Stolen World

by Jennie Erin Smith

  Epilogue

  Benjamin Bucks was arrested in February 2010 in Christchurch, New Zealand, for attempting to smuggle Otago Peninsula jeweled geckos; he spent eight weeks in prison and resumed smuggling reptiles shortly thereafter. Within six months he had earned himself enough to buy an acre of beachfront in Somalia.

  Four more plowshare tortoises were stolen from the Durrell facility in Madagascar. In July 2010 two Malagasy women were arrested in the Kuala Lumpur airport, carrying radiated and plowshare tortoises in their luggage. Though wildlife authorities believed Anson Wong was connected to the smuggling, only the women were charged. Two months later Wong himself was arrested at the same airport, en route to Indonesia, with ninety-seven snakes and one turtle in his luggage. Following inevitable “snakes on a plane” headlines, Wong was sentenced to five years in a Malaysian prison. Durrell reported that two of the plowshares confiscated in Malaysia had been among those stolen from its facility; Malaysia was sending them back to Durrell in Madagascar.

  Tom Crutchfield, in addition to running a sizable reptile business, was working with researchers at Loma Linda University to revise the entire Epicrates genus.

  Varanus bitatawa, a nearly seven-foot-long monitor lizard covered in bright yellow spots that eats fruit, was discovered in the northeast coastal forests of Luzon, the Philippines’ largest island.

  Hank Molt continued, between family obligations and seemingly infinite medical and dental treatments, to plan his Philippines trip.

  Acknowledgments

  My first debt is to my sources, without whose candor and generosity this book could not have been written. I thank Hank Molt for being ruthless and intelligent, full of pique and history and life, one who “stood up for evil in the Garden,” as Robert Frost had it. I thank the big-hearted Tom Crutchfield and his equally big-hearted family, who asked for nothing and gave everything, including real friendship. Edmund Celebucki, Randal Berry, and “Benjamin Bucks” I consider friends as much as sources. Anson Wong, Olaf Pronk, and countless others kindly set aside their skepticism when I knocked on their doors. Joe O’Kane and Bob Standish dug through their files for me. Special thanks to Bill and Kathy Love, Bonnie Berry and her portable copier, Al Weinberg, Brian Potter, Paul Bodnar, Riana Rakotondriany, Ralph Curtis, Eric Thiss, Peter and Sibille Pritchard and the Chelonian Research Institute, Allen and Anita Salzberg, and Bruce Weissgold.

  I am thankful to my wise agent, Irene Skolnick, who saw this the whole way through. My editor, Sean Desmond, along with Stephanie Chan and the designers and copy editors at Crown, worked hard and patiently to shape, refine, and prettify what was once a very unruly beast indeed. Further thanks to Ivylise Simones and Oliver Munday.

  I thank the always generous Michael Suh for reading three manuscript drafts with equal attention and for his valuable counsel. I am similarly indebted to Victor LaValle for multiple reads, smart calls, and heartfelt encouragement.

  Thanks to Nick Trautwein, who was ready with soothing words and level-headed advice at all stages, and to Seth Robbins for repeated close reads, for creating a makeshift portrait studio in a bad hotel room, and for coughing up a title that finally passed muster.

  Thanks to the Daytona Beach News-Journal for allowing me to play with some of these ideas in its pages. Thanks to Luke Dempsey, who bought the book originally and continued to offer moral support. Also in the moral support department, the Kotlow and Decker families, the Robbins-Einsidler clan, Derek Catron, my grandmother Marie McGrath, my uncle Kevin Smith, my cousin Calvin Godfrey, and many more friends and relatives all helped me in different and important ways.

  From the day I started researching this book in earnest to its publication, it will be just over a decade. It was not always a pleasant or easy process, and through it, the emotional help mattered as much as the logistical kind. For this (and a series of interest-free loans) I have my family—my parents, Raymond and JoAnn Smith, and my sister, Lizzie Smith—along with my boyfriend, Seth Robbins, to thank the most. All of you rescued me in more ways than I can count, with more love than I know what to do with, and without you I don’t know where this thing—or I—would be.

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  Wilson, E. O. The Rarest of the Rare: Stories Behind the Treasures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004.

  About the Autho
r

  Jennie Erin Smith is a freelance science reporter and a frequent reviewer on animals and natural history for the Times Literary Supplement. She is a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Award for women writers, a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, two first-place awards from the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors, and the Waldo Proffitt Award for Environmental Journalism. She lives in Germany.