulary,” said Molt, who had the habit of hanging around the Herpetofauna compound for days after making a delivery. “Then again, ‘caution’ was also not in his vocabulary.”
IT WAS largely thanks to Crutchfield’s short-sightedness and impatience that in 1988, when a golden python stared back at him from the first cover of The Vivarium, a new magazine for reptile enthusiasts, he could not take credit.
Five years earlier, a frustrated Crutchfield loaned his last albino Burmese python to a Bob Clark, an Oklahoma City clothing-store manager who’d also lusted after the yellow snake since the March 1981 National Geographic. For years Clark had tried to buy one from Crutchfield, but Crutchfield refused him. “He was impossible,” Clark said. Crutchfield had sent two of the snakes off to Sri Lanka and Thailand but eventually, after protracted negotiations, agreed to loan Clark the remaining one, for $10,000 a year.
Bob Clark was a new kind of snake guy, more snake farmer than hunter. “I remember having a lightbulb go off in my head one day, thinking, ‘You can make these things at home,’ ” Clark said. “That was not the way we looked at animals then—it was all about acquiring them.” But pet birds and tropical fish were already being mass produced for commercial sale, and Clark was discovering that some snakes, especially some pythons, reproduce well under controlled conditions, in floor-to-ceiling racks of breeding drawers and incubators. When the first of his yellow Burmese pythons hatched, in 1986, Clark said, “I didn’t know how much I could sell them for because nobody sold anything like that.” Normal-colored Burmese pythons, imported from Asia, were twenty-five dollars apiece. “I wondered, ‘What if somebody paid $2,000?’ And it turned out they would pay $4,000.” Tommy Crutchfield, when he learned of Clark’s success
, immediately demanded that Clark return his python, only to turn around and sell it to a Cuban drug lord in Miami. “He sold the golden goose!” Clark marveled. Clark negotiated with the Cuban for the snake and resumed his lucrative breeding project. He soon quit the clothing store; his first hatchlings had earned him the equivalent of a year’s salary. He wrote up his triumphs in The Vivarium, making sure to detail Crutchfield’s extortions.
Breeders like Clark had a new word for their trade: “herpetoculture.” If breeding birds made you an aviculturist, and breeding plants made you a horticulturist, then breeding reptiles made you a herpetoculturist. Herpetoculturists bred reptiles like fruit flies, bringing out striking genetic aberrations: yellow snakes, orange snakes, white snakes with blue eyes, striped snakes that were supposed to be spotted. To keep oddball genes prominent, they mated siblings sometimes, or bred snakes back to their mothers. They gave their creations romantic-sounding names: Sandfire, Tangerine Dream, Pastel, Ghost, Creamsicle.
Herpetoculture threatened to make the old argonauts of the snake trade obsolete. Why risk your life in a malarial backwater when you could make millions of dollars in your basement? And yet Tommy Crutchfield wanted nothing more than to be back in the world, searching for adventure. “That was far more exciting,” he said. “Breeding stuff was so fucking boring.”
CRUTCHFIELD CONSIDERED himself something of an Asia hand by now. He had become close enough friends with Mr. Dang of Bangkok that he and Penny were invited to a cremation ceremony for Dang’s parents. The party lasted a week, “with so much pageantry, so much food, people dressed as albino monkeys dancing. I’m not sure what it all meant,” Crutchfield said. When the party was over, he and Penny hunted king cobras in the Golden Triangle, where they sat in a hut and smoked opium with an old Hmong woodsman. They stuffed a king cobra in one of Penny’s suitcases, and filled her purse with lizards.
Not long after their trip, Dang suffered a debilitating stroke. Crutchfield sought a new Asian supplier, and he found one, soon enough, in Anson Wong, a young Chinese-Malaysian animal dealer who operated out of a drab storefront in Penang. Wong’s father had been a live-animal and hide dealer, with a network of animal trappers from Vietnam through Manila, and in some ways Wong, who was only thirty, resembled the Singapore bird barons of his father’s generation, Christopher Wee and Y. L. Koh, both of whom he knew well.
Bespectacled and slender, Wong impressed foreigners as erudite, since like most Malaysians, he spoke several languages, including a very fine British-accented English. He was actually something of a stoner and a dropout, who had left school as a young man to work as a zookeeper in Johor, where he trained dolphins until he could no longer stand the water splashing his glasses, then transferred to a zoo in Kuala Lumpur, where he taught parrots to play tiny pianos. That zoo was then full of Western curators, whom Wong would accompany on parrot-buying trips to Y. L. Koh’s in Singapore. Singapore was one of the few wealthy nations that had yet to join CITES, and “we just drove [animals] across the border—I mean palm cockatoos, scarlet macaws, in the eighties you could do everything,” Wong said. The zoo was poorly run, and its curators on the brink of mutiny, when an escaped-chimpanzee fiasco caused them all to quit. Wong quit, too, and moved back in with his parents. But he kept in touch with his curator friends who’d returned to Europe or the United States or Australia, and they tapped him for any rare reptiles he could find. This was not hard: In Malaysia’s wet markets, even the CITES-listed species were routinely sold for food.
Wong called his fledgling business Exotic Skins and Alives. The skins part was short-lived; he never had his father’s taste for it. But he kept the name and continued to use the letterhead, which was illustrated with a crocodile that appeared to be in the early stages of rigor mortis. The tribesmen who trapped for his father began trapping for him, and so, in time, did their sons. Wong grew rich, infuriating his well-heeled neighbors when his escaped cobras turned up in their yards.
When Crutchfield first ventured to Malaysia and met Wong in person, he found Wong to be nothing like Dang. For an Asian wildlife tycoon, Dang had been a gentle soul. “Dang wasn’t nasty. He tried to keep the animals really well,” Crutchfield said, and Dang for the most part avoided illegal schemes. Wong positively delighted in illegal schemes, always finding ways to slip something extra into a box, and his animal husbandry was proportionately lacking—on one visit, Crutchfield noticed a seedling palm sprouting from the body of a dead tortoise in Wong’s yard.
Crutchfield enjoyed Penang, a mean slice of Asia full of motorboat pirates and Chinese Tong gangsters with whom he was sure Wong was connected, despite Wong’s Brooks Brothers aura. When Wong was late to meet him one night at a restaurant favored by the gangsters, Crutchfield felt their stares from the surrounding tables. “You could have heard a pin drop. Those were bad motherfuckers. Then Anson showed up and everything was okay,” Crutchfield said. He made a mental note to buy Wong a Rolex.
Crutchfield bought an enormous number of animals from Wong, including thousands of baby Burmese pythons, which were a staple of the pet trade until Thailand banned their export in the 1980s. Wong got around the ban by driving the babies—hundreds at a time—across the Thailand-Malaysia border in trucks and exporting them as Malaysian. The deal allowed Crutchfield a lucrative monopoly, for a time, on all the baby Burmese pythons coming into the United States. The catch was that he had to accept whatever other animals Wong sent him, the tens of thousands of fifty-cent lizards, beat-up turtles, and snakes that died shortly after arrival. Wong’s shipments arrived every two or three weeks through Miami—twenty crates at a time, enough to fill a van. When they contained too many junk animals, Crutchfield just faxed Wong and claimed half the shipment was dead.
The Wong connection narrowed the already fine legal line Crutchfield treaded. For eight years, Crutchfield had ingratiated himself with the nation’s best zoos. Thomas Schultz, the celebrated curator of reptiles at the San Diego Zoo, had become a major customer of Crutchfield’s and an increasingly close friend who visited for days or even weeks at a time. Crutchfield funded a local sea-turtle research group and joined the IUCN–World Conservation Union as a crocodile consultant, donating thousands of dollars and traveling all over the world for meetings.
Yet the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had been keeping an eye on Crutchfield ever since the Atlanta Wildlife Exchange, and his habit of berating agents didn’t help. His shipments, particularly the big loads from Wong, were getting heavier inspections. Crutchfield could not escape the government’s sanction forever, and in the spring of 1988, the agency confiscated several of Wong’s boxes for prohibited animals and bad documents. In response, Crutchfield forwarded Fish and Wildlife a fax from Wong, handwritten on his weird Skins and Alives letterhead and laughably transparent in its intentions. “Mr. Crutchfield,” it read,
I have arrived home today in the middle of all problems!!! My secretary tells me you called and there was much confusion. I have to tell you that there has been a terrible, terrible mistake. Because during my absence the packer that I hired two weeks ago not only packed and sent more animals than he had on the permit but the stupid fellow sent you my prized collection of the six heads desert pythons and worse my one and only striped island monitor which I have had since 1977. Please see if there’s any way of sending back my six heads desert pythons and one head island monitor which are both pre-convention animals. As for the extra monitors, do anything you want with them. They’re meant for cobra food.
The agents were not impressed. Crutchfield was assessed $4,000, and the government kept the animals. A month after that “terrible, terrible mistake,” Wong sent Crutchfield a crate containing banned turtles from India; these, too, were discovered and confiscated. “In hindsight I would never have dealt with Anson—it was fun at first when he would put stuff in there,” Crutchfield said. But the penalties were starting to add up.
In May 1989, an employee of Crutchfield’s returned from Miami International Airport with a Toyota mi
nivan filled with eighteen crates from Wong. It was late, ten o’clock or so, when the employee turned into the Herpetofauna driveway and backed up to the warehouse. Crutchfield and two more workers were waiting in the dark, drinking beer, in a good mood. Unpacking a shipment was one of the highlights of the job, a break from the relentless snake bagging and cage cleaning.
Crutchfield seldom handled boxes personally, preferring to stand by and bark instructions. With this shipment, though, Crutchfield glanced at the packing list and made for one box himself. He removed his fifteen-inch Randall knife from its sheath on his waist and ran it under the crate’s wooden lid, popping off the tiny nails that held it together. The box contained green water dragons, little iguana-like lizards that got sold in bulk to the pet store chains of the world, nothing special—each tucked into a cardboard tube. Crutchfield tossed the tubes aside. The dragons escaped and scattered as he dug to the bottom.
At the bottom of the box, immobilized with packing tape, were two rice bags, and from them Crutchfield gently pulled out four Fiji banded iguanas, a species that would have been tough to explain to the Fish and Wildlife office in Miami.
The lizards emerged from their bags healthy and flawless and seemingly docile, if a little shell-shocked. Crutchfield cradled one in the crook of his arm and began “prancing,” recalled the employee who’d driven the van. “Walking around talking about how beautiful they were and how rare they were and how valuable they were and that kind of thing. Was almost like a carnival.”
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