The next day, Eddie Celebucki, gently spoken and wearing a shirt printed with a Chinese dragon, tried earnestly to explain why anyone kept these things. “A venomous animal gives someone a sense of power and a sense of adventure in an otherwise mundane life. Maybe they have a job that’s not really fitting to who they are and what they do. But they can go home and control this deadly animal,” he said. Celebucki now owned a swingers’ club in Cleveland—actually his karate school, converted on weekends into a labyrinth of beds and a dance floor—and he believed it attracted a similar sort of person.
Molt and Celebucki had not stayed apart for long after their falling out in the 1990s. When they met up again, a year or two after Celebucki left federal prison, their first instinct was to hug. After that they were as inseparable as before. Celebucki blamed Molt for sending him to prison, which had cost him his second marriage among other things, but then, he reasoned, he probably would have been caught eventually anyway. Molt was never comfortable talking about what he’d done to his friend, except to defend himself in a big-picture sort of way. “Once you’re a smuggler, you’re an equal smuggler,” he said. “We were all knowingly involved in criminal activities. Our senses of guilt and stuff were quite diminished compared to normal people. If you can say, ‘I’m gonna smuggle these tortoises because they’re gonna be eaten anyway,’ you can put something on a fake credit card, you can do a lot of things. It’s a very weak code of honor.”
No one thought much of Molt’s code of honor, that was clear. At the Hamburg show, people I’d never met volunteered their assessments of his character, and they were uniformly terrible.
But watching Molt’s eyes brighten as he sold a child a cheap turtle, then scrambled to find a container for the turtle as though he were taken aback by the sale, then launched into a lecture on turtle husbandry, I found it hard not to like him. “You have the same obligation to a five-dollar animal as you do to a five-thousand-dollar animal,” he explained.
For the remainder of the decade, Molt was a part of my life. His friends, his enemies, and the ghosts of his past were never far behind.
19
The Hurricane
Hank Molt was a mystery even to the people who knew him best. They could not imagine where his money came from, whether he had a secret trust fund or some sort of disability income or help from his wife. Molt’s wife they knew only from the phone, and his daughter only Eddie Celebucki had ever met, when she was nine; now she was married with a son of her own. None of them had even visited Molt’s home in suburban Atlanta, while Molt made himself a constant presence in their homes.
Molt dropped in for weeks at Randal Berry’s, and at the Winter Haven, Florida, home of Wayne Hill, the owner of the breeders’ expo, and lately he’d been spending lots of time at Celebucki’s Loving Couples Dance Club in Cleveland, which was starting to become a problem for Celebucki. Molt drank too much in the club, which was bad swinger etiquette. But Celebucki felt he couldn’t say anything to Molt about it.
Molt called frequently, usually from the road. He called after waking up in his car in Birmingham, Alabama; he called while wandering on the Arizona side of the Sonoran Desert just after the rainy season, with snake tongs hidden in his pack; he called to say he couldn’t make a reptile show because he’d run out of money. He could, he insisted, “make $40,000 or $50,000 in one week,” but this wasn’t one of those weeks. Celebucki, Molt reported, was having problems with his girlfriend, and the future of the Loving Couples Dance Club was uncertain.
THINGS BEGAN to brighten up for Molt in the spring of 2003, when Wayne Hill invited Molt on a trip to Germany and the Netherlands, where they visited zoos and reptile dealers and a Dutch friend of theirs named Eddy Postma, whom Molt spoke of in reverent tones. Postma was legendary among Holland’s prolific reptile smugglers. Postma had a handsome, salt-and-pepper look that reminded people of George Clooney. Molt and Hill had gotten to know Postma in the late 1990s, when he’d been caught at the Orlando airport with baby radiated tortoises in his socks, and spent months in a halfway house. Molt and Hill had visited Postma as often as they could in Orlando, lunching with him at the Perkins restaurant, for which the halfway-house prisoners had vouchers. Postma specialized in rare geckos from Mauritius, the Seychelles, and Madagascar. He reminded Molt of his old friend Stefan Schwarz, with all his discipline and secrecy and love of a good project. In Europe, Molt and Postma made plans, big, fantastic plans involving China and Fiji that they proposed and expanded and hashed out, then rejected and proposed anew. Molt proceeded to alarm Postma by disappearing overnight in Amsterdam’s red light district. A kindly prostitute was letting Molt sleep off his drunk, but Postma feared Molt had drowned in a canal.
After that trip, Molt began soliciting European customers. The Europeans’ tastes in reptiles tended to align with Molt’s, as they were much more partial to rare species than to rare morphs. But Molt had also burned so many bridges at home—where no sooner had he reemerged on the reptile scene than he gained a reputation for nonpayment, and even outright fraud—that he had to look abroad for business.
He gave up writing his formidable price lists, and finally bought himself a Web site, which he called globalherp.com. Molt designed the site the way he’d once designed his lists, with all manner of illustrations and graphic embellishments. But people complained that not only did Molt not have the vast majority of the animals he listed on globalherp.com, he also stole photos of other people’s animals off their Web sites and pasted them onto his.
That summer, Wayne Hill, who had a tremendous soft spot for Molt, felt confident enough in his old friend to put him in charge of a new, separate venomous snake show to be held concurrently with the regular expo. Molt, whose last paying job, at Starbucks, had ended disgracefully in 1997, proved ill-suited for the task. During the registration period in the hotel, when vendors signed for their tables and collected their name tags, Molt was drunk. The next day he went missing for most of the show, leaving Randal Berry to run it. Molt was avoiding a German reptile dealer who’d sent him snakes but hadn’t been paid, and he was dancing delicately around a Finnish collector who’d sent Molt money but received no snakes.
MOLT SEEMED relieved when the expo was finally over. He and Eddie Celebucki always stayed an extra day or two to swim in the ocean and enjoy Daytona’s prolific strip clubs, and in their room in a 1950s-era cinder-block motel called the Esquire, they entertained some new friends, a Swiss and a German. The German was nearly seven feet tall, with a leonine face and a radiant mane of pale frizzy hair. Molt had nicknamed him Butterbean, a nickname he liked. In turn he called Molt Grandpa, a nickname Molt tolerated. Butterbean was a builder from a town near Münster; his teeth were black, and he had tattoos on his arms of a nun having sex with the Pope. The Swiss was younger, smaller, not tattooed, and bespectacled. He served as spokesman for Butterbean, who did not have much English. They were venomous snake dealers, new to the American scene, and the type of people Molt described admiringly as “hard-core,” his euphemism for crooks. They were friendly with Eddy Postma.
The Swiss, Benjamin Bucks, was in fact an American citizen, born in Zurich of a lapsed Mormon father from Lehi, Utah. Bucks was only in his early twenties, but already well-known to wildlife officials in Somalia, Kenya, and Uganda. He had lived in East Africa, in one country or another, since the age of sixteen. He carried with him photos of his teenage girlfriends, many of them in the act of exposing their breasts, and of his snakes.
In the room at the Esquire, Molt and Bucks talked and talked. Something Bucks was saying caused Molt to smile a lot and his eyes to light up. Something about Ethiopian vipers.
SEVERAL OF the foreign reptile species most coveted by collectors—Fiji iguanas, Komodo dragons, plowshare tortoises, Boelen’s pythons—remained nearly as prized in 2003 as they had been in 1973. But countless other species had arrived in the Western world to great fanfare but then faded in value and prestige as they began to be bred in quantity. Sanzinia, Womas, radiated to
rtoises, Bismarck ringed pythons: All were middlebrow by now. To find something truly novel had become difficult, which was part of the reason the trade had come to focus on new mutations rather than new species. Ball pythons with ugly patches of white along their bodies—a mutation called piebald—sold for $30,000 apiece on the expo floor that summer. But snakes like that meant nothing to Hank Molt, or to Benjamin Bucks, who was young but had old-fashioned tastes.
Molt, Celebucki, Butterbean, and Bucks left the Esquire hotel and walked over to Lollipops, a Daytona Beach strip club the size of a box store. Molt retreated with Bucks to a table in the back, where they talked intensely for hours and coldly dismissed the girls who approached their table, until the girls knew to avoid them.
The snake they were talking about was Bitis parviocula, the small-eyed viper or Ethiopian mountain viper, a heavy, velvety snake that is a beautiful greenish gold with geometric markings of yellow and black along its spine. Parviocula was first described by a German herpetologist in 1977—very late for a large and ornate snake. Most of parviocula’s equally pretty, equally deadly brethren in the Bitis genus, which include rhinoceros vipers and Gaboon vipers, had been described a hundred years earlier. Yet since 1977, three labeled specimens in a Bonn museum still represented most of what was known about parviocula.
Parviocula remained obscure because it occurs at altitudes of eight thousand feet or higher, and the only place it comes into contact with humans is in the cool, coffee-growing highlands of southwest Ethiopia. Only when the coffee fields get cleared are the snakes exposed and easily caught. In 2002, after one coffee harvest, an Ethiopian exporter had sent a couple of the snakes, mixed in with more common species, to a dealer in Florida.
This was not strictly legal. Ethiopia bans exports of its endemic species, and one of the very few things known about parviocula was that it occurs only in Ethiopia. To import it to the United States would have violated the Lacey Act, but few if any wildlife inspectors would recognize such a snake—indeed few herpetologists would. It was not a CITES-listed animal, thanks to its obscurity, and without the international protections afforded by CITES, it was up to Ethiopia to police exports of parviocula, and Ethiopia didn’t bother. In short, Bitis parviocula was illegal enough to be interesting, and not illegal enough to send you to jail.
Molt had in his possession that weekend the sole survivor among the parviocula that had come in the previous year, an old scuffed-up male. He kept the snake in his hotel room during the expo. When he wasn’t avoiding angry customers, he invited friends back for private viewings, and everyone marveled. Zoos didn’t have Bitis parviocula, but Hank Molt did.
And yet a single parviocula—particularly an old, beat-up one—didn’t quite cut it, and that was where Benjamin Bucks came in. Bucks had infuriated conservationists in Africa by exporting quantities of another protected Bitis species, B. worthingtoni, the Kenya mountain adder. Now CITES officials were considering listing worthingtoni, just to stop Bucks. Bucks knew Africa, and he knew his loopholes. He could get more parviocula, he told Molt.
Nothing brightened Molt’s spirits like a project, though it would be years before anything came of this one. And when it finally did, everyone involved would wish Bitis parviocula had remained undiscovered, left to its own in the cool coffee-growing highlands.
MOLT SAID his good-byes to Butterbean and Bucks, and just before leaving Daytona Beach, he abandoned most of his animals, including the male parviocula, to the care of a twenty-year-old kid from Oklahoma whom he barely knew. Molt was always entrusting reptiles to others to save himself the trouble of caring for them. Only a few animals would accompany him back to Atlanta, including a Gila monster that he’d somehow acquired over the weekend. Minutes before he was about to leave, he took a hard fall in the concrete courtyard of the Esquire motel, twisting his ankle.
On his ten-hour drive back to Atlanta, with his injured foot on the gas, Molt reached into a bag and was bitten by the Gila monster. Gila monsters hang on and chew, grinding in their venom, and the pain was enough that Molt ran his Jeep off the road and ended up in a rural Georgia hospital, which he escaped from the next morning without paying.
MOLT DROVE to Florida frequently that fall, sometimes with a canoe atop his Jeep, and would paddle out onto the clear spring runs, or walk the soft beaches at Cape Canaveral, finding giant bleached-out turtle skeletons and mysterious bivalves. Nature calmed him, and imparted to him a gentle and thoughtful affect that contrasted with his loud, Heineken-fueled persona at the expos. He liked to rewind history in his mind, to imagine places stripped of civilization, the whole of Florida as seen by the first Spaniards landing there.
The rest of his life was in disarray. His wife had recently moved to South Carolina and he was expected to follow, but had yet to. His daughter was angry with him about something, and it looked as though he would spend Thanksgiving alone, “eating pepperoni,” he said. He drank an awful lot. He was constantly generating plans, most of which were not to be realized. He talked about collecting Costa Rican tree frogs for the Atlanta Botanical Garden; about starting a reptile expo in Japan; about constructing a breeding facility in South Carolina. Molt’s future was always brighter than his present, which tended to consist of contingencies: friends turned adversaries, missing funds, dead snakes, undelivered merchandise. He left his phone turned off for weeks at a time. His new European customers took to the reptile Web sites to broadcast their discontent:
Greetings, fellow herpers and anyone this may relate to.
First of all, let me begin by introducing myself; I am a venomous snake hobbyist from Finland with primary interest in arboreal vipers. Before I begin, I politely ask you to take a while to read through this letter. It will only take a moment of your time, and in doing so, may save you from big trouble. The point is, as you will find out, to prevent anyone from suffering grave losses, such as mine, by dealing with one of the biggest con-men in the reptile hobby …
Molt never responded to his accusers. “It’s the reptile business,” he said.
THINGS CONTINUED to get worse. Not just for Molt.
In the spring of 2004, Molt’s German friend Butterbean was bitten by a mamba and had to be helicoptered to a hospital in Hamburg and shot up with antivenin. When he finally pulled through, his wife threatened to leave and take the kids.
Then Eddie Celebucki’s Loving Couples Dance Club was raided by police. Celebucki had never applied for an occupancy permit for the club, which he ran in the same industrial loft where he also lived, taught karate, and kept his snake collection. Molt happened to be visiting Celebucki the weekend of the raid. The police had arrived before the club’s guests, fortunately, so no one was naked, but it was a slow news day in Cleveland, and the local television stations played what seemed to Celebucki an endless loop of “Karate School by Day—Sex Club by Night. Do YOUR Kids Go There?” Celebucki’s children were mortified. The police locked the entire building, so Celebucki was now bereft of his regular business, his lucrative club, his snakes, and an apartment. Later that weekend, when things had calmed down, Molt and Celebucki broke into the building to retrieve the snakes and other valuable items, such as a giant fiberglass dinosaur and a sit-on motorized vibrator. Cleveland’s karate community was quick to shun the formerly popular “Grand Master Celebucki,” whose only material assets after the raid were snakes—thousands of dollars’ worth of Angola, Woma, and Boelen’s pythons. Molt offered to sell them on Celebucki’s behalf, and Celebucki let him. “All Hank gave me was what I paid for them,” Celebucki said. “He profited significantly.”
Even that year’s expo proved a disaster of rare proportions. In the days before it started, Hurricane Charley, the first of four hurricanes to hit Florida that year, flirted ominously with the Gulf Coast, approaching land and then skirting back seaward, as though rearing itself to charge. Forecasts had it effectively ripping the state in half. But Wayne Hill didn’t cancel the reptile expo.
Molt and Hill acted tense around each other now, and
Molt was unnerved to the point of mania by the appearance of his old girlfriend Colette, who had emerged in recent years a remarried, elegant, and eminently respectable reptile curator. She had come to the expo to raise funds for her award-winning crocodile conservation program, which Molt had seeded in the 1970s with smuggled Philippine crocodiles. She seemed equally on edge to have Molt around.
Benjamin Bucks was busy with a new daughter in Africa, but Butterbean made it over from Germany, fully recovered from the physical effects of his mamba bite, though there had been other repercussions. His wife had had enough of his snakes, and he’d spent a few weeks in jail after putting a man in the hospital for calling him a “hippie.” The first night of the expo, Butterbean had to exile himself for hours on a bench facing the ocean, trying to resist an urge to beat up an American reptile dealer who owed him $900 and was flagrantly blowing him off. Molt egged on Butterbean to fight, but Butterbean held fast to the bench, battling the urge. “I am a man of honor,” he repeated to himself, again and again. Butterbean shared a room at the Thunderbird, a motel roughly identical to the Esquire, with a German mortician whose cell phone was filled with pictures of corpses. Molt, Celebucki, and Celebucki’s girlfriend shared a room down the hall. Tom Crutchfield was staying at the Thunderbird, too, but on the far side of the building. Any fears Molt had of Crutchfield physically attacking him had dissipated long ago, but the two had not spoken for a decade, and did not much enjoy crossing paths.
On Saturday evening, Hurricane Charley made landfall on the west coast of Florida, snapping light poles in half, and tore through to Daytona Beach in a little over an hour. The reptiles in the convention center were unharmed, but flying objects and pebbles broke the windows of cars in the lots. Street signs came unbolted and flew bladelike through the air.
Stolen World Page 27
