IN THE BONE BIZ, it can be tough finding good employees. Villemarette usually puts an ad in The Oklahoman, reading something like "Seeking person to remove tissue from animal skulls. . . . Weak-stomached people need not apply." More than once, new hires have shown up, worked until lunch, and not come back.

Skulls gets some strange requests from individual clients. One man wanted his own femur ball, which had been removed during a hip replacement, used as the knob of a walking cane. Recently, a model at an art school e-mailed to ask how much it would cost, after her death, to turn her into a skeleton the school could use. Villemarette quoted a price of $7,500, with a discount for prepayment.

Bone dealers, too, sometimes step outside the boundaries of normal behavior, which brings us back to the smuggling thing. In 1995, Oklahoma City–based agents from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service obtained a warrant to search

During Villemarette's 1998 bust, U.S. Fish and Wildlife seized 500 skulls. Today, he shrugs it off as "a paperwork thing."

Villemarette's business and home, charging that he'd violated federal and international wildlife laws and treaties by falsifying documents related to the origins, contents, and shipping of many of his specimens. In 1998, he pleaded guilty to a two-count felony charge for interstate trafficking and smuggling of skulls from rare, endangered, and otherwise protected wildlife. He served 180 days of house arrest, got five years' probation, and paid a $10,000 fine.

I'd asked Villemarette about this before I arrived in Oklahoma. He seemed comfortable with his past, the picture of a reformed man. "I don't mind talking about it," he said. "I have nothing to be ashamed of. It was a paperwork thing." Then, like a true bone nut, he started to reminisce about one of the seized items, a skull from a 100-year-old babirusa, an endangered Indonesian pig. He misses that skull.

According to Nicholas Chavez, the Fish and Wildlife agent who oversaw the case, Villemarette's problems were "hugely larger than just a paperwork issue."

"We seized well over 500 skulls in violation of CITES and the Lacey Act," says Chavez, referring to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora and the 1900 U.S. government act designed to protect "scarce" domestic wildlife. "In his house, there was a hidden room, behind a big Cape buffalo skull on the wall. Inside were documents and letters and the contraband. It was kind of cool."

Chavez believes Villemarette got off lightly, saying, "Sometimes we find that the judge does not see these things the way we do." Chavez also wonders if Villemarette was less remorseful than he should have been. "I think he thought it was OK because he considered himself a scientist," he says.

According to Fish and Wildlife, Villemarette is not currently under investigation for anything. Whether his obsession with bones will ever lead him astray again is something only he knows, but since the big bust his record has been as clean as one of his specimens.