Stolen World

by Jennie Erin Smith

  Behler apologized to Madagascar on behalf of the zoo. “We deeply regret any misunderstanding that our well-intentioned import of these confiscated tortoises caused,” he wrote, then blamed his underlings for the whole fiasco: “I acknowledge that my staff became overly concerned about the health status of the tortoises.” He agreed to honor the Dutch court’s ruling.

  “We weren’t fighting to keep the animals, so we have no comment on the international flap,” said the Bronx Zoo’s Stephen Sautner, years later. But in March 1999, the Dutch government argued a case that sounded very much as though it was acting as proxy for the zoo. The tortoises were adjusting well in New York and had gained weight, the Dutch told the judge; the Bronx’s facility was among the best in the world, and preparations for the tortoises’ stay were already in the advanced stage. Then, incredibly, the Dutch also argued that though the tortoises were shown not to be carrying harmful viruses or bacteria upon arrival at the Bronx Zoo, five of them had since tested positive for Salmonella. If they weren’t sick when they got to the Bronx, according to this logic, they were now, and they shouldn’t go back.

  The court ruled that the tortoises be returned to Madagascar within six weeks.

  “When the order came down, John flipped out—he did,” said Bill Zovickian. “They had spent a lot of money.”

  A FEW days after the Dutch court’s ruling, Behler circulated his version of events in an e-mail to colleagues labeled “HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL,” which assured, of course, that it went far and wide.

  The basics are that the Netherlands recovered 33 (or maybe 35) G. yniphora in late 1996 and held them at the Iguana Zoo until December of 1998.

  Very few people knew that these tortoises had been recovered (including me). The investigation was (still is) ongoing and Dutch authorities didn’t want anyone to know. That included Madagascar for apparently good reason …

  Madagascar went ballistic when it found out that they had been moved from NL and demanded that the tortoises be returned within two weeks, “or else.” They threatened full diplomatic legal action against WCS. They threatened to close our office in Tana and close our multimillion dollar USAID project on the Masoala peninsula.

  Fury was (and is) driven by Olaf Pronk, the Dutch expat that is wanted in his country. He (many believe that he masterminded the heist in the first place) personally wants the tortoises back in Mad and hired a lawyer friend in the NL. The solicitor took the angonoka business to small claims court. The judge ruled that the tortoises must be returned. So you may ask “what does a small claims court have to do with an international treaty?” Good question …

  I believe that Pronk will be fully exposed at some point and Madagascar will be so embarrassed by their relationship with him that they will quickly distance themselves from him. I am hoping that NL will try to extradite him. I am keeping my fingers crossed.

  The letter was full of lies: Behler had surely known about the confiscation of the tortoises all along; the investigation had long ago been canceled; Pronk was not wanted for a crime or in danger of extradition. The case had not been heard in a “small claims” court, but in the equivalent of a U.S. federal court. No one close to the case still believed Pronk had masterminded the theft.

  But as payback, it was pretty good. And Behler wasn’t finished.

  WHEN BILL Zovickian heard what John Behler wanted him to do with his dental drill, he refused. “I couldn’t deface those animals,” Zovickian said. So Behler found his own drill and did the best he could. Into the carapace of each tortoise he carved the initials MEF—for Ministère des Eaux et Forêts.

  Plowshares have famously thick shells, allowing the drill to cut deep, and the effect was stark. The freshly marked tortoises were crated up and sent first to Holland, where CITES officials deemed them healthy enough to continue on to Madagascar. Not until the tortoises arrived at the Antananarivo airport, where Pronk and his friends in the Ministère des Eaux et Forêts awaited them, were the markings discovered. The officials were not flattered, Pronk said. “Can you believe it? Imagine getting your famous painting back and the painter’s name is scratched over?”

  The thirty-three tortoises were sent to Pronk’s compound, as promised. Five years later, John Behler died of a heart attack.

  PRONK LIVED on a hilltop near the Antananarivo airport. It was election season, and he drove his Land Cruiser past angry-looking rallies on denuded mounds of red dirt. On the roadsides, children squeezed into oxcarts pulled by other children, and hapless toddlers emerged from ditches, watched by no one, legs coated in red dust. Zebus were everywhere, yoked in the roads and neck-deep in flooded fields, and hillsides had been stripped of their clay to an ugly and probably dangerous degree. In the village nearest to Pronk’s home, a dozen people had recently died of bubonic plague.

  “It’s hard to live here and getting harder,” he said. “I don’t notice the misery anymore. But every time I am in Holland I find myself reluctant to leave.”

  Pronk was a tall man with a long, rectangular face, around fifty years old, and like so many Dutch a skilled linguist, with all his English idioms in order. Madagascar, he kept saying, was hopeless. “We have all the major conservation organizations here in Madagascar. They’re driving around in Land Rovers or Land Cruisers like mine, maybe three or four in a family. These people know there is nothing they can do to stop this as long as the population explosion continues. They see the country burning every year. The wildlife of Madagascar will be gone in twenty-five years. There will be nothing left but maybe a few pathetic lemurs in a preserve. The biodiversity of Madagascar is doomed, seriously doomed,” he said.

  Pronk had by now largely abandoned the reptile trade and was exporting chameleons only to a handful of German customers. It was widely assumed that new reptile export quotas by Madagascar, probably long overdue, had forced Pronk into the plant business, and he had become as well-known for plants—particularly obscure ones—as he once was for reptiles. He had a good relationship with the botanists who came through, who lately had named a species of aloe after him. Unlike in the reptile world, botanists and the plant dealers get along, Pronk said, because they’re glad someone is propagating the species instead of watching them get burned for charcoal.

  At Pronk’s house, enclosed by a fence embedded with glass shards, a silent corps of servants opened gates, brought forth plates and silverware, and watered plants. Pronk was no longer married, and lived with a girlfriend many years younger.

  Pronk was surprised to hear of John Behler’s death. He was pretty far out of the loop of Behler’s friends.

  “I’m sure many zoo curators—if you want to call them that, I’d rather call them head animal keepers because that’s what they are—it’s not embarrassing,” he said. “If you like animals and you’re able to work with them, well, it’s the best there is. I would never have started trading animals if I would have had the possibility to keep a large collection living in Holland. It’s all I like. And there are many Behlers. Behler is not just one person, it’s a stereotype.”

  After lunch, Pronk dispatched one of his silent servants to the pen where he kept the plowshares—there were thirty-two now, since one had died. Every night, he said, he moved the animals from the pen and locked them up. The servant carried back in a box one high-domed golden tortoise that was now a teenager and looking very hardy. Its shell, though, was still quite defaced; after many years the deep grooves of the “MEF” had not faded at all, only widened as the shell got bigger, like a tattoo on a growing boy.

  These tortoises were not yet of breeding age, but coming close. Pronk would not be able to sell their offspring, under the terms of his contract with Madagascar, so there was little point in trying to make more plowshares, he said. “Even if Madagascar were stupid enough to issue a captive-bred CITES I permit for the babies resulting from these animals, no country would ever allow the import of them,” he said.

  He’d thought about renting the tortoises out to foreign zoos to raise funds for Madagasc
ar’s wildlife reserves, the way China did with its pandas. But what zoo would want a tortoise with the letters MEF carved into its back?

  The sharp smell of smoke floated into Pronk’s garden.

  “Madagascar,” he said.

  WIL LUIIJF drove a Land Rover around his hometown of Breda, a town only a few miles from Eindhoven, where the plowshares were recovered. He resembled his nemesis Olaf Pronk physically, with a similar rectangular face and balding pate and bright eyes, and seemed to be about the same age. In the front yard of Luiijf’s modest brick house, there was an enclosure for some animal, probably a large tortoise, and in his living room, a baby redfoot tortoise ambled about in a terrarium.

  Luiijf had owned any number of tortoises over the years, but denied, despite the evidence to the contrary, any personal interest in tortoises as a hobby. “If you want to work your way into tortoises, you have to talk their talk,” he explained. Luiijf had recently created an organization that he called the Fast Forward Foundation, whose icon was a cartoon tortoise. Its purpose was “blaming and shaming everyone I can,” Luiijf said, adding that he’d recently bought or intended to buy the domain name wildlifecrime.org, a site with similar intentions. Two years later, the site was still not active.

  Olaf Pronk, Luiijf conceded, probably hadn’t stolen the plowshares. But as far as he was concerned, Pronk was still a criminal, even if he’d never been convicted of a crime. “He can play the holy boy—forget it,” Luiijf said.

  Then Luiijf burst out with something surprising.

  “I would be a wildlife smuggler,” he said. “It’s a lovely life! Running around the forest, flying from this place to that—it would be so fun! If I didn’t have the conscience, this is what I’d do.”

  The Dutch, he said, were the best smugglers in the world, better even than the Germans. “We know the trade routes and we’re good at zoos,” he said.

  Only thirty-three of the thirty-five plowshares had been flown to New York in December 1998. Two more had remained in Holland, never accounted for.

  Luiijf, confronted with this fact, said he was surprised to hear it and that it couldn’t possibly be true. He never responded to another e-mail or phone call.

  BEFORE THE plowshare theft, Luiijf’s former informant Wim Janssens had for many years owned a pet store in Antwerp. Afterward, Janssens was never in one place for long. For a while he had a zoo in southern Spain, then a farm in Brazil, then a reptile business with a German partner. Lately he was raising crocodiles in Xai Xai, Mozambique. “I have NEVER been involved in ANY way in this affair, nor has ever my name come up in this story, and I prefer to keep this situation like this,” he wrote in response to an e-mail about the plowshare theft. He decried Wil Luiijf as “a poor looser [sic] and ordinary thief,” then never wrote again.

  MANY WONDERED what role, if any, Anson Wong had in the theft. Wong told prosecutors after his plea agreement that he had bought eleven young plowshares shortly after the theft from a Chinese middleman, and had never asked where they came from. One died, Wong said; he kept two, sent PacRim two more, and sold the rest to customers in Asia.

  But Wong could just as easily have been involved in the theft’s planning. Wong knew Wim Janssens well. Not long after offering George Morrison the two plowshares, Wong claimed to have access to dozens more. Either Wong was in touch with the Dutch smugglers or he or someone he knew in Asia had received the other forty stolen plowshares. The prosecutors who deposed Wong in 2001 hoped he would shed some light on what had happened, but he couldn’t, or wouldn’t. “I was as forthcoming as I could be with them,” Wong said, “since by then it didn’t matter.”

  Later he told a reporter for the Kuala Lumpur Star the opposite—that he’d fed the American officials only what they wanted to hear. “They bought my story—hook, line and sinker,” Wong told the newspaper. “I was not obliged to tell them the truth. In this business, you can’t reveal your network. You’d be done in if you did.”

  IMMEDIATELY AFTER the plowshare theft, the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust—soon to be named the Durrell Wildlife Trust in its late founder’s honor—secured the remaining tortoises in pens of reinforced concrete, and installed an infrared alarm system to guard them from intruders. But ten years later the trust was again flirting with the idea of splitting the colony, proposing to export fifty to American and European zoos. To export plowshares required the approval of Madagascar, which was far from certain and would take years. Plowshares, meanwhile, were turning up in Thailand and Singapore with a regularity that alarmed conservation groups. None of the tortoises appeared to be captive-bred. On Kingsnake.com, the reptile-trading Web site, no one was stupid enough to post pictures of G. yniphora for sale, but in a section of the site for sharing photos, anonymous users in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand showed off pictures of their plowshares. Thinly disguised inquiries followed from France, Australia, Japan: “nice yniphora very round shell and orange. please email me for share idea how to keep yniphora.” Though U.S. officials had always asserted that plowshares were worth $30,000 apiece on the black market, none had ever been known to sell for more than $5,500, and that was the pair Wong had sold to George Morrison in 1996 for $11,000. Now, by most accounts, they were about $1,000 each.

  Olaf Pronk, with characteristic cynicism, thought this might have something to do with Durrell’s renewed desire to offload the world’s rarest tortoise. “Plowshare tortoises were made a flagship species for conservation organizations,” he said. “That’s how these organizations work. They need flagship species to raise funds, the giant panda as far as mammals go and there are other animals you can think of. And this is a rare species. It’s always had a limited distribution, it’s certainly not a species that could sustain a commercial trade. But just the number of them now in Southeast Asia alone proves that these animals are not as rare as people think they are, and the species no longer has its flagship status.”

  IN 2008 the Bronx Zoo opened a $62-million permanent exhibit called Madagascar! to house its lemurs and fossas and radiated tortoises and Pyxis tortoises. A reviewer for the New York Times was unusually critical, finding the tone of the exhibit “self-consciously virtuous and explicitly self-promotional,” as its captions focused more on the zoo’s good deeds in Madagascar than on the animals on display.

  Absent among the species on exhibit was, of course, Geochelone yniphora. A more glamorous cage for the world’s rarest tortoise could hardly be imagined, but this one seemed destined to remain empty at least a little while longer.

  Part IV

  Old Age and Treachery

  By August 2001, Wayne Hill’s annual reptile expo had moved from Orlando to a larger space in Daytona Beach, Florida. The reptile craze had probably already peaked by then, but it was huge compared to what it had been only five years earlier. Every weekend of the year saw as many as twenty reptile shows across the country, some nearly as large. Germany now had a show that was bigger than Hill’s, and it took place every few months.

  It was my first time back since 1996, the summer the plowshare tortoises were stolen and Wolfgang Kloe ran across the East-West Expressway. Tom Crutchfield was there, too, also for the first time since 1996. His hair had turned white, and he was walking around in a T-shirt stenciled with a Fiji banded iguana.

  Hank Molt looked just as he had five years before, except his turgid eyes were a little darker underneath, and vertical wrinkles slashed the surface of his forehead.

  Every so often in recent years, Molt had circulated an erratic, elaborately designed price list. He made his animals sound so good that even people who hated snakes might be tempted to buy one of his Sifnos Island vipers from the Aegean Sea, with “tiny cinnamon flecks over entire body”; or a Yangtze mamushi “with bold chevrons of red, orange, brown & white, the most INCREDIBLY BEAUTIFUL small montane Asian pit viper.” No one believed that Molt actually had any of these animals, but people liked the lists, not least because they never saw price lists anymore; the reptile business had migrated
to the Internet. Web sites like Kingsnake.com threatened to make even the magazines, like Reptiles, obsolete.

  On the convention floor, Molt sat alone at a table, wearing a name tag, with nothing to sell. He complained that he was bored. The whole snake world had gotten too sanitized, too industrial, for his taste. If I was interested in something different, he said, a small but much better show was coming up in Hamburg, Pennsylvania. In Hamburg, “a sixteen-year-old can buy a black mamba and take it back to Manhattan!” Molt said, laughing.

  I took Molt’s business card, which bore a skull and crossbones.

  That October, I flew to Pittsburgh, and Molt met me at the airport wearing hunter’s camouflage. We waited for his zookeeper friend Randal Berry to fly in from Arkansas, and then the three of us drove north toward Hamburg, where Molt and Berry planned to meet up with Molt’s old compatriot Eddie Celebucki. They had pooled funds to rent a table at the show.

  Berry and Molt had been friends since the 1996 reptile expo, when Tom Crutchfield’s enterprise entered its death throes. Crutchfield had warned Berry to stay away from Molt, but the advice never took, and Molt and Berry bonded over a fear of Crutchfield so deep that after the expo, as Molt was giving Berry a ride back to his house near Lake Panasoffkee, they scrambled to find hiding places in a highway rest stop when they saw the Crutchfields pulling in.

  In Hamburg, Molt, Berry, and I checked into a hotel and visited some reptile dealers down the hall. In a room whose corners were stacked with plastic boxes of live vipers, cobras, and rattlesnakes, a young boy reclined on a bed, watching television. The boy’s father, with forefingers bent and stiff from snakebite, reached into a knotted pillowcase and emptied a Gaboon viper onto the same bed, for no obvious reason. The snake’s venom glands had been removed, supposedly, but it was still a Gaboon viper, a thick, starkly patterned monster of a snake with a head like a slice of pie. The boy barely blinked as the snake slowly navigated the duvet.