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SALON (San Francisco, California) 02 January 11 Book Review: "Stolen World": Snake geeks run amok - A wild new account of the strange, scruffy animal trade reads like a real-life Elmore Leonard novel (Laura Miller)
Any work of nonfiction that contains the sentence "He boarded a plane to Stuttgart with a Tasmanian devil in his hand luggage" is a title worth attending to, but when the man with the carnivorous marsupial in his carry-on is merely a supporting character — and not the most interesting one at that — it's time to cancel your dinner date and take the phone off the hook. Jennie Erin Smith's "Stolen World: A Tale of Reptiles, Smugglers, and Skulduggery" is a book that fully justifies such measures, a flabbergasting chronicle of atrocious behavior, foolhardy schemes and dangerous animals that reads like a real-life Elmore Leonard novel. (And yes, a lot of it takes place in Florida.)
"Stolen World" is the story of two men, Hank Molt and Tom Crutchfield, who, at one time or another since the 1960s, have been players in a shady, scruffy scene that Molt refers to as "the reptile world." It is populated by men who have been obsessed with scaly creatures since their youth and have devoted their adulthood to studying, collecting and trading in the animals, frequently in contravention of U.S. and international law. They are, in short, snake geeks, although the geekery of this particular subculture has a distinctly bikerish aspect, complete with ponytails, tattoos and stints in the federal pen.
As Smith details in an obligatory but blessedly short potted history of biological-specimen collection, there has long been a class divide between the academically credentialed pooh-bahs ensconced in museums and zoos and the "shooters and baggers" who are sent off to remote areas to bring back the goods. Despite their own lack of scholarly background, the field men often considered themselves the "true naturalists," while the "museum men" regarded their emissaries as semidisposable grunts. Roaming the tropics in search of rare vipers and geckos is not only extremely perilous; it can also turn the men who do it into risk junkies and "did not," in the opinion of one 19th-century collector's daughter, "fit them for so-called civilization."
Molt belonged to a generation of guys who grew up reading the two-fisted, pith-helmeted adventures of Frank "Bring 'Em Back Alive" Buck, and by 1970, when he first ventured to New Guinea in search of the elusive Boelen's python, he'd already been running a rowdy, mammal-free pet shop in Philadelphia for a couple of years. The mentally disturbed ex-con who lived over the store helped out when he wasn't setting fire to police cars or shoplifting "large quantities of meat." "He had a talent with the animals," Molt said of this individual. "Plus you couldn't make him go away — he would burn your house to the ground."
At that time there were few regulations on the international animal trade, rendering it an industry "totally devoid of conscience," according to Molt — a man who by his own account seems to have tried to swindle everybody he ever met. Soon enough, restrictions tightened, most notably in 1973, when the U.S. signed on to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species and President Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act.
After that, Molt and his cronies (he had a knack for gulling naive young snake buffs into serving as his mules - and paying him for the privilege to boot) were obliged to become smugglers in earnest. They hid contraband reptiles in crates with false bottoms, in cassette tape cases, and amid their socks and underwear - even strapped to their bodies. One man had to persuade an airport security officer that the strange lump in the small of his back was a tumor. Another carried several Fiji iguanas into the U.S. inside his prosthetic leg. Still, Molt has his limits; he refused to go through the airport with an early protégé, a taxidermy enthusiast who traveled with "a suitcase filled with knives and dead birds and LSD."
Even the most prudent of Molt's factotums ran into trouble, like the guys who had to immobilize the cobra that got loose in their room at the Zurich Airport Holiday Inn. A disgruntled junior smuggler broke into Molt's shop and stole his best illegal stock, demanding, as ransom, money that Molt already owed him. He got the cash, but then made the mistake of getting into a car with Molt, who choked him until he gave it back. "We were running more on testosterone than common sense at the time," the ever-quotable Molt confessed to Smith.
Eventually, Molt got busted and did time, apparently never grasping that his habit of conning even his closest associates, then sending them multipage letters filled with baroque threats and abuse, did not foster the minimum level of trust that even crooks need to run a profitable business and elude the authorities. As Molt's star waned, Crutchfield's waxed. With his background in the Southern tradition of private roadside zoos, Crutchfield knew enough to treat his suppliers well (he was famous for dispensing Rolex watches) and was more responsible than the hard-drinking Molt. His employees, however, suffered his explosive temper, which they attributed to steroids, since Crutchfield was an obsessive weight lifter who removed all his body hair with depilatories and covered the walls of his house with floor-to-ceiling mirrors so he could watch himself pop a muscle whenever he felt like it. He once threw a peach pit "so hard it chipped the window of his office."
Crutchfield got fairly rich, but he also ran afoul of the law, which led him into a feud with Molt, who, after serving his time, had created a bogus research institute, a "not-for-profit corporation with the sole purpose of defrauding Papua New Guinea of its choicest reptiles." In time, Crutchfield's legal defense encompassed forged documents, files obtained from the San Diego Zoo under mysterious circumstances, and a Southern lawyer who claimed that Fiji iguanas, when in their natural habitat, were regarded as "the chickens of the trees. The natives eat them" (a lie). Crutchfield and his lawyer attempted a double-cross of Molt that Molt parlayed into a triple-cross of Crutchfield.
All these escapades will take you through a little more than half the book, in which you will learn, for example, that there is nothing that agents of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hate more than being referred to as the "duck cops," and that the line between dodgy animal smuggler and respectable zookeeper can be vanishingly thin. And there's still more to come: the infamous theft of 74 extremely rare plowshare tortoises from a reserve in Madagascar ("one of the heists of the century" according to the New York Times) and an Ethiopian caper involving a recently discovered variety of deadly mountain viper. Smith spent the better part of a decade nailing down the facts of each of these murky events, and she delivers them with an often hilariously laconic deadpan.
Yet the abundant human comedy in these stories never entirely distracts Smith from a central, piteous irony. As often as the major figures are commended by their confederates for "loving the animals," you can't help but notice how many of the poor creatures end up dead as a result of their exploits — frozen, starved, infected, suffocated or simply battered while in transit or under the "care" of the inexperienced and negligent. You don't even have to like reptiles to wind up feeling sorry for those rare and striking enough to attract the covetous attention of Molt, Crutchfield and their ilk. If that's love, the humans could teach the reptiles a thing or two about coldbloodedness.
Book Review: "Stolen World": Snake geeks run amok

DALLAS NEWS (Texas) 16 January 11 Book review: 'Stolen World,' by Jennie Erin Smith (Bill Marvel)
Smuggled drugs and humans make headlines, but another illegal transborder trade is going on out there almost unnoticed by the average American. Bit by bit the world's natural heritage is being stripped bare by traffickers, dealers and collectors. Cactus, rare orchids, fossils, minerals, fancy birds, and exotic snakes, lizards, turtles and frogs – if it can be moved and sold it can end up on somebody's shelf.
It's the creepies and the crawlies that caught the attention of freelance science journalist Jennie Smith, who has written this chronicle, as alarming, bizarre and occasionally as grimly funny as any tale of smugglers and their booty.
Talk about snakes on a plane! And in suitcases, backpacks, purses, even coffins. Pantyhose stuffed with rare tortoises, trouser legs squirming with endangered lizards – the ingenuity is equaled only by the rapacity, as dealers and collectors vie for the latest rarity, the one snake or turtle that nobody else has.
Money helps drive the trade. Coldblooded critters are hot. Almost 5 million American households now keep pet reptiles. Folks line up at reptile shows and expos to buy ball pythons, green iguanas, fringed lizards. Meanwhile, commercial breeders pump out snakes in color "morphs" never seen in nature.
But you get the idea here that the hard-core snake-snatchers are driven by something deeper and darker, some febrile urge to go to out-of-the way places and do dangerous things just for the rush. Henry Molt Jr., for example, went broke, went to prison, lost his marriage, his friends and his health, and yet popped up again and again with sales lists of exotic creatures that made curators and collectors salivate. ("The Dallas Zoo had a thing for his Australian lizards," Smith reports.)
The trouble was, Molt didn't always have some of the things he claimed to have, a fact that got him into almost as much trouble as what he did have. This is as much a story of rip-offs and betrayals as of reptiles stolen and sold. No honor, apparently, among smugglers.
Molt's perennial nemesis was Thomas Crutchfield, a depilated bodybuilder with a crocodile temper. Unlike Molt, Crutchfield actually had the goods most of the time. To favored customers, he passed out Rolex watches like after-dinner mints, building a $2 million-dollar-a-year business before ambition, carelessness, crooked associates and federal authorities got the best of him.
Looking under the rocks, the author has turned up a dozen or so other characters, each as colorful, and several of them possibly as dangerous, as their wares. Gold-flashing Asian rare-animal dealers, snake-smitten college kids, and some zoo people, who should know better. Almost every major zoo in the country has benefited at one time or another from the trade in illegal reptiles, Smith writes.
For some reason, authorities have neglected prosecution of those who buy smuggled reptiles, especially when they buy on behalf of an institution. But then, legal pursuit of the sellers has also been an off- and on-again thing, waxing and waning with the particular administration's enthusiasm for wildlife protection. (Jimmy Carter was a high point; since then, not so much.)
In the past, zoos justified participation in the trade on the theory better alive in our cages than extinct in some coffee plantation or jungle clearing. Smith is unfriendly toward this argument, perhaps unfairly. Programs to breed rare and endangered species – and here the Dallas Zoo has been a leader – have arguably taken some of the pressure off wild populations. Undeniably, development and habitat destruction endanger far more wildlife of every kind than a handful of collectors.
Nevertheless, this is a mournful story for anyone who loves nature, who hopes to encounter out there somewhere along the trail something rare and beautiful.
Dallas writer Bill Marvel has collected snakes since he was a boy in Denver, but he never smuggled them in his pants.
Book review: 'Stolen World,' by Jennie Erin Smith

Seems Tom is tring to save some of his rep. He all ways uses people who don't know the wanker. http://www.reptileradio.net/reptileradio/showthread.php?t=25351

I find it interesting how Amazon.com reviews from readers who have actually read the book find the book to be an excellent piece of literature. Well documented and properly pieced together to make a great story.

But almost every negative review is from people who have personal relations to T. Crutchfield

From how I see it no one who read the book actually sees it as a book about the evils of smugglers “Tom and Hank” but more as a great story of nonfiction writing.

I can’t believe those kids on that forum. With no respect to a grown woman. They haven’t even read the book and formed their own biased opinion just because TC says the book is against the reptile industry. It’s about as ignorant as the person who hates snakes because they’re so biased against them.

What a sad and pathetic industry the exotic animal trade has become.

yep! their evil, screwing all the native people from being able to make boots and wallets. Or if the Governments just exported common animals with a export tax there would be no smugglers and Conservation money from the tax . Supply and demand, its a powerful natural human activity everywhere on earth no matter how brutal the punishment. Now if you want to be a noble bounty hunter of smugglers that are clearly have a "Stolden World" effect, really disrupting the ballence of Nature and being cruel to animals by the megga-ton, then arrest China. Get real. VM.......pic caption "thank God for reptile dealers or I'd be crap" instead i'm X 1,000

Jennie say's it all here.
disquieting meme

My opinion is coming from someone who has worked at a zoo, for an importer and is currently involved with academic herp research. All the while, I have maintained my growing herp collection and frequented the Daytona show. I am in this hobby until I die.

And to let you know where I am, I am not against importation (though we need to completely change how we handle this) or a wild animal rights person. I feel if you want to own something and can properly care for it, you should be able to do so. I SUPPORT the private hobbyist. This is what this hobby needs to resort to. Not farms cranking out animals you and me, producing animals we are interested in and give daily care to. Not someone who throws lettuce into a bin with 150 animals or have workers doing the work, leaving them in disconnect with the animals.

I am against the exploitation of wildlife, which is what the characters in the book represent.

First, I did not find this book to put down the herp community. Aside from the references of pony-tails and tattoos, nothing that calls us out. But hey, it takes a special kind, and I'm one of them. I didn't find this book to have an Animal Rights agenda, either. I don't know where people got that idea. Everyone is just so on the defence about the new laws we are facing that limit our hobby that anything that doesn't paint a pretty picture for reptiles is condemned from the beginning.

Second, in the link posted earlier in this thread, the author brings up a good point that many people are complaining that the book is full of lies, but fail to point of examples. I have looked at the reviews and atleast haven't found any mention of what info in the book wasn't true.

Before I read this book, I heard a lot of fuss about Crutchfield. Having just finished it, the fanfare I have heard is suprising considering he only makes up a modest part of this book. Those sticking up for "Tom Terrific, the hero" (in the book) seem to be Tom, close friends or employees of his and maybe a few people just going with the flow.

REMEMBER PEOPLE, this guy is now trying to continue making a living by selling reptiles to everyone. You can not expect him to embrace this book, which paints a less than flattering picture of his past as a SMUGGLER of ENDANGERED ANIMALS.

(Before I go on, the book redeemed Tom a few times, expressing his admiration for a butterfly, disgust at someone throwing rocks at a bob cat and not stooping to some of the business practices embraced by Sickly Reptiles, but.......)

With my work for importers, I have seen that when importers look at an animal, they don't see it's unique morphology, it's interesting natural history or impressive features about the animal or it's behavior, they see dollar signs. When an animal is encountered in the field, their thoughts aren't "Look at this!", it's "I could get $50 for this." Crutchfield may like the animals, but in the end it's all about the money. Yes, he is running a business, but this is an unhealthy attitude toward wild, exploited species.

Crutchfield is not the victim in this case. Maybe he has changed for the better, but his past is still there and what is at issue. We all care for animals, but when that fascination is overcome with greed, you get the characters in this book. Crutchfield got greedy and then became associated with Anson Wong, knowingly traded in illegal species and did whatever he could to make a dollar.

You may argue that "these animals will just get eaten." While they may be comsumed, they are not down and out (the COMMERCIALIZATION of "bush meat" world-wide is a totally seperate issue which will lead to extinction). If Tom was able to go to Madagascar and bring back all the radiata he wanted, he would bring back every single specimen he could find. He would just be going around picking up piles of money. He would not stop to think about the need for the survival of the species and leave some behind to sustain the population, every one would be on it's way back to the US. Causing local or total extinctions wouldn't matter to him and people like him, they want to make the money, because if they don't someone else will.

Madagascar species are being vaccuumed from the country. In Asia, there are so many illegal radiata in the trade that animal dealers can't even get ride of them, something as prized as a radiata! Chelondina mccordi is another example. The species because commercially extinct at the hands of poachers a few years after the species was described.)

We all care for the species in our possession. We would like to be able to have our little breeding groups at home, but not at the expense of wild populations. These characters would rather see these species in their cages in their backyard than knowing they are roaming around in the wild. (Ya, Crutchfield has done something for this effort and thrown some money around, but that's peas and carrots with him grossing a million or two. And it's the LEAST he could do for the damage he's caused.)

I could go on more, but at the bottom of everything, here we see people who are disconnected from the animals we love. They see piles of hundreds in bins and cages, not the animals we appreciate. They will exploit whatever they can to ensure they are on top and not missing out on any profits.

To those uncertain about this book, read it. It is a history of the beginning of a part of herpetoculture and it is very interesting. It is not a writing that is against our industry but against those who exploit wildlife in the name of profit. You do not have to stand up for Crutchfield and the other characters in this book because you are not them! Make your own way and leave guys like that behind in the past.