“Mad” is a term we use to describe a man who is
obsessed with one idea and nothing else.
—UGO BETTI
NEWCOMER WAS DEVASTATED. HE was unused to failure, and losing Kojima came as a major blow.
He broke the news to Marie Palladini. He had screwed up big time. She advised him to relax and take a deep breath.
“I told him to just wait it out. Kojima would come back. I knew the history of the guy. We don’t like anybody to get one up on us. We’re such a small agency that our players will sometimes resurface if we miss them,” she recalled.
Newcomer was grateful that Palladini handled so well what he considered to be a fiasco. Even so, he continued to be vexed by the case. He replayed conversations in his mind and wondered what he could have done differently. One thing kept leaping to the forefront.
Maybe if I hadn’t acted so quickly. If I’d just asked for meaningless, common butterflies, maybe I would have caught Kojima by now.
“I had fantasized about being an agent for so long. This job felt so right that I never had any doubt I could do it,” Newcomer acknowledged.
He’d been ultraconfident. Now he had to learn to move on. He threw himself into another case and tried to put Kojima behind him.
Newcomer hoped to prove that Aeroflot crew members were sneaking beluga caviar into the country in a consistent and calculated fashion. It was late 2003, and at that time there was an exception in the CITES rules. People were allowed to bring two small tins of beluga into the United States inside their personal luggage.
Newcomer did a detailed analysis of declaration forms and noticed an odd pattern among crew members on Aeroflot flights. Either the entire seventeen-member crew brought in the allotted amount of caviar all at the same time, or none of them did.
Newcomer suspected that smuggling was afoot. Most likely the crew checked in to a local hotel, combined their tins of caviar, and sold the entire lot to a local dealer. Forty thousand dollars’ worth of beluga caviar was brought into the country during a six-month period in this way.
The case looked great on paper, however the U.S. Attorney’s Office turned it down. There was one major problem. The CITES loophole screwed things up.
“All someone had to say was, I brought the caviar in for my own personal use and never ate it. So, what else were we going to do with all this caviar? Throw it away? Of course, I didn’t intend to sell it at the time of import,” Newcomer explained.
He was back to where he had started.
There were plenty of cases to keep Newcomer busy, but Kojima continued to haunt him like a phantom pain. He kept hoping to receive an e-mail or a phone call, only to wait in vain. Everywhere he looked there seemed to be butterflies flying in all directions—except toward him.
PROBABLY NO ANIMAL OR INSECT has come to represent the process of transformation more than the butterfly. Shrouded in mystery for centuries, they’re considered to be fragile symbols of metamorphosis, life and death, beauty and hope. After all, what other species has the chance to be born twice? And how many of us wish we had that opportunity? Except for the ugly duckling, there is no more powerful example of metamorphosis.
Butterflies have fascinated man from the beginning of recorded time, carrying with them heavy spiritual and emotional significance. They’ve been found on Egyptian tomb frescoes and on both Roman coins and funerary monuments. A butterfly emerging from a human skull was discovered in a mosaic in the ruins of Pompeii; while the Greeks use the same word, psyche, to describe both butterflies and the human soul. Not only were butterflies a symbol of the spirit in early Christianity, but the idea of reincarnation was conceived as Brahma watched caterpillars turn into butterflies. The bugs can be found in every country and culture.
Chuang-tzu, a Taoist poet, philosopher, and mystic, was so taken with butterflies that he once dreamt that he was one. He awoke uncertain if it had been a dream or if he was actually a butterfly now dreaming of being a man.
Native American legend portends that if you whisper a secret wish to a butterfly, it will be flown to the heavens and your wish granted. Before a race, Navajos rub the colored dust from a butterfly’s wings on their legs in order to run swiftly and light with its spirit.
Mexicans believe returning monarch butterflies are the souls of dead children, while people in the Middle Ages imagined that butterflies were really fairies.
Children imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps used their fingernails and pebbles to carve hundreds of butterflies into their barrack walls. It was as if they knew they were going to die and hoped their souls would become butterflies. According to eyewitness accounts, butterflies fluttered around Auschwitz and other death camps for years after the Holocaust. Many believed the children’s souls had been freed at last.
And in China, single white butterflies have been found in the cells of recently executed convicts. All had converted to Buddhism as one of their last requests.
The Papilio indra has a devoted following verging on the maniacal in America and Japan and was the focus of the first successful butterfly sting operation in California. As fate would have it, the case agent had been John Mendoza, the man that Kojima outwitted. Newcomer knew the case inside and out. He’d read all about it during his preparation for the L.A. Insect Fair.
Fish and Wildlife had received a tip back in the nineties about Richard Skalski, a pest exterminator at Stanford University nicknamed “the Bugman.” He was known to be poaching protected butterflies in national parks, wildlife refuges, and national forests and selling them in the commercial trade. Included in the lot were rare Papilio indra panamintensis and Papilio indra kaibabensis from Death Valley Monument and Grand Canyon National Park.
Working with him was Tom Kral, a young real estate assessor. While Skalski was described as an emotionless neat freak, Kral was filled with enough emotion to fuel a jet engine. Completing the group was fellow poacher and associate Mark Grinnell. At fifty years old, Grinnell still lived with his parents in a room that should have been disinfected, scrubbed, and cleaned as part of his punishment.
The trio spent a decade doing the job of three environmental wrecking balls. They lived, breathed, and dreamed of nothing but butterflies, documenting their passion for the winged insects in a series of four hundred letters, many of which were signed “Yours in Mass Murder,” “Yours in Crime,” and “Yours in Poaching.” Naturally, they kept their correspondence, which was eventually found by Fish and Wildlife.
Skalski’s collection of Kaibab swallowtails was reputed to be the largest of its kind in the world. He was absolutely gaga over the little black butterflies. Patches of blue on their hind wings danced before his eyes. The dabs of color resembled sprinklings of fairy dust, each punctuated by a single fiery red flame.
The trio was also obsessed with precisely labeling their prey. Every tiny butterfly sported four toe tags containing the pertinent information: where the bug was caught, by whom, and exactly when. It made the prosecutor’s job of convicting the men that much easier.
Like most trophy seekers, the men relished the thrill of the hunt. Skalski would obsessively drive from Redwood City, California, to the Grand Canyon in one night, fueled by six-packs of Coca-Cola, along with his passion for indra. Meanwhile, Kral took twenty thousand envelopes on one collecting trip, fully expecting to fill them all up. He was disappointed to return after having gathered only nine thousand Rocky Mountain butterflies.
The adrenaline rush came not just from the hunt but from then taking their quarry home with them. All the while they reveled in knowing the prey was theirs as they spread and pinned each butterfly’s wings. Sterile, glittering equipment routinely lay spread on Kral’s dining room table as though he was a surgeon. The numerous pieces were specifically used for mounting his catch. It was part of the ritual.
“It’s beyond a passion. It becomes fanatical. Obsessed collectors have to have every single type, every single specimen, and cost is no object. They want something that’s easy to dominate. It’s a control issue. They have the power of life and death over butterflies,” explained Fish and Wildlife entomologist Chris Nagano.
Skalski and Kral went to great lengths to keep their collecting spots hidden, revealing them to only a select few. “I’m entrusting you with my secret! Do not share it with anyone,” Skalski once wrote to Kral.
“Because some of the things you sent me are on the endangered species list, I will be careful not to reveal where I got them . . . it’s best to trade ‘under the table’ like this,” Kral responded.
“It’s like controlling DeBeers diamonds,” Nagano explained. “They kept their locations secret so that they were the only ones to have access to certain butterflies.”
Kral pretended to be a bird-watcher, or simply claimed ignorance of the law if caught while collecting. He’d quickly stash away his portable butterfly net, known as a “National Park Special.”
Fish and Wildlife agents found one of the finest collections of butterflies ever seen during their raid on Tom Kral’s home. They spent eleven hours combing through what Nagano estimated was more than 100,000 butterflies, of which 1,637 species were illegal. But a far eerier discovery awaited Special Agent Mendoza at Richard Skalski’s house.
He entered Skalski’s kitchen and opened the refrigerator door to find something he’d never seen before. Mendoza froze at the sight of a newly emerged butterfly, still alive but entombed in a glassine envelope. The light and heat in the room worked its magic as the butterfly started to awake from its slumber. Its feet began to move as though it understood its fate and was struggling to escape. The volume mysteriously grew until it erupted into a Greek chorus and the crackling of glassine envelopes filled Mendoza’s veins like ice water.
His horror intensified as he slowly realized that hundreds of newly emerged butterflies were neatly stacked inside, each held captive in its own pristine cell. All were alive, though they’d been imprisoned for weeks. The cold, dark refrigerator kept them in a semi-dormant state until the internal fat in their wings metabolized. Then they’d be thrown into Skalski’s freezer to die. He’d be left with perfect specimens that hadn’t flapped off a single scale.
The butterflies now reacted en masse to the sun and warmth by stomping their “feet,” the only appendages they could propel. Thousands of little legs joined in the struggle to be free of the glassine envelopes. The sound was the stuff of nightmares, as if thousands of nails frantically scratched within prematurely closed coffins.
An even more bizarre sight awaited the agents in Skalski’s bedroom, where dozens of indra pupae were taped to the ceiling above his bed; that way he could lie awake and watch, excited as a child to unwrap a new gift. The little mummies were the last thing he saw at night and the first thing he saw when he woke in the morning. He eagerly waited for each butterfly to emerge. They would know only a moment’s freedom before being confined to death within transparent glassine walls. Approximately eighty-seven Papilio indra kaibabensis swallowtails were found in Skalski’s home. It was the largest collection of its kind in the world.
Catching and possessing perfect butterflies was what Skalski, Kral, and Grinnell lived for. Altogether, 2,375 butterflies were confiscated from the three men, including 14 of the 20 North American butterflies that were listed under the Endangered Species Act at that time.
“They’re hunting trophies, but we’re hunting them. They’re our trophies,” commented former agent Pete Nylander. “In that sense, we’re more like them than many people realize.”
Skalski received five months in jail and a fine of three thousand dollars. Kral and Grinnell were given each three years probation, a three-thousand-dollar fine, and ordered to perform community service. But other collectors have been known to be equally illegal and greedy.
“There’s an unspoken code of ethics that you don’t really want to collect more than you need. Every now and then you get an individual who not only takes hundreds of specimens but also cuts down all of their food plants so that other collectors won’t be able to get them. This is where you cross the line into the pathological,” explains entomologist Ken Osborne.
“Some of these people you find are pirates,” butterfly dealer Ken Denton agrees. “They’re outlaws and they’re collecting for commercial gain. Their incentive is to try and make all the money they can. They don’t care about the laws and the rules.”
Denton believes the focus should be more on observing butterflies and less on collecting them, as mounting habitat loss occurs. “People look at butterflies as a replenishable resource, but that’s not actually the case.”
Is it possible, then, to separate a pure love of butterflies from the obsessive urge to collect them? That seems to be the challenge. It was a fascination with butterflies that captivated collectors in the first place. Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that even butterflies should not be possessed.