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MIAMI HERALD (Florida) 03 August 08 Reaping reptiles: Sorting through the sordid secrets of the illegal animal trade and its purveyors (Nancy Klingener)
THE LIZARD KING: The True Crimes and Passions of the World's Greatest Reptile Smugglers. Bryan Christy. Twelve. 239 pages. $24.99.
In South Florida, we love our weird crime stories. And we love our weird animal stories. And we're happiest of all when the two categories intersect.
A few months can't go by without a story in the newspaper about some guy's getting busted at the airport with birds in his underwear or snakes in his socks. ''That's funny,'' we think, as we email those stories to our friends in less interesting places.
But those busts are the rarely visible public evidence of a vast, illegal, lucrative trade, exotic animal smuggling, which Bryan Christy recounts and reveals to great effect in his new book.
The lizard king of the title is Mike Van Nostrand, owner of Strictly Reptiles, a Broward reptile wholesaler whom federal authorities long suspected of smuggling exotic animals in violation of U.S. and international wildlife laws. The hero of the book is Chip Bepler, a special agent with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service who made it his mission to nail Van Nostrand for crimes that were, in the view of most feds, not all that important.
Since we're talking reptiles, and the book's primary setting is South Florida in the 1970s and '80s, Christy has great material, and he handles it well, rarely straying over the top in his characterizations. With this cast, you don't need to exaggerate.
There's Van Nostrand's father Ray, who turned a childhood fascination with animals and an entrepreneurial spirit into a family empire before getting caught up in the drug trade and eventually turning informant in a vast federal investigation nicknamed, naturally, Operation Cobra. The drug trade was an easy step for someone comfortable dealing with reptiles, Christy writes, ``just something a little dangerous that you picked up and sold -- familiar territory.''
Christy does a nice job introducing us to the less colorful but dedicated people on the law enforcement side of the game, such people as Bepler and then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Chris McAliley, who fought against limited budgets and differing agency priorities to pursue cases that many of their colleagues viewed as victimless crimes.
Ray Van Nostrand wasn't the only one to see the affinity between exotic reptiles and the drug trade. After prosecuting a turtle poacher in the Keys, McAliley learns that the ``profile of a wildlife smuggler exactly matched the profile of a drug smuggler; plus there was an added victim: the animal itself.''
For the smugglers, the wildlife trade was attractive for similar reasons. The money was good, and the penalties were far smaller than in drug cases. So were the chances of getting caught. The enforcement attention, everyone knew, was elsewhere. In the major-cases section of the U.S. Attorney's Office, McAliley found ''a very plain reality: a smuggled parrot had no chance against a drug-filled Panamanian tanker.'' Still, she, Bepler and a few others persisted and zeroed in on Van Nostrand's operation, with some unexpected but timely help from Dutch police who were onto one of his key middlemen, a Dutch national.
Christy jumps around quite a bit in time and place, from Ray Van Nostrand's childhood in New Jersey to Malaysia and Indonesia, where Mike Van Nostrand travels to procure rare and valuable animals. Christy also salts the book with occasional chapters supplying history and context for our fascination with reptiles and attitudes toward their import and sale. Yet he keeps his main thread -- Bepler's pursuit of Van Nostrand -- from getting tangled in the facts.
He also resists the temptation to go too far into the details of the ancillary federal investigations that play into the book's events. The urge must have been strong, because the anecdotes in such investigations are so juicy, but for the casual reader, more diversions would have bogged down the story in too much detail.
Christy was obviously helped along with terrific access to most of the case's major players; he even has the notes from Mike Van Nostrand's attorney at Greenberg, Traurig, a former Customs agent whose intake assessment of his new client was as follows: ``We are helping this creep who imports lizards captured in a small valley in Tanzania so he can sell them to kids who put them in cages.''
If the judicial resolution to the book's central case feels a bit anticlimactic, you can hardly blame Christy. That's what happened in the case, and that's how it really works in life, if not on screen. Besides, the real-life action is more than dramatic enough to propel this fascinating story.
If You Go: Bryan Christy appears at 8 p.m. Aug. 14 at Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables. Free. 305-442-4408.
Book: The Lizard King

BRIDGETON NEWS (New Jersey) 19 August 08 Reptile trade author with no ax to grind (Matt Dunn)
Millville: Bryan Christy could have been the director of his family's funeral home.
The Millville native and published author's life took a different path - a direction that found him doing research for a book on the underground reptile trade one day at a reptile show in Hamburg, Pa., a sort-of flea market for reptiles.
Christy stared curiously at a man who was nonchalantly holding an 8-foot-long snake.
It certainly looked like a cobra.
"Is that a cobra?" Christy asked the man.
"Yeah," the man replied. "It's a vemonoid."
A vemonoid is a snake with its poison glands removed.
"When did you buy it?" Christy asked, pressing further.
"I bought it this morning," the man replied.
"You must really trust the guy you bought it from," Christy remarked.
At that moment, the cobra lunged at the man holding it, sinking its teeth into the man's arm.
"The guy looks at me," Christy said. "He looks at the snake and then he says, I guess I really do trust the guy."
Situations like this and over two years of extensive interviews with people connected to the black market reptile trade went into Christy's first book, "The Lizard King," which was released earlier this month and is receiving glowing reviews, including one this week by Janet Maslin of The New York Times.
Like a rattlesnake coiled motionless before striking out at its prey at just the right moment, Christy's literary career has moved in a similar fashion.
Success may be coming fast now, but it took years for Christy to get to the point where he was ready to strike.
Christy never considered writing a career choice as a teenager in Millville.
Although he won writing awards while a student at Millville High School and in college, he considered writing to be a hobby, "like playing checkers.
"I had no idea what I wanted to do for a living," Christy said. "There's no money in writing is what I said ... something I'm embarrassed about to this day."
He contemplated becoming an accountant.
Then he thought about joining his family's business, Christy Funeral Home, a funeral home in Millville started by his great-grandmother in 1898.
His father, Paul Christy, who operated the funeral home with his uncle Matt and aunt Jane, discouraged him from taking that path.
"I told him, Dad, I want to join you in the business.
"He said, No.
"I remember everything about that moment. I started to cry. It was hard for him because it was a family business. He certainly wanted me to follow him. But he knew that I had other things that I cared about," Christy said.
Christy still wasn't ready to be a writer.
Instead, he went to law school and, after receiving his law degree, began practicing law in Washington, D.C.
"I was at some of the best firms in D.C.," he said. "Politics seemed the next step. I had planned to run for Congress, but ended up seeing too many people that I didn't want to be like."
So Christy quit the law profession to become a writer at the age of 32.
He was going to follow his passion, taking the advice of his father, who died in 1995.
Christy's plan was simple.
"I thought I'd write this thriller. It would take me two years to write and would make me a boatload of money ... Grisham-wise," he said.
His first big break took two years to complete, a story for Playboy on the world's most valuable coin.
The story did not make him rich but convinced the magazine to let him write a follow-up story on wildlife smuggling, which became a story about reptile smuggling after a mix-up with one of his editors.
"Another one of the editors had a pet turtle and the facts got confused," Christy said.
The mix-up turned out to a be a blessing.
Christy had a passion for reptiles stemming back to when he was a boy catching snakes and other creatures at his parent's house, in Millville.
"We used to catch frogs and turtles on Hogbin Road and Perkin Drive. There was a whole group of us that traded frogs and turtles like baseball cards," he said.
A love of reptiles gave the author a way to break into the secretive reptile smuggling world and interview some of its players.
What began as a magazine story grew into "The Lizard King.
When acclaimed publisher Twelve received the manuscript and decided to come on board to handle publicity and distribution of the book, numerous requests for radio and print interviews followed.
Christy is being praised for his book's pace and entertaining approach to a subject that many people are unfamilar with.
He said discussions have taken place about turning the book into a feature film, with comparisons being made to the films "Catch Me If You Can" and "Blood Diamond."
According to Christy's Web site, "The Lizard King" focuses on two people: Mike Van Nostrand, who with his father operates a vast criminal empire dealing in the illegal trade of rare and unusual reptiles, and Special Agent Chip Bepler, of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a man looking to bring down the operation.
Christy conducted extensive interviews with Van Nostrand, although he described his first visit to the Florida man's store as a mess.
Posing as a customer, Christy was handed a coral snake to hold, one of the most venomous snakes in the world.
"My hand just started to shake violently," he said.
After Christy ditched the undercover approach, Van Nostrand was surprisingly willing to talk after bonding with him over reptiles.
"They figured I was one of them, more or less," he laughed.
Christy's book doesn't take sides or attempt to villainize the criminals he writes about.
He said it presents his subjects as they are, which has surprised many people.
"There's been a number of people who have said I shouldn't have spent so much time with Van Nostrom. They think I should have crucified him more because he's an animal dealer," Christy said.
But Christy wants readers to decide for themselves.
"The problem with wildlife trafficking is that no one writes about it without advocacy," he said. "I want to do that. I want readers to be able to see this world for the first time without prejudice."
Christy said most of the feedback has been positive.
"The tops at the World Wildlife Fund and other groups have written me personally and thanked me for the freshness with which I've approached the subject," he said. "I'm really happy that the conservation world gets it."
Reptile trade author with no ax to grind