Mellon offered Molt a deal: three years in prison. But Molt was not interested in a deal. Counts were whittled down; whole cases got thrown out. Only those built on the testimony of Allen, Levy, and Sorensen would be prosecuted. But Molt would be tried.
Steven Levy, by then a first-year law student in San Diego, returned from class to find a U.S. marshal waiting to put him on a plane. Peter Shanahan, too, was quietly flown from California to Philadelphia to be deposed. “Hank never knew I was there,” Shanahan said.
Molt relished the thought of cross-examining John Behler. That year Behler had succeeded Wayne King as the Bronx Zoo’s curator of reptiles, the office once held by Molt’s hero, Raymond L. Ditmars. This offended Molt, who wanted badly to make an ass of Behler. But Behler refused to testify in person. He had a vacation planned, he told the judge, and the timing was inconvenient.
MELLON AND O’KANE’S successes, up to now, had been modest. “The judges were not buying it,” Mellon said. “They viewed it as a technical violation about obscure customs statutes that nobody really gave a damn about. We tried to impress on them that it was far, far more than a technical violation.”
In wildlife conservation circles, meanwhile, Mellon and O’Kane’s work was viewed as nothing short of heroic.
The National Wildlife Federation presented a special falcon-shaped trophy to O’Kane, its favorite tree-hugging tough, though O’Kane’s motives had more to do with “giving the bad guys agita,” he said, than with saving the planet.
Mellon’s fortunes also changed course. His original boss had been fired, and the new U.S. attorney in Philadelphia was keen on wildlife crime. And now so was President Jimmy Carter, who advised the Justice Department to “seek stiff penalties for persons who engage in illegal wildlife or plant trade including jail sentences for principal violators.”
MOLT FOUND much to enjoy amid his tribulations. “It was like living in a movie,” he said. The Philadelphia Inquirer covered his first hearings, and Molt proved a quote machine. The government had spent $2 million on his case, Molt told the paper—“They built a tank to kill a rabbit!”
The government had spent nowhere near $2 million on Molt’s case. Molt just made up the figure. He felt it was fair game, though, since the government was making up its own figures about him. They’d labeled him a kingpin of a multimillion-dollar smuggling ring when his best year had netted him $39,000. By now Molt’s wife was begging his father for spending money and his mortgage was in arrears.
In September 1979, a jury found Molt guilty of violating the Endangered Species Act. In a separate case, a judge found him guilty of violating the Tariff Act. And there were three more cases to go.
President Carter lauded the verdicts in a press release: “The evidence adduced at a trial of a wildlife dealer in Philadelphia which led to his conviction for felony violations revealed that he purchased one species of reptile for $10 a pair and sold it for $550 a pair.”
Such profits, the president added, “are greater than those from drugs.”
MOLT’S DELIGHT in the spotlight gave way to the disquieting awareness that he could find himself on the butt end of a landmark court decision. After the Carter speech, Molt deemed it time to exchange his laid-back suburban lawyer for a tougher one. Molt’s father, weakened from his stroke but recovering, promised to pay the bills.
Gil Abramson defended white-collar criminals, and righteously. He knew nothing about reptiles or wildlife law. “This was the only snake case I ever had,” he said. Molt sold mostly to zoos. This was practically a public service, Abramson felt. “When the kids walk into the Bronx Zoo and see a pair of tortoises, that’s a wonderful thing. How many kids have an opportunity to go to Borneo?
“The government tried to portray him as some sort of evildoer who was trying to destroy the ecology,” Abramson said. “I always thought of him as quite the opposite. He loved the animals. There’s no comparison between someone like him and the guys who deal in animal skins.”
Abramson’s legal strategy was to bundle Molt’s remaining cases into one and plead guilty on most counts, yet reserve the right to appeal. In December 1979, Molt pleaded. All that was left was his sentencing. All the counts together could earn Molt ninety-five years. Mellon’s demand for twelve was enough to keep Molt up at night.
Mellon called on the chief of international affairs for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, an Australian customs official, and the head of the Justice Department’s new wildlife crimes unit to attest that Molt was an eager agent of extinction. All the evidence that had previously been suppressed—letters to Megot Schetty and Jonathan Leakey, tape recordings of Ed Allen and Stefan Schwarz—was admissible in sentencing. O’Kane and Mellon were sure these letters and tapes would expose Molt as the sociopath they knew, not some giddy man-child whose love of reptiles had gotten the best of him.
Molt had few well-placed allies left. Certainly none among the zoo people. He would rely on his own testimony, mostly, and a few words from his father, his family doctor, and a lady who worked at his plumbing-supply company.
IN MELLON’S opening statement to Judge Edward Becker, he called the case “a grave matter involving the business of extinction, that is, the business that Mr. Molt was engaged in for some 10 to 15 years, and its consequent effect upon the environment, and, frankly, our heritage.”
Becker cut him off. He was irked by Mellon’s hyperbole. At the same time, he was confounded by Molt. Becker knew what to do with drug dealers and bank robbers. He did not know what to do with reptile smugglers. Was this case about undervalued goods or about extinction, as Mellon and his witnesses emphatically claimed? The chief of international affairs for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it was about extinction. Using some mysterious algorithm, he calculated Molt to be “public enemy No. 9 in terms of the destruction of our natural heritage.”
Judge Becker knew nothing about reptiles. He was flabbergasted to learn that hundreds, maybe thousands, of Americans kept cobras as pets. He asked whether such people also kept mongooses.
A few years earlier, Becker had taken his own children to the Philadelphia Zoo’s new reptile house, more than half of which, he now learned, had been stocked by Molt. Molt had impressed Becker at one hearing with the story of climbing a tree in pursuit of an iguana on the island of Ovalau, Fiji. Becker even remembered the native term for the iguana: “voiki.”
“I don’t know whether Mr. Molt just went up and grabbed the first hundred voikis or whatever they were, or whether he said to himself, ‘Well look, these are not rare or endangered species, there are plenty of voikis over here’ … It is important for me to know whether Molt went over and indiscriminately and callously grabbed voikis because voikis were available without any reference to the impact of such matters,” Becker said.
Becker also took an interest in the Bronx Zoo’s reptile curator, who was absent from the proceedings. Was it true that Behler bought reptiles from Molt, then fingered him to the government? Yes, Mellon acknowledged, but Behler suffered for it professionally.
The judge wanted to know what pythons and iguanas ate. And whether Molt viewed himself as guilty.
“There is no question, is there,” Becker asked Molt, “that you knew the illegal character of the importation?”
“Absolutely, I did know the illegal character.”
“You knew you were smuggling, violating the law?”
“Absolutely.”
“What plans do you have for the future in terms of reptile activity?”
“Well, I love reptiles. It’s something—it’s hard to explain to somebody, but I think I will always be interested in them no matter what happens.”
“Do you plan down the road to engage in importing or retail sales of reptiles by putting out price lists and so forth?”
“Well at the present time I have, you know, people ask me, and I say I might, I might not. I just don’t know.”
BECKER SENTENCED Molt to fourteen months in prison. For his three-year probation
to follow, Molt was barred from importing reptiles and from traveling to Australia, Switzerland, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, or Fiji.
“I don’t think society needs protection from Mr. Molt at this juncture,” Judge Becker concluded. “I don’t think he is a likely candidate to be involved again.”
O’Kane couldn’t believe it. “I almost thought he was talking about some vestal virgin, rather than the Molt we’ve all come to know,” he told a newspaper.
Molt, pushing for a reduction of his already minimal jail time, wrote Becker the next week. He’d had some time to think, he said, and “fully recognizing that wildlife dealing was no longer a viable and dependable vocation, and faced with the reality of living in today’s world, my father and I sought to establish a small family business.” He was through with reptiles, he claimed, for good.
Molt, in the months before he left for prison, kept a low profile at the plumbing supply company, where every week or so arrived parcels marked “Books” and “Photographs—Do Not Bend” from Australia.
Part II
Tom Terrific
After Tom Crutchfield’s second prison term ended, in 2001, he was hired as an ecotour guide in the Everglades. The Web site for the company, Everglades Day Safari, provided Crutchfield with a very flattering biography that, while not untrue, did omit quite a bit of the context:
Tom Crutchfield is a native Floridian and a world renowned Herpetologist. His reptile pursuits have taken him to Africa, Asia, South and Central America, and the Caribbean. He has authored many scientific papers on the captive propagation and social behavior of reptiles. Tom is also very qualified in Ornithology, Mammology, and Everglades History. We were very lucky to find Tom in the jungles of Belize, where he owned an ecotour business. Tom’s vast knowledge and his ability to entertain make him a great addition to our staff of professional naturalists.
I took Crutchfield’s safari with a couple from Arizona. We were to meet Crutchfield at 7:30 in the morning; he pulled into the parking lot ten minutes later. He was not tall, only five-six or so, but with a torso like a side of beef, and arms that skewed a few degrees at his sides from all the muscle. His legs were completely hairless.
Crutchfield did demonstrate vast knowledge and the ability to entertain, though both traits weren’t always on simultaneous display. He had hunted in the Everglades for forty years and knew all its secrets, but was clearly tortured by the rote repetition of the Everglades Day Safari script, and a robotic tone crept into his voice as he narrated and drove. He delivered knowledge in bite-sized chunks of taxonomy, etymology, myth, or ethnography, very often prefacing them with the phrase “Point being …” Any foreign words or places he pronounced in an approximated, staccato accent—Haiti was “High Tea,” Guatemala was “Gua-tey-ma-LAH,” even Africa became “Af-REE-ka,” or, alternately, “Af-ree-KA.”
So a typical Crutchfield-ism might go like this: “The word ‘Sem-in-ole’ is from a Creek word, ‘simano-li.’ Does anyone here speak Spanish? The Creeks adapted it from the Spanish ‘cimarrón,’ or ‘wild man.’ Point being, the Seminole was not a true ethnic group but the wild wandering men of several Western tribes, pushed East into the Everglades by Andrew Jackson, who’s actually a distant ancestor of mine …”
Crutchfield seemed to view the world as an endless string of immutable factoids, wound up like a ball of twine.
“For twenty years I owned and operated one of the largest international reptile concerns in the United States,” he explained as he drove, but the Arizona couple appeared not to understand what he meant. Lately, he noted, wild populations of Burmese pythons—snakes he’d imported thousands of in the 1980s—were exploding in the Glades, and he feared they would decimate the ground-nesting birds.
On the trails of the Fakahatchee Strand, where there was wildlife to be found, Crutchfield entered his element, spotting snail kites and roseate spoonbills and snakes concealed in brambles, which he caught with a bare hand and a quick lunging action. We hopped from the trail into a boat for a long ride through a mangrove-lined canal. There Crutchfield fell asleep in the hot sun, a cigarette burning in his hand, letting the captain’s jaded narration substitute for his own. It made sense that he was tired. After the twenty years he’d had, anyone would be.
6
I Search for Adventure
The reptile men of the South came up in a different way. No stately old zoos or cathedral-like natural history museums stood to inflame their young ambitions. Instead there were the roadside snake men.
Since the turn of the century, a handful of Southerners had made a living selling snakes and alligators to the zoos and circuses of the North, and to the traveling carnivals that proliferated all over the country until there were three hundred or so by the Great Depression. After the Second World War, the number of traveling carnivals swelled to seven hundred, most of them operating nearly year round, and every single one had a snake show. The Southern snake men could feed this demand only with colossal imports from Latin America; in 1947 one Oklahoman imported 150,000 pounds of snakes from Mexico alone, along with monkeys, Gila monsters, boa constrictors, and iguanas that became “green dragons” behind the curtains of carnival booths. The animals died fast, but there were always more, and as highways got paved and the rural carnivals waned, “free zoos” sprung up on the roadsides as fronts for cons, luring in motorists with the promise of monkeys and snakes, then fleecing them in card games. People grew tired of the cons, but not of the animals, and in the 1950s, when the nation was awash again in money and hope, and families set out to discover the highways in their Buick Roadmasters, the roadside zoos simply charged admission and thrived.
These small zoos were especially concentrated in Florida, which had no natural history museum at the time, only a dank university collection in Gainesville; and of its two public zoos, one was an embarrassment staffed by inmates of a municipal jail. Land was cheap in Florida, tourists were plentiful, and animals could be kept outdoors all year. All you had to do was gather a lot of them in one place, whether you had ten acres or a vacant lot next to a gas station. It helped if you knew how to feed them, but if they died, the snake men would replace them for a pittance with the next shipment from Mexico.
With enough animals, a spot close to a highway, and a decent sign, you had a Wonder Gardens, a Snake-A-Torium, a Gator Land. You could use the snakes and monkeys to sell gasoline. Or you could successfully reinvent yourself as a man of science, interpreter of the world and its mysteries.
One man did this better than anyone else.
In the mossy tourist village of Silver Springs, Florida, Ross Allen wore khakis, tall boots, and a Randall knife on his belt. He was a champion swimmer and a woodsman, who as a young man had served as Johnny Weissmuller’s body double in Tarzan films. Allen had begun his career traveling to Honduras and Panama as a snake importer for carnivals. Before the war, he set up a business milking rattlesnakes of their venom. The venom went mostly to the military, which was seeking ways to weaponize it, and in the 1950s, Ross Allen’s Reptile Institute came to thrive as a tourist destination, where visitors could watch Allen grapple with an anaconda underwater, or tease a diamondback rattlesnake into popping a balloon with its fangs.
Ross Allen’s Reptile Institute was a very strange, very successful hybrid of sideshow and science. Allen had genuine scientific interests, and recruited a local biologist to help him author hundreds of papers and pamphlets on the natural history of Florida reptiles, while in the institute’s gift shop, tourists bought live snakes and baby alligators, key chains made from rattles, and canned rattlesnake meat in “special sauce.”
Allen had peers all over Florida, fellow snake men who wore lab coats and pushed snake heads into beakers and even injected themselves with venom; others wore safari suits and sat on alligator backs. For millions of tourists in the 1950s and ’60s, these institutes and serpentariums were just part of the landscape, experiences quite interchangeable with the Cypress Knee Museum or the Weeki Wachee mermaids
.
But for those kids with eyes only for reptiles, who hid their snake books inside their math books and spent their summers searching rock crevices with forked sticks, these highway snake men were so much more.
TOMMY CRUTCHFIELD came from a line of wealthy English adventurers, military men and seamen, the kind of people who like to be in charge and who do not play well with others. The first Crutchfield to arrive in the New World was a sea captain named Thomas, and for two centuries his descendants, many of them also named Thomas Crutchfield, built banks, hotels, and vast plantations from Chattanooga to Dallas. They fought in the highest ranks of the Confederate Army.
With the South’s defeat, the Crutchfield fortunes evaporated. Later generations of Crutchfields became vaudevillians: Will Rogers was a Crutchfield relation, and others danced with lassoes or joined the circus. When, in 1949, Bonnie Crutchfield had “Tommy,” not “Thomas,” inscribed on her newborn son’s birth certificate, it was as though all memories of the family’s stalwart past had faded beyond recall. Two years later, she would name his brother Bobby.
The Crutchfields were poor even by the standards of the Florida panhandle: no hot water or indoor toilet, much less a telephone or television. As a child, Crutchfield had to visit a neighbor’s house to watch The Lone Ranger. His father plowed their garden with a mule. When Crutchfield was six, his father left the family. At seven, Crutchfield began penning up wild alligators in the backyard and hunting snakes. Ross Allen’s Reptile Institute paid a dollar a foot for rattlesnakes, and half that for rat snakes. There wasn’t much work for boys in rural Florida then—“It was snakes or loading watermelons,” Crutchfield said—so the young Crutchfield hung on to whatever snakes he’d gathered until he could get a ride to Silver Springs and dispose of them.
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