New Jersey at the Heart of New Docuseries On Exotic Reptile Smuggling

In the iconic Sopranos episode “Pine Barrens,” Paulie Walnuts and Christopher Moltisanti wander the vast south Jersey woodlands frozen and frightened.

Imagine if they’d stumbled upon dozens of dead reptile carcasses.

And yet, just such a discovery is at the heart of a new HBO documentary series from the creators of Tiger King and Chimp Crazy.

Monsters of God—which debuts Thursday, August 6—is a five-episode deep dive into the strange, lucrative and sometimes violent world of exotic reptile smuggling.

It is based, in part, on New Jersey author Bryan Christy’s 2008 book The Lizard King.

“When I was a boy growing up in southern New Jersey, we traded reptiles the way other children trade baseball cards,” Christy has written.  

“I hunted for them after school and on weekends. I asked for books about them for my birthday and for Christmas.… In many ways, true crime stories for adults are what reptiles were for me as a boy. They hold a promise of violence, of mystery, and a strange, almost embarrassing fascination.”

In the very first Monsters of God episode, a Philadelphia-area reptile dealer named Hank Molt goes to war with a Florida-based competitor.  

Both go on to make millions illegally transporting snakes, turtles, iguanas and other creatures from foreign countries to the United States, where the reptiles were then sold to zoos, pet shops and private owners.

By the late-1970s, federal authorities were investigating Molt, as well as his partner, an ex-NFL player also from the Philly area named Eddie Allen.

At one point, U.S. Customs agents came knocking on Molt’s door. The two men came up with a plan to hide the evidence.

“Eddie Allen agreed to load up his car with a bunch of the reptiles,” Molt recalls. “He said, ‘I’ll take (the reptiles) to my house.’… I didn’t know what he’d done with the reptiles at the time.”

In fact, Allen had driven deep into the Pine Barrens and buried all of the creatures alive, as he confessed when investigators confronted him.

“He rolled over immediately,” Molt recalls.

One Customs investigator adds: “He told us where the reptiles were…. He directed us down dirt roads with no signs, no names.  He was good at that, he was a big-game hunter.  He understood the [Pine Barrens].… And we commenced to dig.”

When all was said and done, the line of dead reptiles stretched for 50 yards, by one estimate, with another putting the number of dead animals exhumed at 74.

“It’s one of the cruelest things I’ve ever seen,” another Customs agent says in Monsters of God. “I can’t imagine how those animals suffered.”

An Associated Press report in August of 1977 began: “Zoo officials ‘were just looking the other way’ as an international smuggling ring brought more than 600 rare contraband reptiles into the United States, a federal prosecutor says.”

The same report says eight “of the nation’s most prestigious zoos…received the contraband animals,” including facilities in Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and Rochester, New York.

And yet, things only got stranger after a series of arrests were made and charges filed, against Allen and Molt, as well as an amateur herpetologist from Trenton, another Jersey-based reptile dealer, and alleged associates in Europe, Asia and Africa.

The Pine Barrens discovery turned out to be just an early, bizarre chapter in a decades-spanning saga that many online critics have already said is better—or at least weirder—than Tiger King.

Some of the smugglers operating out of the South Jersey-Philadelphia area received what critics slammed as light prison sentences. Monsters of God suggests that influential people with links to popular zoos may have swayed law enforcement higher-ups.

Some of these same reptile smugglers then teamed up with other colorful associates, including CIA-trained veterans of the Cold War “Bay of Pigs” invasion, and went on to continue illegally selling live creatures. Then they moved on to selling guns and drugs as well.

As Monsters of God continues into the 1980s and 1990s, law enforcement informants infiltrate these million-dollar operations, only to end up dead.

Which only goes to show you that Paulie Walnuts and Christopher Moltisanti weren’t the only bad guys wandering around the Pine Barrens back in the day.