Stolen World

by Jennie Erin Smith

  Molt stepped up his cooperation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Michael Rubinstein, making frequent trips to Tampa. Rubinstein was coming to like the wildlife-prosecution genre, and appreciated Molt’s tutelage. In meeting after meeting, Molt lectured Rubinstein on reptile smuggling in general, adding a few specifics “against people that I had a personal bitch with,” Molt said. “I wasn’t just gonna rat anyone out.”

  Molt provided Rubinstein the full story, complete with names and dates, on Crutchfield’s illegal exports of Bismarck ringed pythons to Germany. The story implicated Molt’s old friend Eddie Celebucki, but Molt didn’t care. “My goal was to get that ringed python thing turned into another indictment for Tommy,” Molt said. “Ed and those guys were collateral damage.”

  EDDIE CELEBUCKI was surprised to see Molt.

  Celebucki was remarried with a new baby, and had just bought a pet store called Jungle Friends, on the east side of Cleveland, when Molt walked in from the cold. It was mid-January 1993, and Molt told Celebucki that he was in the process of moving his stuff from Philadelphia to Atlanta, and thought he’d stop by. Celebucki knew Molt well enough to know that “he never just stops by. There is always a secondary motive,” Celebucki said, “and Philadelphia is seven hours away.”

  Molt stood and talked while Celebucki cleaned cages. Suddenly, a large glass aquarium broke in Celebucki’s grasp. A shard of glass had cut Celebucki’s hand deeply enough that he needed stitches, and Molt accompanied him to the hospital. In the emergency room, while Celebucki waited, they talked, and Celebucki let slip the name Kevin O’Donnell, the blind janitor they’d trained together years before.

  Molt insisted on a generous cut of any scheme he’d helped design, in perpetuity. Molt had designed, and contributed some money to, Blind Man’s Bluff, the plot to have O’Donnell suitcase snakes out of Rabaul, New Guinea. So for years, Celebucki had made a point of never mentioning O’Donnell, or the fact that the blind man was still running snakes for him. When Celebucki had shown up at Crutchfield’s with a cache of Bismarck ringed pythons, and bumped into Molt there, he claimed to have smuggled the ringed pythons himself. Molt believed Celebucki then.

  This time, “something about what Ed was telling me wasn’t jiving,” Molt said. Celebucki’s cut hand was throwing him off. Celebucki, not having the energy to persist in a lie, blurted out the truth: It was O’Donnell making the trips, and he would leave on another by the end of the week.

  A month later, Kevin O’Donnell was arrested in Los Angeles with twenty-six Bismarck ringed pythons in his luggage. “We had information that if we checked his bags we would find the snakes,” said Marie Palladini, the arresting agent. Palladini said the tip had come through Tampa, by way of the U.S. Attorney’s office.

  Celebucki suspected a Molt hand in O’Donnell’s arrest. “Hank had called me and said, ‘You should have your guy get rid of the stuff.’ But by then he’d already tipped them off,” he said. “It was the typical Hank m.o., covering his ass.”

  O’Donnell told Palladini everything he knew about Eddie Celebucki. Five years earlier, when one of her colleagues had confiscated Celebucki’s shipment of Boelen’s pythons at the L.A. airport, Palladini had opened an investigation into Celebucki that went nowhere. She regretted shelving that case, particularly since it involved the Knoxville Zoo. Unlike some of her colleagues at Fish and Wildlife, Palladini had no qualms about going after zoos, and felt they weren’t targeted frequently enough.

  Palladini located her old Celebucki files—she figured they would be of use, someday.

  MOLT AND Rubinstein agreed that Molt would plead guilty to a single misdemeanor for having transported an endangered species across state lines. For this he would receive two years’ probation, during which he was to stay out of the live-animal business; serve a hundred hours of community service; and pay a twenty-five-dollar fine.

  While waiting to be formally sentenced, Molt resumed the vituperative letter-writing campaign that had begun with his fax to Thomas Schultz. After that, Fred Ohlinger had shot Molt a letter accusing him of libel, which only spurred Molt to further extremes. In the sanctuary of his wife’s garage, Molt cut out and photocopied ghoulish images—a vomiting rat, detached eyes, frogs clutching desperately to a log—onto the same pastel-colored, legal-size sheets he had once used for his price lists. These made for creepy visual prologues to the invective that followed. Crutchfield, he was sure, would be terrified by the images, for Crutchfield had spent time in Haiti and was taken with voodoo and magic and symbols. On a word processor, Molt drafted his letters in a Gothic, quasi-Victorian style marked by acute thesaurus abuse. “It was my poor man’s fantasy of being a writer,” he said.

  Mr. and Mrs. Crutchfield:

  I am aware of the threats, rumors, and innuendos you have been spreading about me. Also, I understand that you are telling people that I am “CRAZY” because of the letters I have sent out. It would seem to me that simply telling the truth, reporting accurately events that really did take place, would be far from “CRAZY.” Leaving aside the subtle epistemological issues that can always be summoned to cloud the obvious, I hold that the 88 pages of San Diego Zoo records are real. You can feel and touch them as well as see them. They are not a figment of my imagination. Likewise your idiot lawyer’s visit to Philadelphia last July to see me and the resulting false affidavit are also real facts, as is all the additional evidence. All the money you have spent is real. Likewise the 3-177 form, the CITES export permit for 7 ringed pythons and the invoice for same, as well as the Lufthansa air waybill and customs export applicable to that transaction are real, tangible, existing items. There is no alchemy in the universe that can make those documents magically disappear …

  Molt continued at length.

  “Tom,” he concluded,

  You are a man who in your prime used fear as your instrument of personal satisfaction. The satisfaction of your reputation, so carefully cultivated, led to the culmination of all that has now befallen you, where, I am sure, your life consists of many frustrations and few satisfactions. But planning was never a feature of your work. It is not apparent that the SIMPLE TRUTH, by impartial plenojure, will soon render its hard verdict and you will soon harvest the bitter seeds you have sown in the cold and acrid cup that awaits you at the end of your rainbow. The truth remains the truth no matter how loud the clamor of your denial.

  Anon, when your appeal is denied, nobody will accuse you and Fred of perspicacity. And then it will be time for a new song. “I Am Tom Terrific” will no longer be appropriate. A Medieval threnody may be more suitable for the imprecation you have brought upon yourself …

  I realize it is never over until the fat lady sings. However, if you listen carefully you can hear her rehearsing the stygian dirges in chambers not so distant.

  Enclosed were photos of two Fiji iguanas, preserved in alcohol.

  MOLT COMPOSED letters similar in tone and intent to Fred Ohlinger and Eddie Celebucki, and on April Fool’s Day 1993 sent copies of all the letters he had written over the previous three months, reprinted in a palette of pastel shades, to all parties involved, complete with cover art and a table of contents. It was a courtesy, he explained, to keep everyone from having to fax the stuff around. “Most importantly, this saves paper, and since Tom was so concerned that President Bush did not sign the Rain Forest Treaty, I thought I would do my small part to save our ecosystem. Thank you all very much and have a nice day.”

  Shortly after sending the packages, Molt headed off to the Chattahoochee National Forest to serve his sentence of a hundred hours’ community service. There, in the cool mountain creeks, he conducted trout surveys with foresters. “They were worried about the dust and silt and runoff from highway construction and whether the trout could lay their eggs,” Molt said. “We slept in tents. We had electric shockers with gasoline generators on our backs and we’d net off a hundred yards of river at a time. We stuck these things in the water and all these fish would float to the surface and
we’d record how many species came up.” This was fine with Molt, who loved to be out in the woods. He was invited to serve as the project’s herpetologist, identifying the stunned frogs and salamanders that floated up with the fish.

  No one heard from Molt again for years. “He just sort of dropped off the face of the earth,” said Crutchfield.

  THE NEXT year, Tom Crutchfield fired Fred Ohlinger, and his new attorney successfully appealed his conviction on the basis of prosecutorial misconduct. Crutchfield had yet to serve any prison time.

  Michael Rubinstein, the appeals court ruled, had been out of line for eliciting any mention whatsoever of Penny Crutchfield’s sexual history and for his “countless irrelevant inquiries seemingly designed only to display to the jury his own expertise in the reptile field,” among other offenses. Crutchfield was free to pursue a new trial. His new attorney counseled Crutchfield to accept a plea agreement instead. Crutchfield pleaded guilty to a single charge of receiving, concealing, and facilitating the transport of Fiji iguanas. It would mean five months, not seventeen, in jail.

  “I felt avenged,” Crutchfield said.

  Rubinstein felt humiliated. Tampa newspapers ran his photo, with news of the reversal, on their front pages. Rubinstein had wanted badly to prosecute more wildlife cases at a time when, he felt sure, bigger ones would be coming. Crutchfield had killed that hope.

  IN MAY 1994, federal prosecutors in Ohio indicted Eddie Celebucki for crimes committed on six separate smuggling trips to New Guinea—some on his own, some using Kevin O’Donnell—dating back to 1986, when he’d shown up in Port Moresby with a turtle trophy for the agriculture minister.

  O’Donnell faced only misdemeanor charges. Molt, who had a hand in several of O’Donnell’s trips, was not charged. The Knoxville Zoo, the designated recipient of so much of Celebucki’s contraband, was not even mentioned. Six months later, Rabaul, New Guinea, was buried by a volcano.

  Celebucki spent much of his prison term reading Buddhist texts, though he thought about Molt more than he would have liked to. “I’ve been abandoned by virtually everyone in my life,” Celebucki said. “Hank knew more about me than anyone else. Having him turn on me didn’t help my abandonment issues.”

  Celebucki asked prison officials to transfer him to a boot-camp program as a way to shorten his term. There he was beaten up by fellow inmates who didn’t believe anyone could get fifteen months for snake smuggling.

  In Atlanta’s financial district, a youthful crew of Starbucks employees met their new manager: Hank Molt. He took to the job well, as he had a talent for bossing around teenagers.

  With the proceeds from Starbucks, Molt hired a carpenter to build a small, apartmentlike enclave in his wife’s garage. This allowed him to live more comfortably.

  15

  Sanzinia

  The reversal of his conviction hardened Tom Crutchfield’s abundant natural cockiness into the stone righteousness of the vindicated. Friends of Crutchfield’s considered the reversal a pyrrhic victory; Crutchfield saw it as a moral one. Though he still had a five-month jail term to serve on the one charge he couldn’t escape, he chose not to obsess over it. Hank Molt had stopped shooting off his terrorist tomes, and never again would Crutchfield squander a brain cell ruminating about Molt, the Dietleins, Anson Wong, Fiji iguanas, or Mike Rubinstein. “Prosecutorial misconduct”—the very sound of it delighted him.

  Crutchfield was in a celebratory mood, and in August 1994, just before the annual reptile expo in Orlando, he ordered two Rolex watches from his customer and friend Frank Lehmeyer, a jeweler with an elegant shop in the Rhine River city of Speyer, Germany. Crutchfield had established a tradition of entertaining guests in the days leading up to the expo—a tradition he kept up even in the summer of his conviction—and Lehmeyer was always among those guests, often with his family in tow. Lehmeyer “always wanted really rare stuff,” Crutchfield said, including the Bismarck ringed pythons fresh from Eddie Celebucki’s suitcases. Legal formalities never much concerned Lehmeyer, who would put a snake in his own luggage and take it back to Germany if it saved paperwork. Lehmeyer paid on time, sometimes in jewelry. Once he brought Crutchfield a gold, snake-shaped belt buckle with emerald eyes, which Crutchfield cherished.

  The year before, Lehmeyer had arrived complaining of some lingering ailment, a fever he’d caught in Madagascar. He had been arrested, on his very first trip there, trying to smuggle tree pythons and radiated tortoises back to Germany, and spent a week in jail. Lehmeyer’s Madagascar story impressed Crutchfield, who had regarded his friend, until then, as a connoisseur, not a smuggler, and certainly not someone tough enough to withstand such an ordeal.

  “If you want a good snake, you have to get it yourself,” Lehmeyer explained.

  IT HAD been years since Crutchfield wore a Rolex. Gold Rolexes were once his personal trademark and corporate calling card, to the point where rival reptile dealers started wearing them to keep up, but legal bills had forced him to go without. Frank Lehmeyer’s watches were steel, not gold, but they were duty-free at least. Crutchfield kept one for himself. The other he gave Adamm Smith, his number-two and his increasingly close confidant.

  Smith was the young man who had lived for years with Crutchfield’s enemies, the Dietleins, then redeemed himself to Crutchfield by humiliating them in federal court. He showed up in Lake Panasoffkee a month or so later, and Crutchfield rewarded him with his own business. Or rather, Crutchfield led Smith to believe that Tropical Fauna, Inc., was his own business; Smith never saw the incorporation papers, which made no mention of him. Tropical Fauna was indistinguishable in every way from Tom Crutchfield’s Reptile Enterprises—same storefront, same mailing address, same phone and fax—but for its name, and that it was a licensed importer and exporter of wildlife. Crutchfield furnished its Lake Panasoffkee offices with a big, glossy new conference table and a towering leather chair that his employees called “the throne.” The license was Smith’s; the throne was Crutchfield’s.

  Crutchfield—after a very brief period of circumspection—was back to welcoming visitors with suitcases. His old friend and manager Dwayne Cunningham, who had a new job as a juggler and comedian on cruise ships, was returning from the Caribbean with island rarities he’d hide in the cabins until his ship cleared customs, and Crutchfield had always been weak for island rarities. Thomas Schultz of the San Diego Zoo was coming around Lake Panasoffkee once more, too, for days at a time, and was swapping animals with Crutchfield again.

  Years before, Schultz had bought from Crutchfield some baby Woma pythons that Hank Molt had received in cassette tape cases from Australia. Now Schultz was trading Crutchfield the offspring of those same Womas, which Crutchfield listed as “zoo-bred” on his mailings. Frank Lehmeyer took a few of these zoo-bred Womas back to Germany as payment for the Rolexes. It was beautiful, the way it all worked out.

  AND YET the reptile trade was expanding faster than Crutchfield could keep on top of.

  Some two million American households now kept reptiles, according to the American Pet Product Manufacturers Association, and the figure would nearly double by the decade’s end. Reptile conventions imitating Wayne Hill’s Orlando expo popped up in civic centers and school gymnasiums around the country. Species that were easily bred—leopard geckos, bearded dragons, ball pythons, and green iguanas—the herpetoculturists were breeding commercially, and these were becoming as standard in pet stores as gerbils. They were a better product than the imported reptile pets of the past, since they were free of parasites and not beat up from long journeys. After the 1993 movie Jurassic Park, cheap, farm-raised green iguanas, with their little velociraptor faces, emerged as a fad pet, and pricier snake morphs began to make their way into pet store chains, too, as did specialty books, specialty foods, frozen mice, and all kinds of products for lighting, watering, and disinfecting reptiles. The popularity of pet reptiles necessitated a different type of reptile business, and in the vacuum left by a weakened Crutchfield a new class of superdealer emerged.


  Strictly Reptiles was a volume dealer on a scale the trade had never before seen. Strictly’s proprietor, Ray Van Nostrand, was of the same generation as Crutchfield and Hank Molt, with roots in the freewheeling animal trade of the 1960s. But the Van Nostrand family, unlike Molt or Crutchfield, put business before personal prestige, zoo accounts, or rare specimens. Strictly’s bread and butter was farm-raised green iguanas, which it imported from Central America in lots of thousands and wholesaled to chains like Petco and PetSmart, which were expanding aggressively throughout the 1990s. Strictly also received all manner of wild reptiles from Mohamad Hardi and from Anson Wong, who after parting ways with Crutchfield sent his massive, miscellaneous shipments to Strictly.

  Crutchfield could only stand by and watch as Strictly ballooned, dubbing itself “the Iguana King” and moving into hangarlike new headquarters. “They didn’t mind the losses and the huge quantities and selling cheap,” Crutchfield said. “Morally, I did mind that, I really did.” Sick and dehydrated ball pythons got tossed into Strictly’s Dumpster, only to be salvaged by neighborhood children. When local veterinarians complained about school kids marching in with listless, half-dead snakes, state wildlife officers padlocked the Dumpster. In Crutchfield’s best year, he’d sold two million dollars’ worth of reptiles; the Van Nostrand family sold $8 million.

  Reptiles were becoming a commodity divorced from science and zoos. To a younger generation of reptile buyers, accustomed to morphs and mutations, the color of an animal mattered more than the species; its natural history was a distant afterthought. The trade magazines changed with the times. Where The Vivarium had taken pains to establish a lofty, scientific tone, the newest magazine on the pet store stands, Reptiles, had no such pretensions. Reptiles went for neon-colored headlines—THINK SKINK!—and glossy lizard centerfolds. Its articles were full of grammatical errors. Eventually, The Vivarium folded, leaving Reptiles to dominate the Petco checkout.