Stolen World

by Jennie Erin Smith

  “THEY EAT the animals over there,” Fred Ohlinger, who had never been to Fiji or anywhere near it, told the jury. “If you go out as the sun’s coming down and you look up in the trees around the islands, you can see them fluttering. The chickens of the trees fluttering around. The natives eat them. They don’t protect them.”

  It was closing arguments, and Ohlinger was determined to use whatever he had, including this nonsense about Fiji iguanas as food. Ohlinger had already recapped his claims about spotted owls and the many other ways in which the stars had aligned against the Crutchfields through no fault of their own.

  Yes, the Crutchfields did have Fiji banded iguanas, and no, they didn’t have permits for them—that much Ohlinger finally conceded. So, if the Crutchfields had Fiji iguanas and no permits, why shouldn’t they be convicted?

  Very simple, Ohlinger told the jury: the Fijis were Hank Molt’s.

  “Hank Molt, he was at the beginning of this case, and he was at the end of this case; in fact, he is the beginning and the end of this case as far as Fijis are concerned. There is no way that you can exclude the reasonable doubt that those are captive bred progeny from Hank Molt.”

  Ohlinger said it again: “There are animals out there that Hank Molt had and the case started with Hank and that’s where it comes back to and the progeny would still be alive today.”

  On June 16, the jury returned its verdict in United States v. Tommy Edward Crutchfield, et al. Penny was found guilty on half the counts, and Tommy on all of them.

  14

  Chambers Not So Distant

  Two days after his conviction, Tom Crutchfield tried to phone Hank Molt in Philadelphia, but instead reached Molt’s wife, who was disturbed by what he had to say. The four Fiji iguanas he had been convicted over “were your husband’s property, and that’s the truth,” Crutchfield vowed before hanging up.

  When Molt returned, his wife played the answering machine. She had accidentally recorded the conversation. “I thought, ‘What the fuck is this shit?’ ” he said.

  Molt called Crutchfield back, incensed. They hadn’t spoken since March over the $5,000 Crutchfield owed, and now Crutchfield wanted to buy Molt a plane ticket to Florida. It was urgent that Molt, Crutchfield, and Fred Ohlinger meet as soon as possible, Crutchfield said, and Tom Schultz would be flying in from San Diego, too. Crutchfield informed Molt that the Feds were looking to arrest him, a fate he might avert by cooperating.

  Molt figured he might be vulnerable to arrest in the Crutchfield case. Much as he would have enjoyed testifying against Crutchfield in federal court, presenting his pickled iguanas in their jars, he did not volunteer his services to Rubinstein, for fear of being slapped with a felony violation for transporting an endangered species across state lines. And now it had happened.

  MOLT TOLD Crutchfield he wanted his money first. Then he’d think about flying to Florida.

  The next day, Fred Ohlinger called. Molt, who hadn’t taped a conversation since 1974, let the answering machine record. Molt told him the same thing he told Crutchfield: he would not consider a meeting unless he was paid first. Ohlinger promised to put $5,000 of Crutchfield’s money in escrow until Molt’s cooperation could be assured. If all went well, Ohlinger said, Molt would receive it, perhaps even more.

  It took several more conversations over several days before Molt figured out what, exactly, Ohlinger and Crutchfield were scheming. Ohlinger and Crutchfield planned to file a motion for a new trial, based on the premise that the four Fiji iguanas had been Hank Molt’s lizards all along. “That was the rusty nail they were gonna hang their weak hat on,” Molt said.

  Obviously the San Diego Zoo fit into this scenario, too, if Tom Schultz was involved, and it would all have to be hammered out fast—they had only a few weeks to file.

  CRUTCHFIELD AND Ohlinger nervously awaited an answer from Molt.

  “By now I am thinking that these guys are totally nuts, totally out of control,” Molt said. “We’re crossing the border from wildlife violations into perjury, obstruction of justice.” It was so reckless a scheme, he thought, that it might not be real. Crutchfield and Ohlinger could be trying to entrap him, hand him to Mike Rubinstein in exchange for a lighter sentence for Crutchfield.

  But if Ohlinger and Crutchfield were serious, Molt realized, he could do the reverse—hand them to Rubinstein and get his own charges reduced, or even dropped. He had to decide quickly: Rubinstein’s office had just contacted Molt, demanding he show up in Tampa for processing on his felony charge.

  Molt phoned Ohlinger. He’d thought it through, he said, and he was ready to help, but only if Ohlinger came to Philadelphia, alone. Ohlinger balked, but Molt insisted.

  Crutchfield’s attorney arrived the next day on a flight from Tampa, dressed in golfing clothes. Molt sat waiting for him at the gate. Ohlinger refused to talk at the coffee shop in the airport; instead, he rented a room at the airport Econolodge, where he patted Molt down for recording devices.

  Ohlinger, a heavy smoker, lit cigarette after cigarette as he talked. He proposed that Molt sign an affidavit swearing that the four Fiji iguanas were his reptiles, and that he had delivered them to Crutchfield on March 13, 1989. It was a day that Molt had actually been at Crutchfield’s. He’d been delivering smuggled Woma pythons from Stefan Schwarz, but no one needed to know that. The point was that credible people, including the deputy curator of reptiles at the San Diego Zoo, could testify that they had seen him there.

  Molt would have to fabricate receipts for a sale of the iguanas, Ohlinger continued. Molt said he thought it would be awfully hard to convince people that any of his Fiji iguanas had survived since his round-the-world collecting trip in 1973, which would have been the last time Fiji iguanas were legal. But Ohlinger said no, these lizards were to be called the offspring—or offspring of offspring—of the original iguanas. He had something in mind to help establish this, he said, that he’d explain later.

  Molt assented to everything. “I said, ‘Yeah, that’s a really good idea, Fred’—it was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard of. And seriously dangerous shit, fabricating evidence.”

  Ohlinger’s return flight to Tampa was at six o’clock that evening. By now it was four, and Ohlinger had one last item of business, a thick packet of papers that he tossed onto the bed “with a great dramatic gesture,” Molt said. It was the San Diego Zoo’s entire file on its storied Fiji iguanas—some eighty-eight pages in all, including feeding data, clutch laying dates and hatch dates, zoo association awards, and a long, meticulous series of studbook entries. The file, Ohlinger explained, contained all Molt needed to know to create four Fiji iguanas on paper. The idea was for Molt to claim that he’d held on to some iguanas since 1973, and secretly bred them. Molt could use the zoo records as a model to create his own records. Ohlinger left the file with Molt to study.

  Years later, Thomas Schultz claimed that Ohlinger must have obtained the copies of the San Diego Zoo records some other way—that whatever papers Molt saw could not have been the original file. Both Molt and Crutchfield insisted otherwise. The file “looked like someone took it out of a drawer and handed it over,” Molt said—entries were handwritten in ink, older papers were yellowed, and the whole thing was shot through with separator pages and colored tabs. “Schultz gave them to me,” Crutchfield said of the records. “How the hell else would you get them?”

  At 4:30, Crutchfield called the Econolodge. Ohlinger assured him that they had a deal. Molt and Ohlinger had drafted an affidavit, which Ohlinger would have typed and faxed to Molt the next day. Molt would sign it, notarize it, FedEx it back to Florida, and receive the $5,000 he’d been trying to collect for the better part of a year. Crutchfield and Ohlinger would file a motion for a new trial.

  Ohlinger handed the phone to Molt. Crutchfield, on the other end, sounded happy and relieved. He asked Molt what he thought of the San Diego Zoo file. “Tom thought it was just fantastic, a magic bullet,” said Molt, who was finally certain that Crutchfield and Ohlinger were
not setting him up, but crazy enough to believe they would get a new trial out of all this. Instead, “they handed me their ass on a golden platter,” Molt said.

  The next morning, Molt’s fax machine spit out the false affidavit from Ohlinger’s office in Florida. In March 1989, Molt claimed, he’d delivered four Fiji banded iguanas to Crutchfield in Fort Myers. The iguanas were, he went on, “captive-bred progeny of my founder stock of Fiji banded iguanas which I personally collected in the Fiji islands and imported to the United States in 1973, not subject to the provisions of CITES nor the Endangered Species Act permit requirements.”

  Molt did not sign the affidavit or return it. Instead he packed it up, along with the zoo files, his answering machine tapes, and two jarred iguanas, and drove straight to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Tampa.

  MIKE RUBINSTEIN found Hank Molt more likable than he’d expected—cerebral and businesslike, a refreshing contrast to Crutchfield’s huffing and puffing. He spared Molt the drama of being fingerprinted and photographed at the Tampa courthouse, which Molt appreciated. Molt surrendered himself with a signature, and sat on the other side of Rubinstein’s desk like a colleague.

  The reality, though, was that Molt was looking at some prison time. A year, Rubinstein insisted. “For babysitting a couple of lizards?” Molt scoffed, and Rubinstein thought that was funny. Molt said he would not agree to any deal that involved prison, and for good reason—he had something interesting to offer. Molt presented Rubinstein with Ohlinger’s false affidavits, the San Diego Zoo files, answering machine tapes of his conversations with Ohlinger, and color photos of his pickled Fiji iguanas, in their jars. The actual iguanas were in the car, he explained—he didn’t think the security guards would want him bringing them in.

  Rubinstein was not entirely surprised. “Crutchfield and Ohlinger seemed to be doing stuff behind the scenes and we were sort of aware of it,” he said. Molt informed Rubinstein that Crutchfield and Ohlinger were waiting for a FedEx containing the signed affidavit. They had only four days left to move for a new trial, and they were increasingly desperate, Molt said. Maybe they could be lured to Tampa to discuss and sign the false affidavit in person—and be caught in the act?

  Rubinstein called the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and a plan emerged to arrange a meeting and to bug a hotel room. “We went to Wal-Mart and bought a baby monitor,” said Eddie McKissick, one of the agents working with Rubinstein. “I thought it was so funny—I’m a brand-new agent and I thought we had all this surveillance technology.” But Fish and Wildlife was not the FBI, and McKissick found himself in the nursery aisle.

  Adjoining hotel rooms were rented and prepared—one for Molt, another for the wildlife agents. Molt helped them scratch for places to conceal their device. From his room Molt placed the first call to Ohlinger, who accepted his explanation that he had flown to Tampa and had issues to discuss in person. Crutchfield and Ohlinger agreed to drive to Tampa the next morning.

  That night, Molt hit the Tampa strip clubs and drank himself into a stupor. When Molt’s alarm went off at six a.m., he had a terrible hangover and a strange woman in his room, “a homeless chick,” he said, whom he kicked out.

  The wildlife agents came on time, but Ohlinger and Crutchfield never showed. They’d been edgy about the plan from the start, and with a whole night to think about it, they had changed their minds. Something about Molt’s behavior struck Crutchfield as weird. Why had he come down on his own, without so much as calling?

  “After a while it became clearer that it was a setup,” Crutchfield said.

  Crutchfield sat in Ohlinger’s office, unsure what to do next. And then Molt called. “I got Tom on the phone,” Molt said. “Tom was getting nervous and at some point I made a slip of the tongue to one of the agents. He said, ‘Are you alone?’ and got off the phone.”

  After that, Crutchfield said, Molt “kept calling and calling in that soothing Hank voice.” Crutchfield let Ohlinger handle Molt’s calls. “I said, ‘Tell him we’re not fucking coming,’ ” Crutchfield said. “He kept calling and calling and finally we quit answering the phones.”

  After several hours, the agents retrieved their baby monitor and informed Mike Rubinstein of their failure. They walked Molt to his car, where he handed over his jars of iguanas.

  It was by no means the triumphant unveiling he’d envisioned, but “there was no point in running around with them in my car anymore,” he said.

  RUBINSTEIN NEVER sought criminal charges against Ohlinger and Crutchfield for their scheme. He did manage to quash their motion for a new trial, a motion that—not surprisingly, given the time frame they had—was hastily cobbled together and a total mess.

  Molt, undaunted and still bitter about the $5,000 Crutchfield owed him, launched his own, extrajudicial campaign against Ohlinger and Crutchfield.

  That August, Molt stormed into the reptile house of the Columbus Zoo, claiming certain of its snakes were rightfully his—Crutchfield had not paid him for them, he explained, and the zoo could expect to hear from Molt’s lawyers if they didn’t come up with a plan. The zoo, spooked enough as it was by Crutchfield’s Fiji iguana affair, cut its ties to Crutchfield. “Hank ruined all my accounts there,” said Crutchfield, who was discovering how it felt to be a zoo-world pariah.

  A week later, a thirteen-page fax arrived at the San Diego Zoo’s reptile house, addressed to Thomas Schultz. Molt had sent it in the middle of the night “so that in the morning it would be like toilet paper all over the floor,” he said.

  Tom,

  The purpose of this communication is to make you aware of a potentially very dangerous situation which is ongoing at this time. There could possibly be serious consequences involving you and the San Diego Zoo. This matter concerns Tom Crutchfield and his recent court case involving Fiji iguanas. Let me begin by saying that I realize you and Tom are very close friends and it is not my intent to have any influence on that. I am just going to report to you a series of FACTS, ABSOLUTE COLD, CLEAR FACTS and you can decide how you need to handle this information.

  Molt went on to describe his series of calls and meetings with Crutchfield and Ohlinger. Most curious, wrote Molt, was the San Diego Zoo’s eighty-eight-page Fiji iguana file, which Ohlinger had tossed onto the hotel room bed. It seemed remarkably authentic, Molt said, and he still possessed it—or rather, the government now did, and “I intend to fully cooperate with the US government in any investigations or legal proceedings,” Molt informed Schultz.

  “I knew Tom Schultz, how to push his buttons. I wasn’t out to get him, I was out to get Tommy,” Molt said. “I knew that by going through the San Diego and Columbus zoos I could.”

  AT CRUTCHFIELD’S sentencing hearing that fall, Rubinstein presented letters from scientists attesting that Fijians do not eat Fiji iguanas, as Fred Ohlinger had boldly and repeatedly claimed. Three local Baptist pastors sent letters on Crutchfield’s behalf, but not one zoo came to his aid, which hurt his feelings.

  Crutchfield was sentenced to seventeen months in prison and two years’ probation. Penny received a year of house arrest and probation. Crutchfield, not humbled by any of it, announced that he would appeal the verdict. Since Hank Molt was not going to cooperate, his appeal would have to be based on something else. Crutchfield focused his ire on Rubinstein.

  Dear Customer, Crutchfield began his January 1993 price list. I would like to thank all of you for your patronage in 1992. It was our most successful year yet. My staff and myself wish all of you a very Happy and Prosperous New Year.

  At this time I would like to explain some of the details and circumstances of the problems we had in 1992 and dispel many rumors. First of all I am not in jail and have not been in jail. It is true that I was convicted for 4 wildlife violations in 1992. I am not guilty of the crimes I am charged with committing. Early on I could have engaged in a plea bargain of substantially less penalty than I received but I cannot plead guilty to something I did not do …

  The first person that played perha
ps the most important role in this persecution was the Asst. U.S. Attorney Michael Rubinstein, a customer of mine dating back to the late 80s. Mr. Rubinstein probably has a great future in politics as he has all the major qualifications. This trial incidentally was conducted at the exact same time the Earth Summit was being held in Brazil. The U. S. is the only country in the world that did not sign the agreement. I believe that our persecution and prosecution was as much politically motivated as inspired by our heinous criminal behavior …

  In the next few months we will be updating you on the facts about the case so stay tuned next month for another episode of “As the Stomach Turns.” You Reptile Dealers might want to check your mailing list and see if Mr. Michael Rubinstein at 510 Bosphorus Ave., Tampa, Florida, is on your list.

  HANK MOLT’S wife and daughter moved to Atlanta. They didn’t consult with him extensively before doing so. If he chose to come along, his wife said, he could sleep in the garage.

  The garage was fine with Molt. There he had plenty of time to ruminate. Molt’s lingering bitterness over Crutchfield’s $5,000—money Crutchfield had zero intention of paying—had swelled into an all-consuming vendetta.

  Years later Crutchfield would wonder whether money was really the source of Molt’s fury. “I was perplexed why he even got mad,” Crutchfield said. “My whole life I never did anything except help him. He never did anything but cheat me since I was a kid.” All Crutchfield could think—the only thing that made sense—was that Molt had been secretly envious of him for years, and now saw his chance to destroy him.