Robert Cusack was sentenced to five and a half months in prison for smuggling a variety of endangered species into the United States from Thailand in 2002. In addition to the four birds of paradise and 50 rare orchids that he had in his suitcase, Cusack had somehow managed to hide two slow loris pygmy monkeys in his underwear. I'm not sure I really want to know how. They were pygmies, I guess, and apparently slow ones at that. But still.
Cusack admitted to the monkey-secretion after the birds of paradise escaped from his suitcase, apparently during a search by customs agents. "I have monkeys in my pants," Cusack told them, rather than wait to be questioned. According to the report, "[t]wo endangered slow loris pygmy monkeys were rescued from Cusack's underwear."
Cusack has already served his sentence, but he was back in the news this week after police finally tracked down his companion, Chris Mulloy, who managed to get two Asian leopard kittens through customs in his carry-on bag. (Apparently airline security is not all that great in Thailand. We can't even take bottled water on board here and this guy got on with two leopards.) Mulloy was arrested on Monday in Palm Springs and could get up to 20 years.
A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's office said that he was not particularly surprised by the put-a-couple-of-slow-loris-pygmy-monkeys-in-your-shorts tactic. "We had a guy who did it with snakes [put them in his underwear, that is] about eight or nine years ago coming in from Mexico," he said. "You name it, it's been done."
Link: CourtTV.com
