The 1970s heyday of the illegal reptile trade was about as weird and dangerous as it gets, something Casper resident Dominic Domenici knows all about because he helped bust it when he was a federal wildlife agent.

At one point during an undercover operation, he was with a suspect in a Subaru crammed full of sacks of snakes when the ties on one of the sacks came loose.

“I reached down beside me to get a snack, and I felt a snake,” he told Cowboy State Daily. "I thought to myself, ‘Gee, I hope that’s one of the friendly ones.’"

It wasn’t. The slithering escapee turned out to be a coral snake, a venomous species.

“We wound up spending quite a while with flashlights trying to find it and recapture it,” Domenici said.

Luckily, the episode ended with the snake back in the sack and nobody bi

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