That price, and the circumstances in which they were being kept—on clean sawdust, in what looked to be a clean apartment—did not suggest to me that they were headed to the food trade. It suggested to me that they were headed for Anson Wong, or someone a lot like him. The really odd thing was why he was showing me these photos at all.
Later, when a reporter for a Malaysian newspaper interviewed Wong, he opened his laptop for her and showed her the same photos. He said he had taken them himself, while on vacation in Zanzibar.
17
Anson and Friends
Anson Wong had always loved rare animals, and the “goodies,” as he called the illicit species he dealt in now and then, had less to do with making him money than with assuaging his boredom. Most of his business was in giant, legal bulk shipments, millions of wild geckos and frogs that ended up in crowded aquariums at Petland, if they made it that far. Volume was how Wong made his money, but volume was dull. Less dull were the shipments of something special—say, wild star tortoises from India—laundered through a third country as captive bred, a favor Wong sometimes did for Strictly Reptiles, his biggest customer in the 1990s.
It took an animal very rare indeed to get Wong’s mind racing. Even the Fiji banded iguanas that had caused the whole Crutchfield fracas hadn’t had that effect. A Swiss man had arrived in Penang one day with more than one hundred of them—“Two suitcases worth,” Wong said, and Wong guessed that they weren’t that hard to come by in Fiji if he’d gotten so many out. Wong had bought ten and sent four to Crutchfield, later getting bored with his own six and reselling them. “They were just iguanas,” Wong said; over his fifteen years in business he’d had red pandas from Burma, hyenas, a Spix’s macaw. But there were still animals that did it for him, and in November 1996, when a man in New Zealand called Wong about tuataras, he had that feeling again. “I had seen them at one of the zoos once—geez, where was it? You know how you see that dress and you want it? So the next payday you have to go buy it? That’s how it was,” Wong said. The caller was Freddie Angell, a dedicated wildlife smuggler who had been imprisoned twice already for stealing tuataras, some of which he’d swiped from a museum menagerie. Angell was presently incarcerated again, phoning Wong from jail.
New Zealand’s tuatara is arguably the strangest living reptile—strange foremost in that it lives at all, since it is the sole surviving member of an order from 200 million years ago, unrelated to any modern reptile. It looks something like a brown iguana—except it has no ear holes, and the males lack hemipenes, transferring sperm to the female through a birdlike vent instead. Amazingly, it can live a century or more. A handful of American zoos kept the more common tuatara species, Sphenodon punctatus, though the San Diego Zoo, never to be outdone, managed through the efforts of Thomas Schultz to acquire eight of the much rarer Sphenodon guntheri, which are confined to one small island in the Cook Strait and number less than a thousand. Both species are CITES I, and strictly protected by New Zealand.
Wong already had a buyer for the tuataras, someone he had never met face-to-face and had only been dealing with for a year or so, George Ross of PacRim Enterprises in California. The fact that Wong had an outstanding arrest warrant in the United States, dating back to Crutchfield’s Fiji iguana trial, did not deter him from dealing in illegal animals with Americans he hardly knew. “I knew I was a wanted person,” he said, but he was safe in Malaysia. For six months now, Wong had been sending Ross mislabeled shipments of Gray’s monitors, Timor pythons, Indian star tortoises. “It took me away from the monotony of the usual frog and gecko shipments,” Wong said.
In retrospect, Wong felt, there had been something odd about George Ross and PacRim. “When I started dealing with them, it was all so easy—anything that is too good to be true usually is. My terms are always the same: 50 percent before shipping, 50 percent after, and they said, ‘No, it’s not necessary, we’ll just pay in advance.’ ”
GEORGE ROSS was George Morrison, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife agent who had introduced PacRim Enterprises by way of a classified ad in Reptiles magazine. The Reptiles ad was intended to help Morrison dispose of any legal reptiles he imported, nothing more. “The guys I care about catching are the Anson Wongs, not the lesser guys,” he said. Morrison had already made contact with Wong before placing the ad, and Wong turned out to be far easier to deal with than Morrison imagined. “How did you find me?” Wong asked when Morrison phoned, and Morrison replied that everyone knew who Wong was. The answer seemed to satisfy Wong, so PacRim and Sungei Rusa Wildlife—Anson Wong had finally retired the horribly dated-sounding “Exotic Skins and Alives”—exchanged price lists.
Then the Reptiles ad ran, and Morrison started fielding calls from the two-bit snake nuts he expected to hear from. “In ’94 and ’95 you had a huge increase in people wanting to get into the business,” Morrison said. One of the first calls came from an eighteen-year-old in Buckeye, Arizona, who ran his reptile business from his parents’ house—such was the caliber of dealer this ad attracted. But then, six months later, the same Arizona teenager called Morrison again, to offer him Gray’s monitors from the Philippines “without papers.” Anson Wong was the only reptile dealer who routinely trafficked in this species. Improbable as it was, the kid had a connection to Wong.
The kid’s name was Beau Lee Lewis, and youth had treated him poorly. He was freakishly tall, and suffered from muscular dystrophy, for which he had undergone three separate surgeries. He had also been treated for asthma, allergies, temper tantrums, pneumonia, suicidal thoughts, and depression, and was so socially isolated by these ailments that he had finally dropped out of high school and retreated to his bedroom, reading snake books and composing various communications for his Southwest Reptile Exchange, a business that comprised, essentially, a fax machine. Lewis had the screwy habit of corresponding in capital letters, and his grammar and spelling were appalling. Yet Lewis was not to be taken lightly if he was in touch with Anson Wong, and Morrison was quick to cultivate him.
Lewis had yet to actually smuggle any animals when he offered Morrison the Gray’s monitors. All he’d ever done was sell common, cheap reptiles to local pet stores, and managed somehow to get Anson Wong to take him seriously. Wong invited Lewis to fly to Penang and take Freddie Angell’s tuataras back to the United States. Wong routinely used kids Lewis’s age as couriers; some frightening percentage of Penang’s university students had run missions for Wong to Australia. “You have to get young people with a lot of cojones,” Wong explained. But Lewis refused. It was too risky, and he had bigger ambitions than to be someone’s mule.
Lewis confided all this to George Morrison. Morrison and Lewis were starting to brainstorm business deals, all of which involved Anson Wong in some way or another. Lewis wanted Wong to send him animals by DHL, but wasn’t sure how to make it work. Morrison was talking about cutting Lewis in on some of the big commercial shipments from Wong, letting him sell off what he could in Arizona. Lewis sent Morrison and Wong a list of his code words for Komodo dragons, false gavials, star tortoises, radiated tortoises, tuataras. Wong didn’t bother to use it; as far as Wong was concerned, that stuff was for kids.
In September 1996, Lewis turned nineteen. He changed his business name to Beau Lewis Rare Reptiles Import-Export/Herpetological Brokers. Morrison helped him type his first list. Few of the tremendously pricey animals on that list were actually in his possession; most weren’t even in the country. He still lived at home.
That November, Wong, Lewis, and Morrison talked almost daily about tuataras. Morrison had agreed to buy them—he’d already wired Wong a payment—but Lewis was still not inclined to pick them up. “Some of us go in for that,” Morrison told Lewis, but he’d have to decide for himself. Wong used the advance from PacRim to front Freddie Angell’s wife a few thousand dollars, something to tide her over until her husband was released. Angell did snare four tuataras after leaving prison, just as he promised. But police soon discovered him with nets, poles, and Mesozoic reptiles in his c
ar.
Wong called Ross the next month with an even better offer: young plowshare tortoises, two for $13,000. Ross talked him down to $11,000.
GEORGE MORRISON regarded live-animal smugglers as congenitally different from other wildlife crooks. “When I worked ivory cases, no one was a collector of tusks,” he said, and he felt both Beau Lewis and Anson Wong to be possessed of “that sickness—the same sickness you see in people who are into butterflies, insects, shells.” Lewis had been chasing snakes since kindergarten, and Wong accumulated books, art, artifacts, even samples of beach and river sand.
Wong, Morrison said, “would build the animal up and talk about how beautiful it was, but there was no real love for it.” Most animal dealers, however, would recognize Wong’s attitude as ennui. Anyone who handles thousands of specimens gets inured to them eventually. Unless the specimen is breathtakingly rare—then the old love comes surging right back.
The wildlife agents had expected some of the famous stolen plowshare tortoises to arrive in the United States, and Morrison wasn’t wholly shocked by Wong’s offer. Some of Morrison’s colleagues believed Wong might have masterminded the theft. “If anyone could have done it, it would be Anson,” he said. Wong was offering two plowshares, but claimed he had access to dozens more. Wong told Morrison he had already sent four to Japan, using couriers who’d tied them up in pantyhose and stuffed them into backpacks.
The timing of Wong’s offer was curious. It had been seven months since the theft of the plowshares, and no one had heard a thing about them until two weeks before, when Dutch authorities called U.S. Fish and Wildlife to say that thirty-five of them—just less than half the number stolen—had turned up in a small city in the Netherlands. For now, they were being held in secret while an investigation proceeded. The media had not been informed, nor had the government of Madagascar.
Wong was adamant that his plowshare tortoises were not among those stolen from the breeding program, but Morrison found that hard to believe. Morrison tortured himself trying to get Wong to say something about the tortoises’ origins, let slip some hint of the chain of custody from Madagascar to Malaysia. But Wong gave him nothing. Wong, he suspected, fed him disinformation—sparingly, the only effective way. “I got the feeling that I was dealing with a very cunning and intelligent person,” Morrison said.
Morrison paid in advance for the plowshares. Wong would conceal them in a shipment of other species.
Plowshare tortoises represented a sensational turn in the Wong case. But for this case to actually see a court of law, Wong would have to enter the United States, which he had no plans of ever doing. Morrison tried from time to time to interest Wong in Hawaii. “No place on earth like it,” he’d say, but Wong never sounded too enthused.
AFTER THE plowshare tortoise theft of 1996, the New York Times began paying unusual attention to reptile crimes, placing on the cover of its Sunday magazine a photo of a radiated tortoise with the words: “I was caught in Madagascar. Peddled for 30 cents. Smuggled to Orlando. Sold for $10,000. I’m a rare, coveted tortoise—coldblooded contraband.”
Radiated tortoises, which were CITES I and coveted but not all that rare, were some of the animals Wolfgang Kloe had taken delivery of that fateful morning at the Waffle House. They did not sell for $10,000, but closer to $1,000.
The Times Magazine story, which relied heavily on agency sources, estimated the global illegal wildlife trade as worth between $10 billion and $20 billion annually—“roughly equal to the trade in smuggled weapons,” a Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman added. This was an unprecedented hyperbole. Traffic, the group established by CITES to monitor the wildlife trade, offered no estimates for the illegal trade, saying reliable ones were impossible to come by. Traffic’s values for the entire legal trade in live animals—all the aquarium fish, birds, reptiles, and mammals exported worldwide—hovered at around $500 million a year, and the illegal trade was thought to be a fraction of that. Yet somehow, $10 billion to $20 billion were the numbers that made the Times Magazine. “There are a lot of mythical numbers in the wildlife trade,” said Bruce Weissgold, a Fish and Wildlife agent who had formerly worked for Traffic. “I was there for the genesis of many of those numbers.”
The Times Magazine story mentioned Kloe’s pursuit and arrest, the unsolved plowshare tortoise theft, and the efforts of U.S. Fish and Wildlife to combat the global trade in illegal reptiles. It took particular care to explain why those efforts were warranted: “According to Fish and Wildlife authorities and a chorus of independent biologists and ecologists … if the decimation of animal populations and their habitats continues, the tapestry of life across whole blotches of the map may start to unravel. Though few scientists agree on the timing or severity of this scenario, they have given it a name: ecosystem collapse.”
Privately, the Fish and Wildlife agents didn’t delude themselves that their reptile campaign was winning battles for the planet. “The major impact to any wildlife resource is degradation of the environment,” said Ernest Mayer. “No one can argue otherwise.” Reptile smuggling was an environmental pinprick next to the carnage wrought daily by mining, logging, and conversion of wilderness to farmland. Still, smuggling was something the agents could at least attempt to control. Already they had expended tremendous energies on the Kloe case, on Crutchfield, and on a sprawling new case against Strictly Reptiles and its suppliers in Indonesia and South America. These investigations, which were supposed to have lasted a year, had gone on for two, with no end in sight. Inside the agency, the team took heat for all the time and money spent protecting animals that weren’t even American, much less ducks.
In short, said Bruce Weissgold, “when Special Ops decided to mess around with Johnson’s flying snakes from East Walla Walla, people said, ‘What the fuck?’ ”
But then “ecosystem collapse” sounded pretty bad, too.
Two days after the Times Magazine article appeared, Anson Wong’s plowshare tortoises arrived, safe and sound, at PacRim.
SMUGGLING REPTILES via one of the international parcel companies, DHL, UPS, or Federal Express, became popular in the 1990s, an upgrade of the old postal schemes. The parcel companies were fast, but you still had to label the contents as something besides animals, and this meant no one looked out for their safety. If you were an expert packer, the animals could last a week or more confined in their boxes, but if you weren’t, they would die, and you could expect to be caught. Few smells are more distinctive or disgusting than that of dead snakes.
Beau Lewis pondered ways to improve on the practice, until in May 1997, he had it. After much deliberation and planning, a friend of his was hired as a FedEx driver. The friend would ensure that Lewis’s parcels were pulled off the line immediately, then signed for by their fictional addressees.
The first of Lewis’s FedEx shipments from Wong, labeled as medical books and addressed to “Dr. Harry Glassman,” contained a Boelen’s python and a false gavial. The false gavial arrived dead and the python badly injured. Lewis remained optimistic.
LEWIS MADE an impressive debut at the Orlando reptile expo that summer, renting himself one of the penthouse suites at the Radisson Twin Towers, across the hall from Wayne Hill’s. Even Hank Molt was taken with the nineteen-year-old’s swagger.
Molt had finally been fired by Starbucks for erratic behavior, which made him very happy, and now, with his probation period from the Crutchfield affair over, he inched his way back into the reptile business, armed only with the cash from the painful sale of his entire natural history library. He crashed in Hill’s penthouse and rented a table for the expo, though all he had to offer was a pile of photocopied flyers with a blown-up drawing of a mata-mata, a bizarre fish-eating turtle from the Amazon whose head looks like a leaf. Underneath it, he reintroduced himself to the world. “I HAVE BEEN IN THE REPTILE BUSINESS SINCE 1965—I AM A QUALITY FANATIC—LET’S DO SOME GOOD DEALS: CONTACT—HANK MOLT REPTILES.”
Molt had always been attracted to crazy young men. Not only did they keep hi
m young and hopeful, they were readily persuaded to put snakes in their bags. Lewis knew of Molt by reputation. Most of the younger kids entering the business had a hard time imagining a world where if you wanted an animal, you actually had to go out and get it; their elders joked that they thought snakes came from deli cups. But Lewis was better schooled. In his penthouse, Lewis produced for Molt his photos of rare snakes, a ritual courtship gesture among reptile people. “He was clearly wanting to impress,” said Molt, and Molt, never wasting an opportunity of his own to impress, regaled Lewis with his fireside chats, the forever-mutating stories of climbing trees for Fiji iguanas and setting bounties on Boelen’s pythons.
After the expo Molt remembered his young friend and wrote him again. “The herp world needs more guys like you,” he said.
PACRIM HAD by now purchased more than two hundred illegal animals from Anson Wong. The agents in San Francisco were stuck feeding lettuce to plowshare tortoises, and Morrison had just ordered from Wong his second Komodo dragon. It was time to shut the operation down, and yet Wong had made it clear from the start that he would not travel to the United States. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to meet Morrison. “I was always inviting the PacRim guys over, but they never had time,” Wong said. Wong was even more amenable to a meeting now, because Morrison had announced that he was closing PacRim and starting a new, bigger business with Beau Lewis. He hoped the three of them could meet up and make plans. Wong insisted they meet somewhere in Asia.
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