Nearly two decades ago, former Oxford resident Bryan Christy entered a world of reptile dealers, smugglers, collectors, and criminals for an investigation that became his book, The Lizard King. He could not have known then that the people he met would eventually find their way onto television screens.
That has happened with Monsters of God, the HBO documentary series from Eric Goode, the filmmaker behind Tiger King and Chimp Crazy.
For Christy, watching it has meant returning to people and places he knew when the investigation was still unfolding.
“It is surreal, to be sure,” he said.
Goode and Christy have known each other for years through their shared interest in reptiles. Goode began filming Christy and some of the people who appeared in The Lizard King shortly after the book was published. It was Goode’s first attempt at filmmaking, but other projects intervened.
“He kind of got sidetracked into big cats and monkeys,” Christy said. “But he’s been on this forever, and our paths have crossed from time to time over the years.”
The result brings cameras into a world Christy originally entered with little more than the tools of a reporter.
“He tracked down people in my book who do not want to be seen,” Christy said. “I only had to go in with a pencil. Eric had to bring an entire film crew in.”
Christy helped Goode make some connections, but others the filmmaker found and persuaded on his own.
“I know how hard that can be,” Christy said. “I think it’s really an amazing thing to see these people brought back to life.”
Christy’s path to that investigation was an unusual one. Before becoming a journalist, he practiced international trade law in Washington, D.C., worked for a U.S. senator, and spent time in the Executive Office of the President. The experience left him comfortable approaching people with considerable power, something that later mattered when those people included government officials, corporate leaders, and criminals.
It also shaped the way he reports.
“My goal is that if you read one of my stories, you will see both sides of the problem as if you were sitting in a trial,” he said. “You will be able to be your own judge and jury, and I try not to bring a lot of advocacy or judgment to the page, but let the characters testify for themselves.”
Christy had been investigating organized crime in the Philadelphia area when an opportunity arose to meet editors at National Geographic. He had loved animals since childhood in South Jersey, particularly reptiles, and saw a way to combine that interest with criminal investigation.
The magazine initially saw things differently.
“What they said to me is, ‘We don’t do crime here,’ and I said, ‘Of course you do crime here. Every endangered species story is a crime story, or at least has one in it.’”
That distinction became central to the work Christy would do at National Geographic. Rather than begin with the animal as victim, he wanted to turn the reporting around and follow the people responsible.
“You, Nat Geo, tend to focus on the victims in these stories: the motherless elephant, or the rhino that’s just been killed, or the tiger,” he said. “Those are victim-based stories. Let’s focus on villain-based stories.”
The approach eventually took Christy far beyond reptiles. As founder of National Geographic’s Special Investigations Unit, he investigated the international ivory trade and the networks connecting poachers with traffickers and consumers.
His work took him around the world, including years spent living right here on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
When Christy began examining elephant poaching, much of the reporting he encountered attributed demand broadly to China. He believed the answer was inadequate, both as journalism and as a way of understanding a criminal enterprise.
“I spent a lot of time looking from top to bottom,” he said. “What’s going on when you come to these cases?”
That led to one of the more unusual investigative tools in modern wildlife reporting: artificial elephant tusks containing hidden GPS transmitters.
Christy had heard reports that armed groups in Central Africa were trading ivory for weapons. He wanted to test the claim without simply repeating it, and without personally following ivory into some of the most dangerous territory in the region.
“If this were drugs, how would I go after drugs?” he said. “I might put a tracker in a suitcase of cash, and here the cash was ivory.”
Christy knew George Dante, a taxidermist who had worked with the American Museum of Natural History, and asked whether he could create a convincing artificial tusk. His team also located a specialist who had designed tracking devices used on condors in Chile and Burmese pythons in the Everglades.
The two ideas came together.
Christy sometimes described his National Geographic investigative team as a version of “Mission Impossible.” The magazine gave him resources to pursue targets around the world, and he believed serious investigations did not have to be presented as grim exercises for readers.
“Another thing that’s lost in these projects is they should be fun,” he said. “They should be fun for the audience. They should be fun for the investigator.”
There was, however, nothing imaginary about the risks. One of the groups Christy was interested in tracking was Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, notorious for kidnapping children and forcing them into service as soldiers. Christy had no desire to personally carry an ivory investigation into Darfur.
When an editor suggested he do just that, Christy proposed a condition.
“I said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it if I can seat you on the hood of my Land Rover, and I’ll drive in, but you are first.’ And that changed the dynamic.”
The GPS tusks offered another way in.
Christy’s investigations eventually contributed to a much broader public understanding of wildlife trafficking as organized crime rather than simply a conservation issue. But he has remained wary of allowing advocacy to replace reporting.
His rule at National Geographic was simple.
“Accuracy is the best advocacy.”
That did not mean pretending he had no personal investment in the subjects he chose. Christy had spent considerable time around elephants and knew what was being lost as tens of thousands were killed for ivory.
“If you have a baby elephant’s trunk go across your face and feel your face in a way that suggested he wanted to know me and remember me, if that happens to you, you become a crusader in some way,” he said.
The choice of what to investigate may contain an element of advocacy, he said. Once the reporting begins, however, his job is to understand everyone in the chain, including the people most readers would prefer to regard simply as villains.
“The mysterious, exotic perspective is not law enforcement,” he said. “That’s well-trod territory. But the mysterious, exotic perspective is the consumer and is the quote-unquote villain.”
That approach eventually carried Christy from nonfiction into the novel In the Company of Killers. Monsters of God, however, reaches further back, to the investigation that helped establish the direction his career would take.
Seeing those people again has not necessarily softened his judgment of them.
“There is one character in particular—I am reminded how venomous and just horrible a person he is,” Christy said.
Other parts of the series have given him something his original reporting could not. Christy spent years working largely alone on The Lizard King, concentrating on the reptile business and the crimes surrounding it. Goode’s cameras reveal what some of those lives looked like from inside their families.
The Van Nostrand family, whose reptile import-export business figures prominently in the story, was one example.
“I didn’t appreciate the family dynamics in the way you see on screen,” Christy said.
He pointed particularly to Elaine, the mother of one of the central figures, a retired schoolteacher and NPR listener whose family life intersected with drug trafficking, weapons, and the reptile trade.
“That contrast, and what pressure it put on that family, I didn’t fully get,” he said.
For a reporter who spent years trying to get inside closed worlds, Monsters of God has offered an unusual experience: watching someone else go back through a door he opened almost 20 years ago.
And this time, Christy gets to watch along with everyone else.
