Stolen World

by Jennie Erin Smith

  Morrison would have to lure Wong to a country that would extradite him to the United States for animal smuggling, a crime seldom considered extradition-worthy. Morrison almost pulled it off when Wong said he’d meet Morrison in Vancouver. Canada had agreed to arrest Wong, and it had extradited a far less egregious reptile smuggler the previous year, an Ontario man connected to Frank Lehmeyer, so the prospects for an extradition were good. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police were on board to apprehend Wong when he landed. But in August 1998, just before Wong was to leave, Beau Lewis, who scanned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Web site regularly for useful tidbits, remembered something. He searched for and found an agency press release about the extradition of Lehmeyer’s friend. Lewis forwarded the release to Penang, and Wong canceled his trip. “It was very stressful and a huge blow when Anson said he wouldn’t come to Canada,” Morrison said. The agents brainstormed. Wong loved tropical places and he loved women—maybe they could charter a boat with beautiful women and steer it into international waters? “We thought of all kinds of crazy stuff,” said Ernest Mayer. In the end Morrison settled on Mexico, which had beautiful women, beautiful wildlife, and an extradition treaty.

  BEAU LEWIS’S FedEx scheme grew to involve three drivers and a designated receiver, who was paid $200 for every package he signed for. Wong made a special trip to the Philippines to secure Gray’s monitors for Lewis. He talked to Lewis like a colleague now, not some college kid with a backpack to rent.

  Beau Lewis had by now received multiple indications that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was onto him, all of which he chose to ignore. Lewis’s FedEx driver had voiced suspicions that a package from Wong had been opened and resealed, and later told Lewis he’d seen Fish and Wildlife agents in the FedEx shipping office in Phoenix, inspecting parcels. In the summer of 1998, the Gray’s monitors from Anson Wong—animals Lewis had been awaiting nearly three years—simply never arrived. They had been intercepted and confiscated, at George Morrison’s direction, and sent to the Los Angeles Zoo.

  That August, a large package from Indonesia was returned to the main FedEx office in Phoenix, radiating a foul stench. Some brave soul at FedEx cut open the parcel to find nine dead snakes, partially liquefied from the heat. An agent from U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s Phoenix office was called in to deal with the mess.

  Lewis was quick to find out, and by now he was worried. It seemed inevitable that something would happen, and the first thing to happen was usually a search. But Lewis had himself covered. He’d already sent the one friend he could trust a box full of his most incriminating documents—waybills, receipts, faxes, check stubs, bank account numbers, wire transfer receipts, and every last fax to and from Anson Wong.

  When he received the box, Morrison got a warrant and searched it.

  GEORGE MORRISON paid for half of Anson Wong’s ticket to Mexico City and bought Beau Lewis a ticket, too, though that one was dated a full day later. Morrison never intended for Lewis to make it.

  Wong had some business first in Japan, so he flew from Kuala Lumpur to Osaka, then to Tokyo, and then, circumventing the United States, to Vancouver, which he deemed safe enough as a transit point. In Tokyo, a Japan Airlines representative took his passport and ticket, and then scrawled something into a notebook, which alarmed him. “I asked, ‘Is this procedure normal? Is this what JAL does all the time?’ And she said this is a precaution because of a Swissair crash, and for some reason that made sense to me,” Wong said.

  In Vancouver, Wong found a pay phone and called his wife, who was half asleep. He wandered into a shop and bought sweatshirts that said “Canada,” in different sizes. He stopped at a kiosk for some sushi. “I was eating it and then happened to turn and I caught this guy following me. He had been tailing me since the phones. Could I have turned back at that moment? I think yes.”

  But Wong boarded the flight to Mexico City. He would recognize George, he’d been told, by his Orlando reptile expo T-shirt.

  ON SEPTEMBER 14, 1998, Mexican agents grabbed Anson Wong out of an immigration line at the airport, where he was standing next to Morrison, and pushed him into a line of his own. “Anson was looking around wondering what was going on. He seemed very confused,” Morrison said. The Mexicans stamped his passport, then arrested him.

  The same day, Beau Lewis was arrested in Buckeye, Arizona.

  THE REPTILE sting was wrapping up nicely. By the day of Wong’s capture, German officials had arrested Frank Lehmeyer, albeit only for tax evasion. Belize was then on the verge of expelling Tom Crutchfield. Wolfgang Kloe had been sentenced to forty-six months in federal prison, a sentence that would have been a lot shorter had he not gone running across the East-West Expressway. Mike Van Nostrand of Strictly Reptiles had been caught laundering frilled dragons through Jakarta to Holland and then reexporting them to the United States, among other offenses. He was sentenced to eight months in prison and forced to pay $250,000 to the World Wildlife Fund. Dwayne Cunningham was convicted following years of smallish entanglements with Strictly Reptiles, Crutchfield, and Frank Lehmeyer.

  The government had made good use of Adamm Smith, Crutchfield’s former manager, as an informant. After serving up Crutchfield, which he didn’t feel all that bad about, Smith provided wildlife agents with just what they needed to begin investigating Thomas Schultz of the San Diego Zoo, someone they’d been eyeing for years. “I really regret that—I can’t express to you how much I regret it,” Smith said about Schultz. “That was the one thing that pained me the most. I was complicit in costing him his career. I don’t think Tom did anything the zoo didn’t know about, but publicly he took the fall.”

  Zoos had always presented a problem for the Fish and Wildlife agents, who weren’t stupid—they knew that zoos continued to acquire and dispose of animals in dubious ways—but their will to police them was limited. Zoos provided a reliable outlet for their seized animals. Ernest Mayer had investigated six zoos in his career, but never made a significant case against any of them. Wildlife laws were complex and fungible, and “when it comes to surplus animals zoos are kind of stuck,” Mayer said. “It’s just one of those things.”

  In the course of his zoo career, Tom Schultz had provided countless surplus reptiles to Tom Crutchfield. This was in keeping with the San Diego Zoo’s fairly liberal protocols for disposing of surplus animals. The zoo, throughout the 1990s, was found to have sold or donated a full third of its unwanted stock to private businesses, which in itself was no crime. But using zoo permits to import snakes, then selling them to Tom Crutchfield for cash, then not reporting the sale to the zoo, was fraud.

  For Fish and Wildlife to go after the largest and perhaps best zoo in North America, a zoo that prided itself on breeding seventy-two endangered species, took some audacity, but the agents had been hearing whispers about Schultz since Crutchfield’s Fiji iguana trial. In August 1999, Schultz pleaded guilty to two charges of fraud.

  The San Diego Zoo defended Schultz, paid his legal bills, and encouraged other employees to pen commendatory letters to the judge, on zoo stationery. No one at the zoo believed Schultz had traded animals for cash and pocketed the money, as the Feds were insinuating. All you had to do was stroll through the reptile house to see what the money had bought. Wrote the zoo’s director of collections:

  Collecting trips have been part of the history of this institution, and they are not confined solely to the reptile department. Often times these travels take us to remote parts of the world, such as Papua New Guinea, where literacy is at a very low rate and life is primitive. I can assure you from my own experience, your Honor, that it is not always possible to provide receipts from those with whom one has a financial obligation, i.e., indigenous people collecting in the bush …

  Curators at other zoos, who cringed at the thought of Schultz’s fate befalling them, wrote their own letters to the judge, all arguing the same point—that any truly good collection requires some thinking outside the box. Absent, not surprisingly, were letters from the more pr
ogressive factions of the zoological community—John Behler in the Bronx, or anyone at the American Zoo and Aquarium Association.

  Schultz was sentenced to three years’ probation, forced to retire, and ordered to pay $75,000 in fines. He never kept a reptile again.

  ANSON WONG, naked but for his shoes and boxer shorts, spent his first night in prison awake on the floor of a cell without beds. The cell’s twenty-odd prisoners, who had been curled up on the floor like millipedes when Wong was brought in, were then kicked into the corridor. The cell now held only Wong and a giant man covered by a blanket, and though Wong was very cold, he refused his cellmate’s offer to come share it. At dawn, when Wong looked out the window, he saw that a queue of visitors had formed by the gate. They were families of the prisoners, who had come to celebrate Mexico’s Independence Day, waiting, carrying whole hams and baskets of food. He was hungry and tired, and what he was experiencing “wasn’t fun,” he said, “but it was new.” Then, later that morning, “I heard banging on metal doors like angry bulls,” Wong said. “We heard shots fired and we quickly went back to the cells,” where the prisoners put milk on their faces to protect them from pepper spray. “The visitors started the riot because they were trying to control the main gate and they thought they were being shut out,” Wong said.

  Wong spoke seven languages, but Spanish was not among them. When he couldn’t respond to the word “nombre,” a guard kicked him in the shin. “Shit,” Wong said, and the guard punched him in the stomach. He was transferred to a cell with a brain-damaged prisoner who’d decorated it with “feces all over, some of it dried, some of it fresh,” said Wong. He was grateful for his shoes. When the food cart came around, Wong split a plastic Coke bottle in two. He now had a bowl and a cup, which he stuck through the bars.

  Wong’s extradition to the United States was by no means guaranteed. The Americans wanted Wong to volunteer to leave Mexico. Wong refused them—he would stay. His wife managed his animal business in Penang. He began to learn Spanish from an American drug smuggler named Fred, who also translated his legal documents. One afternoon, “Fred and I were having a tortilla when someone came up and stabbed another guy like four feet away, and Fred looked at his tortilla and there was blood on it!” Wong said. It did not occur to him that prison in the United States federal system might be a cleaner and safer experience. “I figured they were all the same,” he said. After two years, with the encouragement of his American lawyer, he gave up the fight. When the U.S. marshals came to put him on a plane, he demanded time for good-byes with his Mexican friends. His Spanish was very good by then, though it had a noticeably rough edge to it.

  ALL THE delays in getting Wong to the United States caused Beau Lewis’s trial to be pushed back by two years. Part of Wong’s plea agreement was that he would testify against Lewis, the boy who’d been recruited to bait him. It was the second time in twenty years that the agency had recruited a teenager to ensnare reptile smugglers, then prosecuted the recruit aggressively. Lewis pleaded not guilty; Morrison, he said, had entrapped him. Physicians and psychologists testified to Lewis’s immaturity and suggestibility and copious illnesses. Lewis was found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison. But an appeals court ruled that all the government’s delays in waiting for Wong violated Lewis’s right to a speedy trial, and reversed his convictions. Lewis was retried and convicted, and his case was dismissed again, on rulings. A decade later, Lewis was still waiting to see if the government would indict a third time. He had suffered two heart attacks in the meantime, or so he told people.

  ANSON WONG pleaded guilty to pretty much everything, and signed his plea agreement like a movie star might, sideways, with a swirling loop around the letters. Days later, one of Wong’s Komodo dragons, by then a permanent resident of the Los Angeles Zoo, bit off a chunk of Sharon Stone’s husband’s foot during a private tour of its enclosure. “Phil screamed and we heard this crunching sound,” the actress told Time magazine. “The deal is, they pull you off your feet and apparently then try to eat you.”

  Fish and Wildlife issued a triumphant press release about Wong. The World Wildlife Fund issued another.

  WWF believes that the world’s endangered species are one small step safer with the recent sentencing of Keng Liang “Anson” Wong to 71 months in federal prison, sending a signal that illegal wildlife trade will not be tolerated. Wong, a notorious dealer of threatened and endangered wildlife, was sentenced last Thursday in federal court in San Francisco and ordered to pay a US $60,000 fine …

  Actually, the judge had given Wong credit for time served, so Wong would spend only two more years at the low-security federal correctional facility in Dublin, California, where the amenities were top-notch. “Gosh, it was nice,” Wong said. “The guards were courteous. They called you ‘inmate,’ ‘sir,’ not ‘asshole.’ ” All Wong lacked were animals. He volunteered for leaf-raking duty so he could look for lizards. On New Year’s Eve 2003, Wong was freed. He had not seen his family in five years and four months. Wong knew he was not reformed—no reptile smuggler ever was. But it had been an ordeal, for sure, “and it kind of gives me a perspective on things when I want to do something bad,” he said.

  Wong’s lawyer bought him Kenneth Cole shirts and shoes and new jeans, then put him on a plane for Taipei, where he would board another for Penang. Wong upgraded himself to business class. He was given the choice of lobster or duck. He asked if he could have both, and the stewardess said, “Of course,” which made him start crying. Eventually he pulled himself together and asked for ice cream.

  18

  Whatever Happened to the Plowshare Tortoises?

  The story of the plowshare tortoises neither began nor ended with Anson Wong, but remained entwined in a long and fragmented chain of events that started minutes past midnight on March 19, 1993, when four Germans emerged onto a road from a forest trail in Ampijoroa, Madagascar, and were shot.

  The Germans had been collecting reptiles. When they walked out of the forest, they were apprehended by Malagasy gendarmes, who then opened fire. Three of the Germans were wounded; two died of their wounds en route to the hospital, and one, a well-known museum herpetologist named Fritz Jürgen Obst, lost an eye. The fourth man, unharmed in the shooting, escaped into the forest and reemerged after daybreak, shivering, soaked, and disoriented. Such are most of the agreed-upon facts about the incident. On other points, the accounts are so divergent as to be irreconcilable.

  The way Obst recalled it, at eight p.m. on March 18, he and his three companions, amateur reptile hobbyists, were dropped off by their driver at the entrance to a forest path at Ampijoroa. They wore headlamps and carried batteries and reptile-collecting supplies and managed to bag two species of chameleon and three species of gecko, one of which they suspected to be new to science. At midnight, they emerged on the path to meet their driver, who was normally punctual, and were surprised not to find him waiting. Moments later, they saw the lights of a car approaching, but it was not their Mercedes; this one was a car marked with the emblem of the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust, a British zoo whose many conservation projects included a tortoise-breeding center in Ampijoroa. The Germans flashed their headlamps to signal the car. It stopped. To their surprise, uniformed Malagasy gendarmes emerged from the backseat, carrying automatic weapons.

  The armed men seemed agitated, and shouted for passports. One of Obst’s companions, who spoke French, answered that the passports were in the Mercedes, which was nowhere to be found. The gendarmes pointed weapons at the Germans, who had switched off their headlamps and, with the car’s headlights pointed at them, had a hard time seeing what was happening. None of the Germans was armed, but all four were ordered to put their hands in the air, then to lie on their stomachs and spread their limbs. Obst felt safer once he was prone on the road, thinking the gendarmes would relax when they realized the group was harmless. But then one of the Germans recalled that his passport was in his pocket, and jumped up from the ground. There was a flash, and sudden
ly Obst realized that he had been shot.

  Obst was bleeding from his head and throat. One of his companions had been shot so badly in the legs that they seemed to be coming off his body; another, the youngest, had lost part of an arm, most of a leg, and enough of his chest that lungs were exposed. He now begged the gendarmes to kill him. The fourth man, who had jumped up, was unharmed. He started running. Obst yelled at him to stop, but he disappeared.

  Obst begged for help, though he could not discern, through the darkness and his bleeding eye, if anyone was still present. Obst noticed that one of the Malagasy gendarmes was lying on the ground with them. The gendarme, he saw, was dead. The bullet meant for the fourth German had killed him instead.

  The rest of the gendarmes had fled.

  The escaped German, a gecko collector named Robert Seipp, had not run far. He hid in a bush close enough to the scene to see a white man return in a Land Cruiser, and with the help of a Malagasy friend load the two worst wounded into the truck bed. Obst was able to sit up, in the back. The dead gendarme was left on the road.

  After the Land Cruiser had driven off, Seipp heard more cars coming—for him, he felt sure—and he ran deeper into the forest reserve. In the moonlight he saw a lake, and he waded in. Seipp stayed underwater for hours, breathing through a reed. The next morning, Seipp was discovered soaked and despairing on the roadside by more gendarmes, who pointed weapons at him. Again Seipp feared for his life. Then a car pulled up. The driver was the same white man from the night before, who had carried off Obst and the others.

  The white man identified himself as Don Reid, the station manager for the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust at Ampijoroa. Reid ran a program breeding plowshare tortoises, one of Madagascar’s most endangered reptiles.