Stolen World: A Tale of Reptiles, Smugglers, and Skullduggery by Jennie Erin Smith

(Crown, 336 pages, $25)

“If you visited a major zoo anytime from the 1960s to the 1990s,” chances are good that the scaly creatures you saw in the reptile room got there illegally, said Randy Dotinga in The Christian Science Monitor. Journalist Jennie Erin Smith’s deeply funny new book unveils the “colorful, law-unabiding characters” behind that underground trade. Her subjects are men who spent their boyhoods in basements playing with pythons and their adulthoods smuggling baby boas onto commercial flights in suitcases, in socks—even, in one case, in a prosthetic leg. A federal crackdown in the late 1990s all but ended the racket, but for years, “zoo officials either looked the other way” or “actively slithered into illegal deals” with these rogues.

Smith couldn’t have found a better collection of characters than the “risk junkies” she’s assembled, said Laura Miller in Salon.com. In their heyday, these ponytailed “snake geeks” lived lives straight out of “an Elmore Leonard novel.” There’s Hank Molt (his real name), who ran a “mammal-free pet shop” in Philadelphia before he started assembling a ragtag cadre of smugglers, including one known for carrying a suitcase “filled with knives and dead birds and LSD.” Molt’s main rival, Tommy Crutchfield, was a steroid-popping snake enthusiast with a “background in the Southern tradition of private roadside zoos.” One Crutchfield sidekick made it through a frisking once by telling customs that the python under his shirt was a tumor.

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“This is all disgraceful, of course,” said Carolyn See in The Washington Post. These men profess to love reptiles, but they had no qualms about bundling up shipments of 100 baby snakes knowing that only half were likely to survive. To her credit, though, “she refuses to judge.” She has homed in on a bigger story, about “the futility of much human endeavor.” Her smugglers, who are at once “stunningly innovative” and “dizzyingly incompetent,” operate in a world most of us have never seen. But their day-to-day struggle to keep the game afloat feels awfully familiar.