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Colette
Hank Molt’s Herpetofauna quietly died. Molt had fallen into a depression after the disastrous New Guinea trip with Eddie Celebucki. The aquarium shop above his reptile store flooded, and “one night I just vacated,” Molt said, moving the reptiles that remained into the warehouse of the plumbing supply company, whose assets he was now selling off. His price lists ceased.
With both businesses collapsed, Molt hoped to reinvent himself as an itinerant reptile collector, but he was mostly just itinerant, spending a lot of his time with Celebucki in Cleveland. Their failure in Los Angeles had put Molt in a rut, but Celebucki was fixed on future success in New Guinea. There was too much money at stake not to try again. A Boelen’s python was fifty dollars there, and $7,000 here. Bismarck ringed pythons were $3,000 on Tommy Crutchfield’s price lists; Celebucki could dig one out of a trash heap for free. Celebucki’s other options were limited anyway. He had quit his job as a prison guard because it was making him paranoid. Teaching tae kwon do at the YMCA didn’t cover the bills.
Molt, having little better to do, lent his faculties to Celebucki’s cause. This time, they decided, there would be no messing with phony research institutes, government officials, false-bottom boxes, or zoos. It was back to basics: Celebucki would smuggle snakes home in his suitcase, and together they would sell them to Tommy Crutchfield. This presented one problem. Since not a whole lot of snakes can be carried in a suitcase, the trips would have to be frequent to garner significant profits, and both New Guinea and United States officials were well onto Edmund Celebucki. They would have to train mules.
Their first recruit was Kevin O’Donnell, a janitor at the Cuyahoga County jail. O’Donnell was legally blind as a result of a childhood reaction to penicillin, and “we thought there would be enough sympathy for a blind man to prevent him from being overly scrutinized,” Celebucki said. During a dry run at the Cleveland airport, as Molt and Celebucki watched, their theory was proven. O’Donnell wore the most outlandish clothes he owned, “a Hawaiian shirt when it was like February,” said Molt. “Flower pants that clashed with the shirt. The most bizarre outfit. And then we put a ten-inch bowie knife under his belt. He went through security just fine.” Molt termed the operation Blind Man’s Bluff.
O’Donnell left for Rabaul, a town in the island province of East New Britain, in late 1987. He returned with two suitcases full of Bismarck ringed pythons. The next year Celebucki, feeling more confident, made several trips to New Guinea himself, reasoning that if he could avoid Port Moresby he could avoid detection. He flew straight from Sydney to Rabaul, where he taught karate for weeks on end. “On my visa form, I put that I was a volunteer to train the Olympic team in tae kwon do,” Celebucki said. “It was a convenient truth. I did train the team. The team members paid for their lessons by hunting ringed pythons.” On his returns through Sydney, Celebucki would dress as a businessman, in suit and tie, carrying a briefcase and a bottle of duty-free Scotch. After each trip, he turned the snakes over to Molt, who sold them to Crutchfield.
On one return through Sydney, the suited-up Celebucki bought his bottle of Scotch and walked through security, only to set off a metal detector. “I had reptiles in my pockets and a six-foot diamond python balled up in the small of my back,” he said. “They’re running the wand over me and hit the python,” Celebucki said. “The guy’s squeezing it—it’s in a little tight bag. The guy said, ‘What is this?’ and I didn’t know what to say, so I said, ‘It’s a tumor.’ ” Celebucki was allowed to proceed.
On his next pass, however, Celebucki’s luggage was discovered to contain fifty mangrove monitors and six pythons, and Australian authorities arrested him.
Celebucki, who was sensitive to cold, had trouble sleeping in jail. He had no clothes with him, because he’d traded everything for snakes in New Guinea, so Molt wired him money for long underwear and blankets. He got on well with his jailers, since he’d been one himself. Soon, they allowed Celebucki to live in a parole-like arrangement. For three months he taught karate and awaited trial.
THE LAST thing Hank Molt expected, given the general trajectory of that summer, was to fall in love.
Colette Hairston worked as a reptile keeper at the zoo in Brownsville, Texas, just across the Rio Grande from Mexico. It was rare enough for a woman to be a reptile keeper, much less a woman with fine cheekbones and long legs. The reptile curators of North America had a collective crush on Hairston, who, it was reputed among them, sunbathed in a bikini on the roof of the reptile house.
Hairston had left home at seventeen and landed in Brownsville with a drug-dealing boyfriend. She dumped him and married another drug-runner, who then branched into people-smuggling. But Hairston’s real interest was reptiles; all her young life she had chased snakes and lizards. In 1976, after a year of trying, she got a job at the Gladys Porter Zoo, where she maintained the reptile terrariums, and those small worlds provided her some badly needed asylum. “The zoo pretty much raised me,” she said. “It was really a source of stability through years of insanity.” She still drank and did drugs and fought girls in bars, but by her late twenties Hairston had also made a name as a serious, published keeper, an expert on reptile diets, and a very good breeder.
Molt had first encountered Hairston years before at a reptile symposium, where she was sitting on the floor of a Dallas hotel with a parrot perched on her shoulder. “It was hard to forget that sight,” Molt said. Shortly afterward, he made a stop in Brownsville, ostensibly to visit Hairston’s boss. Molt found Hairston—just as he’d hoped to—in the reptile house, feeding flowers to her rhinoceros iguanas. She did not seem unhappy to see him. “You keep some bad company,” she joked to her boss.
“There was just always something there, always something between us,” Molt said. Every year Hairston attended the reptile symposium; every year, it pricked at Molt’s heart to see her. Once she turned up pregnant, “looking very radiant and beautiful in her pregnancy,” which just made Molt sadder.
Hairston was divorced, sober, and a mother of two by the summer of 1989, when she attended the reptile symposium in Phoenix. Molt was still drinking and still married, facts he downplayed to the best of his ability.
“The minute I got there she put her hands around my eyes,” Molt said of Hairston. “I had a rental car and she drove with me to the zoo. We sat together under a tree. We were everywhere together.” At midnight, she knocked on his hotel room door with news: Her endangered Philippine crocodiles, animals that Molt had bought in 1973 from a leather farm in Manila, smuggled back, and sold to the zoo as tiny babies, had hatched out babies of their own! “The next day at the bar, she had her legs draped on my lap,” Molt said. Everyone knew, and everyone was, to Molt’s delight, flabbergasted. “John Behler, all those guys couldn’t believe it,” Molt said. Tommy Crutchfield couldn’t believe it. “I was shocked,” Crutchfield said. “I thought she was an idiot. She could have done so much better.”
Before the weekend in Phoenix was over, Molt got a phone call from a friend of Bob Udell, Molt’s bearish former compatriot from Philadelphia. Udell had died of a drug overdose in an Ohio house crowded with firearms and reptiles. The timing of it all—the death of Udell, the birth of the crocodiles, this improbable romance—struck Molt as eerie and wrenching, a movie happening to him, again.
MOLT STARTED to divide his time among the Crutchfield compound in Florida, Colette Hairston’s place in Texas, and his own home in Philadelphia. He told Hairston that he was divorced and staying at a YMCA when in Philadelphia. “I never knew who he was living with. I never knew where his money came from. I never cared to know,” she said. “Most of the information I got about him came through back channels.” As Hairston suspected, Molt was not divorced, and his wife had no clue about most of his doings. “She never asked me where I was at any time in my life,” said Molt. “My family had nothing to do with anything—it was two different universes.”
In Brownsville, Molt bought Hairston’s young boys
bikes, and told them bedtime stories. “Hank would sleep until noon, then come into the zoo with his coffee, wearing these jean shorts that showed his knobby knees. He’d sit around for hours telling stories,” she said. “Everyone got used to him and liked him,” except for the zoo director, who had some misgivings about an unrepentant smuggler loitering in the reptile house. On weekend nights, they left Hairston’s sons with a babysitter and drove the empty country roads together, looking for rattlesnakes.
Molt never stayed in Brownsville for longer than two weeks. He could only take so much of Hairston’s boys, and wanderlust was his dominant emotion anyway. Molt would hole up in Philadelphia when the weather was mild enough to get snakes through the mail, and open packages from Stefan Schwarz. Then he would drive the animals to Crutchfield’s, and drink himself to sleep in Crutchfield’s living room. Then it was back to Texas.
EDDIE CELEBUCKI faced the prospect of a very long prison sentence in Australia until, days before his trial, the zoo in Sydney came to his aid. “The curator made a deal that if I was willing to sign the snakes over to the people of New South Wales or whatever, he would speak in my defense,” Celebucki said. Hours after his trial, Celebucki was deported.
When Celebucki returned to Ohio, he was penniless and facing divorce. His wife was not only mad about the Australia debacle, but also “in love with another guy who was remodeling the house every time I left on a trip,” Celebucki said. Hank Molt suggested that he and Celebucki open a business together—a travel agency–cum–coffee shop–cum–reptile store in downtown Cleveland. They would call it the Adventurers’ Gallery, and it would get Celebucki back on his feet. Celebucki rented a storefront, next door to a taxidermist’s. But “Hank didn’t have any money to contribute,” and was spending most of his time in Florida and Texas, so the Adventurers’ Gallery became a place for the single, destitute Celebucki to house his reptiles and lick his wounds.
Then Molt accused Celebucki of cheating him out of the proceeds from some lizards. Celebucki thought Molt could forgive this, since he’d taken one for the team in Australia, but Molt demanded his share. Molt had a peculiar way of accounting that tended to deny his compatriots any profit whatsoever, and “I never made more than beer money with Hank,” Celebucki said. They stopped speaking.
EVEN IN his best years, Molt’s success had depended on Stefan Schwarz and his Australian reptiles. In 1989, when Molt was living out of his car, running to Texas and Florida, Schwarz was all Molt had left. Schwarz was Molt’s product line, his solvency, his sole source of adventure, and his hope.
Their constant challenge was getting animals that nobody else had. By the late 1980s, a huge number of Australian species had already been smuggled into the United States, or imported quasi-legally from animals smuggled to Europe, and were being bred. Snake people in California had ruined the market for smuggled Mexican reptiles by breeding the ones they’d already smuggled; now the same was happening with Australian reptiles. Any species Molt received had to be new and fantastic, which meant that Stefan Schwarz had to risk more and travel farther.
In 1989, Schwarz hatched his first Woma pythons. These were big, splendid white-and-honey-colored snakes, with burnt-orange heads and a black sunburst pattern around the eyes, colors that dissolved them into their austere desert habitat of red rock ledges and crevices. No zoo in the Western Hemisphere possessed a Woma, and Schwarz had taken his usual pains to catch wild adults of the most beautiful strain he could find, then set them up in a breeding group. This alone took two years, and two years after that the first finger-sized hatchlings arrived at Molt’s, curled tightly inside cassette tape cases.
Molt paid Schwarz $1,000 for each hatchling; Crutchfield paid Molt $4,000, then sold them for $12,000. The day Molt delivered the first Womas to Crutchfield, he was startled to find a young assistant keeper from the San Diego Zoo awaiting him there, sent by Crutchfield’s friend and customer the reptile curator Thomas Schultz. “Needless to say there was no discussion of permits,” said Molt, and the young keeper trembled so much holding the Womas that Crutchfield forced him to sit down, lest he drop them.
Schwarz had an even better project in the works. This involved a massive green python that lived in ancient sandstone caves within the well-defined boundaries of the Kakadu National Park, near Darwin. Oenpelli pythons were first described in 1977, when an Australian herpetologist spotted one crossing a road. The Oenpelli python grew to eighteen feet, and it was incredible that a snake so huge could have eluded science for so long. A pair of Oenpelli pythons could have commanded far, far more than what Crutchfield was asking for Womas. Of course, one could not easily snag an Oenpelli python. In the Kakadu National Park, “there was only one road to come in on, no food, no water, mosquitoes everywhere, and the Aboriginals would know you’re there; they’re like ghosts,” Molt said.
No one, least of all the scientist who had discovered the species, believed Stefan Schwarz when he said he’d captured two Oenpelli pythons outside the boundaries of the park. Schwarz had caught the snakes in caves well within it—one of them as it was struggling to eat a wallaby. But Schwarz stuck to his story, and the Australian government miraculously issued him permits to keep two Oenpelli pythons. By then Schwarz had caught four. They were constant trouble—one would only eat birds, another had problems laying eggs. But in time, babies hatched. Schwarz invited Molt to Australia to come have a look, and bring along the money he still owed for the Womas. In early 1990, Molt, newly flush from selling the Womas to Crutchfield and high on his affair with Colette Hairston, flew to Cairns, cash in suitcase.
At the airport, an Australian customs officer greeted Molt a tad more warmly than Molt expected, or homed in on him—Molt couldn’t quite tell. On his immigration card, Molt had written that he was in the window business. “Is the window business any good?” the customs officer asked, a bit smirkingly. Molt was so surprised by the question, and the officer’s tone, that he did not reply. “That comment haunted me for days,” Molt said.
Schwarz’s young Oenpelli pythons looked fantastic, spotted olive drab miniatures of their parents, healthy and feeding. The usual postal treatment would not do for Oenpelli pythons. Molt and Schwarz needed a plan to smuggle them, but Schwarz would not talk about plans in the house, and Molt was still on edge about the “window business” comment. So Molt and Schwarz put on their swimming trunks and talked amid the rushing waters of a river. Schwarz’s paranoia was not unfounded—the Australian government was onto him, for sure, but what they knew was hard to say. “All the reptile people called him the biggest smuggler in Australia,” Molt said. “But he was disciplined. Not even his family knew his business. He was always on my shit for not being as secretive as him.”
AFTER A few weeks, Molt was starting to miss Hairston. He sent her postcards and aerograms and called her from the pay phone across the street from Schwarz’s house, as Schwarz had suspicions that his own phone was tapped. Molt had not filled Hairston in on the objective of this Australia trip, “and I had given her the vague general impression that my smuggling days were behind me,” he said. Hairston sent letters to Molt in Cairns, and he kept them in the inside pocket of his new jacket from Banana Republic, which sold safari clothes in those days. It was called a smuggler’s jacket, and it featured all kinds of folds and zippers and hidden pockets. Molt couldn’t resist it when he saw it.
By the eve of Molt’s departure, he and Schwarz had a plan for the Oenpelli pythons. “We were gonna have a college girl courier them from Darwin to Hong Kong to Turkey, then by train to Germany,” Molt said, where the young snakes could be exported to the United States, labeled captive-bred. Tommy Crutchfield would be ready to buy the pythons—that went without saying—and the San Diego Zoo would be their likely destination.
Molt wore his smuggler’s jacket on the ride to the Cairns airport. On the way, he and Schwarz stopped to mail a diamond python to Philadelphia. Schwarz was paranoid, but habitual. He had placed the python in a mailing box inside a pillowcase, his
usual procedure. Then, as Molt waited in the passenger seat of his truck, Schwarz emptied the bag into a mailbox. “We stupidly did it while I was in the country,” Molt said, and agents were right behind them.
Molt was drinking a beer at the airport bar when two agents came for him. They took him to baggage, where his suitcases had been pulled from the pile. “I better not get bit by anything, mate,” said one as he opened Molt’s bag, but it contained only natural history books. They opened another, but it contained only clothes. “Then they strip searched me—naked,” he said. “They asked me about Eddie—‘How’s your friend Celebucki?’ they asked, pronouncing it ‘Celebussy.’ ”
The agents opened every pocket on Molt’s jacket. He winced as they read his letters from Hairston.
“Are you pinchin’ fauna, mate?” one asked.
Molt couldn’t understand him through his accent.
“You got plenty of time to learn the language in jail, mate,” he said.
Molt demanded that the agents charge him already. But they had nothing to charge him with. Stefan Schwarz had mailed the package, and it was Stefan Schwarz they wanted. Schwarz returned from the airport to find wildlife officers in his driveway. “They had been following us since the day I arrived,” Molt said. “They’d videotaped [Stefan] dropping the snake in the mailbox. That pay phone that I thought was so clever to be using—they probably bugged it.”
Molt returned to the United States unscathed, but Schwarz was ruined. Within weeks, all of Schwarz’s animals, even the legal ones, were confiscated. The Oenpelli pythons were taken to a zoo, and, being rather high-maintenance, died shortly afterward. Schwarz sent Molt a letter announcing his retirement from smuggling.
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