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Warning: The following story describes cases of animal cruelty.
In 2017, Des Moines, Iowa attorney Philip Colt Moss was charged with drug possession after a raid on his home 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 dealing, but Moss' attorney told the Des Moines Register that his client was just someone “who needed help.” Moss had stepped away from his work as an attorney and “checked into an eight-week inpatient treatment facility outside Iowa,” the newspaper reported at the time.
“Hopefully common sense will prevail,” Moss' attorney said. “He needs help. He's getting help, and he wasn't dealing drugs.”
Moss eventually pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors and “two felonies, namely, failure to possess a tax stamp.” He was given two years' probation.
Moss started his own law firm after all this was over, so maybe things were changing for him. But a few years later, he got caught up in a new investigation, a pretty serious federal investigation, by the FBI and the federal Fish and Wildlife Service. Both agencies were very interested in his internet activities on Telegram and WhatsApp.
They say the Internet is a hub for every interest, no matter how niche, reaching into even the darkest corners of the human psyche. That was certainly true here. The government investigated a scheme in which U.S. citizens would gather in “private online groups and one-on-one chats on encrypted messaging applications” to share their fantasies about making “monkey crush” videos.
The name actually makes these videos sound more innocent than they are. While crushing a monkey to death would be horrifying enough, the “clients” in this closed online group were willing to watch monkeys being tortured for hours on end. They complained when the monkeys died too quickly. They suggested dressing baby monkeys in diapers and yellow outfits, then bottle-feeding them in front of their parents before brutally breaking bones, hacking off limbs, inflicting pain with fishhooks, pliers, and skewers, burning wounds with lighters, gluing various orifices shut, attacking them with snakes, and sexually abusing them.
And it was all done. In a truly horrific example of global, Internet-based outsourcing, the client's “ideas” were funneled to an anonymous minor in Indonesia, who would purchase the monkeys for a few hundred dollars via Western Union, film their torture, and send the videos back to the Americans.
As part of this investigation, the government came across Telegram messages that Philip Colt Moss had allegedly sent to the leader of one such “monkey crush” group. The messages suggested that the rehabilitation had not entirely stuck.
“I got everything. What you need. I got a fling for everything you're looking for. Ups downers. Girls. Lol,” Moss said in a 2023 post. “From weed to shrooms. Coke to meth. Molly to acid. Dope to tar. Xanax. You gotta remember, as a lawyer, I know all the dealers because I represent them.”
The two men made plans to meet in Chicago and “go wild on the town,” but after Moss shared a photo of his fiancée, the conversation turned back to monkey videos.
“Are you telling her about all the monkey business?” asked the leader.
“Man, I'm trying because she's a cool girl and a party girl,” was the response. “She doesn't really get the monkey business, which makes sense, but she likes that it's a small community and that makes me happy, apparently.”
However, the joy likely faded when Moss was arrested on August 8, 2024. The charges against Moss were made public by the Justice Department late last week, and Moss now faces years in federal prison.
