When Crutchfield turned eleven, his mother married a man who beat him so badly he stayed out of school a week. Crutchfield sent away for the Charles Atlas bodybuilding course, “thinking that by the time I was fourteen I’d beat the fuck out of him,” Crutchfield said, and he did as he planned, which strained relations at home. During the school year, Crutchfield took refuge in the snake books of Raymond Ditmars and Clifford Pope. In the summers, he emancipated himself from his family and went to work for Ross Allen.
In the mid-1960s, attendance at Ross Allen’s Reptile Institute had diminished to barely a trickle of what it was at its postwar height, but Allen was still around, wrestling anacondas with a couple of his sons helping out. “Ross was past his prime,” Crutchfield said, “but he didn’t realize it.” ABC-Paramount had recently offered to buy Allen’s property, which he ought to have recognized as a bad omen. Walt Disney had just bought 27,000 acres in nearby Orlando; corporations were displacing Florida’s quirky homegrown entertainments. But Allen chose to see only opportunity in the new Florida. He set up a second zoo in Panama City called Ross Allen’s Jungle Land, where the teenage Crutchfield performed all summer, popping open alligators’ jaws with a fish hook, then straddling their backs and forcing them closed.
Crutchfield no longer loved Allen with the sweet, unfiltered love of a boy for his idol, but the old man still dazzled him. Allen had limitless patience for Crutchfield’s questions about reptiles, and had more facts at his disposal than anyone Crutchfield had ever met. The two had plenty of time for long chats because Jungle Land was failing, unable to compete with the local Snake-A-Torium, whose owner walked through pits of rattlesnakes wearing sneakers. Allen sold Jungle Land and left for Sarasota, where he performed five reptile shows a day alongside a “Bird Circus” and “Gardens of Christ.”
Crutchfield didn’t know what he would do with his life, just that he wanted out of the Florida panhandle. A short-lived television show from the 1950s, I Search for Adventure, had seared into his psyche images of African leopard men and other exotic dangers, “and I thought Jesus, that’s got to be the neatest thing in the world,” he said. When he finished high school, Crutchfield made a gift of his alligators to Ross Allen and got his passport. He married Penny, a beautiful girl with waist-length hair who took tickets at the Snake-A-Torium. They moved to South Florida, where Crutchfield registered for biology classes at a community college. “I was gonna become an academic herpetologist,” Crutchfield said, and Penny encouraged him, but his adviser warned him that there were barely any jobs in that field, and the few that did exist didn’t pay—better to keep your job, he told Crutchfield, and make reptiles your hobby. Crutchfield was working in the flooring department at the Fort Myers Sears then, living in a mobile home and earning $18,000 a year selling carpet and tile. He dropped out of the biology program.
On weekends, the Crutchfields flew from Miami to Hispaniola, the Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos, looking for rare iguanas and boas. The Caribbean was as far as they could afford to go, but it was as rich in snakes and lizards as anywhere. There were endemic iguanas, each unique to a small island, in a palette of colors and sizes. There were bright red boas in the trees, and ground boas, slim as pencils, hiding on the forest floor. And there were species yet to be discovered. In the Turks and Caicos, Crutchfield, poking around the walls of a crumbling old fort, captured a gecko he’d never seen before. He sent three specimens of this gecko, a holotype and two paratypes, to a famous herpetologist in Miami, and was thrilled to find out that it was new to science. Crutchfield hoped it might be named for him, but the herpetologist named it after a colleague instead.
On another trip to the Turks and Caicos, Crutchfield collected a pair of Epicrates chrysogaster, a native boa constrictor. Crutchfield sold the pair of boas, the female bulging with young, to the Jacksonville Zoo. He used the $600 as a down payment on a one-acre home site, the first land he ever owned. When the female boa gave birth, Jacksonville’s curators published a triumphant account of its breeding. First breedings were a big deal in the zoo world, and Crutchfield felt he’d been slighted, yet again, by the scientific establishment. Jacksonville hadn’t bred the snakes—the snakes had bred in Crutchfield’s mobile home while he was figuring out what to do with them. He’d even charged the zoo extra because the female was gravid.
In 1980 Crutchfield quit Sears, having sold all the carpet he ever cared to. He dug crocodile pens in his yard. He packed his car for the annual reptile symposium, which that year was being hosted by a zoo in Monroe, Louisiana. Reptiles would be Crutchfield’s whole world, and no sooner had he decided this than the federal government entered his life for the first of many times.
AFTER THE Molt trial, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service felt the time was ripe for a reptile sting of its own. The agency, part of the Department of the Interior, had been sidelined during the Molt case, with Joe O’Kane at U.S. Customs taking the lead. This was embarrassing to Fish and Wildlife, whose law enforcement agents were regarded, fairly or not, as a group of glorified game wardens. The wildlife agents spent part of the year in northern marshes surveying ducks and duck nests, then migrating south with the flocks and ticketing poachers. There weren’t many of them—fewer than two hundred in the whole country—and they weren’t taken seriously by federal prosecutors, or by their counterparts at U.S. Customs, the Drug Enforcement Administration, or the FBI. “They were understaffed, under-trained, and ill-equipped,” O’Kane said. “Duck-stamp guys.”
The point of the “duck cops,” as they cringed to be called, was to prevent illegal commerce in game, a role little changed since the passage of the Lacey Act in 1900. In the 1970s, after the passage of the Endangered Species Act, the beefed-up Lacey Act, and CITES, a few dozen branched out to become wildlife inspectors at the airports. The new laws put reptiles, tropical fish, and parrots under the agency’s watch, but to distinguish among tens of thousands of species, legal and illegal, was stretching its abilities.
Within a few years, though, the Justice Department’s newfound interest in wildlife crime provided the agency the moral and financial boost it needed to enforce the new laws. Its chiefs started phasing out the old warden types, recruiting agents from U.S. Customs, the FBI, and narcotics enforcement with promises of better pay and rank, and retraining some of their own. In 1979, the Fish and Wildlife chiefs noticed that Bob Standish, a ranger in his early thirties, had a master’s degree in zoology. They sent him off to learn about evidence collection and how to shoot a gun, and Standish found himself one of the handful of investigators in Fish and Wildlife’s new Special Operations branch.
Standish designed their first operation: a fake reptile business in Doraville, Georgia. He called it the Atlanta Wildlife Exchange, and called himself Bob Stephens. He compiled a list of a hundred people, most of them small-time poachers, suspected of smuggling reptiles. Hank Molt was on the list, for everyone assumed that he was still smuggling reptiles, and so was Tommy Crutchfield.
With a thousand addresses copied from the directory of a herpetological society, Standish mailed out price lists. He bought reptiles from whomever he could, and hired an unwitting teenage keeper away from the Atlanta Zoo’s reptile house to care for them. Standish tricked out a van with a snake design along its sides, driving it hundreds of miles and popping in on pet stores. When the timing felt right, he would ask for, or offer, a species that was illegal to sell across state lines, or a venomous snake that was illegal to mail. Dealers sometimes balked at sending snakes by mail, but Standish insisted.
Tommy Crutchfield, like Hank Molt, had a reputation for circumventing federal wildlife laws, and Bob Standish targeted him intensely, sending his teenage intern down to Florida in the snake van, and phoning frequently. Crutchfield offered Standish threatened rattlesnakes, proposing that in lieu of a sale, which would have been illegal, he instead “give” Standish the animal, and that Standish, at his convenience, “give” Crutchfield the money. He offered Standish endangered Jamaican boas under a “b
reeding loan agreement,” with a donation instead of payment.
All these tricks were variants of Molt standbys. Molt frequently “donated” or “loaned” to zoos protected species as a way of avoiding the Endangered Species Act’s ban on interstate sales. A donation was a way to disguise a sale, with the price of something else inflated to compensate for it. But it was one thing to offer an animal on breeding loan to a zoo. A breeding loan to a shady animal dealer in Atlanta was pushing it. Crutchfield felt sure it would work. He could even send a shipment of alligators across state lines and feign ignorance of the law, he told Standish—the government had to prove he was aware of the violation. Standish demanded indigo snakes and “swamp lizards,” their code for alligators. Crutchfield was always fresh out.
IN EARLY 1980, after only a few months in business, the Atlanta Wildlife Exchange “was booming,” said Standish. “It just got totally out of hand. We got another agent to help.” One day, he said, “I got 1,500 box turtles out of Oklahoma. We had to take them over to one of the field agents in Atlanta. We put them in his yard in swimming pools—it was a real chore.”
For an agency tasked with guarding the nation’s biological heritage, Fish and Wildlife was putting an awful lot of it on the market. In a year and a half, some 10,000 illegal specimens, a number of them poached from national parks, were bought and resold by Standish. Fish and Wildlife’s feeling was that the operation had to fund itself, and the more animals the exchange moved, the more cases Standish had. Federal prosecutors urged him to close the businesses already and start making arrests. “Even some of our own agents frowned on that investigation—‘We’re supposed to be protecting ducks and deer,’ ” Standish said.
Standish agreed to close the exchange down, but first he had to attend to some business in Louisiana.
TOMMY CRUTCHFIELD had known Hank Molt since he was a teenager, enchanted by Molt’s price lists. “Then I ordered a baby Burmese python from Hank and it came in with broken ribs, dying. He never did anything for it,” Crutchfield said. “He cheated me.” Crutchfield chalked that up to his own naïveté, but then, in 1975, Molt had stiffed him again on some iguanas he’d gone out of his way to collect for Molt on a trip to the Caribbean. By June 1980, they hadn’t spoken for five years.
Crutchfield had also recently appropriated Molt’s business name. At first, Crutchfield had called his import-export business Reptile World, and then Reptile World Research and Breeding Center, though very little research or breeding occurred there. Unfortunately, he soon found out, the name Reptile World was being used already, by a venom farm near Orlando. Herpetofauna, another name Crutchfield liked, was also taken, by Hank Molt. But Crutchfield didn’t care what Hank Molt thought—Hank Molt was on his way to jail. Crutchfield’s new firm would be called Herpetofauna, Inc., and Molt was helpless to do anything about it. People said he would become the next Hank Molt.
ON THE road to the reptile symposium in Monroe, Louisiana, Crutchfield stopped to take a dip in a clear Florida spring. He emerged with an alligator snapping turtle the size of a woman’s palm. Alligator snappers were protected in Florida, but this little one had swum right by Crutchfield’s face. The turtle was a certain sale; Bob Stephens at the Atlanta Wildlife Exchange had been asking everyone for alligator snappers.
“Bob Stephens” sat by the hotel pool, drinking whiskey and wearing a wire, his teenage friend beside him. Crutchfield sold the agent the snapper. Later that day, Standish sold the turtle to Hank Molt, whose conviction, imminent incarceration, and unpaid debts to any number of people were not enough to keep him away from a reptile symposium. Nor had those kept him from selling smuggled reptiles—Bob Standish called Molt frequently that summer, seeking Australian reptiles, and Molt was happy to take the orders. Standish had also promised to procure for Molt some nice alligator snappers, the kind Molt insisted on—young, with no blemishes. “He found it necessary to say to me, ‘These are illegal as hell but I’ll send them,’ ” Molt said.
By buying the turtle from Crutchfield and selling it to Molt, Standish racked up two interstate wildlife violations in an afternoon. By the end of the weekend, he would have dozens more potential cases; by the end of the year, hundreds.
Molt had not expected a warm reception from Tommy Crutchfield in Monroe. Surprisingly, though, Crutchfield was cordial, for Crutchfield had learned that Molt still had, if not much else, a steady and discreet supplier of Australian reptiles. In the reptile business, “ancient hatreds revert to friendships with the promise of money,” Molt said, “and ancient friendships revert to hatred with the first transgression.”
Crutchfield and Molt got on like old friends that weekend. Crutchfield remembered Molt, a condemned man, looking delighted as he played with his new turtle by the pool.
“It was a nice turtle,” Molt recalled a quarter century later. “A perfect juvenile, flawless.”
ON JULY 16, 1981, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service arrested twenty-seven people in fourteen states, including the formerly law-abiding kid whom Standish had lured away from the Atlanta Zoo with the help of a snazzy snake van. Tommy Crutchfield’s Herpetofauna, Inc., was raided.
More than a hundred agents had trained for the takedown. Goggles were issued in the event of a spitting cobra encounter. Some of Fish and Wildlife’s newly minted agents drew their guns for the first time while they banged down pet shop doors in Michigan and South Carolina. By two o’clock that afternoon, the Feds had issued a press release: “A massive illegal trade in protected and endangered U.S. reptiles has been uncovered by a live animal ‘sting’ that was concluded today by Federal wildlife agents … the 18-month investigation revealed that hundreds of thousands of U.S. reptiles are illegally taken from the wild each year for a thriving black market.”
Hank Molt was performing his cafeteria job at the federal prison in Allenwood, Pennsylvania—rolling knives, forks, and spoons into napkins—when a fellow inmate called him by his nickname. “Snake man! Snake man!” the inmate yelled. “Come look at this!” Footage of the arrests was playing on the evening news.
At the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s press conference in Washington, a pretty secretary handled for the cameras a few of the live, wriggling snakes recovered in the July 16 raids. Later, Bob Standish released some alligators in the Okefenokee Swamp, and set loose his indigo snakes on some property he owned in Georgia. As for the foreign reptiles he’d bought, “some of them may have ended up in zoos,” he said. The rest were impossible to account for, shipped overseas or lost to a labyrinth of small-time deals.
Most of the offenders faced only civil penalties. A handful went to jail for a month or two. Hank Molt was ordered to pay $30,000 for selling Australian reptiles to Standish, but never bothered to. Tommy Crutchfield paid his $5,000 fine, assuming this would be the end of it.
ROSS ALLEN’S Alligator Town, a fifty-acre, $800,000 theme park in Lake City, Florida, was set to open in June 1981. Allen had found a wealthy new business partner, and at seventy-three looked forward to his comeback.
Alligator Town would boast all the trademark Ross Allen spectacles, the gator and anaconda wrestling and the rattlesnake shows, but there would be an amphitheater, too, and a turtle garden and “lizard jungle.” Lake City itself was sleepy, but at the intersection of I-75 and U.S. 90, Alligator Town could siphon off any southbound traffic headed for Disney World.
In the month before Alligator Town was to open, Allen was hospitalized, sick with cancer he never knew he had. Tommy Crutchfield visited him in the hospital, and found his mentor strangely upbeat, “talking about what he was going to do in the future. I’m sure he knew at that point he had a very short one,” Crutchfield said.
Weeks later, Allen was buried at Alligator Town. Crutchfield could not bear to attend the funeral.
7
Golden Pythons
In the summer of 1981, the summer his mentor died and Bob Standish’s agents raided his house, Tommy Crutchfield cheered himself up with some highly desirable snakes.
He’d seen the first one that spring in a photograph in National Geographic: a big, healthy, golden-yellow snake dangling gracefully around a Thai man’s neck. The snake was a Burmese python—not a rare snake, but normally a greenish brown, not yellow. The man in the picture was smiling, holding a cordless telephone. “ ‘Mr. Dang’ of Bangkok annually sells nearly a million dollars’ worth of pets from Asia,” read the caption. “This rare albino python could bring $20,000 in Germany, Japan or the United States.”
The accompanying article was a depressing exposé of the international wildlife trade. In it Hank Molt’s conviction was mentioned, as a hopeful sign that the trade could be curtailed. The rest of its photos showed cheetah pelts in Hong Kong, bear paws made into soup, disemboweled sea turtles. But Crutchfield, like many of his fellow reptile dealers, saw only the yellow snake. The question was who among them would get it.
Weeks after the article appeared, an enterprising Thai thief broke into Mr. Dang’s Bangkok compound and stole three of Dang’s golden pythons, and a few months after that, in July 1981, an animal importer in the Bronx was offering the trio for $21,000. “Nobody in those days paid $7,000 for a snake,” said Crutchfield, who immediately bought all three.
Crutchfield hid the pythons at his business partner’s place, fearing they would be stolen. He quarantined them in new cattle troughs and fretted over them, terrified they would die. Reptile dealers began making pilgrimages to Fort Myers, where Crutchfield’s guys would present one of the pythons ceremoniously, then remove it to its undisclosed location. Even Hank Molt, just weeks out of prison, took a break from selling plumbing supplies to drive down and have a look. The pythons were brighter and prettier than they’d appeared in National Geographic, yet they were “not something I felt really jealous about, for some reason,” Molt said. They were, after all, only mutants of a common species.
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