Stolen World

by Jennie Erin Smith

  Molt’s attempts to unnerve the zoos succeeded for only a few weeks. Eventually the curators went to Fish and Wildlife, seeking assurances that they would not be subject to prosecution if they did buy parviocula, as they clearly hankered to. Even Molt’s ex-girlfriend Colette engaged herself in trying to dispel Molt’s accusations. “Our local USFWS agent offered to speak to any zoo person that had a legitimate interest in the legality of the parviocula,” she wrote colleagues. “This agent is a friend of mine and he told me the Gladys Porter Zoo could, with his blessings and support, receive shipment of those animals with a clear conscience.”

  The zoos went ahead and bought parviocula.

  WHENEVER MOLT came to the end of the line, when his attempts to provoke outrage or mayhem failed, he always claimed that he was “wiping the slate clean,” or, alternatively, “getting away from all the negativity,” and moving on.

  For months, Molt had been soliciting Butterbean and Benjamin Bucks for any sort of adventure, anywhere at all: “I am bored to tears and lust for some action, some roguery, some semi-desperado stuff that is still safe for us and profitable,” he wrote Bucks. During his daily Web searches at the public library, Molt had located a German expatriate in Rio de Janeiro who sounded amenable to an illegal reptile deal, as he had responded warmly to Molt’s suggestion that they “do something creative.” This German had even made mention of a snake rarer yet than parviocula. This was Xenoboa cropanii, a tree boa with greatly enlarged scales that gave it a primitive, prehistoric appearance. Cropanii was first discovered in 1953 by researchers at the American Museum of Natural History, but was believed extinct until twenty or thirty years later, when two more specimens were collected. It had never been photographed in situ—the snake books used photos of the preserved specimens. Yet Molt’s German contact insinuated that he’d seen cropanii, which lived in a highly protected area in a forest outside São Paulo, alive. Even cropanii, Molt now believed, was not outside the realm of possibility.

  Molt was self-conscious that he hadn’t made a big trip in a while. He was rusty, he complained, and kept talking about the need to get his “feet wet” with a warm-up venture to Mexico or Belize. Brazil was deeper waters. Still, he was determined to go, though he had confessed to Eddie Celebucki that he feared this trip could be his last. Molt was sixty-eight, and there was nothing wrong with him that Celebucki knew of, but he seemed more anxious than invigorated.

  Eddie Celebucki had mixed feelings about Molt living in Ohio. It was nice to have his friend in the same state, but it also made Celebucki susceptible to being sucked into Molt’s snake schemes, just when he was finally living like a normal human being again. For two years after his club was raided, Celebucki lived in the drafty basement of the small karate studio he rented, with no kitchen or proper bathroom. To shower, he had attached a hose to the sink tap, and stood in a plastic trough to catch the water. He had a bigger karate studio now, and a decent apartment, and Celebucki worried most of all that if Molt’s wife ever expelled him, he’d have to let Molt move in. Celebucki was irritated at Molt, too, for making such a stink about the parviocula. He would have liked to buy some parviocula one day, but Molt had to ruin it. Even this Brazil trip seemed pointless to Celebucki. “Hank never allows himself to connect fully with the people around him,” he said. “Which is why he’s always lusting for the next adventure.”

  MOLT HAD just taken off for Brazil when the studiously elusive Peter Nguyen found himself on the front page of the Washington Post.

  Nguyen’s neighbors, sick of finding escaped Mexican rattlesnakes in their yards, had prompted the town council of Arlington, Virginia, to pass an ordinance banning venomous reptiles. The cries for a ban became louder after an incident that spring in which a plumber, summoned to fix Nguyen’s hot tub, arrived to find twenty dead snakes in containers and called 911. Nguyen refused to let police officers into his house, and a five-hour standoff resulted. The reason dead snakes were rotting next to his hot tub, Nguyen told police from his window, was because he was skeletonizing them for research. Nguyen denied to the Washington Post that the escaped Mexican rattlesnakes, snakes worth more than a thousand dollars apiece, had been his. “It would be an impossibility of physics,” he told the paper. “It’s downright impossible for them to get out, much as a goldfish would have the potential to leave its bowl and go scampering about the community.”

  And yet, for all Nguyen’s evasions, the Post reporter discerned something noble in his obsession:

  A snake is not something you get emotionally attached to, he explained. You research its history, anatomy and physiology. You observe its behavior. You don’t handle it; you “encounter” it …

  Fea’s vipers, “dazzling” bright blue natives of Himalayan cloud forests with red striping, usually die in captivity. Nguyen has three. A rare Ethiopian small-eyed viper with green and black patterns is considered the “Holy Grail” in snake collecting circles. “Only one person in the world has kept one alive for more than six months, and that was me,” he said.

  The town council, unmoved, gave Nguyen a month to get his snakes out of Arlington.

  MOLT’S BRAZIL trip took a wrong turn at the start. Shortly after Molt and Butterbean landed, their German export contact was arrested. Wildlife officials had followed a package of snakes from Amazonia, a package intended for Molt and Butterbean, addressed to the German’s eighty-year-old neighbor. When the German came to retrieve it, he was taken into custody. “He had to pay like a $15,000 fine,” Molt said. “He couldn’t even see us the whole time we were there.” All Molt and Butterbean could do was drink beer and go to soccer games and zoos. They flew home empty-handed.

  Benjamin Bucks, in an e-mail, described the trip as a “real fuckup.” Butterbean, he said, “seemed to put much of the blame on Hank and said it seemed the Brazilians did not like his boasting ways and promises which all never would be realized.”

  But Molt had been to Brazil, which was all that mattered. He’d come out alive, and now all he could think about was going back.

  PETER NGUYEN wound up in the Washington Post again that summer, this time because the housekeeping staff at the Hy-Way Motel in Fairfax, Virginia, had discovered seventeen snakes, twelve of them venomous and two of them dead, in a room Nguyen had rented.

  Nguyen had placed the snakes in containers, which he then concealed in suitcases and the type of thermal bags used for delivering pizzas, and rented a room for them at the Hy-Way, where he failed to check up on them. It was the smell of the dead snakes that gave him away.

  He explained to police that he’d already sent the rest of his now-illegal collection to Florida, and these were the last batch he had yet to find homes for. The Post did not mention whether there were any parviocula in the Hy-Way, but there were indeed.

  MOLT FELL mysteriously out of touch. He missed the Daytona reptile expo, again, this time without excuse or explanation. Another month passed, and Celebucki and Bucks and Butterbean all started to worry, at once.

  Bucks thought Molt might be in Latin America, in jail. Celebucki thought that someone had finally killed him. “There are so many times he’s taken payment for animals that he didn’t deliver,” Celebucki said. No one had any way of contacting Molt’s family. Molt made sure of that: he enforced a strict, almost paranoid, separation of his worlds. He used a P.O. box for his mail, and all the family’s phones were unlisted.

  Finally, in early October, Molt called, sounding a hundred years old. He had suffered a perforated intestine, he said. At first he’d thought it was stomach flu, but it got worse and worse over days until finally he checked himself into the hospital, where he underwent emergency abdominal surgery. Molt had been recovering for six weeks, and he needed yet another surgery. He now had a colostomy bag attached to him, which disgusted him to no end.

  PETER NGUYEN, now bereft of the snakes he loved, considered buying Molt a snake to aid his recovery. Nguyen believed that Molt’s callousness was not some congenital disease, but a progressive hardening o
f the heart that began when he stopped keeping his own animals, abandoning them instead to the care of his friends. “The best thing Hank could do for himself,” Nguyen wrote in an e-mail, “is to get himself a snake—something interesting, though not necessarily something costly—and just take care of it. Keep it. Not attempt to sell it, or to use it as a prop for an Internet scam, or anything of that sort. Hank has, I’m afraid, forgotten all about his love for the animals themselves; and seeing the animals as only a means to an end—a way to make money, which they are not and inherently cannot be—and thinking of herps in terms of their cash value has blunted Hank’s enjoyment of the one and only pursuit about which he was ever really passionate, and has consequently made him bitter and insane.”

  Nguyen wrote again, recalling how back in 2005, during the first parviocula affair, there had been something strange about the way Molt insisted, over and over, that Nguyen travel with him to Germany and collect his snakes in person. “Except that if I’d gone,” he wrote, “Hank couldn’t have intercepted the parviocula and attempted to sell them there. I’ve always wondered if Hank was telling me, ‘I’m about to do something unforgivable to you; I don’t want to, but I can’t stop myself; stop me.’ ”

  It was hard for Nguyen to shake his enduring sympathies for Molt, but eventually he came to his senses and took the mildly vengeful step of buying Molt’s domain name, globalherp.com, which Molt had allowed to lapse. He thought of filling the site with ads for dinosaurs and imaginary reptiles, lampooning Molt’s excesses as many before him had done, but in the end he just left it blank.

  OVER SEVERAL months, Molt’s health improved. He had a second surgery to piece his intestines back together, and no longer suffered the indignity of a colostomy bag, though he remained terribly gaunt and struggled to gain weight. He began driving short distances and resumed his daily visits to the public library, where he researched a new area of interest for a future trip to Brazil.

  This was the town of Tabatinga, bordering Colombia and Peru, a place where things a lot more dangerous than reptiles got smuggled all the time. “The Indians up there are really good at collecting animals,” Molt said, sounding like himself again. “They hate the Brazilian government and aren’t keen on their laws and will do anything for money.” Some of the animals in the ill-fated package his German expat friend received had come through Tabatinga, Molt said. It would be much, much better to go in person, “to pick what you’re getting and see it.”

  NO ONE had much idea what Peter Nguyen or his friend Al Coritz had done with all the parviocula they’d once had, or if some or most had died. At one point they’d had more than forty, including babies. Many zoos were rumored to possess them, yet only three had formally registered their parviocula in the zoo association database. The next news of parviocula came in the Tampa Tribune the following winter, when a Florida man claimed that one had been stolen from his house. The sheriff’s office valued the stolen snake at $10,000, and published a toll-free number in the hope of its recovery. Later, the man was charged with filing a false police report. Apparently he’d stolen his own snake.

  Nguyen said he’d left five parviocula with that same Florida man in his desperation to get the snakes out of Arlington. The Florida man had a lousy reputation, but so did everyone in the reptile world, so Nguyen paid no mind. Then Nguyen saw the theft reported in the Tampa Tribune. The same month, more parviocula turned up on Tom Crutchfield’s price list.

  TOM CRUTCHFIELD had done what no one thought he could ever do. He’d built another reptile business, and was having some success.

  It began when the doctor’s drinking and gambling finally caught up with him. The doctor’s yacht was repossessed, and the Fort Lauderdale house he was renting to Crutchfield and Patty fell into foreclosure. Crutchfield had amassed enough animals and money by then to escape, and the foreclosure gave him the excuse. Crutchfield moved himself, the animals, and Patty to a friend’s farm on the edge of the Everglades, where they built pools and pens for animals and started afresh.

  In early 2009, Crutchfield introduced his new business to the world by e-mail, as Tom Crutchfield’s Reptile Price List. Every month Crutchfield e-mailed a new list, full of big, colorful photos of his animals. He was farming albino iguanas and turtles, using the profits from those to buy what he loved most—Caribbean rarities, the boas and lizards that thirty years ago he had caught by hand in the West Indies, but now mostly imported from Europe.

  Crutchfield had by then managed to acquire dozens of the red Haitian boas he’d failed to collect in the Dominican Republic. These came not from Europe but from a businessman in New Jersey, a snake hobbyist who had received his founding stock from the Bronx Zoo, many years before. He loved the red boas so much that he’d bred hundreds, and since he was rich enough that he never needed to sell them or trade them, no one knew he even had them.

  The businessman owned his own plane, and Crutchfield flew to the Bahamas with him, searching for the black boas of Bimini. One of Crutchfield’s daughters was deeply suspicious of the businessman, and the trip to the Bahamas unnerved her. The New Jersey man was becoming a constant presence in her father’s life, she said, and “one day I’m scared that he’s gonna offer Dad something so good he can’t resist.” She brought her misgivings to her father, who assured her not to worry; he’d long ago learned his lesson.

  PETER NGUYEN wanted his Bitis parviocula back, and though he barely knew Tom Crutchfield, he phoned him, hoping for some answers. Crutchfield answered Nguyen truthfully—the snakes had come from the same Tampa guy who later reported one stolen. In other words, they were Nguyen’s snakes. It was too late to do anything about it, Crutchfield told Nguyen: he’d already sold them.

  Six weeks later, Crutchfield circulated an e-mail to friends and colleagues. Someone dear to him had just been bitten by a parviocula, he wrote, and now that friend was hospitalized, his life in the balance. Crutchfield wanted to know if anyone else had been bitten by a parviocula, and if so, what treatment was administered. He wouldn’t say who’d been bitten. Within days, though, a newspaper in Wilson County, Texas, reported that Earl Turner, a salty old-time snake keeper, had been bitten by a parviocula, the “world’s rarest snake.” Turner asked his wife to shoot off his arm when it happened, but she refused, and he somehow lived to brag about it anyway.

  The only snake collector in the country without any parviocula, by this point, seemed to be Peter Nguyen.

  HANK MOLT was always lamenting that the trouble with reptiles was that it got harder and harder to find novel species, and as soon as you did find one, the romance of it died. Parviocula was a case in point: from the world’s rarest snake to someone like Earl Turner begging his wife to shoot off his arm. “All the low-hanging fruit has been picked,” he said. “It’s very daunting to find anything new. And I have more years behind me than ahead of me at this point.”

  Brazil once again consumed all of Molt’s energies, as he and Butterbean made new plans for the border town of Tabatinga. Butterbean had located a promising charter flight, one that ferried German families to vacation towns in Recife. Butterbean thought he’d avoid the usual customs scrutiny on such a flight, though he was a tattooed giant with black teeth and heavy-metal hair.

  In the midst of Molt’s preparations for Tabatinga, Eddie Celebucki fell ill with the same diverticulitis that Molt was still recovering from. Celebucki was already dealing with painful arthritis and nerve damage to his shoulder after decades of teaching karate, and was recovering from a recent cataract surgery, when he wound up in the emergency room suffering intestinal agonies. Molt drove over from Columbus to help, and stayed a week while doctors tried to decide whether to cut Celebucki open or not. The whole time, Celebucki said, Molt talked about Brazil.

  It wasn’t that Celebucki lacked for reptile fantasies himself. He followed the reptile classifieds carefully. He still scrutinized listings for Boelen’s pythons, the snakes that had so taken hold of his imagination that they’d set the course of his life. But C
elebucki had a sense of his physical limitations, at least. “We’re not kids anymore,” he said. “I keep telling Hank that.”

  Their relationship had changed. “He’s been my best friend and my worst friend,” Celebucki said of Molt once, and that pendulum was swinging back. Now that they were getting older, Molt came around seeking nothing but Celebucki’s company.

  When, a few weeks after being hospitalized for diverticulitis, Celebucki finally went back in for colon surgery, Molt showed up again to neaten up the karate school and to instruct Celebucki on converting to a high-fiber diet. Molt’s extensive Brazil plans had been shelved, indefinitely, and he was talking about the Philippines now, specifically an island province in the southwest called Palawan that he’d researched rather exhaustively in his long library afternoons. On Palawan, he could live for weeks or months in a cabin on the beach, and since it was cheap to hop over to Australia from the Philippines, he could visit Stefan Schwarz, whose face he hadn’t seen in twenty years. A pair of any one of a half dozen illicit but rather nice species, including Varanus mabitang, an arboreal fruit-eating monitor discovered only in 2001, would net him enough to pay for the trip, and breaking even was at this point, with the onset of his eighth decade looming, all Molt cared about or could dream of expecting. He had nothing in the bank, but there were always ways, and V. mabitang was waiting in the trees.