That's because the Komodo dragon, the world's largest lizard, is a Jurassic Park wannabe. With strong jaws, teeth like razors, and poisonous saliva, it's built to take down cobras, buffalo, and everything in between. It can grow to 300 pounds and 10 feet in length; the one that bit Phil Bronstein was seven feet long.

Photo Credit: Ernest Mayer, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

The Komodo dragon is on the endagered species list.

Why her shoeless husband was inside its cage at mealtime is anyone's guess, but the really interesting part of the story is why the lizard was at the zoo in the first place:

Komo - that's what the zookeepers named him - was evidence in a criminal investigation. The zoo was his foster home while his importer was on trial.

The Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) had broken the case of Anson Wong, the kingpin of international wildlife smuggling. Wong ran a legitimate import-export business that he used as a cover to smuggle reptiles for reprobates with deep pockets who collect exotic, endangered species -- species protected under law by 150 nations.

Some readers might wonder, as the author did, why anyone would want to provide a home for dodgy creatures like Komodo dragons, Madagascan ground boas, or green tree pythons. Suffice it to say that some collectors prize Van Goghs or Picassos, and some folks on the other side of the law prefer exotic, endangered reptiles. And they will pay big money for them.

There's even more traffic in illegal wildlife parts: skins, tusks, bones, skulls, eggs, claws ... the list is as long as one's imagination because the parts are used for everything from clothing to cult rituals. And consider this parenthetical aspect of the wildlife-importing business: drug smugglers have been known to hide their stuff inside containers of legally imported reptiles.

Back to Anson Wong: Fish and Wildlife had been tracking him for more than five years. The Customs Service aided in the investigation, which culminated in his getting busted in Mexico. Mexico extradited him to San Francisco, where a jury there found him guilty of several offenses of great interest to Fish and Wildlife and the Customs Service, including conspiracy and money laundering. He was sentenced to six years in a federal prison, one of the longest sentences ever delivered for violating U.S. wildlife laws, and fined $60,000.

Public funding is such that the Fish and Wildlife Service doesn't have near enough inspectors at ports of entry, so its inspectors depend upon The Customs Service to help make seizures. "You don't know how grateful we are for your help," said an anonymous FWS inspector.

The three biggest ports for wildlife imports, legal and illegal, are New York, Los Angeles, and Miami. The ports' locations tend to determine what legal and illegal species they see; for example, Miami gets the most reptiles because its sub-tropical location favors species like the Komodo dragon, from southern Indonesia, or the plowshare tortoise, the rarest tortoise on earth, which is found only in Madagascar.

Wildlife smuggling is a very high-profit enterprise in part because -- unlike drug smuggling, for example -- it involves few middlemen. Interpol estimates that wildlife ranks third on the contraband list in terms of value, right after drugs and firearms, raking in more than $6 billion a year. Wong alone brought in 14 illegal shipments, some of the rarest reptiles on earth, worth half a million dollars, in only 22 months! Komo would have fetched $30,000 on the black market had he not been rescued.

Nature-lovers, kids, scientists, veterinarians-anyone who cares about animals -- can point to smugglers, who generally get their commodities from poachers, for helping to exterminate too many forms of wildlife. In 1970, for example, there were about 65,000 black rhinos in the world; as of the year 2000, only about 2,200 were left. The World Wildlife Federation estimates that 103 species of reptiles and 58 species of amphibians are currently under threat of extinction, including such exotics as those mentioned, along with the tuatara lizard, Chinese alligator, false gavial crocodile, and dwarf crocodile. Even zoos can't find some of these species, yet smugglers can.

Even worse, almost 90 percent of smuggled animals die in transit: they're packed carelessly, they starve, they die of thirst, crush or eat each other, or are left hot or freezing on tarmacs waiting for planes. Customs inspectors have found tortoises, geckos, and chameleons packed together so tightly that they suffocated. They've seen snakes and frogs forced into CD sleeves, sandwich bags, Jiffy bags, and socks.

Four years ago, a pair of amateur smugglers figured to get rich quick by smuggling critically endangered White Cay iguanas from the Bahamas. Fewer than 200 of these lizards are left; these two smuggled 20 of them - ten percent of the entire population. They all died in transit.

The tragicomedy of wildlife smuggling includes marmosets hidden in hats; parrot chicks tucked into a brassiere, one per cup; tortoises stuffed into a passenger's parachute pants; and Cuban finches hidden inside hair rollers taped to the passenger's legs. One particularly gutsy fellow coming into Los Angeles Airport tried to smuggle snakes inside his jockey shorts; inspectors realized very quickly that this guy wasn't just happy to see them.

There was also the case of birds sedated and hidden under the skirt of a wheelchair-bound woman. They woke up about the time she tried to clear Customs. The tip-off? Her skirt started flapping.

But the pièce de résistance of wildlife smuggling involved an export. It was a gorilla sting back in 1993.

The director of a Mexican state commission of zoos and parks tried to buy a gorilla on the black market to replace one that had died. He offered $92,000 to an undercover FWS agent in Miami. The agent asked Customs to be part of the sting.

They borrowed a gorilla cage filled with droppings from the Miami zoo. They put the cage inside a Customs undercover plane for "transport." They dressed a Fish and Wildlife agent in a gorilla suit and put him in the cage.

When the zoo director boarded the plane to see what he'd bought, he commented, "Boy, that's a big one!" That's when the pilot, also an FWS agent, arrested him.

The director went to trial, but the court found no evidence that he intended to harm the primates involved (presumably neither the human nor the putative gorilla). The evidence showed that he was a conservationist, that he loved animals, and that he intended to use the gorilla for breeding purposes to help perpetuate the species. So the court went easy on him at sentencing: three years of supervised release and a fine.

Jorge Picon, an FWS agent who has worked the Miami port of entry with the Customs Service for 11 years, says of the wildlife smuggling business, "Some folks think they can get rich quick in the illegal wildlife trade. But judges are finally imposing the heavy fines and lengthy prison terms that these crimes deserve. And the word is getting out that it's not worth taking the risk."