Stolen World: A Tale of Reptiles, Smugglers, and Skulduggery [NOOK Book]

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Overview

Tortoises disappear from a Madagascar reserve and reappear in the Bronx Zoo. A dead iguana floats in a jar, awaiting its unveiling in a Florida court. A viper causes mayhem from Ethiopia to Virginia. In Stolen World, Jennie Erin Smith takes the reader on an unforgettable journey, a dark adventure over five decades and six continents. 
 
In 1965, Hank Molt, a young cheese salesman from Philadelphia, reinvented himself as a “specialist...
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Stolen World: A Tale of Reptiles, Smugglers, and Skulduggery

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Overview

Tortoises disappear from a Madagascar reserve and reappear in the Bronx Zoo. A dead iguana floats in a jar, awaiting its unveiling in a Florida court. A viper causes mayhem from Ethiopia to Virginia. In Stolen World, Jennie Erin Smith takes the reader on an unforgettable journey, a dark adventure over five decades and six continents. 
 
In 1965, Hank Molt, a young cheese salesman from Philadelphia, reinvented himself as a “specialist dealer in rare fauna,” traveling the world to collect exquisite reptiles for zoos and museums. By the end of the decade that followed, new endangered species laws had turned Molt into a convicted smuggler, and an unrepentant one, who went on to provide many of the same rare reptiles to many of the same institutions, covertly. 

But Molt soon found a rival in Tommy Crutchfield, a Florida carpet salesman with every intention of usurping Molt as the most accomplished reptile smuggler in the country. Like Molt, Crutchfield had modeled himself after an earlier generation of natural-history collectors celebrated for their service to science, an ideal that, for Molt and Crutchfield, eclipsed the realities of the new wildlife-protection laws. Zoo curators, caught between a desire for rare animals and the conservation-minded focus of their institutions, became the smugglers’ antagonists in court but also their best customers, sometimes simultaneously. 

Crutchfield forged ties with a criminally inclined Malaysian wildlife trader and emerged a millionaire, beloved by some of the finest zoos in the world. Molt, following a string of inventive but disastrous smuggling schemes in New Guinea, was reduced to hanging around Crutchfield’s Florida compound, plotting Crutchfield’s demise. The fallout from their feud would result in a major federal investigation with tentacles in Germany, Madagascar, Holland, and Malaysia. And yet even after prison, personal ruin, and the depredations of age, Molt and Crutchfield never stopped scheming, never stopped longing for the snake or lizard that would earn each his rightful place in a world that had forgotten them—or rather, had never recognized them to begin with.
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Editorial Reviews

Carolyn See
I'm trying to think of the best way to say how absolutely marvelous Stolen World is and wondering if the answer can't be found in the subtitle: "A Tale of Reptiles, Smugglers, and Skulduggery." Yes, it's got all that, along with screwball comedy and a subtle, understated sermon on ecological values. But…there's more…Because reptiles, eternally repellent and charming, aren't really the main subject here, even though they're a constant ingredient. And petty crime, although wonderful to read about—especially if it's not happening to you—isn't the central theme either. No, it's the guys…What turns "Stolen World" from sober, well-researched nonfiction into a wacky comedy is that these men are at once stunningly innovative, dizzyingly incompetent, quite sociopathic and very low on bookkeeping skills.
—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
In this very disturbing and very entertaining chronicle of reptile smugglers, the collectors and zoo keepers who trade with them, and the federal agents who try to catch them, the humans are as devious, dangerous, and creepily charming as the cold-blooded creatures they lust after. Science reporter Smith bases her book on extensive original interviews with two smugglers: Henry Molt Jr. is a reptile dealer who, in the 1960s, unable to get a job with a zoo, began a lifelong career of reptile collecting involving restless international travel, partner-stiffing, and jail time, with an undaunted enthusiasm that's survived into his 60s: "The reptile business ‘is a disease,' he said, and you can't retire from a disease." Equally outrageous is the volatile, knife-wielding Tommy Crutchfield, who expanded his childhood alligator-and-snake business into a million-dollar empire of reptile hunting and dealing. Even the curators of the Bronx and San Diego zoos let their obsession with the animals lure them into deals in order to obtain illegally imported rare breeds. Smith's affection for these unsavory people gives the book an intriguing moral ambiguity (which might make some environmentalists cringe), but the subculture's brazen shenanigans make for a convoluted, fascinating tale. (Jan.)
Library Journal
Snakes and other reptiles give many people the creeps; however, a few individuals, beyond zookeepers and zoologists, are completely enthralled by them. Obsession and fascination drive some through a succession of stages from simply keeping reptiles as pets to acquiring and selling reptiles to finally traveling to whatever country necessary to find more, stranger, and rarer creatures to satisfy the compulsion and make money. Trafficking in endangered and protected animals is generally reviled, although reptiles usually evoke less empathy than other animals and most people don't understand the conditions by which these creatures are found and captured. To illustrate all of this and more, science journalist Smith documents the lives, travels, business booms/busts, and legal problems of two of the most infamous Americans involved in the reptile trade, Hank Molt and Tom Crutchfield, as well as an assorted cast of frequently slippery, devious hangers-on and associates and questionable businesses and governments in numerous countries. VERDICT All readers will be amazed at the sordid details of how these exotic animals get to pet shops and zoos.—Michael D. Cramer, Schwarz BioSciences, RTP, NC
Kirkus Reviews

Freelance science reporter Smith debuts with an exciting tale of reptile smuggling.

During the Victorian era's natural-history craze, British museums hired working-class freelancers to collect Asian wildlife specimens. Later, zoos in the United States turned to similar adventurers to obtain live animals. By World War II, the heyday of specimen collecting had ended. But that did not deter two young snake-smitten Americans, Hank Molt and Tom Crutchfield, from embarking on the colorful careers recounted here. For several decades, separately and together, they lied, cheated and skirted the law in an obsessive worldwide quest for rare species to sell to eager curators. Many of their best deals violated wildlife export bans and the Endangered Species Act of 1973. A former salesman taken from childhood by "the romance of the snake," Molt began dealing in reptiles in the 1960s, when the animal trade was still little regulated. Working out of a Pennsylvania pet shop (with help from a crazy ex-con), then from a brick storefront called the Exotarium, he filled the wish lists of many zoos. Once, he created a fake research institute in New Guinea to procure lizards and pythons for the Knoxville Zoo. Federal officials pursued Molt, calling him "an agent of extinction" and the "kingpin" of a multimillion-dollar smuggling ring. In fact, he netted $39,000 in his best year. Smith describes Molt's escapades as he travels around the world, using bribes, flattery and phony zoo uniforms, as needed, to acquire animals and get them safely past U.S. inspectors. In the '80s, his Florida-based rival Crutchfield, inspired by the Southern snake men who supplied traveling carnivals, quit his own sales job and built a hugely successful reptile business. His 120-acre Herpetofauna compound included a barn the size of an airplane hangar filled with lizards, turtles and snakes. Narcissistic and violent, he eventually became down-on-his-luck Molt's biggest buyer. Both men did time in prison, but kept coming back. "I'm addicted to drama," said Molt.

A richly detailed narrative of global malfeasance.

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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780307720269
  • Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
  • Publication date: 1/4/2011
  • Sold by: Random House
  • Format: eBook
  • Sales rank: 894,377
  • File size: 5 MB

Meet the Author

JENNIE ERIN SMITH is a freelance science reporter and a frequent reviewer on
animals and natural history for the Times Literary Supplement. She is a recipient
of the Rona Jaffe Award for women writers, a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work
Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, two first-place awards from the American
Association of Sunday and Feature Editors, and the Waldo Proffitt Award for
environmental journalism.
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Sort by: Showing all of 3 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted March 14, 2012

    Excellent

    This was a very well written book. Ms. Smith did an excellent job of giving the general public an inside look at the strange and fascinating world of exotic animal trafficking. I worked for various reptile importers over a ten year period, and I knew all the players in this game that the author interviewed. It is gratifying that someone finally laid to rest the wild exaggerations put forth by "experts" and federal agents. The illegal live animal trade is populated by fringe people who never made any real money, but had an obsession with adventure, travel, and conservation. They smuggled small amounts of animals because they loved them so much. Indirectly, they assured the survival of these animals, as they will disappear from their wild habitats shortly, not from illegal trade, but from encroaching humanity. The notion that this is a multi-billion dollar business was just laughable, but notion still persists. The legal traffic in skins and "pets" is the abomination, not the animals that occasionally arrive in collections from these people.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted January 21, 2011

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    Posted February 10, 2011

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