Madagascar denied Reid’s request. Two months later, half the tortoises were stolen.
ON MAY 6, 1996, a thief or thieves cut two holes in the wire fence surrounding the tortoise pens at Ampijoroa, and made away with two adult and seventy-two juvenile plowshares. Or two adults and seventy-three juveniles—the number was never certain. Such a huge haul was perplexing for a number of reasons—it seemed too big and audacious a feat to have been performed without being caught, at a site where people had died for much less. It also defied the conventional reptile-smuggling wisdom to take only as many animals as could conceivably be sold.
The New York Times called the theft “one of the heists of the century.” Turtle people all over the world received e-mail alerts from John Behler, urging them to report any word of the stolen plowshares. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service offered to help Jersey recover the tortoises, since no one expected Madagascar to launch a serious investigation. Agent Bruce Weissgold requested the guest ledger from Ampijoroa, only to receive no response, “which I thought was weird,” Weissgold said.
Jersey never cooperated with the Americans, but instead allowed a Dutch national named Wil Luiijf to pursue his own investigation. Luiijf later claimed that Lee Durrell tapped him for the job; Durrell insisted that Luiijf volunteered.
Luiijf had in the early 1990s worked as an inspector for Holland’s Algemene Inspectiedienst, an agricultural agency that also made cases against wildlife smugglers. By the time of the plowshare theft, Luiijf had quit or been fired from the agency and worked from home as a freelance investigator, sometimes picking up assignments for the World Wildlife Fund and Traffic, sometimes taking it upon himself to investigate wildlife smugglers for nothing more than his own satisfaction. Weissgold and other Fish and Wildlife agents who knew Luiijf were wary of him, particularly since he no longer had any governmental authority, and because he was a tortoise collector himself. It did not take long for Luiijf to produce a suspect.
LUIIJF HAD known and despised Olaf Pronk long before Pronk had even moved to Madagascar, when Pronk ran a shop in the Hague that specialized in high-end collectible fauna. In the 1980s, Dutch law made it illegal to keep European tortoises as pets, but Pronk had special permission to export them to foreign customers. Pronk also had an extraordinary permit that allowed him to possess any CITES-listed animals, as long as he declared them within three months of importation.
Pronk claimed that his problems with Luiijf began when Luiijf tried to buy a tortoise that could not be sold in Holland. Then, Pronk said, there was another dispute over another tortoise that died after Luiijf had strapped it to his back and driven it home on a moped in the middle of winter.
Luiijf always said he opposed Pronk on principle—that Pronk was a criminal, albeit a shrewd one who had yet to be caught. In 1988, Luiijf persuaded Dutch tax authorities to pursue an investigation of Pronk. Luiijf accompanied them on the raid, and confiscated a number of Pyxis tortoises and two Fiji banded iguanas from Pronk’s apartment, along with piles of documents. The Fijis were sent to the Rotterdam Zoo, and Pronk’s special permit was not renewed.
Luiijf also found among Pronk’s effects a fax to Japan in which Pronk seemed to be offering a plowshare tortoise for sale. Luiijf attempted to make a legal case based on the fax, but there was much legal wrangling about its authenticity, and a court ruled in Pronk’s favor.
That year Pronk decided he was through with Holland, and set up shop in Antananarivo, Madagascar. Three years later, Pronk was arrested there after the Madagascar government received a letter from Luiijf, signed also by Traffic, Jersey, and World Wildlife Fund officials, claiming that Pronk had fled Holland to avoid a tax fine. The Dutch embassy came to Pronk’s aid, and he was released after four days.
In 1993, the year that the Germans were killed, Luiijf flew to New York and gave a presentation to conservationists on the horrors of the international wild-tortoise trade. He showed slides he’d taken in his inspector days, of tortoises crushed and maimed in their shipping crates. There Luiijf met John Behler, and they talked about Madagascar. Both already knew Don Reid and his plowshare project; now they discussed Olaf Pronk, who since his arrest had married a well-connected Malagasy woman and was enjoying much warmer relations with the Madagascar government.
Behler’s relationships with animal traders had always been tense, and he was particularly irked by Madagascar’s. The Bronx Zoo’s parent organization, the Wildlife Conservation Society, was becoming very active in Madagascar in the 1990s, developing its own conservation projects on a scale similar to Jersey’s. “What seems so incredulous here is the disparity between how scientific pursuits are scrutinized by Eaux et Forêts and the way dealers operate with impunity,” Behler wrote colleagues after a 1994 visit. “A dealer can somehow send out 10,000 reptiles and amphibians on his collecting permit and we have to have an accord—perhaps two of them—to collect 1/10 cc of reptile blood and pick up a tortoise shell.” Behler singled Pronk out in that same letter as “a Dutch resident, with a highly placed Malagasy wife, who has repeatedly been implicated in the illicit trade of Madagascan herpetofauna by Dutch and Traffic European authorities.” Those authorities together comprised Wil Luiijf.
JOHN BEHLER, Wil Luiijf, and Don Reid were all quoted in the New York Times article about the plowshare theft, all seemingly eager to direct suspicion toward Olaf Pronk. Luiijf described a “a very nasty Dutch reptile salesman in Madagascar who in the past has been known to sell wild plowshares to Japanese fellows.” Reid told the paper that some Germans had stopped by Ampijoroa and informed him that a Dutch reptile dealer had offered them plowshares a month before the theft. “The Madagascar Government is completely involved,” Behler told the Times.
When Olaf Pronk read this, at his hillside home in Antananarivo, “I knew I was in trouble. I started sweating,” he said. Only one day after the article was published, the tortoises made their first appearance, not at the Orlando reptile expo, as everyone predicted, but in the small Dutch city of Eindhoven. “When I heard they were in Holland,” Pronk said, “it was even worse.”
IN THE fall of 1996, the national police in Eindhoven got a call, late at night, from someone whom they never identified. The caller had a friend, he said, who possessed thirty-five of the young plowshare tortoises, and was thinking of killing and burying them all. Unless something could be worked out first.
It was Wil Luiijf, the freelance investigator, who hand-delivered the first two tortoises to the police. Days later, the remaining thirty-three were placed in a Styrofoam cooler and left near the Eindhoven train station, where police picked them up. No suspects were charged, or questioned: the deal, whatever it consisted of, had been accepted.
Henny Smits, the officer who’d brokered the deal, claimed that it was done for the good of the tortoises. U.S. Fish and Wildlife agents, when they found out what Smits had done, were flabbergasted, but had no choice but to let it go.
The thirty-five recovered plowshares were confiscated by the Dutch government and moved to Reptile Zoo Iguana, a small, private animal exhibit on the North Sea. Iguana was an odd choice for so large a quantity of high-profile animals—the Rotterdam or Amsterdam zoos, with their ample space and top-notch vets, would have seemed to make more sense. But the Iguana Zoo and Wil Luiijf had a long-standing relationship, and Iguana was obscure enough that the tortoises could be kept there indefinitely without attracting notice.
In December, Don Reid traveled to Reptile Zoo Iguana and identified the plowshares as the stolen ones. Unfortunately, Reid wrote in a statement to Dutch authorities, the tortoises “cannot be returned to Madagascar, since they could be carrying a disease that could wipe out the world population of the species.”
Reid did not say where they would or should go instead.
A DUTCH name began to emerge in connection with the theft, and, curiously, it wasn’t Olaf Pronk’s.
Don Reid had told the New York Times that two Germans had stopped by Ampijoroa shortly after the theft, and informed him
that a Dutch dealer had offered them plowshares. The Germans were Tom Crutchfield’s friends Frank Lehmeyer and Wolfgang Kloe. Reid was on good terms with both of them despite their reptile-snatching tendencies; he’d by then resigned himself to the larcenous habits of German and Dutch enthusiasts.
The Dutch reptile dealer who’d offered Lehmeyer plowshares was a man by the name of Wim Janssens, a detested rival of Olaf Pronk’s and an old informant of Wil Luiijf’s from Luiijf’s time as an airport inspector. Like most reptile smugglers of any real ambition, Janssens was also friendly with Anson Wong.
Janssens was scoping for potential buyers for baby plowshares in the month before the theft, and Lehmeyer agreed to make a few phone calls for him. The first call was to Tom Crutchfield’s Reptile Enterprises, where no one was interested. “There is some honesty among thieves,” Crutchfield said.
IN FEBRUARY 1997, two plowshare tortoises the size of grapefruits arrived at PacRim enterprises, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s California front company. Anson Wong had concealed them in a shipment of other reptiles. It was the first evidence of the stolen plowshares having made it to the United States, and a chance for American wildlife officials to rescue the case from the abortive stewardship of the Dutch.
But Wong did not make things easy for them. He told George Morrison, PacRim’s undercover agent, that the plowshares came not from Ampijoroa but from somewhere in Asia, though this seemed hardly likely, considering their size.
Wong stuck to his story that the tortoises had come from Asia. He knew nothing more about them, he insisted.
The two Wong plowshares went to the Los Angeles Zoo while the investigation into Wong progressed. One died within a few months; the other took a little longer.
OLAF PRONK decided to launch his own investigation of the plowshare theft. “I was worried from the beginning that people would think I’m behind it,” he said. “That was my first and main concern. And then it became very important to prove that I was not involved and to try and get the original thieves.”
Pronk heard from his sources in Madagascar that a Dutch diving instructor, who taught for long stretches at a resort on the northwest coast, had been paid to remove the tortoises from the site. The Dutch diver “was kind of a general criminal, a little of this, a little of that,” Pronk said, and knew the wife of Wim Janssens, who traveled to Madagascar for her husband and often stayed at that resort.
In the course of these investigations, Pronk made frequent contact with the CITES and World Wildlife Fund authorities in Madagascar, popping into their Antananarivo offices to update them on his findings. After one such visit, Lee Durrell phoned Pronk. Their conversation was stiff, Pronk said, as “I didn’t trust her and of course she didn’t trust me.” But Durrell, Pronk recalled, didn’t seem to be harboring any suspicion that he was involved.
Pronk had by then learned that the tortoises had been confiscated in Holland. But Durrell professed to know nothing. “I have been unable to verify this,” Durrell wrote Pronk in an e-mail. “There have been so many rumors. Bangladesh, Japan, Czech Republic, France. And the police have been very tight-lipped on the subject.” Except Durrell knew exactly where the tortoises were, since her own employee, Don Reid, had traveled to the Netherlands and identified them. Wil Luiijf knew where they were, as did the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It was also likely, given his contacts with Luiijf, Reid, and Durrell, that John Behler knew by then, too. Only Madagascar, the tortoises’ legal owner, was kept in the dark about their whereabouts.
The secrecy was mystifying. The animals were not needed as evidence, since there had been no investigation—why should the Dutch continue to hold them?
Pronk got the sense that another sort of deal was being made.
MORE THAN a year after the theft, Lee Durrell continued to insist, publicly, that the tortoises had not been recovered. At Olaf Pronk’s urging, Madagascar wrote CITES officials in Geneva, asking for information on the tortoises; it never received a response. Jersey’s rationale for leaving the tortoises tucked away at Reptile Zoo Iguana had been the threat of disease, but after more than a year there, the tortoises had not been tested for disease and appeared healthy.
Some suspected that Jersey had lost its enthusiasm for the plowshare program, and that the theft was providing an excuse to abandon it. “There’s such a thing as donor fatigue,” Fish and Wildlife’s Bruce Weissgold said. “Ten years is a long time for them to be running a conservation program. The objective is always to turn it over to the native people; even if that’s not humanly possible, that is always the stated objective.”
In late 1997, Don Reid left Madagascar for England, and the trust did not replace him at Ampijoroa.
ONCE OLAF Pronk knew for sure where the thirty-five tortoises were, he found a lawyer who would represent Madagascar and demand their repatriation. The animals would not be returned to Ampijoroa, since Jersey now didn’t want them, but rather to Pronk’s own hillside compound outside Antananarivo. Pronk and the government of Madagascar had arrived at a plan, a signed agreement declaring that the plowshares and their future offspring remained the property of the state of Madagascar. Pronk would care for the tortoises and pay the bills.
On one level, Pronk acknowledged, this was a sort of revenge. But there were few other places for the plowshares to go. “Jersey said they couldn’t come back to Ampijoroa because they were ill. Madagascar wanted the animals back. There were not many options—the zoo here is really not an option,” Pronk said.
In December 1998, a Dutch attorney representing Madagascar filed a request for an emergency hearing in the district court nearest the Iguana Zoo. He filed on a Monday, stating his intent to demand the return of thirty-five tortoises to Madagascar. The hearing was scheduled for that Friday.
In the middle of the week, thirty-three of the plowshares were flown, under special emergency permits, to the Bronx Zoo. The two remaining tortoises were never accounted for again.
THE OSTENSIBLE “emergency” necessitating that thirty-three plowshare tortoises be flown to New York in the dead of winter was a medical one, John Behler explained in a memo to colleagues.
As chair of the turtle and tortoise specialist group for the IUCN, Behler wrote, “I was asked for advice on placement of seized tortoises and health assessment issues. Most suggestions (program sites and Europe or Mauritius, collaborators there, diagnostics) were not acceptable for political or economic reasons. I finally offered our medical facilities at WCS.”
Behler had once again recommended, as head of an ostensibly impartial conservation committee, that tortoises be transferred to himself. This time, the trick worked.
Lee Durrell, in a half-hour phone interview more than a decade later, said she was “a little hazy” as to the decision-making process that had led to the tortoises being flown to the Bronx Zoo days after Madagascar filed its intention to demand them. It was “purely and simply a health thing,” Durrell said at first. But then, Durrell acknowledged what seemed patently obvious—that it was the prospect of their being sent to Olaf Pronk that compelled the evacuation to New York. “We were all very concerned that the animals were going to go back,” Durrell said. “We did not want them to go back to our facility and we would not have accepted them back there, and we felt it was foolish to get them repatriated, especially to Pronk.”
Someone had influenced Dutch CITES officials to approve an emergency export permit for the animals, possibly Wil Luiijf. The Bronx Zoo would insist that the plowshares’ New York sojourn was not meant to be permanent—“They couldn’t be properly cared for in Holland, so we agreed to hold them temporarily,” said zoo spokesman Stephen Sautner. But Behler did not see the arrangement as temporary, since no sooner had the tortoises arrived than he offered five to his dentist friend Bill Zovickian.
Zovickian drove to the Bronx from Connecticut in the winter of 1999 to view Behler’s new charges. The tortoises “were under strict quarantine,” Zovickian recalled. “You had to put on a sterile suit to even look
at them—they were getting the best of care.” Behler, Zovickian said, told him to pick out five. “I picked out the five biggest,” he said. Once the quarantine was over, Behler promised, Zovickian could take his tortoises home.
ONE PARTY to the importation of the tortoises came to regret it soon afterward: the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Someone in the agency had approved Behler’s emergency CITES import permit believing that the tortoises were sick, and when it became clear that not only were they not sick, but that Madagascar was about to make an international incident of it, the agency had a serious problem.
“A number of us were aghast when the tortoises came to Behler,” said Ernest Mayer. “Under CITES, the country of origin has the rights to any animals seized—when we learned Behler wanted the animals, we said bullshit. I don’t know how the permit got issued. It was a huge mistake—a huge faux pas.”
Olaf Pronk was spurring Madagascar on in its outrage, of course. Without his help and the help of his Dutch attorney friend, Pronk acknowledged, the plowshare case “would never have seen the light of day.” But it didn’t matter, for it was the sovereign state of Madagascar, not Olaf Pronk, taking the matter to court again, and this time, it was a national court in the Hague. The Dutch government was the defendant, and the question before the court was whether the Dutch had acted improperly in allowing the tortoises to be flown to New York.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service tried to placate Madagascar with a formal apology, and sent Behler stiff instructions that the tortoises not be loaned or moved until after the Dutch court’s decision. John Behler had enjoyed two decades of close relations with the agency, helping it to investigate wildlife smugglers. Now the agency was treating him like one.
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