Crutchfield knew of the nascent criminal investigation into the Fiji iguanas, but had no good sense of where it was going, if anywhere. He focused instead on his new business, which he was bent on making a success. He created a new logo for it, a sort of tribal-tattoo snake design, which he slapped on everything. He brought on two old friends to help him. The first was Dwayne Cunningham, a reptile enthusiast and former Ringling Bros. clown who’d been trained by Crutchfield’s uncle. Cunningham became the new manager of Tom Crutchfield’s Reptile Enterprises. Crutchfield’s other new partner—his investor—was Jack Constantine, an old-school sideshow owner with traveling acts such as Fat Albert, an 856-pound man, and Little Eddy Taylor, a midget pianist. Sideshows had made Constantine rich, and Crutchfield persuaded Constantine that reptiles would make him richer. With the legal bills he now faced, Crutchfield needed capital.
Hank Molt held no official title at Tom Crutchfield’s Reptile Enterprises, but took it as his duty to make life unbearable for everyone.
AT FIRST Molt lived with the Crutchfield family, and when that arrangement grew tiresome, Molt moved into a rental house with Dwayne Cunningham. Cunningham had grown up in Philadelphia, where he had worked in the zoo’s reptile house. He knew of Molt because the curators talked about him in mythical tones. Cohabiting with Molt proved impossible, though. “Dwayne and I were always arguing,” Molt said. “Tom always had to break it up. Every day there would be a meeting. Then Tom would be in Colombia or Haiti, we’d have snakes loose in the room, and we’d be coming close to fistfights. I don’t know why we hated each other so much.”
Crutchfield’s contempt for Molt mounted. “I was nice to Hank in spite of what I knew he was,” said Crutchfield. “But until he lived with me I had no idea how twisted he really was.” Crutchfield was livid when a terrified Colette Hairston sent a parcel from Texas, returning all of Molt’s gifts, lest he continue to bill her for them. And then there were Molt’s unexplained absences, which lasted weeks. He was visiting his family in Philadelphia, usually, but never bothered to inform anyone before he left. “He would just be gone and we never knew where he went,” Crutchfield said. “You never knew what he was gonna do.”
Molt thought no better of Crutchfield after those months in close proximity. “Tom called Saturdays ‘J & A’ days at his shop. ‘J & A’ stood for ‘jerks and assholes,’ which is what he called his own customers!” Crutchfield was intense and hard-working in some ways, pathologically lazy in others. He neglected to pay his electric bill for months, “and would freak out and go nuts on the electric company when they shut it off,” Molt said. “Meanwhile, he had $100,000 in the bank.” Crutchfield’s truck was repossessed one day outside a restaurant, while he and Molt were having lunch. “Tom was fuming—the usual high blood pressure and muscle pumping. I said just go to the bank, take out the money, and get it back,” Molt said, but Crutchfield refused.
“His Mercedes was a moving trash can. His house was a stationary trash can. Every surface in the kitchen was filled with dirty dishes and refuse, even the oven. He and Penny were real Florida people, no education, happy to live in a little town with a Piggly Wiggly,” Molt said. It drove Molt crazy to watch Crutchfield stuff his face with energy bars and study muscle magazines, grunting with approval at every picture. “He was just like a fucking caveman.”
TENSIONS WERE further exacerbated when Eddie Celebucki started showing up in Lake Panasoffkee. After a two-year hiatus from smuggling, Celebucki suddenly had hundreds of fresh New Guinea reptiles that he was selling directly to Crutchfield, instead of using Molt as his middleman, as he’d done before. Molt, Celebucki felt, had given him no choice. “I never made any money until I started selling directly to Tommy,” he said. Crutchfield felt bad for Celebucki. “Hank used to cheat Ed, though Hank had me convinced it was the other way around,” Crutchfield said. “Hank would take the lion’s share and the right sexes, leaving Ed with what was left. Meanwhile Ed was doing all the work. It took me a while to realize that Ed was truly the nice guy and Hank was the asshole.” In the summer of 1991, Molt walked into Crutchfield’s office to find Celebucki in the process of a delivery. “It wasn’t outwardly hostile,” Molt said of their meeting. But neither was it friendly. Crutchfield was really getting to like Celebucki, and had it in mind to groom Celebucki to run missions for him, to do the kind of work that Molt had proved unfit for. That fall, Crutchfield and Celebucki traveled to South America together, while Molt sat around the Waffle House.
A CANAL ran adjacent to the house Dwayne Cunningham and Hank Molt shared. Molt liked spending his evenings on the porch, drinking beer and listening to the alligators bellowing in the canal. One night Molt was sitting on the porch when “I see these guys with binoculars in the driveway across from me, looking around,” he said. “Then they pull into our driveway.” Vance Eaddy, a special agent with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, introduced himself and asked, politely enough, if he could take a walk through the house. Eaddy seemed fixated on a large birdcage behind the house, half shaded with tarps, that housed some African chameleons, smallish green lizards that, from a distance, looked a little like Fiji iguanas. Cunningham wouldn’t let him near it.
A grand jury had convened in the Crutchfield case. Molt and Cunningham received subpoenas shortly after Eaddy’s visit, instructing them to bring to the Tampa courthouse the green lizards in their yard. By the date the two were scheduled to testify, though, the agents had already determined that the lizards weren’t Fiji iguanas after all. Don’t bother with the lizards, they instructed Molt and Cunningham, who would have none of it. After making sure to notify the TV news, they loaded the cage full of chameleons into a car, then hauled them, with great feigned effort, up the courthouse steps.
Back in Lake Panasoffkee, Crutchfield bought beer and threw a little party. “He thought it was great that we made assholes of the Feds,” Molt said. “He was absolutely sure he was gonna win.”
Crutchfield’s enterprise, meanwhile, was quickly unraveling. Jack Constantine pulled out of the business partnership, leaving Crutchfield heavily in debt. Employee paychecks bounced. Dwayne Cunningham quit. Hoping to avoid another subpoena or worse, Molt departed for Philadelphia, promising he’d be back. Crutchfield hoped it would be a good long while.
Federal agents were coming around Lake Panasoffkee so much that they started lunching at Catfish Johnny’s.
On November 6, 1991, Tom Crutchfield, Penny Crutchfield, and Anson Wong were indicted for conspiring to violate the Endangered Species Act and CITES. Wong elected to blow the whole thing off, understandably. Malaysia wasn’t going to extradite him over lizards.
Crutchfield decided that he and Penny would fight the charges with every cent they had. Molt thought Crutchfield was out of his mind. “With a case like that, you either did it or didn’t do it, and if you did it you cut your losses and make a deal,” said Molt, who had some experience in these matters. “But there was nobody around him with a brain.”
MOLT RETURNED to Lake Panasoffkee several months later, seeking money. Crutchfield had just sold off the last of Molt’s consignment of snakes, most of them to the Columbus Zoo. He now owed Molt $5,000, by Molt’s calculations. But Crutchfield had lawyers to pay; he had already paid Molt some $25,000 over the past year, and that last $5,000 suddenly seemed like a lot. When Molt arrived at Crutchfield’s, keen to collect, Crutchfield told him that the snakes died only days after being sold, that he hadn’t been paid for them, and that he therefore wouldn’t be paying Molt. This did not sit well with Molt at all.
Crutchfield was in remarkably high spirits for someone facing a major federal court battle, Molt thought. Eddie Celebucki was in the shop again when Molt arrived, helping Crutchfield pack a shipment of Bismarck ringed pythons bound for Germany. The pythons had been smuggled from New Guinea, as usual, but Crutchfield and Celebucki had just falsified CITES papers alleging that the snakes were the product of a breeding program in Ohio. Crutchfield was in such a good mood about all this that he sponta
neously burst into his theme song: “I’m Tom Terrific / Greatest hero ever / Terrific is the name for me / ’Cause I’m so clever.”
Molt did not think that falsifying government documents in front of a room full of people, with a federal trial pending, was clever. “But that’s how Tom did things,” Molt said. “He never had the worst-case-scenario conversation with himself.”
Before leaving Lake Panasoffkee, Molt gave Crutchfield a ride from the shop to the crocodile farm, because Crutchfield had accidentally locked his keys in his trunk. In the privacy of Molt’s station wagon, Crutchfield’s spirits subsided. The indictment was weighing on him more than he let on.
“I hope those iguanas are history,” he said to Molt. “Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.” Molt assured him that they were. In fact, they were still in the wheel well of Molt’s station wagon, and Crutchfield was sitting on top of them.
13
United States v. Tommy Edward Crutchfield, et al.
Tommy Crutchfield had rarely ever worn a suit, and his friend Thomas Schultz thought he resembled John Gotti in one. Not once during Crutchfield’s two-week trial had he taken the stand, opting instead to influence proceedings thorough a silent display of aggression. He’d blown kisses to the prosecution’s key witnesses, Don and Nora Dietlein, and slapped their lawyer on the back, hard. It was June 15, 1992, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Rubinstein wrapped his closing argument with a synopsis of Crutchfield’s persona:
Mr. Crutchfield is a person who, his good friend Mr. Schultz says, can’t keep his mouth shut about anything. He’s not a shy person, he’s a flamboyant person. He’s an extrovert. He is a short person who lifts weights every day until he has a bad back. He’s a person that tells other people that I can beat the you know what out of you. He’s a person that goes around wearing a big knife all the time on his waist. He’s a show off. Mr. Crutchfield is the kind of person that wants to be number one. He wants to be the biggest and the best and the first with the most. That’s his psychology …
My God, he can get things and does get things and daily possesses things that no zoo in the world has ever got. And he knows more about these animals than any zookeeper.
So what does Mr. Crutchfield do? He gets, he does the impossible. He gets the Fiji banded iguana. The hottest thing there is. One lizard that nobody can get.
MICHAEL RUBINSTEIN was a reptile enthusiast—not the type to remortgage his house for a snake, but someone who would understand the temptation to do so. Rubinstein kept lizards and attended monthly meetings of the Tampa Herpetological Society. As a kid in New York, he’d spent many weekend days in the dark and humid corridors of the Bronx Zoo’s reptile house, nose against glass. All this made him either the best or the worst person to prosecute the Crutchfields. The Crutchfields deemed him the worst: Rubinstein, they protested in pretrial motions, had not only toured Herpetofauna with the Tampa Herpetological Society in 1990, he had purchased a pet lizard while he was there. Rubinstein acknowledged to his superior and the judge that he had indeed visited Crutchfield’s place and bought a forty-dollar savannah monitor as a pet for his son. They allowed him to proceed with the case anyway. Rubinstein wanted the case because of, not despite, his interest in reptiles. “I couldn’t have prosecuted the case without it!” he said. “You have to know about the industry you’re dealing with. I know a lot about drugs, I know a lot about money laundering, I know a lot about medical malpractice, Medicare and Medicaid fraud—this happened to be something that I was interested in since childhood.”
The Crutchfields retained for their defense Fred Ohlinger, the lawyer they’d used in their civil suit against Don and Nora Dietlein. Ohlinger had brought to that litigation a rash, aggressive personal style not unlike that of his client. At one point, he’d even likened wildlife officials’ ticketing and inspections of Crutchfield’s facility to Nazi persecutions. This only endeared him to Crutchfield. When the Dietleins sold off a herd of Herpetofauna’s Galapagos tortoises, in violation of their receivership agreement with Crutchfield, Ohlinger persuaded the county judge to issue warrants for their arrest. Crutchfield published the warrants on his price list.
No sooner had Crutchfield’s indictment been issued than Rubinstein was forced to defend himself against an outrageous rumor, circulated by Ohlinger, that the forty-dollar lizard Rubinstein bought from Crutchfield had died, that Rubinstein had not been refunded, and that he was now retaliating with a federal case against Crutchfield.
“An aura of menace hung over this case,” Rubinstein said. “Here was this lizard case that was being conducted under the aura that could have been a Mob case.” Rubinstein was notoriously excitable, and Crutchfield enjoyed winding him up. “I tried to fluster him so that he hated me so much,” Crutchfield said, and Ohlinger did nothing to stop him.
“Believe me, if he had come and said, ‘Let’s work this out,’ we could have made some kind of deal, and that would be it, but it’s the ego thing,” Rubinstein said of Crutchfield. “I thought he was an asshole.”
RUBINSTEIN EXPECTED Fred Ohlinger to come up with one of three possible defenses for Crutchfield: “One, that some goon in Malaysia packed the box by accident. Two, that they were the progeny of pre-CITES animals, that he didn’t import them. And three, they’re not Fiji iguanas, they’re something else—there’s a million green lizards out there.” Ohlinger surprised Rubinstein by employing all three arguments at once, along with some even less plausible ones. At one point he floated the notion that the entire case against Crutchfield was a plot to distract attention from the George H. W. Bush administration’s abysmal environmental record—in particular, its support of logging interests in spotted owl habitat.
Ohlinger didn’t have a coherent defense, but he was good at trashing Rubinstein’s witnesses, most of whom “didn’t have degrees of any kind, they were all kids—they were all smart but they were kids—who’d quit, been fired, hated Crutchfield, this kind of thing,” Rubinstein said. “So Ohlinger could say these are pot-smoking drifters.” Rubinstein identified with them. “These were kids like I was a kid, who would love to have worked in a place where there were all these exciting things coming in,” he said. “Most people may not appreciate that but to them it was the most exciting place in the world you could be, and they were there. The only problem was that Crutchfield was there, too, threatening them. So that was the downside. The only people who were experts were the Dietleins, and they had their motives.”
Rubinstein also identified with Don and Nora Dietlein—too much, he would later come to think—and hoped the jury would see the couple as he did: scientists and art dealers, wine and cheese people caught up in Crutchfield’s cracker world. “I was very impressed with their love of animals and the fact that he had been a zoo director,” Rubinstein said.
The Dietleins may have been wealthy and accomplished, but, like most middle-aged couples who share their homes with leopards and young men, they could hardly be called normal, and Nora Dietlein created nearly as many problems for Rubinstein as she had for Crutchfield. “I eventually got a feeling that there was something going on psychologically with her. Something that I didn’t really know,” Rubinstein said. He forced Dietlein to repeat before the court an evil phone message she had left for the Crutchfield family, accusing Penny of having an illegitimate child. It was a preemptive move—“I thought, ‘Oh shit, [Ohlinger]’s got the tape and he’s gonna play the tape to show this crazy lady is so vindictive that she will do anything to attack Crutchfield,” Rubinstein said, but the move backfired, causing a furor in the court and accusations that Rubinstein was painting the sweet, churchgoing Penny Crutchfield as a slut.
It got worse for Rubinstein when Adamm Smith, the young man who had lived for years as the Dietleins’ ward, testified for the defense with enough vitriol toward the couple that he seemed to be using the trial as an opportunity to break up with them. Nora Dietlein, Smith testified, was an alcoholic and a drug addict. Every day, Smith said, she would take “about three or four Darvo
cet or Percodan, whatever we had at the time, at night. With some Scotch.” Sometimes Nora’s lemurs escaped, Smith said, because she was so addled. Nora, Smith testified, was a woman “very much in charge. Having control of everything that was going on around. That kind of thing,” Smith told the court. And what she wanted above all, he said, was “to ruin Mr. Crutchfield and steal from Herpetofauna.” Rubinstein, furious, probed Smith about his relationship with the Dietleins, hoping to make him seem a freeloader and a parasite. If the Dietleins were such terrible people, Rubinstein chided, why had they been so generous to a nobody like him? “We loved each other” was Smith’s odd answer. “Supposedly.”
THOMAS SCHULTZ of the San Diego Zoo testified for the prosecution, though much of what he said seemed designed to aid the defense. About the only way Schultz actually helped Rubinstein was by establishing, once and for all, that the animals in question were Fiji banded iguanas, and not some other green lizards, as Ohlinger had first tried to claim. Schultz said that though he had received a Fiji iguana in a package from Crutchfield, he never asked about its origins because he “didn’t want to know.” And Schultz said he couldn’t rule out the possibility that Crutchfield’s Fijis were not, in fact, progeny of iguanas Hank Molt had imported in the 1970s.
Hank Molt was not called as a witness, though Rubinstein brought up Molt’s name a lot, keen to establish that Crutchfield was very friendly with a convicted criminal who had also smuggled Fiji iguanas, many years before. But Fred Ohlinger got the judge to bar any mention of Molt’s convictions. This drove Rubinstein crazy enough that he tried, underhandedly, to elicit the real story on Molt from witnesses. “Have you heard about a bunch of bodies of lizards that were found buried in the New Jersey Pine Barrens near Philadelphia?” Rubinstein demanded of Thomas Schultz, who didn’t get a chance to answer over the yelling and gavel-banging that ensued.
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