When a beloved fish gets kidnapped from an aquarium’s display, the city of San Antonio has some questions.Big Time is an Apple Original podcast, produced by Piece of Work Entertainment and Campside Media in association with Olive Productions. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.apple.co/BigTimePod
Chapter 1: What is a touch tank at an aquarium?
If you've ever been to an aquarium, you've probably seen a touch tank. It's an interactive exhibit with shallow basins of water where you can stick your hands in to try to touch sea creatures. Usually you'll find crabs, sea anemones, stingrays, and even sometimes sharks in there. Here's what I have to say to that. No thanks. I don't need to get my hands slimy and sleeves wet with dirty fish water.
And it's none of my business what those fish are doing in there anyways. Now, the reason I bring this up at all is because today's caper takes place in the murky water of one of those touch tanks. It's a story about folks who definitely didn't mind getting their hands dirty and most certainly didn't grant these sea creatures the respect they deserved.
I'm Steve Buscemi, and you're listening to Big Time, an Apple original podcast from Peace of Work Entertainment and Campside Media in association with Olive Productions. Today's episode, part one of a two-part story, is reported by Rajiv Golan.
Chapter 2: Who are the key players in the exotic pet community?
If you've ever spent time around anyone who keeps exotic pets as a hobby, you know they can be more on the eccentric end of the spectrum. Even calling it a hobby seems like underselling it. For them, it's really a lifestyle. It defines their entire personality and consumes an inordinate amount of their square footage and bank accounts. And personally, I say more power to them.
Wave that freak flag high. The exotic pet community encompasses a lot of different types of folks. And among the different communities of bug people and reptile people and rodent people and fish people and bird people... there's a definite hierarchy of weird.
Fish people are very, very different because they love their fish. But it's not like you get to go cuddle it and scratch it. There's an emotional connection, but there's not a lot of touching that happens like it would for, let's say, a parrot or a mammal. Bird people take bites like crazy. They're like, oh yeah, I totally bit my finger and I love you so much.
That's Jamie Schenck. She's a fish person. And so is Jenny Spellman.
I have driven 15 hours from San Antonio, Texas to Atlanta, Georgia, just to go see the whale sharks in the aquarium there. They're absolutely amazing. I'm fortunate enough to live about four hours from there now, so I go see them on the regular basis.
There really is nothing that can stand between a fish person and a fish they love. Except for, well, another fish person. which is exactly what happened on a summer morning in 2018 when a fish went missing at the San Antonio Aquarium. That fish, like many other fish in aquariums around the world, was a no-name talent, a background actor with a snowball's chance in hell at making a name for itself.
But after the great 2018 aquarium heist, that fish became an international celebrity, became so famous that its exact location remains a closely guarded secret even today. One of the few people tasked with keeping that secret is self-proclaimed fish person Jamie Shank.
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Chapter 3: What happened during the 2018 aquarium heist?
She also serves as the director of the San Antonio Aquarium, a place that tries its best to bridge the physical gap between fish and fish person.
What's unique about us? We make it possible so guests can come and touch and feed our octopus, touch and feed our stingrays. And a lot of our tanks are set up that way so that we can provide an experience for the guests to have an emotional attachment with that animal.
As you can imagine, providing that sort of interactive experience is a pretty demanding job.
My days and my nights are pretty much merged together.
But that's the sort of commitment you only find when you're dealing with fish people. And it's absolutely necessary when you're overseeing over 8,000 animals.
I mean, you're dealing with life, right? So you never know who's going to be sick, who's going to do this, babies being born, new projects being completed, everything like that.
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Chapter 4: What challenges do fish people face?
The folks running the San Antonio Aquarium have seen just about everything. Newborn lemur needs to be hand-fed overnight? No problem. Iguana escape the terrarium? They can catch them with one arm tied behind their back. That's the kind of folks that keep the aquarium ticking, keep all the guests happy, and all the animals safe. Folks like whale shark superfan Jenny Spellman.
My name is Jenny Spellman. I was a general manager at the San Antonio Aquarium.
Jenny Smelin pulled into work on July 28, 2018, expecting it to go like any other day. She unlocked the doors and started running down the checklist of her duties as general manager.
We opened up the facility. We put cash in the registers. We made sure all the staff showed up. We had a morning meeting just like every morning, kind of introducing myself to the staff I hadn't met yet.
The reason that she hadn't met all the staff yet was that Jenny had just been hired on as general manager a few days earlier.
They showed me how to unlock the doors, how to reset the alarm code, showed me where the bathrooms were, and how to get money to the bank. I'd done some training for two days, and then day three, this happens.
Her name tag might have been born yesterday, but Jenny sure wasn't. She'd worked in zoos, aquariums, and vet offices her whole life, and if Jenny had a nickname, it would be the brick wall. Because nothing got past her. This was a big job for Jenny, and the aquarium was gigantic, over 50,000 square feet, almost the size of a football field.
Aside from 8,000 animals and about a dozen touch pools, there was a gift shop, a bouncy house, an arcade, snorkeling pools, an aviary, interactive lemur and otter exhibits, and a handful of mermaids waddling around posing for photos. Managing a place like that was like riding a bull, except you had to hold on for a whole day. The rodeo kicked off as soon as the doors opened.
And at some point in the early morning, there was a truck that parked in a towway zone. It was this big red truck right by the gift shop, which is where people exited from. So I also was trying to track down the owner of that. We had announcements go out over the PA, trying to get the owner of the truck to move it. But I got busy and kind of forgot about that.
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Chapter 5: How did the theft unfold at the San Antonio Aquarium?
What did I tell you earlier? Brick wall.
So I decided to go confront them and see what happened.
But while Jenny's on her way out the door to find this guest, the fish keepers find a big problem in the cold water room.
So in the back, we have sanitization buckets. We have a bleach diluted bucket so we can sanitize our scrub brushes or anything that we put into the tanks so we're not cross-contaminating. So he took it and he dumped bleach into our system. And if you're familiar with aquariums, bleach kills fish. So it was kind of like, okay, this guy took our shark. He's also trying to crash one of our systems.
It's a big enough emergency that it warrants calling the assistant animal husbandry director, Jamie Shank, on her day off.
You're kind of in a bit of a state of shark, a state of shock. Then it's like you're trying to take care of almost two things at one time. Then the staff members were on the phone with me. What do we do? What do we do?
This was the aquarium equivalent of a robber throwing marbles behind him. But these aren't just any old rent-a-cops. These are San Antonio's finest marine caretakers.
Basically, we did a large water change and we're able to put dechlorinators into the water really fast. So in the end, we actually had zero loss, which is amazing. And then at the same time, go hunt him down. So we were moving pretty fast.
With Jamie and her staff taking care of the fish tank, it's all on Jamie to track down the thief. And she is in hot pursuit.
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Chapter 6: What evidence did Jenny find after the theft?
Now they had a prime suspect and video evidence. But they still didn't know what had actually been stolen.
I thought maybe he had sold like a starfish or something, something really easy, something kind of portable. You can just throw in a little bucket or whatever. But once they examined the video, we realized that he wasn't in the starfish tank. He was in the shark tank.
Now, before you start imagining the shark tank from Austin Powers, a little jacuzzi with two great white sharks in it, let me clarify things here. The sharks we're talking about are not big, man-eating, shark-weak, nightmare-fuel type sharks. The sharks in question were a lot smaller, about a foot or two long, and a hell of a lot cuter.
The tank was about the size and height of a dinner table, and the top was totally open because you were allowed, encouraged, to reach inside and touch the sharks.
Yeah, we saw exactly what happened. Stirring up the sharks to get them real excited and pulling a nut out of his pants, reaching down, scooping one up, and then hurriedly walking over to one of our back rooms and disappearing with that.
Jenny called the animal caretakers to check on the tank.
They went and looked and did inventory.
If he took a bamboo shark, it would have been a lot harder for us to identify because we have like hundreds of bamboos. And it would have been more difficult for me to identify.
After a quick head count, it was clear which shark was missing.
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Chapter 7: Who was the prime suspect in the aquarium heist?
So I reached out to my friend at the police department in San Antonio and had him kind of talk to his superior officers. And that's when they actually started getting some traction on the case. As soon as the cops got more involved, that's when the media circus began. I was taking calls until about three in the morning. It was insane.
I did so many interviews, I lost my voice.
It was absolutely out of body. I spent the first two weeks that I was there, like not only learning my job, but also fielding as many interview requests as possible, you know, get all the publicity we could. And I understand like it's, you know, any publicity is good publicity for them.
Almost overnight, Miss Helen became an international celebrity. Something about the absurdity of the theft, a shark in a baby stroller, was just absolutely captivating.
All right, a trio of thieves took Shark Week too far. They walked right into a busy Texas aquarium and then right out with a live shark.
Good morning to you.
Something about the name Miss Helen just made the shark so knowable and familiar, like she was your first grade teacher or the nice old lady you see at the post office sometimes. It felt personal.
Actually, if you want to know a secret, she was given that name on that day. For the media. I'm sorry to ruin your world. She had another name, but Jamie just didn't know what it was and she just threw out Miss Helen.
Yeah, well, now I'm upset. You're upset. No one's happy. But the story isn't over yet.
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Chapter 8: What type of sharks were involved in the theft?
and the San Antonio police were dragging their feet. It took them two days to follow up on the license plate number that Jenny had written down. They traced it back to an address in a small suburb outside town, and when they drove by the house, they saw the red truck sitting in the driveway. They knocked on the door, and the owner of the truck stepped out.
He told the cops he'd been out of town, that his truck may have been used without his knowledge. Before the cops left, however, they spoke with a neighbor who said they'd seen another guy next door carry a large fish into his house a few days earlier. Now they had a solid lead, and the cops returned later that day to investigate.
But they didn't really have a protocol for what to do if they actually found the shark. So the police called up Jenny and Jamie and asked them to come over.
So I rushed over there because I wanted to be a part of it, and Jamie came as well and brought equipment for bringing her back. An officer showed up, and then two or three other police cars showed up, and then they went and knocked on the door. We were made to wait in the driveway.
And while they searched the house... I'm just washing all this, and I'm just like, I just want my shark back. Like, you can take him away. I just want my shark.
They walked in, they walked through the living room, looked at some of the fish tanks in the living room, and then the man that stole the shark volunteered that it was in the garage. So they opened the garage door.
As the garage door slowly raised and rolled up, a full picture came into focus for Jenny and Jamie. And finally, the police let them come inside to see everything for themselves.
The whole back wall was covered with tanks and fish. So he was a hobbyist. He definitely had experience. He wasn't some newbie that never took care of fish before.
There was a huge above-ground swimming pool full of saltwater.
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