In the summer of 1993, something peculiar happened to the global appetite for cold-blooded creatures. Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park had barely finished its theatrical run before audiences, electrified by the sight of resurrected dinosaurs, began filing into pet shops in search of the next best thing — a bearded dragon here, a ball python there. Among them was Jeremy McBride, an Emmy-winning film-maker who simply wanted an iguana. What none of those wide-eyed visitors to their local terrarium could have known was that their enthusiasm was feeding something far darker: a multibillion-dollar black market that would eventually attract criminals of a calibre usually associated with narcotics, not nature.

That shadow world is the subject of Monsters of God, the new five-part HBO documentary directed by Emmy-nominated Eric Goode and executive produced by McBride, which premiered this week to immediate comparisons with Tiger King, Goode's pandemic-era sensation about eccentric private zoo owners. Where that series found its menace in the grotesque, this one finds it in the genuinely sinister — in smugglers who ransack ecosystems across multiple continents, in collectors willing to bankroll them, and in major institutions such as the National Zoo, which were drawn, however reluctantly, into the same murky commerce. "You never know when that knife is going to go in your back," Goode observes, "because everyone's trying to make a deal with the feds, with another reptile dealer. Even the good guys were supposedly doing bad things.

It's messy." The series reaches back to the trade's peculiar origins, tracing a lineage that begins in the 1960s with a cheese salesman named Hank Molt, who began distributing a reptile price list to zoos and discovered, to his own evident delight, that rarity commanded spectacular sums. Molt's globe-trotting exploits made him both a folk hero to reptile enthusiasts and a persistent headache for the US Fish and Wildlife Service — dismissively nicknamed the "duck cops" — who understood far sooner than the public did that the plundering of native ecosystems rarely ends quietly.