The specimens went into crates with false bottoms, perhaps crates that otherwise contained legal imports some specimens were put into socks or other hiding places. They would go on expeditions to, say, Madagascar or New Guinea, and hunt up specimens themselves or pay others to do so.
Molt”s usual modus operandi was to convince a gullible young snake fan (such as he himself had been, without the gullibility) to accompany him to distant lands. (Smith describes the appeal of one particular snake: it was “illegal enough to be interesting, and not illegal enough to send you to jail.”) Eventually there came the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species and other laws, but they only seem to have made the work of Molt and others more complicated, not more daunting, and certainly not impossible. In the ”70, there were few regulations on trading animals the trade relied on the conscience of the traders, which was an insubstantial foundation to say the least. By adulthood, running a reptile pet store in Philadelphia was far too tame for him he had to get out in the wilds for his own specimens.
Hank Molt (what a name for a snake collector!) grew up reading tales of adventure and animal capture. There are two main characters that weave through the chapters of the book, although the supporting cast of snake geeks is colorful and distressingly antisocial. She researched some of these stories for 10 years, and delivers them with a deadpan humor that is just right for a bizarre and twisted subject. She is a freelance science reporter, and has befriended some of these smugglers, thus entering a dark world of scales, money, foolhardiness and betrayal. Among reptile enthusiasts, there may be some who share the attitude expressed by one character here, “I just want to play with my snakes,” but such innocents are not Smith”s subject. Those are the sorts of guys described in “Stolen World: A Tale of Reptiles, Smugglers, and Skulduggery”(Crown Publishers) by Jennie Erin Smith. Collecting and dealing in reptiles, however, seems to bring out the most reprehensible, venal and (shall we say) cold-blooded traits of the participants. When you consider collecting as a hobby, say stamp collecting, you expect for some collectors to be informal about their collections and others to be obsessive, and you expect some collectors to be in it for love and others for money.
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