The Lizard King: True Crimes and Passions of the World's Greatest Reptile Smugglers by Bryan Christy

Author:Bryan Christy [Christy, Bryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780446537902
Google: 1C3OeVb6_twC
Amazon: B001BANJV0
Barnesnoble: B001BANJV0
Goodreads: 7028073
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2008-08-01T05:00:00+00:00

With more than thirteen thousand islands, each home to its own variety of species, Indonesia is the jewelry store of the reptile world. It has borders with Papua New Guinea and is a stone’s throw from Australia—both home to rare and protected species. Considering the region as a whole, Indonesia is not just a jewelry store, it is the anchor unit in the world’s most exclusive shopping mall. The main reptile-exporting company in Indonesia was Firma Hasco, owned by Mohamad Hardi. A small man with a ferocious laugh, Hardi had followed his father into the bird business, expanding over the years into reptiles.

Van Nostrand had traveled halfway around the world to see Hardi and to bring home two python species, either of which would fund his trip many times over. He intended to smuggle both species home, in two very different ways.

In contrast to the personal attention Wong had given them, Van Nostrand and Marantz spent most of their time in Jakarta with Firma Hasco’s manager, Andre Van Meer, a Dutch reptile expert who had moved to Indonesia to work for Hardi. Each morning, Van Meer would pick up Van Nostrand and Marantz at their hotel and take them to Firma Hasco’s holding farm to pick out reptiles.

In the reptile world, there is green and then there is green. Green tree pythons are beautiful enough that from time to time when a corporation wants to add an exotic touch to an advertising campaign, the species its executives choose is often the green tree python. They are also common in zoo collections and are almost always seen the way they spend their daytime existence: wrapped in a coil the size of a dinner plate with their heads dead center, looped over a tree branch, like a braided emerald rug on a clothesline. At night they rely on heat-sensitive labial pits to find prey in the dark.

To high-end collectors not all green tree pythons are alike. Locked onto islands, green tree pythons have evolved distinctive patterns and coloring according to their locality. Much as a coin collector might assemble a “set” of different years of the same coin design, collectors of green tree pythons often assemble a variety of “locality type” animals within a single species. The most valuable green tree pythons of the moment were found on the Indonesian island of Aru. “Arus” were characterized by a broken series of white dots along the spine, with licks of sky blue at the edges of the spots and along the lips. In the best specimens, the underbelly was also sky blue. Housed in an acrylic display box (much as a large porcelain doll might be) with a pair of branches to hang on, even a single animal was a showpiece. Collectors paid a great deal for Arus. A shipment of fifty nice adults was worth $75,000.

Firma Hasco supplied Van Nostrand with a CITES permit to export fifty captive-bred green tree pythons. Van Nostrand spent each day picking through the wild-caught pythons hunters and middlemen brought to the farm.

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