The pythons were two males and a female, but they looked like they might be siblings, not the best candidates for breeding. Crutchfield’s associates and hangers-on, of whom there were an increasing number as his business grew, recommended that instead of mating them with each other, he should mate them with normal Burmese pythons, invigorating the gene pool a bit and allowing their albinism to show up in later generations. But this would take time, and Crutchfield would have none of it. All he really wanted was a fast litter of little yellow snakes to unload for the price of a house.
Crutchfield’s associates were tempted to mate the albino males with their own normal-looking females, but they were too scared of Crutchfield to try. Crutchfield’s temper was easy to ignite, his fits of rage so sudden and violent that they seemed to short-circuit his own memory. His friends remember him eating a peach one day when something set him off, and Crutchfield threw the peach pit so hard that it chipped the window of his office. When his friends recalled it to him, he responded with the blankest of looks. They wondered whether Crutchfield might be taking steroids, since he went to the gym daily and lifted obscene amounts of weight. He was short but massive, always keen to get bigger, and hairless—he spread depilatory creams all over his body to make his muscles stand out. The Crutchfields’ house was decorated with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and friends watched incredulously as he would stop to regard himself, with a deadly serious expression, and pop a tricep.
Crutchfield was as hard-working as he was narcissistic. If an order came in at closing time, he’d force his guys to stay late and build a shipping box. He never kept records, but seemed to remember which animals people wanted. Crutchfield hustled the phones, doodling the same aggravated star pattern over and over until his pen ripped through his legal pad. He was an impulsive businessman, but a wonderful salesman, with that dollop of vaudeville in his blood. Every single one of Crutchfield’s emerald tree boas was “the greenest I’ve ever seen.” Crutchfield’s price lists never matched the eloquence of Molt’s, nor did they even attempt to hit the high notes of intrigue and discovery that Molt’s did, with some unheard-of Iranian viper and its holotype number in a Prague museum. But unlike Molt’s quasi-literary confections, which came out whenever he was in the mood or had money, Crutchfield’s plainspoken price lists circulated without fail every month. Customers got Molt’s and Crutchfield’s businesses mixed up, because of the names, and this irked Crutchfield to no end. As far as Crutchfield was concerned, there was only one Herpetofauna now, and it was his.
IN 1983, when he could afford to fly farther than the Caribbean, Crutchfield bought himself a round-the-world ticket through the Seychelles, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Japan. At long last, Crutchfield got a piece of the adventure he craved.
In the Seychelles, he went jogging up a mountain road, only to be apprehended by Creole-speaking soldiers with machine guns and thrown into the back of a military vehicle. Things had been tense in the Seychelles after the Irish mercenary “Mad Mike” Hoare had tried to take over the islands, and Crutchfield always cultivated a soldierly look, though he’d kept himself out of Vietnam by staying awake for three days until his blood pressure was high enough that he failed the physical. At the army station in town, an interpreter straightened things out for Crutchfield, and he shipped home some of the islands’ famous giant tortoises.
He progressed to Sri Lanka, where jackals surrounded his bungalow in a national park, and a civil war wore on, just out of sight. “It was nuts of me to even go there,” Crutchfield said of Sri Lanka, since it didn’t even allow the export of animals. But he pressed the Colombo zoo officials hard, asking whether he might trade them some animals, if he couldn’t lawfully buy any.
He thought of his yellow pythons. Albino animals had a mythical cachet in Sri Lanka, just as they did in Thailand. And Crutchfield’s albino python breeding program, back in Fort Myers, wasn’t going as swimmingly as he had hoped. The first hatch had resulted in ten baby yellow snakes with kinked, deformed spines. He figured he’d just sell his breeders and be done with it. So he promised the Colombo Zoo a golden python, and Sri Lanka let him send home his boxes of reptiles.
Crutchfield stopped over in Bangkok, where it took him two days to find Mr. Dang, the man from National Geographic. In his blind search, Crutchfield ended up accidentally at a venom farm, then at a shop where busloads of Japanese men bought snake-blood pills for their sex tours. When a taxi driver finally delivered him to Dang, Crutchfield was surprised to find that Dang knew his name. “You have my snake,” Dang said. Crutchfield had three of Dang’s snakes, actually, but Dang was only upset about one, the female. She was his pet, and he wanted her back. “It was the first I’d heard of the theft,” said Crutchfield. “By then I’d had the snake two years.” Crutchfield told Dang he would think about it.
Dang was Crutchfield’s first experience of that archetype—the Mercedes-driving, Rolex-wearing, flamboyantly wealthy Asian wildlife tycoon—and he was impressed. “I thought, ‘Gee, I could be like that in the United States,’ ” he said. Crutchfield agreed to return to Dang his pet python. “The difference between me and Hank,” Crutchfield said, “was that I actually paid for what I got, and on those trips formed business relationships and friendships that lasted for years.”
Crutchfield returned to learn that his shipment of Sri Lankan reptiles had been confiscated at Kennedy Airport and sent straight to the Bronx Zoo, where John Behler was holding it, and not inclined to release it. Crutchfield was livid. He and Behler had been friendly at the last few herpetological symposiums, where Crutchfield endeavored to give scientific talks such as “Territoriality in Python reticulatus,” an account of snakes mauling one another in his old mobile home. Moreover, John Behler was an occasional customer. After Molt’s trial, all but a few zoos gave Molt a wide berth, so Crutchfield had wasted no time taking over the big zoo accounts.
Crutchfield called Sri Lanka, whose consulate intervened for him in New York. “John wrote me a letter after that,” Crutchfield said. “Saying, ‘I’m like an elephant. I won’t forget.’ ” Crutchfield made so much money on his Sri Lankan animals that he was soon sporting a Rolex President.
HERPETOFAUNA, INC., made its first million dollars in 1986. Some of the money came from zoos, which bought small numbers of high-dollar species from Crutchfield, but more came from the pet store chains, which were starting to devote extra shelf space to iguanas, turtles, snakes, and the stuff to care for them. If a supplier was particularly good to Crutchfield, Crutchfield sent him a Rolex. Penny wore her own gold Rolex, and drove her own Mercedes.
The Crutchfields made Fort Myers a favorite hub for snake people. Visitors got to watch Crutchfield toss baby pigs to his crocodiles, or send his young daughters running along the banks of his ponds—if the crocodiles lunged at the girls, “we knew they were nesting,” he said. When a zoo curator showed up to buy a rare tree viper, Crutchfield shot his blank gun at the snake, just to see the curator’s anguished face as it fell off its branch. Crutchfield had even been getting into movies. He supplied an alligator, the local game warden, and his manager to the set of the zombie flick Day of the Dead; the people played zombies and the alligator played itself.
Hank Molt visited two or three times a year with the Australian reptiles he was getting in the mail from Stefan Schwarz. On every visit, Crutchfield seemed richer, more flamboyant to him. “He went from a vacuum cleaner salesman or whatever to a big house with a pool!” Molt said. And on every visit Molt seemed like more of a joke to Crutchfield. “I thought Hank had weird delusions of grandeur,” Crutchfield said. “He still fancied himself a high-flying wheeler-dealer, when he would come down with ten thousand dollars’ worth of animals he probably paid $20,000 to get.”
Crutchfield brokered Molt’s deliveries to zoos—Houston, Dallas, San Diego. “The zoos all knew where the animals were coming from,” Crutchfield said. “They just couldn’t buy them from Hank.” Molt went so far as to supply Crutchfield with a waiver for every zoo
sale:
These animals are not acquired in violation of any U.S. or foreign wildlife laws, and I hereby indemnify and protect the purchaser from any legal claim or evidence which proves the illegal origin of these animals.
“Which of course means absolutely fucking nothing,” said Molt.
CRUTCHFIELD CHARMED his foreign suppliers and the zoos, but he was not nearly so beloved by his employees, who suffered his temper regularly. Snake kids flocked to Crutchfield’s despite his reputation. At Herpetofauna they could work among more and better reptiles than at any zoo in the country, though Crutchfield would time them with a stopwatch as they cleaned animal cages. The kids lasted as long as they could stand it. Crutchfield’s managers, some of whom were also his investors, had to be replaced at roughly eighteen-month intervals.
Hank Molt nicknamed him Tom Terrific, after a little cartoon from the 1950s. Sometimes, with a beer or two in him, Crutchfield would sing Tom’s ditty: “I’m Tom Terrific / Greatest hero ever / Terrific is the name for me / ’Cause I’m so clever.”
Behind his back, though, people called him the Godfather.
8
Herpetological Research Associates of Papua New Guinea
In 1983, when Hank Molt reemerged publicly on the reptile scene, he aimed to distinguish himself from the more successful, albeit predictable, Tommy Crutchfield, with a memorable price list. To illustrate it, Molt clipped and enlarged slightly repellent images from his collection of art books: a bug-eyed toad, snakes coiled menacingly around a decayed tree. “RAISE HIGH AGAIN YOUR EXPECTATIONS,” he proclaimed. “WE HAVE THE GOOD STUFF & NOTHING BUT!” A word processor opened up new obsessive possibilities for Molt, who needed something to obsess over. Repeatedly he checked for misspellings, tried various color schemes, stood back to take in the whole effect. “I wasn’t down and gone forever. I wanted everyone—the zoos, the Feds—to know that,” Molt said. Molt expected no business whatsoever from zoos, but he sent them his new lists anyway, “just to fuck with them,” he said. “I wanted them to see what I had.”
What Molt had, people suspected, was a fraction of the animals he claimed to have. Everyone assumed Molt was finished. Tommy Crutchfield certainly did after he’d entertained angry Japanese customers who’d marched mistakenly into his Herpetofauna, seeking money Molt owed them. “The decline of Hank’s business had everything to do with the rise of mine,” Crutchfield said. “Though I would have overcome him anyway. If an animal was on my list, I actually had it, unlike Hank.”
As Crutchfield had eclipsed Molt, people figured when they saw Molt’s peculiar new price lists, Molt’s fantasies had finally eclipsed his reality. Molt’s peers made fun of him at the herpetological symposiums, circulating mock ads:
Herpetofauna Irrational
Hank Ecdysis, owner
Tyrannosaurus Rex, adults, in our collection two years, the only ones
available, eats anything, must sacrifice $10,000,000 pr.
226 Horseshit Rd, Horseshit, PA
But Molt did retain a few assets from his old existence: a scheming, consumptive lust for rare species; Stefan Schwarz in Australia, who kept the good stuff coming in the mail; and young local men not averse to adventure. Already Molt prepared to deploy his latest college kid to the Solomon Islands. The kid got his first passport, then impersonated a researcher, as Molt had instructed him to, and squeaked out scientific permits, succeeding “beyond all expectations,” said Molt.
Weeks later Molt announced—in giant letters—“SOLOMON ISLAND PREHENSILE-TAILED SKINKS (CORUCIA ZEBRATA) FLAWLESS HAND-PICKED SPECIMENS: VARIOUS SIZES AND COLOR PHASES AVAILABLE. A UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY TO ACQUIRE ONE OF THE MOST DESIRABLE LIZARDS IN THE WORLD!!! $2500 PR.”
Tommy Crutchfield was among the first to buy them.
ONCE THE word got out about Hank Molt’s Solomon Island skinks, a young man drove from Cleveland, Ohio, to Horsham, Pennsylvania, with his wife’s diamond necklace in hand, hoping to trade it for one. His name was Edmund Celebucki, and he had first learned about Molt in the March 1981 National Geographic. “Hank’s name always came up attached to some novel form of larceny,” Celebucki said. “And his price lists were so imaginative. You always saw something you never thought you’d see alive.”
Celebucki was a prison guard, a karate instructor, and a dedicated thief of antiquarian natural history books, which he would liberate from public libraries and sell to specialty dealers. He was well-spoken and personable in a way that belied the wretchedness of his upbringing. When Celebucki was ten, his mother died of a heart attack. Months later, his father died of pneumonia in the mental institution to which he’d been committed. A Catholic Charities case worker rescued Celebucki, an only child, from an aunt who beat him with the cord of her iron. Celebucki spent the remainder of his youth at a Catholic orphanage, where “I got my ass kicked all the time,” he said. “I had a big mouth and no muscles.”
A teenage Celebucki was riding a city bus with a broken, bandaged nose when he had the good fortune to encounter Mr. Moon, a local karate master. Under Moon’s tutelage, Celebucki earned eight black belts. He went on to college and later joined the Cuyahoga County sheriff’s department as a jailer.
Celebucki had nothing against his wife; he just needed a Solomon Island skink, he decided, more than she needed her necklace.
Celebucki had no passport, nor, at twenty-nine, had he ever ventured far from Cleveland. Yet he had dreamed, from time to time, about Angola, Namibia, and the island of Komodo. “I saw the movie King Kong as a little boy,” he said. “The idea of taking a boat ride to hunt mythical monsters—it stuck with me.” Lately it was Papua New Guinea that excited him, and particularly the beautiful, iridescent Boelen’s pythons that lived in its hills. Molt knew the feeling.
“I think Hank saw me the way he saw everyone, as a potential mule,” Celebucki said. Which may have been true, but Molt also recognized Celebucki as a cut above the ordinary reptile thug. “We had good chemistry,” they both said of each other. The wife’s necklace—it was like something Molt might have tried himself. Molt refused Celebucki the skink, if only because Celebucki seemed to want it so badly. “I knew he’d be back,” Molt said.
A SLIGHTLY deranged tone infected Molt’s next price list, which featured a Shel Silverstein drawing of a crocodile in a dentist’s chair, and a very peculiar message: “SOMETIMES THERE ARE SHIFTS IN THE BALANCE OF POWER: SO, IF YOU WANT A GOLD TOOTH YOU HAVE TO PLAY BY THE GOLDEN RULES AND REMEMBER, HE WHO HAS THE GOLD MAKES THE RULES.”
Only Molt had any idea what he talking about, and years later it wouldn’t make sense to him, either, but it seemed to refer to Tommy Crutchfield, somehow—gold teeth, gold snakes, gold watches. And however Molt might have felt about Crutchfield and the shifting balance of power, Crutchfield was emerging as Molt’s only buyer of significance. He paid fast and in cash, and usually wanted some part of almost every Stefan Schwarz package. Molt took it upon himself to compose special price lists just for Crutchfield, full of nothing but smuggled Australian reptiles:
DIAMOND PYTHONS (Morelia a. argus) 31/2’ by 51/2’. SPECTACULAR COLOR & PATTERNS—these would give the DeBeers diamond family a permanent hard-on. 100% PURE DIAMONDS have not been around for some time—savage feeders on dead rats—EXTRA - EXTRA NICE!
IN LATE 1984, Stefan Schwarz did something no one ever had: He hatched Fly River turtles in an incubator. The babies began arriving at Molt’s two weeks later, in balsa containers lined with rubber and moist sponges, each one wrapped like a Tootsie Roll in a twist of pantyhose. Schwarz labeled them books.
Fly River turtles are a genus all their own, isolated for seventy million years from their closest relatives, living only in the waterways of southern New Guinea and a short curve of coastline near Darwin, in Australia’s remote Northern Territory. They look like miniature sea turtles, with flippers in place of feet and funny piglike noses. Molt and Leon Leopard had each wrangled Fly River turtles out of New Guinea in the early 1970s, but most of those had since died.
Schwarz and Molt had wanted to fake a breeding of this species for years. Schwarz knew someone in the Northern Territory who would help him locate wild Fly River turtle eggs, but he had to hold off on collecting them until Molt’s two turtles were of breeding size. Finally, in 1984, they were. Schwarz drove his Toyota pickup to Darwin and dug up five dozen eggs. He drove them a thousand miles back to Cairns, carrying his own fuel across the vacant, hot, dusty northern deserts. Molt sent Schwarz newspapers from Philadelphia, rulers from Carolina Biological Supply, and Budweiser cans, to make any photos of the eggs look like they were taken in the United States. “I was just thinking forensically,” Molt said.
After months, though, the Philadelphia newspapers were getting yellow and the eggs weren’t hatching. Not a whole lot was known about the turtles’ biology then. Schwarz was fiddling with his incubator one evening, removing trays of eggs to pour a little water into each, “when the door on the incubator sort of slammed and [he] hit the pitcher with his elbow and it flooded his tray and the baby turtles started hatching,” Molt said. Schwarz realized that the developed eggs must wait in a sort of suspended animation until the rains came to flood the riverbanks. Schwarz now had sixty baby Fly River turtles. He snapped their photos with the Budweiser cans and the Philadelphia newspapers, and got to work making boxes.
“HAPPY NEW YEAR,” Molt wrote his customers in January 1985. As always, when he had something really good, he spared them the cryptic talk and baroque illustrations. He typed up a single page with a little sketch of a hatchling Fly River turtle. Molt priced them at $1,500 apiece, many times their weight in gold.
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