Eric Goode is no stranger to eclectic interview subjects. As the director behind Chimp Crazy and Tiger King, he’s even familiar with interviewees who are willing to look past the law. However, his latest docuseries, Monsters of God, might just have brought him face-to-face with his most daunting subjects yet.

The Dark World of Reptile Smuggling

Monsters of God is a five-part HBO series that explores the dark world of reptile smuggling around the world and, particularly, into the United States. The trade took off around the 1960s and has since ballooned into entire enterprises, both legal and illegal. Naturally, Goode was more interested in understanding the latter.

To do so, he sought out some of the world’s most notorious reptile traffickers, including Michael Van Nostrand, Tom Crutchfield, Mario Tabraue, and Anson Wong. These names may not mean much to a layperson, but all have, at times, been sentenced to years in prison for international animal smuggling.

Goode shared with Deadline that he remembers driving with Anson Wong, who casually mentioned how someone was now dead.