By the time Molt reached Bucks, Bucks was standing in a hotel lobby with a snake collector holding a box of five parviocula, “freaking out,” Molt said. Someone had informed on Bucks—maybe the collector, maybe the taxi driver—“and then just that minute, I see the taxi driver pull up to the hotel with some guys I didn’t know,” Bucks said. He figured them to be wildlife agents.
He abandoned the snakes and the collector, ran to his room, grabbed his passport and bag, and escaped through the basement kitchen of the hotel.
Bucks expected that there would be an alert for him at the airport, where he arrived hours later. He already had a ticket to Nairobi, but they would be looking for him in the international wing. So he purchased a second, local plane ticket, and hid in domestic departures until the last moment, when he crossed terminals—African airport security could be helpfully relaxed—and boarded.
Bucks had managed to save his skin, but not his snakes.
PETER NGUYEN wasn’t sure what to make of Bucks’s adventures in Ethiopia. Molt insisted to Nguyen that whatever Bucks was doing was between Bucks and the Ethiopian, some old private score-settling with no bearing on Nguyen.
Nguyen didn’t care, as long as he got his snakes. By now it was December, time for the next Terrastika Hamm show in Germany. Molt had promised to fly over and return with the snakes, and though Nguyen wanted to believe Molt, he wasn’t counting on him. Nguyen knew Molt well enough by now to expect delays, absences, and preposterous excuses. Nguyen had visited Molt’s apartment once, to find it barely habitable, just a bare cell, but for Molt’s books and papers “and literally no furniture but a card table and folding plastic chair,” said Nguyen, who was saddened by the sight.
So Nguyen asked some American reptile dealers, who were also headed to the German show, to bring the snakes back for him. “It just seemed like I was unburdening Hank of a task he couldn’t complete,” he said.
AT THE Hamm reptile show, Molt and Butterbean sold a second pair of parviocula to the same German collector who’d bought the first pair two months before. That night the collector called Butterbean, upset. One of the new parviocula, he reported, had flopped on its back and died.
“We were stumped,” Molt said. “He provided the dead snake, which he hadn’t paid for yet. He was a private collector, a very honest, nerdy, studious reptile guy, so we believed him. We said we could replace it.” But before the weekend was over, the replacement snake died, too.
Something was sorely wrong—the snakes had been exposed to a virus or a bacterium, probably. But Butterbean had taken pains with the parviocula, isolating them from his other snakes and disinfecting every surface and using only fresh containers. It didn’t make sense.
Nguyen’s friends confronted Molt and Butterbean, demanding they hand over the remaining parviocula to bring back to the United States. Molt refused them.
When his friends returned empty-handed, Nguyen wondered whether Molt had meant to defraud him all along. He chose to believe otherwise. “My guess is they were trying to sell the snakes in Germany, then use [Bucks] to get enough of them cheap to fulfill the order to me,” he said.
The way Molt saw it, it was Nguyen’s fault for trusting him. Nguyen “did not take charge of the situation,” Molt said. “He lost $20,000, got no snakes, nothing.”
It was the reptile business, it went without saying.
THE FALLOUT from the parviocula was immediate and nasty. On New Year’s Eve, Benjamin Bucks was arrested and thrown into a Kenyan jail. Kenya now had a long list of grievances against Bucks, as did wildlife officials in neighboring countries, particularly Ethiopia.
When Bucks got out of jail, Kenya began rescinding his various business licenses. Bucks was thinking about giving up Africa for good when, that March, he visited his brother in Zurich. When he tried to return, Kenya blocked his reentry. CITES officials made note of this triumph at their annual conference:
Surveillance on a notorious reptile smuggler has been going on and was being conducted by intelligence personnel from Kenya, Ethiopia and Uganda. The smuggler was arrested at Ukunda on 31st December, 2005. KWS made an application for the smuggler to be declared a prohibited immigrant. The request was granted in March, 2006.
Hank Molt resumed his schedule of reprisals as effortlessly as if the Bitis parviocula affair had merely pressed the pause button on them, and added Nguyen to his roster of enemies, sending him vague, threatening letters with no return address.
MOLT FLEW to Germany again. Butterbean’s recent silence seemed ominous, and the Terrastika Hamm show was approaching. Molt rented a car in Frankfurt and drove it to Butterbean’s in Münster. Butterbean’s yard, Molt saw, was full of empty terrariums half buried in the March snow. Inside, the house was cold, the family had moved out, and there was Butterbean, his gaunt giant’s body outstretched on a couch.
The parviocula were all dead, labeled in bags in the freezer. Butterbean’s veterinarian had performed necropsies on the snakes and determined the culprit to be ophidian paramyxovirus, a pathogen that had wiped out whole snake collections in zoos.
“He was almost suicidally depressed,” Molt said of Butterbean. “He refused to go to Hamm because he was too embarrassed. Lying on the couch all day without the heat on, listening to Gothic music.”
In Butterbean’s cold living room, Molt noticed an escaped rattlesnake, coiled up on a bookshelf. Eventually, Butterbean had to be hospitalized.
PETER NGUYEN would never speak a civil word to Molt again. He blamed his Asperger’s for making him unable to detect Molt’s deceptions, but probably he should have blamed his all-consuming snake lust, the kind of lust that had made fools out of people smarter than him.
And yet Nguyen could not bring himself to hate Molt. “He is an unrepentant smuggler,” Nguyen said. “But he loved the animals. He has magnificent taste in herps—a gentleman’s taste. He can in a single phrase encapsulate the essence of an animal, in a short little burst of telegraphic text until you just say, ‘I can’t live without this thing.’
“He is a man whom, had he been born a hundred years before, there would have been bronzes of,” Nguyen continued, “and that kills him. He wants to be Alfred Russel Wallace, with a bit of Barnum thrown in. He was born a century late and it kills him, it eats him alive.”
21
The Partial Rehabilitation of Tom Crutchfield
Shortly after Tom Crutchfield was released from a federal correctional complex in Yazoo City, Mississippi, where he entertained very few visitors and lit his cigarettes through a hole in the wall, he left Penny, his wife of thirty years. This surprised him almost as much as it did everyone else. Even his new girlfriend, Patty, had trouble believing it. “He told me, ‘I’ll never leave my wife,’ ” Patty said. “I never thought he would.”
Patty waited tables at Joanie’s Blue Crab Café, a restaurant in Everglades City where Crutchfield took his Everglades Day Safari customers for lunch. Patty sometimes worked barefoot, or in a bikini. She was seventeen years younger than Crutchfield, already a widow, and had no great love for snakes. She was pretty, if tough, with chipped teeth and a smoky voice. Crutchfield thoroughly approved of lower-back tattoos and pierced nipples. Patty also tuned up Crutchfield’s car and even proved amenable to arduous days at the gym, where Crutchfield would place an eighty-pound barbell on her back and make her do lunges.
Patty stood no chance with Crutchfield’s daughters, at least not for many years, and she confounded Crutchfield’s friends, who mistakenly called her “Penny,” then caught themselves. How could he leave a woman who had fled with him to Belize? Maybe Penny had dumped him, they speculated.
Crutchfield and Patty showed up without fail for the reptile expo in Daytona. In the years while Crutchfield remained on probation, while he worked as a guide in the Everglades, they sold no animals but rented a small table and sold Crutchfield’s book collection, along with what was left of his handmade knives and spears. Crutchfield’s Mercedes was gone, replaced by a Ford Escort wagon. Som
etimes he would be recognized by former customers indifferently flipping through his books. “Are you—?”
“Yep!” he would say.
“Man, I bought my first snake from you.”
“A lot of people did.”
Here were Crutchfield’s former jerks and assholes regarding him with wonder and pity, like émigrés who’d discovered their exiled king washing dishes at Denny’s. He was as obliging to them as could be. Molt, who kept an extremely polite distance from Crutchfield at the expos, thought that his old nemesis had become too mellow, too nice, that the fire had gone out of his eyes.
TWO YEARS later, when his probation period ended, Crutchfield broke up with Patty, quit the Everglades Day Safari, and moved from Fort Myers to Miami. He lived with a wealthy Miami physician, an old friend, who kept too many animals in squalid conditions in his otherwise lovely home. The doctor frequently forgot to feed them, and his wife did her best to keep them alive. Still, the rhinoceros iguanas banged their noses on wire cages all day, demanding lettuce, and from the snake room adjacent to the house came the smell of something dead. Feral green iguanas sunned themselves on the mangroves near the doctor’s docked yacht, and these iguanas, left to their own devices, were doing better than any of his captives.
The doctor was wan and frail and slept all day. At night he drank white rum and smoked cigarettes until, by dawn, a ziggurat of butts arose from his ashtray. He was a former small-time smuggler himself, who in 2001 had been caught trying to sneak in boas from the Bahamas, and later pleaded guilty. He had recently been bitten by a fer-de-lance in Suriname. He claimed not to have seen the snake, but no one believed him. Not only was he drunk a lot of the time, but he had an uncontrollable urge to capture animals, all kinds of animals. The doctor videotaped the progress of the snakebite, his waxy swollen hand with its blackening index finger, narrating the progress of his symptoms. He distributed DVDs of the event to fellow snake enthusiasts; now, his left index finger was stiffened and useless.
Before Crutchfield arrived, the doctor had tried to open a reptile shop on a busy stretch in North Miami, only to lose his inventory to incompetence and neglect. Crutchfield tried his best to manage the store, but found the walk-in customers hard to bear. In the retail pet business, every day was J&A day. But Crutchfield had finally managed to save some money. He didn’t know whether he’d stay in Miami and help the doctor for a while, or move to rural North Florida, where he could afford property.
Mostly what Crutchfield wanted was to import reptiles again. The doctor came in handy for this, since he had valid import permits despite his Bahamas transgression, and the Feds weren’t about to reissue Crutchfield’s. A crate of a thousand baby iguanas, most of them dying, sat in a back room of the shop. The doctor had ordered them on a whim, and that was a recurrent problem. Many ended up as food for the other reptiles.
AFTER A few months’ separation, Crutchfield and Patty decided they couldn’t live without each other after all. The pet store proved a money pit, so the doctor closed it and bought an overgrown property in Ft. Lauderdale, a compound with two houses for snake breeding and a third house for Crutchfield and Patty to live in while they managed all the snakes. This sounded good on paper, but ultimately translated into full-time servitude for Patty, who was soon at her wits’ end.
“Snake shit,” she said. “That’s all I do, is clean snake shit.” If she wasn’t cleaning cages, she was cleaning house, or cooking, or on a cigarette run. She feared Crutchfield had become dependent on the painkillers he took for his bad back, and that the drugs were making him surly. Lately she had broken a whole set of dishes in a fight.
Patty kept ducks for pleasure, one of the few pleasures she had, but Crutchfield’s escaped snakes ate her ducklings. When she got a day or two alone, she would lock herself in a room with her fluffy white cat, and let the snake shit pile up.
WITHIN A year, Crutchfield’s snake collection filled both back buildings of the compound and a good part of the living area. Patty thought painkillers were turning Crutchfield mean, but being around snakes again seemed to bring out some of the harder aspects of Crutchfield’s personality, the impulsiveness, competitiveness, and short-temperedness for which he was notorious. His one employee, a skilled and friendly Cuban, had already quit, tired of Crutchfield’s badgering. Patty had fallen in love with Crutchfield when he was flat on his back. He wasn’t on his feet quite yet, but he was sitting up, and the ghost limb of his ego was regenerating.
Inevitably, Crutchfield began feeling the urge to travel again.
He was lately fixated on a snake in the Dominican Republic. He had a mission in mind to collect and take field notes on a red strain of Epicrates striatus, the Haitian boa. Most Haitian boas were a granite color, but a rare few were a bright, ketchupy red. The Bronx Zoo maintained a small colony of red Haitian boas, so these were not unknown to science, yet Crutchfield was unshakably convinced that the red ones were a separate, new species mistakenly lumped in with the others, a species “hidden in plain sight,” he said. Back in the 1970s, Crutchfield had collected a gecko new to science, and was mildly disappointed when it was not named for him. This boa was a different story. If Crutchfield could manage to get this snake named after himself—even as a subspecies—the vanity factor would be exponentially greater.
Crutchfield’s plan was to collect as many red boas as he could in the mountainous eastern part of the Dominican Republic, then pay the zoo in Santo Domingo to provide the CITES export permits to move them out, and then, after some schmoozing and chip-cashing up at the University of Florida, submit the blood samples for DNA, and get them designated a new species named, what else? Epicrates crutchfieldii, or Epicrates striatus crutchfieldii, if it wound up being a subspecies. The doctor would provide the money, as usual, and come along for the ride. The doctor spoke good Spanish, which helped, but he was always drunk and that meant Crutchfield would have to babysit him, “make sure he doesn’t fall off a cliff or something,” he said.
Red Haitian boas were worth about $5,000 a pair to collectors, meaning that Crutchfield’s venture was not purely scientific in intent. It certainly lacked the exhaustive planning of a scientific venture. Crutchfield waited until the day before leaving to secure himself a new passport, resulting in a moody, seven-hour wait with Patty in the Miami passport office. On the morning of the trip, when he went to get cash, his bank account was overdrawn.
Crutchfield, the doctor, and the doctor’s son took along a snake hook, four fancy new LED flashlights, and an awful lot of narcotic painkillers. Just to be on the safe side, as there were no truly venomous species on Hispaniola, the doctor packed medicines for anaphylactic shock. Crutchfield announced he would use the opportunity of the trip to quit smoking, but he’d nonetheless packed a carton of Marlboro lights, which he smoked without pause.
The doctor had stopped drinking following a pancreatitis episode over the winter, but fell off the wagon at the airport bar, where he ordered a Tom Collins. Crutchfield ambled over to duty free to check prices on Obsession, his favorite cologne. About half a dozen bottles of it graced his dresser at home, but he could always use more. “It costs less at Walgreens,” he said, dismayed. As the flight boarded, the doctor tried to sneak a cigarette in the airport bathroom, forcing his son to intervene.
A YOUNG snake hunter named Alfred met Crutchfield in Santo Domingo. Alfred was a Dominican who had grown up in New York and had worked as an intern for John Behler at the Bronx Zoo. Alfred had been such a talented teenage herpetologist that he could find wild salamanders in Manhattan, but in his twenties he wound up serving two and a half years in state prison for drug crimes. Now Alfred was thirty, supposedly reformed, and hunting Hispaniola reptiles with every smuggler or scientist who needed his aid. He didn’t discriminate.
Over beers outside a bodega, Alfred shared two inconvenient facts. The first was that a Smithsonian biologist had already done the DNA work on red Haitian boas, and determined them to be, without a doubt, the same species as the black
ones: Epicrates striatus. The second was that Alfred himself had helped a German visitor collect more than a hundred red boas the previous year, and the German had successfully pressed the zoo for export permits. In all likelihood, the zoo gave the German a permit for four or five snakes, and he suitcased the other ninety-five, but still. If the German succeeded in breeding the boas, or at least keeping most of them alive, the market might soon be flooded with red Epicrates striatus, ruining Crutchfield’s plans.
Crutchfield shrugged at the news that snakes were not new to science. Once the scientific pretensions of the trip were effectively disposed of, there was the German competition to worry about. But Crutchfield wasn’t sweating that, either.
Crutchfield just wanted those red boas. They all did. They wanted a lot of them, and they wanted them that day. They got in Alfred’s truck and started off.
“I never fail on these trips,” Crutchfield said as Alfred drove. “Not like Hank.”
CRUTCHFIELD SAID he expected to return from this trip with forty thousand dollars’ worth of snakes, and that first night, in a patch of jungle within Santo Domingo, the group netted two normal black Haitian boas, and at least a thousand dollars’ worth of a small, delicate species, the Haitian dwarf boa. Alfred drank white rum as he hunted. “Something about it opens up my senses,” he said, passing around his bottle. The rum was working; Alfred was seeing snakes everywhere, even while driving, and would come to a screeching halt if a movement in a tree caught his eye. Crutchfield pronounced Alfred “the best fucking snake hunter I’ve ever seen.” The doctor’s son was also an adept hunter. Only Crutchfield seemed to have trouble seeing snakes in this environment. It had been two decades since he’d last set foot on Hispaniola, and nearly a decade since Belize. He had gained some weight, and his back and hips bothered him, making him wobbly on the alternately rock-strewn and spongy ground. “I’m getting old,” he said. “Much as I hate to admit it.”
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