Schwarz’s packages kept arriving in the mail, and collectors kept arriving in Horsham until Molt sold out. The final ten or so Fly River turtles—those meant for the zoos—Molt delivered to Tommy Crutchfield that summer, speeding down I-95, fearing that if he stopped, the turtles would die from the heat. “I couldn’t even get a sandwich at Wendy’s,” he said. Crutchfield didn’t believe for one moment that Molt had bred his Fly River turtles, since he’d visited Molt’s shop a few years before and seen the supposed breeders. “I knew they were both males,” he said.
Molt filed Schwarz’s snapshots away, in case the Feds ever made inquiries, but they never did.
MOLT AND Eddie Celebucki began traveling together to the reptile symposiums, drinking and whoring and sometimes getting arrested. Celebucki demonstrated his karate at bars, spin-kicking ashtrays off tables. They kidnapped Tommy Crutchfield, who could be a little self-serious, and dragged him to strip clubs. Celebucki charged hookers to his wife’s credit card, and Molt drank Scotch in a bathtub with one, while Celebucki poured a bag of Argentine boas all over another, “and she liked it,” Celebucki said.
Celebucki had done much to revive Molt’s sense of possibility. Molt’s travel ban had expired and his probation period had ended, so there was nothing stopping them from traveling to New Guinea and smuggling back the shimmering black-and-white Boelen’s pythons, as Celebucki was gamely suggesting. But to execute their nascent plan for doing so, they would need the backing of a zoo, and this required some finessing.
ZOOS, BY the mid-1980s, were under tremendous pressure to clean up their acts. In 1984 the Humane Society of the United States began taking inventory of the disgusting conditions at even famous zoos, issuing thick reports to the national press. Newspaper editorials began calling for the abolition of zoos.
The American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums defended itself in two ways. The first was to force zoos to raise their standards, fast. Modern, clean enclosures and proper veterinary care would be minimum requirements for membership, and without membership, a zoo stood no chance of getting any more giraffes or orangutans—the association by now completely controlled the exchange of large, high-profile mammals. Since the zoos’ cozy relationship to the animal trade was another longtime sticking point, the association kicked out the old animal dealers, like Fred Zeehandelaar, who had once been among its proudest and most prominent members. It issued public statements against keeping exotic animals as pets, and sided with the Humane Society in a tough posture against roadside zoos, many of which had also been its longtime members.
The zoo association’s second tactic was ideological—to disseminate the idea, long fashionable among elite zoos, that zoos existed, above all, to save endangered species from extinction. Publications like National Geographic ran breathless articles about zoo breeding programs as the “new Noah’s Ark.” So enamored was the zoo association of the concept that it sometimes seemed to take the biblical story literally. “Unlike Noah, scientists piloting the 20th century ark cannot protect endangered animals simply by collecting a pair of each kind,” the association gushed in a brochure.
The zoos’ bird and mammal departments quickly adjusted to the new politics, but the reptile departments lagged. Many reptiles were challenging to breed in captivity, and the keepers still depended on fresh infusions of wild stock from reptile dealers, with whom they continued to fraternize at the reptile symposiums. Reptile keepers faced far less ethical and financial scrutiny than keepers of apes or giraffes. If a giraffe dropped dead, the Humane Society would surely investigate; if a snake died, no one noticed. If the government confiscated a shipment of protected reptiles, straight to the closest zoo they went. What happened after that—whether they were exchanged, sold, or even quietly returned to the dealer who had ordered them—was anyone’s guess.
Still, buying animals from a convicted smuggler like Hank Molt was beyond what most reptile curators could get away with in the mid-1980s. The few zoos that still dealt with Molt did so only because they housed rare and expensive snakes Molt had loaned them before his troubles. Under the terms of his old breeding loans, Molt was entitled to half of any offspring, and the right to sell or recall the parent snakes at any time.
In the 1970s, Molt had loaned the Knoxville Zoo his male olive pythons from Papua New Guinea. Two more zoos, Los Angeles and San Antonio, later moved their female pythons to Knoxville, to try to start a breeding group. For nearly a decade, Knoxville had held all the olive pythons in the country, and they weren’t producing offspring. In early 1985, Molt began making noise about transferring his snakes to a zoo or university that might be better able to breed them, and since he owned all the males, the matter was his to decide. Curators wrote sycophantic letters to Molt, begging him for the chance to work with the Papuan pythons. The University of Tennessee’s zoology department wrote Molt a three-page letter naming eleven highly credentialed people—including, for some reason, psychologists—who would be charged with the care and breeding of six snakes.
Having whipped the institutions into a frenzy, Molt opted to leave the pythons at the Knoxville Zoo, which redoubled its efforts at breeding them. Within a year, the first Papuan olive python babies hatched. Knoxville received the Edward H. Bean Award, the zoo association’s prize for a first breeding. All this meant, of course, that Knoxville owed Molt a favor. Molt already had one in mind.
ON SEPTEMBER 17, 1985, Molt and Eddie Celebucki signed into being Herpetological Research Associates, Inc., a not-for-profit corporation with the sole purpose of defrauding Papua New Guinea of its choicest reptiles. They sealed the deal with a notary’s stamp and a $300 money order made out to the state of Ohio.
The plan was for Celebucki to travel alone to New Guinea and establish a fake research institute. “Hank worried they’d arrest him on the spot,” Celebucki said. Celebucki would procure whatever lizards and pythons he could through his institute, then consign them to the Knoxville Zoo. All Knoxville would owe Herpetological Research Associates, Inc., according to this plan, was half of any offspring produced, which Molt and Celebucki agreed to split. Molt and Celebucki paid friendly visits to the Knoxville Zoo, hanging out at the reptile house. Knoxville “probably expected we would pull some shady stuff in New Guinea,” Celebucki said, but specifics were not discussed.
Celebucki ordered some business cards for himself, illustrated with a Boelen’s python, and paid for his plane ticket with the proceeds of stolen library books. Molt and Celebucki commissioned from a Philadelphia sculptor a realistic likeness of a baby Fly River turtle, mounted on a slab of marble. This Celebucki took to the Cleveland firm that produced his karate trophies, and had affixed to its marble base a plaque:
HERPETOLOGICAL RESEARCH ASSOCIATES
AND
DEPT. OF HERPETOLOGY
AT THE
KNOXVILLE ZOO
ARE PROUD TO PRESENT TO THE GOVERNMENT
OF
PAPUA NEW GUINEA
IN APPRECIATION FOR COOPERATION RESULTING
IN THE FIRST CAPTIVE BREEDING
IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
OF
PAPUAN PYTHON
(LIASIS PAPUANA)
FLY RIVER TURTLE
(CARETTOCHELYS INSCULPTA)
Celebucki planned to present the plaque to some minister or another; he had yet to figure out whom. “They love ceremony, those guys,” Molt had informed him. But Molt, who referred to New Guineans in general as “spearchuckers,” was never one for cultural subtleties, and so Celebucki took it upon himself to research some manners and customs. “I learned that all the people in agriculture in New Guinea were of the Goroka tribe,” Celebucki said. “If you ask them for something, they won’t do it. But if you give them something, they’re bound to return the favor. That’s why the zoos had such bad luck in Papua New Guinea—they didn’t have the diplomacy down.” Celebucki felt certain that he did.
In November 1986, Celebucki departed for Port Moresby, turtle trophy in hand. Ne
xt to him on the Qantas flight from Los Angeles sat a friendly dreadlocked man who introduced himself as Ari Tara, a minister of roads in the Papua New Guinea government. “He had on one of those wool caps—he looked and kind of sounded like a Rastafarian. But he was a minister,” Celebucki said. Celebucki and Ari Tara landed in Port Moresby on a Friday. They spent the weekend figuring out how to impress the agriculture minister. On Monday afternoon, Celebucki stood in the agriculture minister’s office wearing a dress shirt and a tie, presenting his turtle trophy before television cameras and scrawling reporters. The minister, who’d learned of Celebucki’s visit only that morning, had called a press conference. “I would like to give you this on behalf of Herpetological Research Associates, the Knoxville Zoo, the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department, and the People of the United States of America,” Celebucki intoned, with maximum ceremony.
Celebucki’s cultural investigations had paid off. Over lunch the minister asked Celebucki how he could help Herpetological Research Associates, the Knoxville Zoo, the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department, and the People of the United States of America. “We would like to continue our work,” Celebucki said, explaining that this meant getting export permits for snakes. The minister assured him that something could be arranged; all Celebucki would have to do was collect the snakes.
Celebucki was introduced to Steve Cutlack, an Australian who, before New Guinea’s independence, had worked as a patrol officer in the highlands. Unlike Cutlack’s old friend, the erstwhile coffee farmer Peter Shanahan, Cutlack and his family had stayed in New Guinea after independence. Cutlack now worked in the mining industry, traveling between the highlands and his home in Port Moresby. Cutlack liked snakes, particularly Boelen’s pythons. He offered Celebucki a place to stay, and a hand collecting. Cutlack found Celebucki to be “a nice bloke, friendly and cheery,” and got the word out to his friends in the highlands. Snakes arrived on small planes every other day, while Celebucki entertained Cutlack’s family with nightly karate exhibitions, whacking the bottoms out of beer bottles.
Package after package of green tree pythons, D’Albertis pythons, olive pythons, carpet pythons, amethystine pythons, and blue-tongued skinks landed in Port Moresby. To Celebucki’s grave disappointment, none of the packages contained Boelen’s pythons. But every extra day he stayed cost him money and put the animals he’d already collected at risk, so after several weeks, Celebucki chose to return home with what he had. The Knoxville Zoo would be sad not to get any Boelen’s pythons—for by now, the Houston Zoo had the only two specimens in the nation, and these were geriatric, imported by Leon Leopard in 1970.
On the day after Thanksgiving, when Celebucki and his crate arrived at the Los Angeles airport, an inspector for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service took a look at Celebucki and got a feeling. No one had seen a legal shipment of animals out of New Guinea in fifteen years. After three hours and several phone calls, the inspector had no choice but to sign off on Celebucki’s twenty-six snakes and four skinks. The animals were accompanied by proper veterinary and export papers, stamped with New Guinea’s bird-of-paradise emblem. There was rejoicing in Knoxville.
ONLY THREE months after returning from New Guinea, Celebucki flew back, hell-bent on getting some Boelen’s pythons. This time, Hank Molt came, too. Celebucki had assured Molt that nobody in New Guinea remembered him from the colonial days—the government was now full of Ari Taras and guys who chewed betel nuts in Parliament.
In the years since Molt’s last visit to New Guinea, a Rutgers University scientist had discerned the true range of Python boeleni and produced a map of it, which Molt and Celebucki studied. The range was huge—nearly a thousand miles over high elevations all the way west through Irian Jaya, on the Indonesian side of the island. In Papua New Guinea, the pythons were black with short, fat white stripes; as their range progressed west through Indonesia, the white deepened into yellow and the stripes lengthened. The pythons were nowhere near as rare as had earlier been supposed, but they were inconvenient to get to, occurring thousands of feet above sea level in rocky, uninhabited forest.
Steve Cutlack knew those forests well, and soon after Celebucki arrived, a few weeks ahead of Molt, Cutlack’s miners were loading the pythons, tagged with notes about where and when they were found, onto Twin Otter planes back to the capital. Getting them out of New Guinea was a problem that had yet to be solved, as there had been a shakeup in the agriculture ministry, and Celebucki’s minister friend was gone. Having no turtle trophy or anything so inventive in hand, Celebucki considered bribing the new minister with a camera, but Steve Cutlack talked him out of it. Celebucki was starting to think his early success in New Guinea had been a fluke. “That whole turtle trophy thing succeeded in the limited fashion it did because of my naïveté,” Celebucki said. “A more seasoned person might not have tried that.” Cutlack assured Celebucki he could secure some export permits through the University of New Guinea; all they had to worry about was getting the snakes.
Hank Molt arrived at the Port Moresby airport with his own Herpetological Research Associates, Inc., business cards, matching luggage tags, and a fake gold Rolex. Molt had taken note of Tommy Crutchfield’s tendency to gift his foreign suppliers with Rolexes. Molt was more apt to bolt on a supplier than give him a watch, but a fake one was no great sacrifice. At the airport, “Ed was sitting there, sort of glowing,” Molt said. “You could tell he’d been successful.” Five Boelen’s pythons had already arrived from the highlands, Celebucki told Molt, and they stood a chance of getting far, far more if they went to a village called Woitape, which appeared, from the notes, to be the common source of the pythons. On the plane to Woitape, they stared in shock as a young woman clasped a piglet to her nipple and began to nurse it.
Steve Cutlack was not sad to be relieved of Molt, who drank a lot and talked a lot and years back had railroaded poor Peter Shanahan, who never quite got over it. “I did not like him at all,” Cutlack said. Molt had presented Cutlack with a nice book on birds of paradise, but then, Cutlack said, “he stole my book on New Guinea snakes.”
IN A matter of hours, Molt and Celebucki secured a room and an interpreter in Woitape, showed photographs of Boelen’s pythons to prominent villagers, learned the local name for the species—manuf—and set a generous bounty of $120 per live manuf. The “live” specification was important, and a point that always had to be hammered home in the third world; otherwise it was assumed that the collector wanted dead ones. Most snake guys, Molt included, had learned this the hard way.
In Woitape, “you saw a night sky like it was ten thousand years ago, and there were the neatest species, tiny parrots that would eat fungus off the ground at night, all kinds of plants that sting you and kill you,” Molt said. He and Celebucki huffed about in hoodie sweatshirts, going for hikes amid giant windblown cedars. After days, though, the manufs had not arrived. This made no sense, so Molt and Celebucki confronted their interpreter. “He told us that no one believed they would pay $120 for a snake, that we were mocking them,” Molt recalled. They reduced the bounty to fifty dollars. After that, “People came on word of mouth; some walked two days because they’d heard about it,” Molt said. “Within twenty-four hours we started getting the snakes.”
Every evening, weathered middle-aged men arrived at the rooming house with burlap bags that they dumped in the grass before Molt and Celebucki, who surveyed the catch, like regents, from lawn chairs. “Back to bush!” they would declare if a weasel or other mammal crawled out. But there were manufs aplenty—nearly twenty good ones by the end of the week, and more on their way. On sunny afternoons, they would arrange the snakes on branches in a big tree and allow them to bask. “Then Ed would go in and get his karate uniform on and do kicks and moves under that tree. It was like a spiritual thing for him,” Molt said. Finally Molt, knowing that within a few days they would return to Port Moresby “and had to get permits and go to the university and would have to play the role of assisting the government of New Guinea in the future
management of the species and all that bullshit,” began drafting his first and only attempt at a scientific paper.
Herpetological Research Associates, Inc.’s “Preliminary Field Report on PYTHON BOELENI” was not acutely scientific in tone, omitting citations and most other evidence of scholarship, though Molt did manage to note the stomach contents of pythons that had regurgitated, and arranged into a table the daily rainfall data from the Woitape weather station, enhancing the paper’s scientific aura. Molt addressed it to New Guinean agriculture officials, confident that none of them had more than a fifth-grade education.
EDDIE CELEBUCKI thought about using a coffin to transport the reptiles back to the United States. A plain wooden coffin would be a cheap, readymade container secure enough for the eighteen Boelen’s pythons he and Molt had selected from their catch. But when Celebucki and Molt landed back in Port Moresby, three more crates of snakes were waiting for them, filled with animals from the outlying islands. Among them were Bismarck ringed pythons, carpet pythons, and a type of amethystine python that was probably new to science. A coffin would be nowhere big enough: they now had seventy-three specimens. The problem was further complicated when they received their permits from the agriculture ministry and discovered they could take only thirty-nine animals, a mere five of which could be Boelen’s pythons.
This was not exactly a surprise. “We didn’t want to ask for too many because the venture would have seemed commercial,” not scientific, Molt said. The obvious solution was to take home only animals they had permits for, but neither Celebucki nor Molt could bear to do that: the eighteen Boelen’s pythons alone were worth nearly $200,000. More tempting was to alter the permits. “Back then they were stupid enough to give you the original copy,” Molt said, and no one had bothered to spell out the quantities in words. So, with a stroke of Celebucki’s pen, five Boelen’s pythons became fifteen. They were still nearly double their adjusted quota, so they would need a custom-built box to conceal the extra animals. Steve Cutlack and Celebucki designed one with a false bottom and hidden compartments.
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