WHEN MASPHAL KRY was taken into a back room for questioning at New York’s J.F.K. International Airport one morning in November 2022, it wasn’t immediately apparent to him that he was going to miss his connecting flight.
The director of wildlife and biodiversity for Cambodia’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forest, and Fisheries (MAFF), Kry was en route to an international wildlife conference in Panama when agents of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ushered him into an interview room. They informed the 46-year-old bureaucrat that the United States had a warrant for his arrest, charging him with smuggling wild primates. Kry assured them they had made a mistake, according to a transcript of the encounter later released in court proceedings.
“I’m from a conservationist background,” he told them. He encouraged them to check his bag (perhaps to show it contained no monkeys) and to talk with his friend, a more capable English speaker, who was headed to the same conference and out in the airport with Kry’s luggage.
The transcript suggests that Kry was confused, a man whose day had taken an unexpected turn but who was mostly worried about making his plane. He could not have guessed then, of course, that more than a year later he’d still be in the U.S.—on house arrest, awaiting trial on charges that carry a maximum sentence of 145 years in prison.
Nor could he have imagined that his arrest would entangle him in an epic, messy, international drama that’s still dragging on. It set off a chain of events that has left more than 1,200 monkeys in caged limbo in U.S. corporate labs, shaken a lucrative trade sector for his country, and kneecapped America’s multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical testing industry—critical for the development and approval of drugs and medical treatments.
FOR THE U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, apprehending the Cambodian official was a victory in a yearslong investigation. “Operation Longtail Liberation” had uncovered deep and alarming flaws in the supply chain of captive-bred lab monkeys used in America’s biomedical research and pharmaceutical industries. Implicated in the scheme was one of the trade’s supposed regulators: Kry’s employer, the agency charged with protecting wildlife in Cambodia, which was and remains responsible for issuing permits to ensure the legal trade of animals. (Cambodian government offices in the U.S. and Phnom Penh did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement at the time, MAFF said it was “surprised and saddened” by Kry’s arrest and that it upheld the laws and principles of international wildlife trade.)
The eight-count, 27-page indictment, unsealed after the arrest, alleges a sprawling criminal scheme enabled by officials at the top of Cambodia’s bureaucracy. Kry, along with the Forest Administration’s top boss and six employees of a Hong Kong–based company with monkey breeding farms in Cambodia, is accused of conspiring to sell hundreds of wild-caught monkeys, packaged with falsified permits, into the highly regulated pipeline of captive-bred animals for laboratory testing. Two unnamed American companies are also mentioned as “unindicted co-conspirators.”
There is even grainy cell phone video that purports to catch Kry in the act. In the video, submitted as evidence in the court case and viewed by Fortune, Kry, dressed in a blue gingham shirt and sunglasses, watches as workers unload caged monkeys from the back of a pickup truck at the Cambodian breeding facility.
In the scheme, the U.S. government alleges, wild monkeys were given identification tags transferred from sickly captive-bred animals that would later be euthanized. And, it alleges, the wild-caught macaques were exported to the U.S. with Cambodian government-issued permits that falsely identified them as captive-bred.
“The practice of
