8 charged in scheme to smuggle endangered monkeys from Asia, says US

MIAMI - Federal prosecutors have charged eight people with running an international monkey-smuggling operation in which hundreds of the endangered primates were poached from the wild in South-east Asia and shipped to the United States for research purposes, the Justice Department said on Wednesday.

Two of those charged, Omaliss Keo, 58, and Masphal Kry, 46, were Cambodian wildlife officials whom federal prosecutors said betrayed their duty to protect endangered species. Instead, the officials took payments from conspirators to facilitate the scheme, which centred on long-tailed macaques, also known as crab-eating macaques, according to the US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida.

The long-tailed macaques, petite primates with pinkish-brown faces that live near water and wetlands in South-east Asia, are protected by international trade law. A permit is required to bring them into the US, where they are often used for biomedical and pharmaceutical research.

Reputable breeding facilities typically supply the monkeys for export. But prosecutors said that the eight conspirators, who sought to make up for a shortage of suitable long-tailed macaques, obtained the monkeys from national parks and protected areas in Cambodia and shipped them out after falsely labeling them as “captive bred”.

“Wild populations of long-tailed macaques, as well as the health and well-being of the American public, are put at risk when these animals are removed from their natural habitat and illegally sold in the United States and elsewhere,” said Mr Edward Grace, the director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service Office of Law Enforcement.

Each of the eight people was charged with one count of conspiracy and seven counts of smuggling.

In addition to the Cambodian officials, the others charged were James Man Sang Lau, 64, Dickson Lau, 29 and Sunny Chan, all from Hong Kong; as well as Raphael Cheung Man, 71, Sarah Yeung, and Hing Ip Chung, 61, all from Cambodia.

The smuggling charges each carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, and the conspiracy charge has a maximum penalty of five years. If convicted, the defendants could also be fined up to US$250,000 (S$343,466) – or twice the financial gain they made during the scheme, prosecutors said.

The Cambodian Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment on Wednesday.

From December 2017 to September 2022, Kry helped bring captured wild macaques to Vanny Resources Holdings, a Hong Kong-based firm that breeds monkeys for research, according to an indictment unsealed on Wednesday. Sometimes, he would personally deliver the primates to the facilities, which were operated by the co-conspirators.

Two top executives at Vanny Resources Holdings – James Man Sang Lau, the founder and owner, and Dickson Lau, the general manager – secretly worked with dealers on the black market to acquire the wild-caught macaques and “launder them through the Cambodian entities for export to the US”, prosecutors said.

Vanny Resources Holdings could not immediately be reached for comment on Wednesday.

It was unclear how many illegally smuggled monkeys ended up in the US, but prosecutors said that they had tallied about 3,000 “unofficial” monkeys that were illegally allowed to be exported.

On May 11, 2019, a shipment of 360 long-tailed macaques in Alice, Texas, contained about 74 monkeys that had been caught in the wild, according to the indictment. On June 27, 2019, 194 more of those monkeys arrived in Alice, Texas. And on Nov 11, 2020, 323 macaques were delivered to Miami.

The shipments that arrive in the US hold enormous value: One, of 396 long-tailed macaques on Nov 11, 2020, was worth more than US$1 million, the indictment stated.

That valuation is echoed in the huge sums of money that black-market suppliers were paid for their dealings, prosecutors said. One, who is referred to as “Black Market Supplier D” in the indictment, received US$10,380 for his delivery of 60 wild-caught macaques to a Vanny Resources Holdings facility; another got US$8,360 for about 38 more.

In a span of about eight months in 2020, Vanny Resources Holdings paid more than US$2.5 million to seven black market suppliers, which, in return, gave the company more than 14,000 long-tailed macaques caught in the wild, said the indictment. NYTIMES