BIG PHARMA'S MONKEY BUSINESS

A CRACKDOWN ON MACAQUE SMUGGLING HAS DISRUPTED A VITAL DRUG DEVELOPMENT SUPPLY CHAIN. INSIDE THE HIGHSTAKES BATTLE OVER THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN MEDICAL INNOVATION, AND THE PRIMATE SPECIES IT DEPENDS UPON.

- ERIKA FRY

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.