'Monsters of God' Premieres on HBO: Inside Reptile Smuggling — SkimNews
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- Monsters of God, a five-part HBO docuseries by Eric Goode and Jeremy McBride, premiered this week exploring the global reptile smuggling trade and is based on the 2008 true-crime book "The Lizard King"
- The series traces the trade from Hank Molt, a 1960s cheese salesman who built a reptile mailing empire and was federally indicted in 1977 on more than 200 smuggling counts (serving just 90 days), through successors Tommy Crutchfield, Ray Van Nostrand, Mario Tabraue, and Malaysia's Anson Wong — dubbed the "Pablo Escobar of animal trafficking"
- Ray Van Nostrand died during filming just short of his 80th birthday while battling dementia; the filmmakers chose to pair his interviews with son Michael, who expanded the family business and was imprisoned for turtle trafficking, in an editorial decision pushed by an editor whose own father had dementia
- Mario Tabraue, who appeared in Tiger King and served 12 years of a 100-year sentence after a 1989 narcotics and racketeering conviction, was bitten by a Gila monster during filming — McBride noted the venom compound led to the development of GLP-1 drugs
- Slash contributed guitar music underscoring the series, with a vinyl release planned; Eric Goode joked the production is "really good at putting people in prison inadvertently" after one subject under investigation was imprisoned during filming
- The series documents how smuggling has pushed some reptile species toward extinction while highlighting zoos' paradoxical role as both enablers of the trade and "seed banks for preventing animals from going extinct," though Goode acknowledged filmed footage of invasive Burmese pythons in the Everglades was left on the cutting-room floor
Why it matters: The series maps a multibillion-dollar black market that has pushed reptile species toward extinction and disrupted ecosystems worldwide — Goode and McBride estimate one subject was sent to prison simply by being filmed, illustrating how closely the trade intersects with narcotics smuggling. With Goode's Tiger King having become a pandemic-era monoculture moment, the new series positions itself as both true crime and a conservation argument at a moment when wildlife trafficking enforcement faces renewed scrutiny.
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