Molt, Celebucki and his girlfriend, and the Germans all convened in one room, listening to the glass breaking outside. Electricity was sporadic. The Germans wore only their underpants. Molt and Celebucki, high on the chaos and beer, told them the story of the swingers’ club raid as the lights flickered.
The next day the expo opened for business, though smashed signs littered the roads and food was hard to find. A young man got himself bitten by a rattlesnake, right on the floor of the expo, and had to go to the hospital. That evening the strip clubs bravely reopened.
IN THE weeks after the expo, Molt found himself at the center of a hurricane of his own making. The Oklahoma kid he’d entrusted his reptiles to the previous year had cheated him, he decided, and stolen the animals Molt had deposited with him for safekeeping, including many of dubious legality. The kid begged to differ. Several of the animals had died, he claimed, and Molt had been out of contact for months.
Molt drove all the way to Oklahoma to demand the return of whatever snakes were left by that point, showing up on the kid’s doorstep and terrorizing him. Molt called the police on the kid, and the police sent state game officers to confiscate the venomous snakes, which were then sent to the Oklahoma City Zoo. The kid called the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, reporting that Molt possessed Gila monsters and other questionable reptiles.
Molt and the kid lashed out at each other on the reptile Web sites, Molt calling the kid a thief and the kid calling Molt “a washed up drunk old time smuggler.” Somehow Randal Berry got dragged into the whole mess, causing Molt to lash out at him, too. Berry secured a trespass warning from the police, in case Molt ever showed up on his doorstep the way he’d shown up on the kid’s. Now that friendship was over.
But at least Molt managed to get back his one scratched-up Bitis parviocula.
MOLT DROVE the parviocula to Arlington, Virginia, where he entrusted it to another young associate. Amazingly, he never seemed to run out of these. This young man was far more valuable to Molt than the kid in Oklahoma, or Randal Berry, or any of them, because he had money, quite a lot of it, and was particularly guileless.
Peter Nguyen was a self-employed businessman in his mid-thirties, but he looked to be in his early twenties. Nguyen owned a fantastic assortment of rare venomous snakes. Nguyen also had Asperger syndrome, which affected his willingness to socialize. He flew to the reptile expo almost annually but never ventured down to the raucous hotel bar. “I’m just this dork who likes to be left alone to play with my snakes,” Nguyen said.
As a young boy, Nguyen had bested his elders, including many zoo curators, during the old reptile symposium’s annual slide show competition, where contestants identified species from close-up photos of just a few scales. He had known Molt since that time, but only lately had they become close.
In the fall of 2004, Molt placed in Nguyen’s care his sickly Bitis parviocula, a rarity among rarities, which pleased Nguyen to no end. “I’d had this snake in mind since it was discovered,” said Nguyen, who was eight years old in 1977. If you can keep it alive, Molt had told him, it’s yours.
Nguyen got to work researching what scarce information existed about parviocula’s natural history. He knew it would need to be kept cold, since it lived at high altitudes, and that it liked having something to grasp with its tail, if it had been collected, as was rumored, in the tangled roots of coffee trees. There would be no point in giving a parviocula standing water, since a snake like that would lick the rain off its own scales.
The parviocula thrived.
Like everyone else who ever encountered parviocula, Nguyen couldn’t help wanting more. He had a male—now what he needed was a female. “I would have donated a kidney for that snake,” he said.
IN LATE October 2004, Molt holed himself up in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, where he’d rented a hotel room on the hurricane-chewed beach. He wouldn’t say what he was doing there. It was late at night; Molt was sober, and seemed depressed. He sat outside at a table in the wavering blue light of the pool.
Eddy Postma, Molt’s Dutch friend, had disappeared in the Galapagos Islands, and now Postma was presumed dead, at age forty-four. A taxi driver was the last person to see Postma alive. Postma’s body was yet to be found.
The official story was that Postma was in the Galapagos to take photos, but Molt knew that Postma was planning to smuggle the pink-tinged land iguanas of Isabela Island, whose females dig their nests in the soft, warm ash atop the precipitous crater of an active volcano, a mile above sea level. Galapagos land iguanas are normally yellowish; the pink subspecies was one evolutionary novelty missed by Charles Darwin, indeed missed by science altogether until 1986, which was understandable, given the species’s habits.
Molt was sad for Postma, but mourned even more the projects that died with him, the reptiles they would never smuggle, the places they would never go: China, Costa Rica, Fiji, all into a crater.
Molt had been homeless for eight weeks. His wife had moved to South Carolina, and he would have to figure something out. For now, all he had was his Jeep and his fury. Eight weeks he’d spent on the road, harassing and intimidating the Oklahoma kid and Randal Berry and whomever else. He’d done it before, he said—slept in his car, eaten only crackers, spent hundreds of dollars on gas—all to avenge himself on his enemies.
He quoted a favorite proverb: “Old age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill.” It was becoming his mantra, he said.
“The thing you have to understand about the reptile business is, we’re not good people, not me, not Ed—none of us. We’re users,” Molt said.
He feared he might be facing federal charges again, over the Gila monsters and snakes in Oklahoma. He had a plan if he ever wound up in court: He would rent a catheter and a walker and stand before the judge and act infirm. He’d already scoped out a place to rent them.
“I live from obsession to obsession,” he said, and when there was no project to obsess over, his enemies filled the void. “I’m an old man, what else am I gonna do? I have no property, no money, just the clothes on my back,” and even those were getting frayed.
The reptile business “is a disease,” he said, and you can’t retire from a disease.
20
Curse of the Bitis parviocula
It was mostly thanks to Benjamin Bucks, the Swiss American snake wunderkind, that Hank Molt was able to wrest himself from his cycle of futile retaliations and regroup in the service of a project.
The project remained the elusive Bitis parviocula. Molt had let parviocula slide for about a year until his friend and financial backer Peter Nguyen noticed, in the summer of 2005, a classified ad on Kingsnake: A German dealer was taking deposits for a shipment of parviocula from Ethiopia. Molt would soon lose his bragging rights to the species, and if he wanted any for himself and Nguyen, would have to pay the German’s price: $7,500 apiece. Molt told Nguyen that he knew who could fix this situation at once: Benjamin Bucks. Nguyen had never heard of Benjamin Bucks. “He was presented to me as ‘our man in Havana,’ ” Nguyen said. “Hank made sure I didn’t know too much about him.”
Molt and Bucks began e-mailing each other again after a long, unexplained silence from Molt, who had moved, finally, to South Carolina. The German dealer was advertising parviocula, but he didn’t have the snakes yet. This meant that someone in Ethiopia had a stock of parviocula, ready to ship. There was only one snake dealer in Ethiopia. Bucks had worked with him years before, and the two didn’t get along.
Molt e-mailed the German posing as an interested customer, just to get a sense of how many snakes were involved, and how long he and Bucks would have to scuttle the deal. There were thirteen snakes, and they had two weeks. Bucks also e-mailed the German, posing as an Ethiopian customs officer, informing him that he would be prosecuted if he attempted to import this protected endemic snake. The German’s ads disappeared.
Nguyen, at Molt’s urging, wired some money to Benjamin Bucks, and Bucks flew to Addis Ababa to try to patch thing
s up with the dealer there. Bucks arrived with an offer: sell us all your Bitis parviocula for $20,000 cash, and we’ll get you a tourist visa to the United States. The Ethiopian accepted, not least because he’d met a woman online who lived in Seattle, and he was very eager to meet her in person.
The visa was Molt’s idea, and something of a long shot, but Molt began writing the State Department. The $20,000 belonged to Nguyen, who knew very little about the deal save that he would get a female parviocula to match up with his own male, and hopefully recoup his investment from Molt’s sales of the rest. It wasn’t hard to envision, since the Ethiopian sold the snakes for $1,300 apiece, and collectors would pay $7,500.
The summer seemed interminable to Nguyen, who wanted that female snake badly. Nguyen attended the Daytona expo that year, but seldom left his room. On the trading floor, Molt and Wayne Hill set up a little shrine for their disappeared Dutch friend Eddy Postma, complete with wooden clogs.
Meanwhile, in Addis Ababa, Bucks imposed himself awkwardly on the Ethiopian, making sure the parviocula were healthy and ready to ship. Molt had full confidence in his abilities.
BENJAMIN BUCKS’S father was a biochemist, and it seemed natural enough that Bucks, a precocious youth, would also endeavor to become a man of science. But Bucks had barely penned his first and only scientific article, “Further Contributions to the Knowledge of Bradypodion uthmoelleri (Müller 1938) from Tanzania,” for the German herpetology journal Salamandra when he was seized by the urge to run away to Africa. Bucks bought a ticket and took off for Uganda, his parents unable or unwilling to stop him. It was 1994. Bucks was sixteen.
At sixteen, Bucks was somewhat familiar with Africa already. He’d gone on safari almost annually with one parent or another, and had once smuggled a chameleon—the same Bradypodion uthmoelleri he would write a paper about—back to Zurich in his sock. His father had taught him the sock technique, which the senior Bucks used to smuggle king snakes from his native Utah to Switzerland.
The Buckses were more adventurous than the usual upper-middle-class Swiss family, but Benjamin outdid all of them with his departure for Uganda. He arrived at the Entebbe airport with no plans except some vague idea to export reptiles. Bucks helped a woman with her heavy baggage, and she offered him a ride into town, but they would have to stop at cargo first, she said. She was transporting the casket of her brother, who had died in New York. “I thought, ‘This is brilliant, what a cool start,’ ” Bucks said.
At his hostel outside Kampala, Bucks chatted with a former Tutsi rebel, fresh from the war in Rwanda. Suddenly Bucks had the urge to visit Rwanda. He bought a bus ticket. “Welcome, traveler,” the Tutsi soldiers said at the border, and Bucks thought he would be fine until he saw the shot-up walls and burned, abandoned houses of Kigali. “I suddenly realized what I had done,” he said, and Bucks, who had nowhere to sleep, got a lift halfway back to the Ugandan border, and walked the rest of the way, and ended up, soon afterward, in Mombasa, Kenya.
Two years later, American reptile dealers started receiving mysterious, crude price lists hand-scribbled on stationery from Kenyan hotels. They didn’t know Bucks was a teenager; they didn’t know anything about him save that he was selling such rare snakes as Atheris ceratophora, a horned viper from a small range in Tanzania. His boxes of snakes made it out thanks to an arrangement with certain bureaucrats in the Kenyan agricultural ministry. That ministry didn’t have the authority to approve wildlife exports, but American and European customs inspectors didn’t know that. Well after he’d learned to bribe, bluff, and intimidate—all the skills needed to run a business in Africa—Bucks got around to losing his virginity, to a Kenyan woman ten years his senior. He emerged from the experience so terrified of AIDS that he shunned women for a whole year. He slept in an apartment behind a Mombasa nightclub where in the wee hours the bouncers tied petty thieves to chairs and beat them for stealing empty beer bottles.
By the time he showed up at the Daytona reptile expo in 2003, Bucks had already built and lost three reptile-exporting businesses. He’d gotten over his sexual reservations to the point where he was keeping a computer log of his ladies, complete with details such as “habitat,” for where they lived, and “payment,” for what they took in exchange for sex—beer, in most cases, or, in one, two tomatoes and an egg.
Just as his computer sex diary was getting epic, Kenya decided it had had enough of Bucks. The government put Bucks on a plane for Switzerland, but Bucks flew straight back to Africa, circumventing Kenya for Addis Ababa, and worked six months hunting snakes with the Ethiopian reptile dealer who now had a cache of parviocula. Bucks and the Ethiopian came to be more adversaries than friends, and parted ways. Bucks moved to Uganda, occasionally returning to Kenya, where he once again attracted notice for exporting rare vipers. He met the giant Butterbean at a reptile show in Germany, and enlisted him as the European broker for his snakes. When they’d saturated Europe with their product, they took what was left to the United States, and met Molt.
MOLT AND BUCKS harbored two simultaneous plans for Bitis parviocula.
Plan A was the official, five-way plan already under way, involving Bucks, Molt, Butterbean, Peter Nguyen, and the Ethiopian. Nguyen would buy the thirteen snakes at the Ethiopian’s price. The snakes would be sent to Butterbean in Germany, mislabeled as puff adders or some other common species. The snakes would arrive for the Terrastika Hamm reptile show in September, a huge, practically lawless affair dwarfing any reptile show in the United States, even the Daytona expo. Molt, Butterbean, and Nguyen would all meet up in Hamm, Germany, sell some of the parviocula, take the rest back to the United States, and divide the proceeds, although “we never really figured out how exactly they would be divided,” Molt said.
In September 2005, it seemed as though Plan A had worked. The mislabeled snakes arrived safely in Frankfurt. Molt arrived next. Nguyen was supposed to fly with Molt to Germany, but decided at the last minute to stay home, entrusting Molt to deal with everything.
At the show, Molt and Butterbean sold a pair of parviocula off the bat, for $7,500 apiece—a $6,200 profit per snake. All the unsold snakes Molt took back to Butterbean’s house and left there. Butterbean was a government-licensed snake keeper with a well-organized setup in his basement, and Molt decided that Butterbean’s house would be a fine place for the parviocula to rest and fatten up after their hard journey. Butterbean was in good form that weekend, cooking sausages and sauerkraut for his guests; his wife had forgiven him, finally, for being bitten by the mamba the year before.
Nguyen was flabbergasted when Molt failed to return with any parviocula, but then, Nguyen had no knowledge of Plan B.
PLAN B hinged on the unlikely prospect of the United States granting the Ethiopian a visa.
Molt had filled out the paperwork for one, and if it came through, Molt and Bucks were fairly sure the Ethiopian would hop on a plane that day, since he couldn’t stop talking about the woman in Seattle. With the Ethiopian safely abroad, Bucks could travel to the village where parviocula is found and grab a fresh, low-cost batch for himself and Molt. The Ethiopian paid the villagers sixty dollars apiece for the snakes. Bucks would offer $120, which was fairer to them, and far less painful to Bucks and Molt than the $1,300 per snake they’d paid the Ethiopian. Getting the snakes out of Ethiopia was not going to be easy, but Bucks knew of a border crossing to Kenya where a guard might be bribed. Then the snakes could be sent to Europe or the United States, depending—that part they would work out later. Nguyen “was to be cut out of the deal completely,” said Molt, except to be encouraged to entertain the Ethiopian during his visit.
In October 2005, the Ethiopian’s visa came through, and, just as Molt and Bucks expected, he needed little encouragement to travel. He would head first to Seattle and see how that went, then fly to Florida to visit some reptile dealers who owed him money. Nguyen offered to meet the Ethiopian in Florida and drive with him to Washington, D.C., where he could spend a few days touring the Mall and the Smithsonia
n. And then it was back to Addis Ababa.
Bucks was on standby alert in Kenya when Molt phoned. The Ethiopian was safely in the country, Molt reported, but something had not gone well in Seattle, and he had already left for Florida. Bucks now had only a matter of days to collect the parviocula and get them out.
Bucks flew to Addis Ababa, and that evening made it to the village of Bedele, where he met with one of the Ethiopian’s collectors. The collector informed Bucks that within a day or so he could get him five parviocula. Bucks took a cab back to the capital to await the delivery: the collector would hop a beer truck from Bedele and bring the snakes to his hotel. But then Bucks had second thoughts. The Ethiopian would probably find out, sooner rather than later, that the blond, rather hard-to-miss Benjamin Bucks had shown up in Bedele. The Ethiopian knew what hotels Bucks liked; he even knew the cab driver Bucks always used.
Bucks thought about leaving the hotel, but the collector was on his way there with a box of snakes. Bucks called his taxi driver to come collect him, the snake collector, and the box of snakes and get them all somewhere safer. Just then, the phone rang at the front desk. It was the Ethiopian, demanding to know if a blond man had checked in. Bucks mimed to the receptionist—he wasn’t there.
“That was when Hank called,” said Bucks.
Molt called Bucks’s cell phone to inform him that the Ethiopian had not only gotten wind of Bucks’s incursions, he was now so mad that he’d canceled his travel plans and was making an emergency flight home from Miami. Peter Nguyen had been driving down I-95 to pick up the Ethiopian for their scheduled tour of D.C. when the Ethiopian called him and canceled. Nguyen phoned Molt to tell him what had happened.
Stolen World Page 28