David Sneddon's trouble with federal agents started at a booth where he was selling pythons, red-tailed boas and rattlesnakes at Repticon, a reptile trade show in South Carolina.
A customer inspecting his Mojave sidewinders took Sneddon's phone number. Sneddon had no idea the man was an undercover informant for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
For the next 18 months, federal agents surreptitiously recorded all of the informant's phone conversations with Sneddon and intercepted all of their texts as they arranged purchases of albino snakes, scorpions, lizards and other creatures.
