Crutchfield hoped to make a big impression at the expo, and planned a grand opening party for the Thursday before it. Now, with six months to go, he was scrambling, intermittently apoplectic, and sweating so much that a salty white residue covered his skin. Some of his crocodiles had escaped from their new ponds into neighboring yards, and a few had yet to be found, adding to his miseries. Crutchfield complained to Molt that he was doing all the work, while the Dietleins played with their lemurs, and Molt noticed that Crutchfield and Nora Dietlein had the same sort of bossy, haranguing, dominant personality. “One or the other of them was always demanding a meeting,” Molt said. The two would disappear into a trailer, from which Crutchfield would emerge red-faced, his eyeballs and neck veins protruding.
CRUTCHFIELD FINISHED his compound on time and his grand opening party was a success, though tensions with the Dietleins had hardly subsided. There were visitors from Japan and Germany, “barbecues and music, phones ringing off the hooks, everyone in golf carts,” said Hank Molt, who showed up with Colette Hairston on his arm.
In the middle of the party, Molt remembered that the last time he and Hairston had visited Crutchfield’s compound, early that spring, he had forgotten to show her Crutchfield’s Fiji iguanas, and she was curious about them.
Before, the iguanas had been in the barn. Now Crutchfield directed Molt and Hairston toward the woods, a stand of magnificent, mossy live oaks. The iguanas sat atop a freshly cut tree stump in a cage covered with shade cloth, as though they were being concealed. “I thought, ‘That’s kind of weird,’ ” Molt said. “Colette looked at them and thought they were nice, and the next day we all left for Orlando, for the expo.”
The expo, too, was a success. The Howard Johnson’s ballrooms were packed so tightly with visitors gawking at deli cups that it was hard to move around. “With this convention, the breeding of reptiles as exotic pets, which has become a multimillion-dollar industry in recent years, has finally come of age,” the Miami Herald reported. For one glorious weekend, it was Tommy Crutchfield’s industry.
IN THE middle of the two-day reptile expo, the Crutchfields and the Dietleins stopped speaking altogether. The ill will between the couples, building gradually over months, had reached the point where Crutchfield now suspected the Dietleins of harboring a secret agenda to ruin him, to sell him out to the Feds, “and maybe turn the whole business over to Adamm Smith.” Crutchfield planned to pocket the cash sales from the expo, just in case they thought of trying anything. The Dietleins were planning to pack up all the art they’d brought to the business and move it someplace where Crutchfield couldn’t touch it, as soon as the expo was over.
Few noticed what was going on besides Hank Molt and Thomas Schultz, who were helping Crutchfield out that weekend. Schultz detected something strange and surreptitious in Nora’s behavior, for during the expo she’d began to grill him, awkwardly and out of nowhere, about Crutchfield’s Fiji iguanas. She wanted to know the whole story, and she was, unbeknownst to Schultz, concealing a tape recorder under her clothes.
Something weird was going on, something bad was about to happen; Molt, Crutchfield, and Schultz could all feel it. Before the expo was over, Crutchfield turned to Molt for a favor.
That summer, Molt had delivered thirty thousand dollars’ worth of animals—the last of his Stefan Schwarz stock—to Crutchfield. Would Molt draft a document to look as though the opposite had happened, as though he had just bought thirty thousand dollars’ worth of animals from Crutchfield? The fake sale was a way for Crutchfield to hide inventory in case things went south with the Dietleins. Molt said he would. The expo ended on Sunday. Crutchfield departed for Bushnell, and Molt spent Monday with Colette Hairston, then put her on a flight back to Texas. He promised Crutchfield he’d meet him in Bushnell Tuesday to notarize the phony bill of sale. But by Monday, Herpetofauna Inc. was in civil war.
It started when Nora Dietlein and her husband were pulling out of their driveway in their van, and Crutchfield sped up to them in his golf cart, cutting them off. “Get up to the barn!” he screamed. “I want to talk to you now!” The Dietleins had filled their van with art that belonged to the business and were about to abscond with it, Crutchfield said. He jumped out of the golf cart, and the Dietleins got out of their van. Crutchfield blasted the Dietleins with obscenities, then jumped back on his golf cart. “He drove it towards me and I jumped back and he drove over my foot,” Nora said.
Crutchfield disputed the foot part of the story—if it were true, he said, Nora Dietlein would surely have had him arrested.
Hank Molt pulled up the next afternoon to pandemonium. A mountain of gravel sat on the drive linking the Dietleins’ and the Crutchfields’ properties, gravel the Dietleins had hired someone to drop there. Crutchfield’s daughters hurried to remove animals from the barn, while a Jamaican friend of theirs guarded it with a rifle. All the phones, computers, fax machines, and files in the Herpetofauna office were missing—stolen, the Crutchfields said, by the Dietleins. Sheriff’s deputies were on their way, and Crutchfield’s friends searched the yellow pages for a storefront, a warehouse, any available air-conditioned space that could be used to store Crutchfield’s animals. It seemed as though an aging strip mall in the neighboring town of Lake Panasoffkee would have to do, and Crutchfield, his family, and Molt began hauling the animals there.
The joint venture between the Crutchfields and the Dietleins—worth millions of dollars in animals, art, and real estate—had imploded four days after its grand opening.
Somehow, in the middle of all this, Molt managed to get notarized his fake $30,000 receipt, and Crutchfield pulled Molt aside with another, stranger, request. Since Molt knew how to take care of Fiji iguanas, would he mind taking Crutchfield’s pair back to Philadelphia with him, until things calmed down in Florida?
Molt walked to the woods behind the barn, carrying snake bags. The iguanas’ cage was locked, and Crutchfield had been too frazzled to provide a key, so Molt popped the hinges with a screwdriver, and bagged up the iguanas. He arranged them in his station wagon and headed north.
THE DIETLEINS filed suit against the Crutchfields in county court, and the Crutchfields filed a countersuit. A receiver was appointed to divide whatever was left of Herpetofauna, Inc. Adamm Smith fled Bushnell, afraid of being caught between the Crutchfields and the Dietleins. The two families retreated to their sides of the 120-acre parcel, barred by restraining orders from interacting. But neither Nora Dietlein nor Tommy Crutchfield was finished with the other.
For weeks, Nora sifted through the boxes of records she had appropriated, figuring there would be something in them to compromise Crutchfield.
She discovered the double-invoicing Crutchfield and Anson Wong used to avoid import duties on shipments. Nora had discerned by now that Crutchfield and Wong were estranged, and she called Malaysia, figuring Wong might have some more items of interest, and perhaps hate Crutchfield enough to send them.
Wong sent her a fax he had originally sent to Crutchfield in early 1989. At the top was the contorted-crocodile logo of Exotic Skins and Alives.
Dear Tom,
I want to confirm with the exchange of my 7 hds Fiji against your 14 heads RHINO. Can you let me know roughly when I can expect the shipment? Meanwhile here’s real total of invoice 12/89 … $6,669.00. Pls try to send 5-6000.00 this week.
Thanks.
Dr. Wong
Nora Dietlein mailed the fax to the Tampa office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. With it, the criminal investigation of Crutchfield began.
“SOMETIMES BAD, bad things happen to you and it makes you become mentally unbalanced,” Crutchfield said. “I thought of Herpetofauna kind of like a baby, like my son, which I created from nothing. Losing it was like a child dying.”
Late one night, a few weeks after the death of Herpetofauna, Crutchfield walked quietly across the woods to the Dietleins’ house, carrying his Ruger Mini-14. Crutchfield raised the rifle to the Dietleins’ bedroom window. He held it there,
unable to shoot the sleeping couple, unable to put the gun down. “I really wanted to kill them,” he said, “but I thought about my family. I thought about having that on my conscience for the rest of my life. I came closer than they ever knew.”
The Dietleins sold all their animals and moved to Canada.
CRUTCHFIELD REOPENED shop in Lake Panasoffkee, Florida, as Tom Crutchfield’s Reptile Enterprises. He was calling himself Tom now, not Tommy, though it took a while for everyone to adjust, including him. Crutchfield had managed to get his shop in order remarkably fast—it was September 1990, only six weeks since the meltdown—but not his emotions. He hired a private detective to locate the Dietleins in Canada, and had taken to phoning them at four a.m., saying things like “Hi, Nora. This is Tommy. You can never get away from me.” Nora Dietlein would reciprocate with sexual allegations about Penny on the Crutchfield family’s answering machine.
Crutchfield still maintained the crocodile farm on his half of the Bushnell estate, but the barn stood locked, by order of the court, and the Dietleins’ house was now empty. He bought fax machines and computers to replace those the Dietleins had stolen, and came up with a trendy new slogan: “Conservation thru Commercialization.”
The slogan borrowed the self-serving ideology long in vogue at the zoos: Grab the animals while you can because they’re going extinct anyway.
As Crutchfield looked at it, he wasn’t exactly Jane Goodall, but “a lot of the animals I smuggled would have been killed in their countries,” by logging, road building, or the skin trade, or for food. Conservation thru Commercialization, cynical though it sounded, “was something I actually believed in,” he said.
“If I’d succeeded with the Fiji iguanas, there would be millions of them in the U.S. right now,” Crutchfield said. “There would never be another smuggled again.”
12
Waffle House Days
Tom Crutchfield decided to send Hank Molt on a collecting trip to Indonesia, all expenses paid. It was the fall of 1990, and if Crutchfield’s new business was to succeed, he needed a new supplier in Asia. He was lately cultivating Mohamad Hardi, Anson Wong’s rival in the region. Hardi lived in Jakarta, and it was fortuitous that Crutchfield’s brother, Bobby, a merchant mariner, had just married an Indonesian woman and moved there.
Molt’s assignment was to fly to Jakarta, stay with Bobby, travel to Hardi’s farm every day, and select nice, healthy specimens for Crutchfield, putting together shipments that rivaled Anson Wong’s best. Molt, who lately had an abundance of free time but few resources for adventures, was all for it. He left for Jakarta by way of Texas, where Colette Hairston helped him pack. She chose his traveling clothes, fussing over him “just like a wife,” said Molt, which unnerved him slightly.
Molt prepared for himself a cheat sheet of some forty Indonesian words and phrases, which he encased in a plastic sheath and studied:
Blalok Kiri = Turn Left
Beehunti Disini = Stop Here
Saya Mau Lagi Ini = I Want More This
Kuri Kuri = Turtle
Buaya = Crocodiles
Ular = Snake
Kandang = Cage
In Jakarta, Molt spent his days at Mohamad Hardi’s farm and his nights at Bobby Crutchfield’s house. Bobby was half a foot taller than his brother, two years younger, and even more pugnacious. He had spent most of his adult life in the shipping lanes of Asia and the Persian Gulf, where he’d been jailed and tortured for spinning around his ship as his crewmen tried to pray to Mecca. The Crutchfield brothers would spend years out of touch, then get together for weeks at a time in Florida, visits that often ended with them beating each other senseless. After one fight, Tom had left Bobby buried alive in a ditch, knocked out, only to have Bobby show up an hour later, covered in blood and dirt, at the bar where Tom was recovering. “Can I buy you a drink, mate?” said Bobby, menacingly, and then they were back to grinding each other’s skulls into the floor. They were both in their late thirties then.
Bobby had injured his back and received a large settlement from the merchant marines before moving to Jakarta, and now he was landlocked, a state that did not agree with him. His solace was in war toys and miniatures—like his brother, Bobby was a collector. “Bobby was really good. He’d find little tiny German tanks from 1917 still in their boxes,” Molt said. Together they drove all over Jakarta, picking through shops.
Bobby had also contracted hepatitis around the time of Molt’s visit, and was rapidly getting sicker. “Hank was so scared of catching what I had that he never ventured into my room,” Bobby Crutchfield said.
Molt said it wasn’t merely the sickness—he found Bobby Crutchfield just plain scary. “He had that Crutchfield temper,” Molt said. “That instant, volcanic, blood-reddening craziness that was Tom’s downfall.”
AFTER A few weeks, Tom Crutchfield began to sense that Molt was doing a less-than-stellar job in Jakarta. Some snafu accompanied every shipment, some baroque excuse every fax.
Molt blamed the setbacks on Mohamad Hardi, who “was busy downtown playing tennis, driving around in his Mercedes and wearing Ralph Lauren sweaters. When it came to actually making a shipment, he delegated it five times removed,” he said. “The guys on his farm were like serfs. They didn’t know a snake with a bad eye or a broken tail. If they got the species right it was a home run.”
All Molt was interested in, it seemed to Crutchfield, was drinking and smuggling Boelen’s pythons. Hardi had permits for four Boelen’s. Molt wanted to ship twenty-six. “THINK about it … Serious money potential!!!!” he implored Crutchfield in a fax. Crutchfield chose not to chance a high-risk venture with Molt. “Hank would have found some way to fuck it up,” Crutchfield said.
Molt, who used a fax machine as if it were a Teletype, sent Crutchfield weekly updates, and they continued to get worse.
TOM—SITUATION HERE VERY NEGATIVE. BROTHER BOB STILL SICK. MIGHT HAVE TO GO TO HOSPITAL IN SINGAPORE—PERMITS FOR A SECOND SHIPMENT HAVE NOT BEEN SIGNED—OFFICER IN BOGOR WHO MUST SIGN THE PERMITS IS NOW AWAY FROM COUNTRY ALSO—PRESENT STOCK AT FARM NOT VERY GOOD.
Molt’s Indonesia trip ended in failure. He had managed to get some shipments off to Crutchfield, but the last one—the biggest—got held up at the Miami airport, where part of it was confiscated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He blamed Hardi’s serfs.
WHEN MOLT returned, he drove to Colette Hairston’s in Texas, only to be dumped.
Molt’s drinking had been bothering Hairston for a long time. “She made me go to AA meetings,” Molt said. “She had a very gradual program to change me, but I wasn’t alerted to it until fairly late in the game. I wanted to drink and hunt rattlesnakes. I wasn’t ready to be that good.”
For the remainder of the fall, Molt made no contact with Hairston. But as winter took hold, Hairston began to receive hostile letters. “He’d mail me pictures of people with no eyes,” she said, and the letters “would always be postmarked from someplace unlikely, someplace that made no sense.” Molt was living out of his car when he sent the letters to Hairston, driving around the country, in the freezing cold. His depression, which he had always struggled to control, had returned.
It had been an unlucky few months for Molt. The disastrous trip to Indonesia, followed by getting dumped, was then capped off by Tom Crutchfield’s Fiji iguanas dying in his care. Molt froze the iguanas for Crutchfield, to prove he hadn’t sold them, but when Crutchfield learned that they were dead, he seemed relieved, which mystified Molt.
Then Crutchfield started calling Molt at home in Philadelphia, demanding that he destroy the carcasses. “It just kept getting worse and worse,” Molt said. “Tom’s calling and calling, saying, ‘You gotta make those things disappear.’ I thought, ‘There’s something bad going on here.’ ”
Molt assured Crutchfield that no trace of the iguanas remained. He then removed them from his freezer, filled two empty instant coffee jars with alcohol, dropped an iguana into each, photographed the jars, and hid them in the wheel well
of his station wagon, which he was now driving around the country.
“I didn’t know they came from Anson Wong, or anything about them,” Molt said of the iguanas. “I just wanted to keep my options open.”
MOLT, MISERABLE, decided to hole up at Crutchfield’s awhile and regroup.
For eighteen months, Molt had shuttled among Texas, Florida, and Pennsylvania. During that time he had lost Eddie Celebucki, Stefan Schwarz, and Colette Hairston.
Molt did have a friend left in Tom Crutchfield, even if Crutchfield vowed never to send Molt abroad again. “I felt sorry for Hank,” Crutchfield said. “I fed him and I housed him. He’d drink Heineken that I bought, go to Catfish Johnny’s and eat food that I paid for.” It seemed to Crutchfield that Molt spent at least half of each day at the Waffle House. “All Hank did was sit around and talk,” said Crutchfield.
Back at the reptile expo the previous August, Crutchfield had written Molt a phony bill of sale for thirty thousand dollars’ worth of animals, to fool the Dietleins. But actually, Crutchfield owed Molt the exact same amount for some snakes he’d bought earlier.
So Crutchfield paid Molt in increments of a few thousand dollars at a time, and that was enough to keep Molt in waffles indefinitely.
CRUTCHFIELD’S LITIGATION against the Dietleins wore on. Determined to avenge himself against them, Crutchfield was starting to use his price lists as a soapbox, not unlike the way Molt once had, except that Crutchfield’s style was more mafioso. He published the Dietleins’ address in British Columbia, tacitly inviting his customers to go settle his scores.
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