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Content Warning: The following story describes cases of animal cruelty.
In 2017, Des Moines, Iowa, attorney Philip Colt Moss was charged with drug charges after a raid on his townhouse found marijuana, hashish, OxyContin, Klonopin, Xanax, zolpidem (the active ingredient in Ambien), and “four pills containing methylphenidate” (the active ingredient in Ritalin).
Police found enough evidence to charge Moss with drug trafficking, but Moss's attorney told the Des Moines Register that his client was simply someone who “needed help.” Moss quit his job as a lawyer and “checked into a residential treatment facility outside of Iowa for eight weeks,” the newspaper reported at the time.
“Hopefully common sense prevails,” Moss's lawyer said. “He needs help. He's getting help, and he didn't deal drugs.”
Moss eventually pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors and “two counts of failure to possess a tax stamp.” He received two years’ probation.
After things calmed down, Moss started his own law firm, so perhaps things were turning around for him. But a few years later, he found himself under a new investigation – a pretty serious federal investigation – by the FBI and the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service. Both agencies were extremely interested in his internet activity on Telegram and WhatsApp.
They say the Internet provides a meeting place for every interest, no matter how small, and even the darkest corners of the human psyche. That's certainly the case here. The government investigated a system in which U.S. citizens met in a “private online group and one-on-one chats via encrypted messaging applications” to share their fantasies about producing “Monkey Crush” videos.
The name makes these videos sound more benign than they are. While squeezing a monkey to death would be bad enough, the “customers” of this private online group wanted to watch monkeys being tortured for hours. They complained when the monkeys died too quickly. They suggested dressing baby monkeys in diapers and yellow suits and then feeding them bottles in front of their parents – before brutally breaking their bones, severing their limbs, inflicting pain with fish hooks, pliers and skewers, burning wounds with lighters, taping various orifices shut, attacking them with snakes and sexually abusing them.
And indeed, everything was done. In a truly heinous example of global, Internet-based outsourcing, the “client ideas” were passed on to an unnamed minor in Indonesia, who, for a few hundred US dollars wired through Western Union, obtained the monkeys, filmed their torture, and sent the videos back to the Americans.
During the investigation, the government discovered Telegram messages allegedly sent by Philip Colt Moss to the leader of one such “Monkey Crush” group. The messages suggested that the rehab had not really worked.
“I have everything you need. I have a contact for everything you're looking for. Stimulants, depressants. Girls. Lol,” read one message from Moss in 2023. “From weed to mushrooms. Coke to meth. Molly to acid. Dope to tar. Xanax. You have to keep that in mind as a criminal defense attorney. I know all the dealers because I represent them.”
The two men toyed with plans to meet up in Chicago and “go wild on the city.” But after Moss shared a photo of his fiancée, the conversation turned back to monkey videos.
“Are you telling her about all this stupid stuff?” asked the ringleader.
“Man, I try because she's a cool girl and a party girl,” came the reply. “She doesn't really get the monkey thing, which makes sense, but she likes that it's a small community and that seems to make me happy.”
However, the joy likely faded when Moss was arrested on August 8, 2024. The charges against Moss were unsealed by the Justice Department late last week, and Moss now faces years in a federal prison.
