“When I was a deputy sheriff, I dealt with a lot of sociopaths,” Celebucki went on. “Hank is incapable of holding a job, of committing to a routine; he’s unreliable. Always blaming his illness or someone else’s illness or logistical problems.” Which was, of course, what Molt was doing right then.
ONLY DAYS before the expo, Special Agent Tom Chisdock showed up at Adam Stewart’s pet store to get a look at the special snake with the blue rattle. Once in the door, he dropped all pretenses of being a customer.
It was an Arizona game officer who’d seen Stewart’s ad first. Wildlife officers, both state and federal, made a habit of scanning the online reptile classifieds the way they once subscribed to price lists and Reptiles magazine. Crotalus pricei was highly protected, and any specimen for sale would have set off alarms, but a pricei with a blue rattle was asking for it.
Before contacting Chisdock, the Arizona game officer had e-mailed the ad to a biologist who’d been working with pricei since 1997. The biologist confirmed that he had caught and marked that snake only months before in the Chiricahua Mountains. The game officer hoped that Chisdock could open a federal case on a snake stolen from Arizona. It wasn’t easy to prove poaching under normal circumstances, but a blue rattle helped.
Stewart hadn’t bothered to remove the blue enamel by the time Chisdock came around. Nor did he bother to make up any stories. He surrendered the snake.
Chisdock showed up at Molt’s apartment the same day, but Molt refused to let him in, even though it was raining miserably. Chisdock wedged himself as best he could into Molt’s doorway, trying not to get wet. “He’d just talked to Adam for four hours,” Molt said. “He was convinced that I masterminded the whole thing, put Adam up to it.”
Chisdock demanded that Molt come to the local police station for an interview. Molt refused. That weekend, while Celebucki and the rest frolicked in Florida, Molt sat at his card table, crafting mocking letters to “Agent Cheese-Dick.”
In the end, Molt crumpled up his provocations and wrote Chisdock a fairly subdued letter that blamed Stewart for everything. “He also gave me a litany of failed Fish and Wildlife investigations and talked about my character and lack thereof,” Chisdock recalled, but the affront was modest by Molt’s standards, a mere formality.
Charges were brought against Adam Stewart and the Alabama men, who settled without trial, each paying fines of $1,000. Stewart’s blue-rattled rattler was sent to a South Carolina zoo, where it began to slowly starve. Eventually the zoo sent it on to wildlife officials in Arizona, where it died.
DAVE PRIVAL, the Arizona biologist who had painted the blue-rattled rattler, could not resist writing an article about the incident, in a rather dramatic narrative style, published in a journal called Sonoran Herpetologist. The piece was soon reprinted in any number of conservation magazines, since it had all the elements: Hank Molt, the cunning veteran smuggler; Adam Stewart, the dimwitted apprentice; the father and son from Guntersville with a sack of snakes on a plane. Prival made clear his annoyance at the low fines and lax treatment of the perpetrators by Chisdock; snake poachers might not be much of a threat on their own, he argued, but combined with other factors, such as land conversion and global warming, they could spell the end of a species like pricei.
Molt responded to Prival in an e-mail complete with quotes from Virgil, Kipling, Horace, Wilde, Swift, Pliny the Elder, Galileo, and Shakespeare.
David,
This is my riposte to your straggling, multifarious, elegiac and most importantly, supercilious essay wherein you treat of Hank Molt, Adam Stewart, the Hammonds, a tragic little rattlesnake, geography, the history of how some villages came to be named, the family tree of Will Rogers, the height of a unique cement tower in SC, wildlife legislation, the Lacey Act, the heartbreaking lament that eager beavers no longer frolic in the Santa Cruz River near Tucson, your thralldom over the superiority of AZ to any other USA territory, global warming, human population dynamics, water use, ethics and other musings ad-nauseous, all the while arrogating unto yourself a court of judicature. I will be, with brutal probity, dissecting your many errors and mendacious obfuscation of facts …
For 14,000 words, Molt continued. Though few could make it to the end of so lavish a screed, this one did contain a few salient points. Among them was the fact that the University of Arizona’s preserved collections, to which Prival had contributed substantially over the years, now numbered 58 twin-spotted rattlesnakes and 258 Gila monsters.
“Dead in jars,” Molt added, for emphasis.
MOLT WITHDREW after that. He was mostly caring for his wife, who he said was sick. Every day he made the same tedious circuit from their apartment complex near Clemson, South Carolina, where they lived in separate, adjacent units, to the public library, the Wachovia bank, and Whole Foods or Panera, where he would settle in with a coffee for the afternoon. “I’m bored to tears,” he complained. “I’m bored by my lack of crazy shit happening to me. I’m addicted to drama, but there’s a couple of lines I don’t want to cross. I don’t want to go to prison again, I know that.”
Nor did he, he said repeatedly, want to wind up like Eddy Postma. So frightened was Molt of an accident in the field that he’d begun doing exercises to strengthen his ankles, taking hikes in the uneven terrain of the Blue Ridge foothills. He was not drinking nightly anymore, but when he did drink, he had a hard time stopping.
Death was on his mind. The Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin, had just been killed by a stingray—Molt had known and liked Irwin since his early days with Stefan Schwarz, when they would visit Irwin’s then-small zoo in Queensland, “and he was exactly the same then!” Molt said. John Behler had died that year, too, after a long battle with heart disease. For three decades, Molt had never stopped daydreaming, sometimes out loud, about being stuck in an elevator with Behler alone. And yet he e-mailed friends a sober, respectful notice about Behler’s death. As much as he’d once hated Behler, he hated even more that the snake men of his generation were starting to die off.
23
Parviocula Venom
Hank Molt moved with his wife from South Carolina to a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, where their daughter now lived. He spent hours a day on the computers at the public library, keeping tabs on the reptile world and searching for contacts. He shopped for groceries, babysat his daughter’s dogs, and took his grandson skateboarding. This unremarkable pattern kept up until February 2008, when Benjamin Bucks e-mailed him with some unpleasant news.
Bucks had heard that the same Ethiopian exporter involved in their own failed attempt to smuggle Bitis parviocula had just sent a shipment of them directly to the United States. This was remarkable, not least because there weren’t a lot of parviocula to begin with—anyone who knew anything about parviocula knew how rare this snake was—and because Ethiopian wildlife law did not allow the export of its endemic species, a shipment to America could trigger the Lacey Act. Someone calling himself “viperkeeper” was now posting videos of the snakes on YouTube, Bucks reported.
At first Molt thought that the snake he was seeing on YouTube was the same beat-up male parviocula he had entrusted to Nguyen before their falling out, and that Nguyen had since sold it. But then Molt realized to his amazement that there were a lot of parviocula in the videos, perhaps as many as twenty. New videos appeared daily, complete with dramatic titles: “Introducing Bitis Parviocula, the Ethiopian Mountain Adder!”
To non-snake people, the YouTube videos must have seemed incredibly boring and redundant, the same black-and-green snakes writhing about on the same blue towels. But hundreds of snake lovers followed viperkeeper’s daily parviocula postings, always eager for the next, constantly weighing in with their flattering remarks and inquiries:
Earthtoaster
Hey, gratz man.
You sound so extremely excited.
coclhs944
congratulations what are you going to do with all of them
viperkeeper
Cha-Ching!
“Vi
perkeeper” was a Pennsylvania man named Al Coritz, who soon informed his YouTube following that he was selling the parviocula for $3,000 apiece, and that several of the snakes were earmarked for major zoos. He began posting ads on Kingsnake.com:
They like high humidity but not soaking wet. Mist daily. If you have Google Earth I can send you Lat/Long of the region they are from, think coffee plantation and you’ll have the habitat.
No mention was made of the legality of all this, much less the blow dealt to the species by taking so many gravid females. Of all the Kingsnake and YouTube commenters, only Benjamin Bucks bothered to mention that the snakes were illegal and potentially endangered, and his posts were quickly removed. Coritz then changed the ads to claim the animals had been bred in captivity. Then, for a while, he stopped posting ads altogether.
MOLT RIGHTLY suspected that zoos, at least those with venomous snake collections, would be interested in the parviocula. He e-mailed Coritz, posing as a snake collector named Lisa, who was very interested in reserving some of the baby parviocula that had yet to be born. Lisa also wanted to know which zoos had purchased, or planned to purchase, parviocula, because, she said, “it would be neat to see a few of them in zoo collections.”
Coritz replied:
Hi Lisa,
I don’t take deposits because I never know the outcome of a gravid female. Yes, some of the animals will be going to Zoo’s but I cannot disclose who though. They will not be on the East Coast, mostly central & West
Your #2 on the wait list.
Al
Lisa then inquired about the snakes’ import and export documents, at which point Coritz seemed to detect Molt’s ruse.
“Eat [bleep] & die asshole,” Coritz replied. “I have all of the paperwork for these.”
Molt readied himself for attack—no one would succeed with Bitis parviocula where he and his friends had failed. If any accredited zoo bought parviocula, he would expose it with glee for trafficking in protected wildlife.
“This isn’t sour grapes,” he said. “This is sour watermelons.”
BENJAMIN BUCKS, who was as infuriated as Molt that someone had succeeded with parviocula, theorized that this Coritz, with all his videos, his ads on Kingsnake, and lately, a new Wikipedia entry that deemed parviocula “the world’s rarest snake,” wasn’t the snakes’ real owner.
By then the din about the snakes’ legality was getting louder. A Fish and Wildlife investigation into the parviocula was pending. Zoo curators who had ordered parviocula were putting deliveries on hold, waiting to see what would happen. A month after first advertising the snakes, Coritz posted a few of the import documents on a Web site, to prove that these twenty-one wild-caught parviocula had, in fact, been declared to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The documents showed that the snakes were declared not as Bitis parviocula but under the generic label “Bitis species,” which could have referred to any number of nonprotected, commonly imported snakes. The shipment had not been physically inspected.
Coritz’s name was nowhere on the import papers. In the upper-left-hand corner of one waybill appeared the name of the final recipient of the Ethiopian package. The snakes had been transshipped to Washington, D.C., where they were signed for by Peter Nguyen.
NGUYEN, BY then, was very upset and harried. He had spent more than $30,000 on these snakes, which he had indeed bought straight from the same Ethiopian who’d earlier sold some to Molt and Bucks. Nguyen had arranged to sell the Dallas, San Diego, and St. Louis zoos two pairs of parviocula apiece. He would recoup his costs on the zoo sales, and finally get a female parviocula into his collection—the parviocula that Molt had long denied him. But Nguyen had made the mistake of sending a gravid parviocula to his friend Al Coritz, who went out of his way to publicize what he had—and, Nguyen suspected, sold the same zoos a few of the babies, cheap. Now the Dallas, San Diego, and St. Louis zoos weren’t returning Nguyen’s phone calls. Worse, a seething Hank Molt had contacted the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and was now e-mailing every zoo in the country under the pseudonym “Richard Milden,” concerned citizen and conservationist, proclaiming the snakes to be contraband. “There is credible evidence,” Molt wrote the zoos, “that these wild caught adult Ethiopian Mountain Vipers Bitis parviocula imported into the USA in Jan and/or Feb of 2008 were illegally exported from Ethiopia and thus illegally entered into the USA in violation of the Lacey Act, customs regulations and possible international currency regulations.”
Nguyen finally posted on a Web site the Ethiopian export documents for the parviocula, documents that looked very much as though they had been created on a home computer. The “export permit” listed fake phone and fax numbers, a nonworking e-mail address, and the signature of someone named “Lamy” or “Larry.” Its text, declaring that “Bitis parviocula, an Ethiopian endemic, is added to the other exportable Reptiles,” appeared to have been composed in multiple Microsoft Word fonts on a piece of white paper. About the only authentic-looking thing about the document was the purple stamp of Ethiopia’s Agriculture Ministry, though it was its Wildlife Conservation Authority that dealt with wildlife exports. Benjamin Bucks was quick to recognize the possible ruse, as he’d relied for years on a similar one in Kenya.
THE U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service dropped its inquiry into the parviocula after one fruitless phone call to Addis Ababa. The irregularities, such as they were, had occurred on the Ethiopian side—a single, dubious piece of paper had effectively legalized the species. To make a Lacey Act case, you needed the cooperation of the foreign government, and with a country like Ethiopia it was hard. “Trying to communicate with management authorities in different countries is a nightmare,” said Marie Palladini, the agent who’d sent Eddie Celebucki to jail. “It’s really hard to prove if it’s a violation for foreign law and the animal is not CITES. We’re better off when we can catch somebody at the airport.”
The summer of 2001, when Anson Wong signed his plea deal, seemed to have marked the end of an adventure for Fish and Wildlife. Afterward came September 11, and a radical reconfiguration of federal law-enforcement priorities. For most of the decade, the agency did not exhibit much energy for wildlife-smuggling cases, particularly complex international ones. The agency’s covert unit, whose investigations had in the 1990s destroyed the wild parrot trade and put a very real dent in the illegal reptile trade, had been disbanded; ten years later, George Morrison, the agent who’d taken down Wong, was the sole agent working under the rubric of Special Operations.
Fish and Wildlife’s chief of law enforcement, Benito Perez, acknowledged that the agency’s priorities had changed. “We have to give the American public the most bang for their buck when it comes to conservation,” he said. “Special Operations was a very elite unit that takes a lot of resources to maintain.”
Yet the agency’s law enforcement budget—around $60 million—and its number of special agents—around two hundred—had remained relatively stable even after 2001, so it seemed that there might have been other reasons the antismuggling efforts had died down. It wasn’t for lack of smuggling; that continued apace. In 2007, a young man was caught in California with Fiji iguanas in his prosthetic leg, and every few months came similar reports. Catching smugglers at airports seemed to be all the agency had time for, and the physical work of that now fell to the Transportation Security Administration.
In Europe, where the market for reptiles continued to grow and where smugglers like Benjamin Bucks operated with impunity, there also were fewer big investigations than before. Wilgers Joost, a Dutch attorney who had defended a number of animal smugglers in the 1990s, said he thought the cases had proved disappointments for the governments that brought them. “It was believed that this was a billion-dollar market, the number-two to drugs and guns, very big money,” he said. “Prosecutors now understand that it’s not.”
In March 2008, at the same time that Hank Molt was straining to elicit any sort of government action on Nguyen’s parviocula, the Congressional Research Serv
ice issued a bizarre report attempting to link wildlife smuggling with terrorism. It was nearly fifty pages long, and recycled several of the implausible and debunked claims from the 1990s—that the illegal wildlife trade was worth an annual $20 billion, for one. The terrorism part amounted mainly to geographical overlap—smuggled animals come from hot places, the report noted, and so do terrorists.
MOLT, HAVING had no luck with the American wildlife authorities, turned to Ethiopia’s. The Ethiopian government at first sent tepid responses to Molt’s incessant e-mails, and then no responses at all, and soon it became clear that even they had no interest whatsoever in the parviocula affair.
So Molt resorted to sending Peter Nguyen malicious e-mails, the first of them a treatise on the subject of trituration, which meant, according to the definition Molt supplied, “the grinding of a substance into a fine powder.” Nguyen forwarded this to a lawyer to see if it amounted to a legally actionable threat. Molt followed with arcane demands for snakes and money, including the return of the one male parviocula and reimbursement for “expenses of $823 in El Paso in out of pocket cash, plus wear and tear on my car”—a reference to a road trip Molt and Nguyen had made five years earlier. Molt promised “draconian measures” if his demands were not met. Then, totally out of ideas, Molt began phoning Nguyen repeatedly and hanging up.
“Hank has lost his marbles altogether,” Nguyen said. “I’m sick of all this cloak-and-dagger bullshit. I just want to be left alone to play with my snakes.”
Molt was on a tear, that much was clear, but he was probably not wrong about the parviocula. The export permits were irregular at best, and Nguyen’s claims that he hadn’t noticed anything amiss seemed rather hollow, since he prided himself on his ability to detect all manner of forgeries. During the first parviocula affair, when Bucks and Molt were encouraging Nguyen to put up the daunting sum of $20,000, Nguyen was so insistent on not being cheated that he seemed to see forgeries everywhere, offering minute analyses of shadows and pixelation in photos the Ethiopian had sent of the snakes, concluding, after days of deliberation, that the photos were doctored composites.
Stolen World Page 31