Naturally, the zoo people stuck up for Zeehandelaar. “I am totally dismayed,” the association’s director, Robert Wagner, wrote in a memo to members. “It is my opinion that Fred is being prosecuted to the fullest extent by our government and that they will hound him with indictment after indictment until he loses an appeal, gets out of the animal business, or they break him financially.”
But the government’s zeal had the zoo people confused. Why go after Fred Zeehandelaar? What was the aim of this sudden crusade—the animal trade, or them?
Molt was dimly aware of Zeehandelaar’s case, and though it registered as a semi-significant development, “we were running more on testosterone than common sense at the time,” he said.
MOLT’S JANUARY 1975 price list included none of his usual hyperbole. Just naming the animals was titillation enough. Indonesian frill-neck dragons! Green tree monitors! Thirteen species of crocodile! Fiji boas in small, medium, and large! Six hundred copies of the list were printed, on cheerful pink paper, but none of them got mailed. This New Year had not begun auspiciously.
Levy was back in school, and Allen and Molt weren’t speaking. The week before Christmas, customs officers had contacted Ed Allen about his nine-crate, thousand-dollar shipment. His lawyer, Jack Briscoe, called them back. “It’s not my client, it’s that bastard Molt you want,” Briscoe told customs. Allen had not disclosed that the animals themselves were smuggled, but it didn’t matter: an undervalued shipment was fraud.
Molt decided not to mail his pink price list with its fifty thousand dollars’ worth of smuggled animals. It would be smarter, he decided, to drive straight south and sell them out of the back of the car to as many zoos as possible. He invited the Cobra King, a vagabond snake handler who hung around the shop, along for company.
Molt was readying his Oldsmobile for the trip on the afternoon of January 7, a bitter, snowy, rotten day, when the customs agent Joseph O’Kane knocked on his door. “We had a one-line lead from New York on an illegal importation,” O’Kane said.
A cordial Molt claimed that all his records were elsewhere. Yes, the placard in his window read “Importers-Exporters,” but as a matter of fact, he told O’Kane, he had not imported reptiles in years. He took O’Kane’s card. He would call, he said, the minute he had the records.
O’Kane struck Molt as a hard type, “a big, Irish, beer-drinking thug of a guy.”
Before becoming a customs agent the year before, O’Kane had flown around the world as a sky marshal for the U.S. Treasury’s new antiterrorism unit. O’Kane loved breaking down doors, loved weapons, saw a world filled with irredeemable “bad guys” best dealt with at gunpoint.
Snakes, however, he could not abide.
“I don’t like snakes. I don’t want to be around snakes,” O’Kane said. “Molt had a goddamn snake, a python, up in the transom in the lights. He had deadly snakes spitting at us.” A blue hard-sided suitcase, covered in yellow Qantas labels, leaned against a back wall, but all O’Kane could think about was getting out of there. “Nothing registered until I left,” he said.
THE COBRA King was an odd sort. He was a childlike little man, but so old that he’d known Frank Buck personally, and he babbled habitually about snakes and about lesbians, a sexual fixation of his, for hours on end. Molt, despite having invited the Cobra King on a twenty-hour road trip, was in no mood to listen. Molt had already consulted with his family lawyer about O’Kane’s visit, and was now phoning him from each rest stop along I-95. Everyone in Philadelphia seemed to know about Molt’s customs problem.
The worst of it was that the zoos did, too. In Jacksonville, the curators wouldn’t touch Molt’s animals, even the rare Australian species. Molt returned to his car, grim and speechless. His silence endured to Miami, where the same thing happened again.
A week after leaving Philadelphia, Molt and the Cobra King, having failed in their mission, unpacked the unsold animals into an apartment Molt had rented just to house them, a block away from the Exotarium. Molt had also failed to call O’Kane about the import records, as promised. When he returned to the Exotarium from the apartment, Molt recognized O’Kane’s car. “Molt’s face went white,” O’Kane said. The Cobra King ran away.
For six hours, Molt tried to keep O’Kane and his partner from opening his files. A drawer marked “foreign” had piqued O’Kane’s interest. Molt called his lawyer, but his lawyer was not in. The agents had no search warrant, just copies of some customs statutes. What would happen, Molt asked O’Kane, if he said no? Well, O’Kane replied, he would merely go downtown, get a warrant, and be right back. But he had the authority to search even without a warrant, he told Molt—a bluff he would come to regret.
Finally, Molt’s attorney called. Molt assured him he had nothing to hide, though he in fact had much to hide. O’Kane and his partner snapped Molt’s picture, and his animals, and late that night, O’Kane carried Molt’s filing cabinet out of his humid, snake-filled storefront.
Neither Molt nor his lawyer could be certain about the extent of Ed Allen’s cooperation. He’d been interviewed by customs, but what exactly had he told them? Minutes after O’Kane drove off, Molt phoned Allen to tell him about the raid.
Allen “freaks out,” said Molt. “He fucking panics.”
Allen sped to Willow Grove in his Mercedes convertible. In the dark and the cold, “we drove around and around in circles,” Molt said, “trying to figure out a game plan.” Molt wanted to stop at a diner to talk, but Allen refused. He was sure they were being followed. Allen had disclosed to customs that he’d undervalued the nine-box shipment, but not that he’d smuggled 150 Australian reptiles in suitcases. The prospect of being found out had Allen terrified: The reptiles must be moved somewhere safe. The apartment Molt had rented to house them was too close—customs would find it, Allen insisted. “By then we’d been driving around for hours,” Molt said. It was two a.m.
Removing the Australian animals “was a temporary arrangement,” Molt said. “We were looking just to get them out of harm’s way that night.” Molt and Allen packed them in cloth bags and one of the blue hard-sided suitcases they’d arrived in. Allen drove away with the reptiles, agreeing to touch base in a day or so with Molt.
When they spoke on the phone, two days later, Allen’s tone had changed. “I knew then that the Feds had gotten to him,” Molt said.
WITHIN DAYS of searching the Exotarium, Joe O’Kane located Steve Levy at Allegheny College, where Levy, under the advice of the family lawyer, told him everything. O’Kane found Bob Udell, a furry bear of a man who laughed like a lunatic when O’Kane so much as looked at him. He found Karl Sorensen in New Jersey. “We had three file drawers full of documents, charts, and maps,” said O’Kane. And, curiously, a large collection of audiotapes. After the Udell-Sorensen burglaries in 1973, Molt had adopted the Nixonian habit of taping himself and others. O’Kane played ten hours of Molt’s phone conversations, and they left him more confused than before. Who was the Cobra King? Who were Stefan Schwarz, Mme Schetty, Christopher Wee, and Y. L. Koh? He had obviously stumbled on something meatier than a Tariff Act violation.
In late January, O’Kane returned to the Exotarium for the last time, search warrant in hand. Molt was at home when he received a warning call from O’Kane. He drove straight to the shop, but by then, O’Kane had already broken the glass door and entered. Accompanying O’Kane was John Behler, the Bronx Zoo’s assistant curator of reptiles. Molt’s price lists had long aroused suspicion in the Bronx Zoo’s reptile department. Behler’s superiors, old friends and customers of Molt’s, kept it to themselves, but Behler had been sharing what he knew with O’Kane’s counterparts in New York.
Molt was flabbergasted. Behler and Molt had gotten into a tiff over some snakes once, but nothing too serious, and here was Behler, placing red seizure labels on Molt’s cages. There weren’t a whole lot of illegal animals in the shop, since most of those had disappeared with Ed Allen, but Behler discovered an Argentine boa from Schetty, and slapped a se
izure label on it. He scrawled out another label, for an amethystine python. Except that this was a Timor python, Molt saw. “The great curator of reptiles can’t tell one snake from another!” Molt taunted. Behler ignored him. A baby Nile crocodile snapped its jaws as Behler passed a document over its tank. A Nile crocodile: that was illegal. It thrashed violently as Behler restrained it. Behler removed it to the Bronx, where weeks later it died.
WHEN ED ALLEN returned home from Molt’s on the morning after their meeting, he had not moved the reptiles indoors, as he’d promised. Instead, he had let them freeze to death in his car. When they were good and stiff, he asked one of his sons to help him bury them in the only spot they knew where the ground remained soft in the winter.
Now, nearly two months later, Allen directed O’Kane to a quiet pocket of the Pine Barrens near Medford, New Jersey. “Eddie wanted this to be over,” O’Kane said.
O’Kane, his fellow agents, and John Behler looked on as police turned the sandy earth with spades. Cameras flashed. There, one by one, surfaced the leathery carcasses of Molt’s collection of a lifetime. And one blue suitcase.
4
O’Kane and Mellon Fly Around the World
The Exotarium was a ten-minute drive from Joe O’Kane’s house, and in the weeks after his final raid, he’d taken to spying on it from his parked car, sometimes in the middle of the night. “Molt had his cronies coming in and out at two or three a.m. They did not keep bankers’ hours,” O’Kane said. Yet neither did they resemble the hardened drug smugglers he was used to.
“They were goofballs,” O’Kane said. “Even their names were funny.” The Cobra King? “Like a criminal from a comic book,” he said. “Henry Molt—that’s right out of Dickens.” Bob Udell really weirded O’Kane out—“a big hulking guy with the emotional stability of a fourteen-year-old.”
O’Kane’s Treasury superiors were not as fascinated. To them, and to the Justice Department, this was fringe stuff.
Only Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Mellon felt that a wildlife case was worth the trouble. The photos from the Pine Barrens haunted and sickened Mellon—who, in O’Kane’s estimation, was a tree-hugger.
“Rows and rows of reptiles all lying dead,” Mellon recalled. “It was very poignant, very powerful.”
Mellon had worked on cases with O’Kane before, and liked him. Mellon was a Harvard law graduate with a slight build, long hair, and an affected, WASPy accent. O’Kane was a more straightforward product of North Philly, stout and tough-talking. Mellon liked the idea of trying out the new federal wildlife laws. The only recent endangered species case, against the New York mammal dealer Fred Zeehandelaar, had been based on a technicality. The Molt case smelled more like a multinational conspiracy. Wildlife “was a whole new realm of investigation without any precedent,” Mellon said. “Joe came to me and said, ‘To hell with drug smuggling, everybody in this building is doing drug smuggling.’ ”
“Of course, we knew nothing about wildlife,” said O’Kane.
“Absolutely, positively nothing,” agreed Mellon.
FOR WEEKS after the “Gestapo raid,” as Molt had taken to describing O’Kane’s search, there was only silence from the government: no phone calls, no letters, no word from Ed Allen or Steven Levy. Silence afforded Molt enough confidence to resume business more or less as usual. “I was half hoping nothing would ever come of it,” he said.
The Australian animals were gone, and though Molt had no idea what had happened to them, he had a pretty good sense that they weren’t coming back. He managed to sell the Knoxville Zoo four Fiji iguanas and seven Fiji boas. A zoo in Rochester, New York, bought some D’Albert’s pythons.
Either the Knoxville and Rochester zoos hadn’t gotten the word about Molt’s “customs problem” or, more likely, they didn’t care. In 1975, only a minority of zoo curators viewed themselves as wildlife conservationists. Even the job description “curator,” appropriated from museums, was used mainly by the large elite zoos in San Diego, Washington, and the Bronx. Elsewhere, they were called animal keepers, and they paid little heed to the new federal laws.
The American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums was itself ambivalent about the laws. The zoo association had always supported the government’s efforts to conserve animals in the wild, and was quick to join the international conservation societies, like the World Wildlife Fund, as they formed in the 1960s. But the Endangered Species Act and CITES had zoos worried that they, too, might be facing extinction.
Scrutiny and bureaucracy became the new norms for zoos. The Centers for Disease Control banned the import of primates to pet dealers, meaning that zoos could no longer casually buy monkeys; they would have to apply to the government for permits. The Animal Welfare Act, an agricultural law, was revised to protect zoo animals from cramped cages and filth. Customs checked shipments of foreign wildlife, and the Department of the Interior’s endangered species office issued permits. The Commerce Department’s fisheries division monitored the capture of dolphins and whales. By the end of 1975, no fewer than five federal agencies had oversight of zoos and aquariums.
Zoos that professed enthusiasm about this were either extremely progressive or close enough to a major airport to receive animals confiscated under the new laws. The Bronx Zoo was in the rare position of being both. In the late 1960s, Wayne King, its curator of reptiles, began aiding customs inspectors at Kennedy Airport, identifying the mountains of crocodile skins bound for New York’s Garment District. King was soon doing the same for the live reptiles bound for New York pet dealers. As the endangered species laws grew in number and scope, so did the Bronx Zoo’s cooperation with the government, and the zoo became the permanent repository for many dubious shipments.
On the day Joe O’Kane and his fellow agents raided Molt’s Exotarium, King happened to be off, and this was a relief to him, since he had always been friendly with Molt. It fell upon John Behler, King’s assistant curator, to ride along in O’Kane’s government car and identify any illegal species. Behler had approached the task with relish.
Behler was barely into his thirties then, college-educated and a product of a new and idealistic school of zookeeping. In the 1960s, the Bronx Zoo subscribed to the theory that given the pace of habitat destruction and pollution, zoos would soon serve as earth’s last repositories for endangered species. Its president predicted that the Bronx Zoo would become “a Noah’s Ark” in the years to come, and it chose its keepers in accordance with this lofty undertaking.
John Behler didn’t see the benefits, as his bosses did, of coddling animal dealers and tossing them bonus snakes. Instead he went to work for the government. Behler searched Molt’s sales logs for entries that might intrigue Agent O’Kane.
IN MAY 1975, Molt sent out his first price list since his troubles had started. Molt informed his customers that he would be breeding most of his reptiles now, instead of importing them, and he described quite a few, falsely, as “captive hatched” or “captive raised.” The whole thing might well have been addressed straight to Joe O’Kane and Thomas Mellon, but lest Molt’s customer base lose heart, he advised them to “please remember that we have many, many specimens in stock that are not listed … in fact most of the ‘goodies’ never make it on the list.” The Exotarium, he noted in concluding, was now appointment-only. Molt was in no mood for surprises.
In Switzerland, Megot Schetty faced legal woes of her own. The advent of CITES was less than six weeks away. Many of the rare specimens in Schetty’s greenhouses would be the last of their kind she would live to hold and feed. The treaty’s enactment would instantly eliminate fifty-five reptile species from commercial trade worldwide. Wild parrots would become harder to obtain, monkeys and crocodiles nearly impossible. If you wanted a banned species, it would have to be a specimen imported before 1975, or born of one. “Dear Henry,” wrote Hermann Hücker that May. “This is now my last cry for help! Please ship what you have! Do not wait longer for specimens. Ship please a BIG quantity! With 1st July i
s finished the importation for us. With new laws only few possibilities. Once more: Please Ship!”
Hücker received no response. Molt and the Swiss were finished.
EVENTUALLY, ZOOS stopped placing orders with the Philadelphia Reptile Exchange. There was “a sudden, palpable dropoff,” Molt said, as it dawned on the reptile curators that they, too, were being targeted by Mellon and O’Kane. After months of dismal sales, Molt was forced to take a job selling roofing, windows, and siding. As in his Kraft Foods days, Molt was given a territory and sales quotas. His earnings came from commissions, from sitting around kitchen tables all day drawing houses on graph paper. But Molt was thirty-five now, and this conventional job did not cause him the existential angst that he’d suffered at Kraft. A steady income was a huge relief, and he kept the Exotarium going as an evenings-and-weekends affair, with high school kids feeding the animals and cleaning the cages. In the winter of 1976, Molt traded his Oldsmobile for a Cadillac. He expected that he would have been indicted already if he was to be indicted at all.
IN EARLY 1976, Joe O’Kane drafted a plan outrageous enough that he had to go to Washington to sell it to his superiors’ superiors at Treasury. He brought along a box of documents—correspondence between Molt and Schetty, Molt and the Asians, Molt and everybody; transcripts of phone conversations Molt had taped, including one in which Molt and Ed Allen mulled their smuggling options out of Zurich; maps of Wau, Papua New Guinea; and forged customs documents. “I gave them the full performance,” O’Kane said. “The full song and dance.”
Stolen World Page 7
