Stolen World

by Jennie Erin Smith

  GIVEN THE size of the reptile market, it was all too foreseeable that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service would ponder another reptile sting. After the Atlanta Wildlife Exchange, in the early 1980s, the reptile dealers never lost their fears of one, and continued to assume that the Feds were always near. Any strange telephone call, inquiring into a species of dubious provenance, had to be a Fish and Wildlife agent. Anyone snapping pictures at the expo—a Fed for sure. But the dealers allowed greed to trump caution. Novel snake morphs were starting to fetch new-car sums, making the $7,000 apiece Crutchfield had paid for his albino Burmese pythons, back in 1981, seem quaint. There was simply more money in the system, so much money that it made the old snake men’s jaws drop.

  The agents suspected that all the captive breeding, all the expensive morphs and mutations, were not making smuggling obsolete, as dealers frequently claimed. Rather, they created a larger, more lucrative market for reptiles in general, including illegal ones. In the mid-1990s, the reptile trade remained “almost unregulated,” said Rick Leach, a Fish and Wildlife agent who had helped out with the Atlanta Wildlife Exchange, and later investigated parrot smugglers in an elaborate three-year sting. “Reptiles were still coming into the country by tens of thousands and not only were common things coming in for the pet trade, but some of the rarest species,” Leach said. Wildlife was trickling out from previously unknown conduits in Africa, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Madagascar.

  Madagascar was particularly worrisome. Its endemic animals were both coveted and highly endangered, and after decades of isolation, it was becoming a target for foreign opportunists. In 1993, some Germans had been shot and killed there while removing reptiles from a northern forest. The circumstances of the shooting were extremely murky, and the agents had never heard of anyone being shot dead over reptiles. “That certainly got our attention,” said Leach’s colleague, agent Ernest Mayer. Then, the agents started noticing huge quantities of Madagascar’s CITES-listed animals on price lists like Crutchfield’s.

  Leach proposed to his bosses an undercover reptile operation. George Morrison and Ernest Mayer, both veteran agents, signed up immediately. “I mean, did we really want to do another elk case?” said Mayer. They chose the West Coast for their base, since so many of the questionable reptiles seemed to be entering the country from Asia.

  As “PacRim Enterprises,” the agents rented a 5,000-square-foot warehouse in Livermore, California. Mayer had recently seized a shipping container full of shells and corals for bad paperwork, and sent the container to PacRim. Corals and shells weren’t what the agents had in mind, but they were wildlife products, and PacRim had a warehouse to fill.

  The agents felt sure PacRim would work. It had been fifteen years since the Atlanta Wildlife Exchange, and there were so many newcomers to the reptile market that another was unlikely to incur suspicion. And as an investigative strategy, a front business was an oldie but a goodie. It had worked magnificently against the illegal parrot trade, and “it’s the only way profit can be dumped back into an investigation,” said Mayer. “If we were wholly dependent on the government, we’d never be able to do it.”

  For eight months, the agents bleached the shipload of corals and tried to hatch some sort of plan, when all they had were names. “We asked ourselves, Who were the biggest reptile dealers? Anson Wong, Hardi, Van Nostrand, Crutchfield,” Mayer said. Ken McCloud, another agent working with the team, had been following the German jeweler Frank Lehmeyer. “We looked at Hank Molt, too,” said Mayer, but left him alone when they found him working at Starbucks.

  PacRim accumulated reptiles gradually. Wildlife inspectors at the ports sent over animals they’d confiscated for bad paperwork. When PacRim had amassed a respectable number, it introduced itself to the world, fittingly enough, in the classified pages of Reptiles magazine.

  ATTENTION JOBBERS: West Coast Import/Export company looking to establish long-term business relationships with jobbers in all 50 states. We import mostly high-end herps from around the world. Terms available.

  UNLIKE STRICTLY Reptiles and the newer dealers on the scene, Tom Crutchfield still cared deeply about his relationships with zoos, and about restoring his reputation among them. After the reversal of his conviction, he enticed Randal Berry, a reptile keeper who’d bounced around Texas and Arkansas zoos, to move to Florida and work for him. Crutchfield noted boldly on his price lists that a card-carrying member of the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums had joined his business. “He had my name on that list a month before I even got there,” Berry said.

  Hiring Berry was a coup for Crutchfield, since zoos, at the time, were going ever further out of their way to avoid associations with the animal trade as they strained to deal with their newest public relations mess: surplus animals. Zoo breeding programs had begun in the politically charged 1970s and ’80s as a way for zoos to end their reliance on the commercial wildlife trade, and then, ostensibly, as a way to save species from extinction. But many zoos had since overbred their stock, even their endangered species, to attract a public that, it turned out, loved nothing more than to see baby animals every year.

  So, having little choice, zoos quietly offloaded extra animals onto the same animal dealers, hunting camps, and circuses that they had so publicly cut ties with before. In the 1990s, even the National and San Diego zoos were exposed for selling off highly endangered species to ranches and circuses. The ark—long careening—had finally sunk. The zoo association needed an entirely new rationale for zoos’ continued existence, and it now had tough constituencies to appease—vocal groups such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, a fiercer, more radical organization than the Humane Society of the United States had ever been. PETA had huge budgets and mailing lists and strident slogans, the most disturbing of which was “Never Visit Zoos.”

  The zoos’ answer was to position themselves as part of the broader conservation community. They began sponsoring conservation efforts in the field, some serious and others trivial. Some changed their names: The Bronx Zoo’s parent organization, the New York Zoological Society, became the Wildlife Conservation Society in 1993. Everywhere, zoo visitors were deluged with information about endangerment, biodiversity, global warming, and the evils of the wildlife trade, and asked to donate spare change to gorilla projects in the Congo. Keepers were encouraged to publish scientific papers on the diets or behavior of their charges, whether or not they had ever published a paper in their lives.

  In 1994, the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums changed its name to the American Zoo and Aquarium Association, finally excising the word “parks” and its historic affiliations with amusement and recreation. This was serious, this conservation stuff; there was nothing fun about it.

  CRUTCHFIELD ALLOWED Randal Berry and his wife to squat in the Dietleins’ old house in Bushnell, which stood half derelict now, its electricity siphoned from Crutchfield’s across the way. A few of its rooms were closed off, and there were mysterious giant holes in the drywall. Next door to it was the old Herpetofauna barn, and that was permanently locked under some sort of court order. Crutchfield forbade anyone to go near it.

  For Berry, the whole appeal of moving to Crutchfield’s was to work with rare reptiles, and he was not disappointed. “I saw better snakes and reptiles and amphibians than ever in my zoo career,” he said. In that sense, Crutchfield was still the top dealer around. Strictly Reptiles was richer, but “Strictly was in the middle of the green iguana craze, zillions of iguanas,” said Berry. Crutchfield had things like albino alligators, which looked as though they were carved from soap and sold for $125,000 each. It thrilled Berry just to hold one.

  Berry soon learned, however, that his exalted status as a zoo guy afforded him no protection against Crutchfield’s rages. Berry and Adamm Smith had to replace cordless phones all the time because Crutchfield hurled them at walls when they lost their charge. “Just the way Tom would talk to you, it was like Gomer Pyle and Sergeant Cart
er, nose to nose. He was very manipulative and intimidating and talked in that mean voice. He’d make you want to go shoot yourself,” Berry said. Smith wore a Crutchfield Rolex, but he feared his boss as much as Berry did.

  The climate of fear was mitigated by Crutchfield’s generous gifts to his employees, including guns and knives that “we never used,” said Berry. “We just liked to pretend we were Clint Eastwood all day.” Often, without warning, Crutchfield doled out cash bonuses. “Put that in your shoe,” he’d say on a Friday evening, and slip Berry $600. On his best days, the tyrant pranced about the shop, filled with a child’s enthusiasm, grunting happily to himself. Berry could not help but be charmed.

  RANDAL BERRY was not so charmed by Crutchfield’s German friend Frank Lehmeyer, who came around once or twice a year as he gained customers fast for the snakes and tortoises he was moving out of Madagascar. Lately Lehmeyer was bringing along a companion on his visits to Florida, a younger man named Wolfgang Kloe, whom Berry liked even less. Berry couldn’t put his finger on what was sleazy about Lehmeyer and Kloe. It wasn’t the way they looked or dressed so much as the way everyone acted around them.

  Crutchfield usually told Berry what happened after every closed-door meeting, but not meetings with these two Germans. Adamm Smith was equally clandestine about Lehmeyer and Kloe. Smith was several layers closer to the boss than Berry, and Berry was starting to notice Smith’s lies and obfuscations. Smith had recently flown to Brazil for Crutchfield, collecting Amazon tree boas that he shipped, falsely labeled, out of Suriname. “Adamm told me the snakes had been collected on the Suriname side of the river—that they’d swum across from Brazil. Then I looked at a map and saw the river was like ten miles wide,” Berry said. In April 1995, when Crutchfield dispatched one of his low-level employees to Manhattan and put him up for two nights at the Waldorf Astoria hotel, Berry was roiled. But Adamm Smith cautioned Berry that he didn’t want anything to do with this trip.

  When the employee returned from New York City with a bag full of Madagascar tree boas, Sanzinia madagascariensis, Berry understood what the problem was. “I knew they were [CITES] Appendix I and illegal as hell,” he said, and the whole thing stank to him of Lehmeyer and Kloe. Crutchfield insisted the snakes had been bred in Germany, and had all the accompanying paperwork. “I had a heart-to-heart with him,” Berry said. “Tom denied any illegality. He pretended to listen to me. He said he had learned his lesson with the Fijis.”

  CRUTCHFIELD WAS thrilled with Lehmeyer’s baby Sanzinia when he saw them. Few reptile enthusiasts had ever laid eyes on Madagascar tree boas. Usually they were brown. These, though, had notes of bright orange and red along their entire bodies. “Every single one was absolutely gorgeous,” Crutchfield said. He called Lehmeyer to say so.

  Lehmeyer informed Crutchfield that his checks totaling $14,000 from the Waldorf Astoria meeting had bounced. Crutchfield insisted it must have been a bank error, though it was more likely just his usual negligence; the electricity at his house had been shut off again, and Randal Berry had to plead with Florida Power & Light to get it turned back on.

  Every day, sometimes more than once a day, Lehmeyer called Lake Panasoffkee, demanding his money. Wolfgang Kloe would call on Lehmeyer’s behalf, or Lehmeyer’s wife called, appealing to Penny. Kloe and Lehmeyer had yet to be paid when they arrived for the Orlando expo that August, with fresh Madagascan snakes and tortoises for their now-myriad customers, including, unfortunately for them, the undercover agent Ken McCloud.

  McCloud knew more about reptiles than anyone else at Fish and Wildlife. He styled himself as the snake guys did, with a ponytail and a goatee, and worked under one of those insipid pseudonyms the wildlife agents always seemed to pick: “Mark Phillips.” Over dinner, Kloe and Lehmeyer complained about the $14,000 Crutchfield owed them. McCloud took note. McCloud had been following Lehmeyer for two years, but was only just starting to understand the Crutchfield connection. Hank Molt had informed Fish and Wildlife of that connection years before, in a valiant effort to get Crutchfield reindicted, but the agency had no central computer system then, and the information was missed.

  CRUTCHFIELD HAD more on his mind than paying Kloe and Lehmeyer. He was about to serve his truncated sentence for the Fiji iguanas, a prospect that caused him to do the unthinkable—cancel his August pre-expo festivities. Foreign guests wouldn’t be toasted at Catfish Johnny’s this year, or get to throw dead rats to his crocodiles. But Crutchfield forced himself to attend the expo as a matter of pride, and since he could not avoid the two Germans there, he finally paid them. The following Monday, Penny Crutchfield drove her husband to the federal prison camp in Jesup, Georgia, where for five months he taught English to Mexicans, lifted weights, and read nature books in the library.

  THE NEXT summer, in Madagascar, some seventy-five young plowshare tortoises were stolen from a British zoo’s conservation post less than a mile from where the group of Germans had been shot three years earlier. This heist was spectacular and greedy and immediately big news. Plowshare tortoises, a golden, high-domed species, numbered less than a thousand in the wild, and maybe only a few hundred. Outside Madagascar there were just two in captivity, both of them ancient and one of them sterile. No form of paperwork could cover a plowshare tortoise; it was worse than a Fiji iguana.

  Neither the Feds nor the reptile dealers had any idea who’d engineered so egregious a heist, though there were rumors about one Dutchman, and vague suspicions about Anson Wong. Crutchfield hoped no one would think he had stolen the tortoises—it was just too evil. Crutchfield wondered if Frank Lehmeyer had done it, since Lehmeyer had phoned a month before the theft, asking about the “market value” of plowshare tortoises, a species that hadn’t been on the market since 1972. The plowshare theft was a mystery, but it was widely assumed, in the summer of 1996, that at least some of the tortoises would make their way to the Orlando reptile expo that August.

  FRANK LEHMEYER elected not to attend the expo. After the plowshare incident, the expo would be swarming with Feds, and Lehmeyer was already starting to wonder whether one of his customers, the ponytailed Mark Phillips, wasn’t one of them. He voiced his suspicions to Phillips in a phone call. McCloud and his colleagues hoped it was just Lehmeyer’s nerves. “These guys get a heightened state of paranoia when they think something isn’t right,” said Ernest Mayer. “And remember, you’ve got this whole thing going on with plowshare tortoises. Everybody who was a possible suspect was running a little scared. A whole hornet’s nest had been stirred up.”

  Lehmeyer said it was McCloud’s behavior that had begun to alarm him—his “Mark Phillips” persona had been cultivated a little too enthusiastically in the reptile-rogue mold. “He had this long hair, cowboy boots. He would smoke in the nonsmoking section and then tell the waitress to fuck off,” Lehmeyer said. “We started to make fun of him because he was asking for crazy things from Madagascar—‘I need four aye-ayes, all wild caught.’ We said, ‘Oh yeah, Mark, okay.’ ”

  Lehmeyer’s anxieties prevented him from traveling to the 1996 expo, but not from sending animals. He and Kloe had collected so many by now that there was really little choice. Kloe was willing to travel to Florida and sell the animals, but not to carry them. So Lehmeyer hired a courier, a twenty-five-year-old Briton named Simon Harris, who insisted on being paid in snakes. At his house in Speyer, Lehmeyer supervised as his wife removed Harris’s underwear from his suitcase and repacked it expertly with sixty-one Sanzinia and four baby radiated tortoises. The Lehmeyers drove Harris to the airport.

  Wolfgang Kloe awaited Harris in Florida. Kloe had come early with his wife and daughters, and planned to take Harris’s delivery at the Best Western Bushnell, the hotel closest to Crutchfield’s place. He would sell what animals he could to Crutchfield and bring the rest to the expo. As smuggling plans go, it was all very simple and workable, but when Simon Harris reached Orlando on the evening of August 12, a customs inspector felt something wiggle.

  Agent Ernest Mayer was in the air
port when Harris was stopped. Mayer wasn’t targeting Harris—he had never even heard of him. He was looking for reptile smugglers in general. “The only time these clowns would come into the country was at the reptile show,” he said. What Harris confessed—that he had come to deliver Lehmeyer’s animals to Wolfgang Kloe in a hotel right near Tom Crutchfield’s place—“was like a gift,” Mayer said.

  SIMON HARRIS agreed to wear a wire and make his delivery to Kloe. If all went as the agents hoped, Kloe would drive the animals straight to Crutchfield’s, and everyone would be arrested. In the morning, Ernest Mayer drove Harris to the Best Western Bushnell. Two teams of agents followed. Instead of finding Kloe, Harris found a note taped to Kloe’s door telling Harris he’d left for the Waffle House, because the kids had gotten hungry. Mayer changed his mind then and there about tailing Kloe to Crutchfield’s. “He’s at the Waffle House for breakfast, with all these people there, and you’ve got family members involved. We had no guarantee he was going to go to Crutchfield’s—are we gonna try to follow this person around for days?” The agents sent the wired-up Harris inside the Waffle House. They would arrest Kloe on sight.

  Harris refused to sit down with Kloe’s family, demanding instead that Kloe come out to the parking lot. There, the agents pushed Kloe to the ground. Kloe, said Mayer, “didn’t seem to be too bad of a guy.” He was a smallish man with feminine features who acted passive and cooperative, and the agents, who felt awful arresting Kloe while his daughters looked on, cuffed his hands in front of his body, for his dignity and comfort. Mayer took off toward Crutchfield’s place, leaving the remaining agents to load Kloe and Harris into separate cars and drive them to Orlando. Many hours later, Mayer heard what happened next.