Strutting around his chaotic zoo with a holstered gun on his hip and an outrageous, bleached mullet haircut hiding under his baseball cap, ‘Tiger King’ Joe Exotic liked to wrestle with the big cats he bred.
He would talk big about what he would do to the animal rights activists who assailed him, blasting off his assault rifle at imaginary targets when he did so.
He had a particular one in mind: Carole Baskin, a Florida big cats sanctuary owner — ‘the Mother Teresa of Cats’ according to friends. It was she who led a campaign against Exotic, alleging mistreatment of the hundreds of lions and tigers he kept in Oklahoma. Exotic is now serving 22 years in prison after his subsequent conviction of hiring a hitman to kill Baskin — although, her critics insist she is no saint herself.
Inveterate self-publicist: Joe Exotic with one of his many tigers. A former policeman and pet shop owner, Exotic, 57, originally had good intentions, providing a home for unwanted adult big cats that had become too dangerous for their owners to handle. But then he saw the lucrative commercial potential of charging people to pet lion and tiger cubs
Now the tale of these two extraordinary characters has been turned into a TV documentary. Tens of millions of viewers have been tuning in open-mouthed to the wild events of Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem And Madness, an utterly bizarre seven-part series on Netflix that provides the true story of the outlandish tiger and lion breeder and his bitter feud with the woman activist determined to close him down.
With minimal fanfare, the series has become the most-watched show in both the U.S. and UK, with celebrities and ordinary fans alike clogging up social media to offer reactions while Hollywood is discussing a film version starring Margot Robbie.
For it is not just Exotic who has caught the public’s imagination but also Baskin. Astonishingly, the documentary deals with suggestions, firmly denied by her, that she killed her multi-millionaire husband, put his body through a meat grinder and fed his remains to their tigers.
Exotic, the hillbilly showman, is the series’ ‘star’, however. Now behind bars for a conviction that included two counts of murder-for-hire and animal abuse, including killing tigers, he exploited America’s unbelievably liberal rules on owning exotic animals to become what he said was the country’s biggest breeder of tigers.
There are estimated to be more tigers in the U.S. — up to 10,000 — than wild ones in the rest of the world put together.
Exotic’s bleak ‘roadside’ zoo at one time boasted 227 big cats which were fed with out-of-date supermarket meat.
Perhaps because it’s about caged animals, Tiger King has captured the public mood.
Joe Exotic’s nemesis Carole Baskin. Baskin led a campaign against Exotic, alleging mistreatment of the hundreds of lions and tigers he kept in Oklahoma
The jaw-dropping footage of grizzled rednecks blithely stomping around in cages as they manhandle lions and tigers couldn’t be further removed from today’s coronavirus-worried world, and the current safety-fixated regime of ‘social distancing’.
A former policeman and pet shop owner, Exotic, 57, originally had good intentions, providing a home for unwanted adult big cats that had become too dangerous for their owners to handle. But then he saw the lucrative commercial potential of charging people to pet lion and tiger cubs, with prices starting at $25 for six minutes.However, cubs become dangerous to handle at just 12 weeks, so the business required an extensive breeding programme to maintain supplies.
Exotic bred not only lions and tigers in industrial quantities but also cross-bred them to produce ‘ligers’ and further variants including a liliger and tiliger (tigers and lions bred with ligers).
The hybrids could be huge and Exotic even claimed he could recreate a prehistoric saber-toothed tiger, although he was contradicted by scientists. Some of his creatures were so cross-eyed from inbreeding it’s a miracle they could see anything.
As his animal empire became ever bigger, it drew the attention of Baskin, who found that her not-for-profit sanctuary, Big Cat Rescue, in Tampa, Florida, was being asked to house more and more animals that had been bred and sold by Exotic to rich owners who dumped them as soon as they became too troublesome.
She was particularly dismayed by his travelling roadshow in which he took cubs around in the back of a truck to shopping malls and fairs where he would charge for children to pet them. Ms Baskin, who has a large online following among big cat lovers, threatened to embarrass the malls and publicly hounded Exotic and his unscrupulous, cruel business.
The documentary project, five years in the making, came about after Eric Goode, a conservationist and filmmaker, was investigating a controversial reptile dealer in Florida.
He was horrified when one of the dealer’s customers showed him a caged snow leopard in the back of his vehicle which he had just bought. This started Goode on a trail that eventually led to Joe Exotic.
The latter — exotic by name and by nature — was made for modern television. ‘He’s a completely insane, gay, gun-toting, drug-addict fanatic,’ his friend and fellow zoo owner, Kevin ‘Doc’ Antle, says in the series.
He likes to dress in spangly shirts and leather chaps, is covered in tattoos and piercings and has had so many face lifts his sideburns grow behind his ears. He was notorious at a local gay bar for once walking in with a tiger on a leash.
He was also a regular drug user, taking crystal methamphetamine, the enormously addictive and damaging drug.His string of ‘husbands’ — often at least 30 years younger than him and some almost toothless as a result of the meth — complained that they were actually straight but were drawn to him because he kept them supplied with drugs.
Baskin with husband Howard on a leash. Ms Baskin, who has never faced criminal charges and insists she’s innocent, has accused the documentary series of over-egging the claims against her
They would sleep three in a bed with Joe in the middle. Like the men and women who worked for him, his boyfriends were a bunch of rough diamonds who usually came from prison or rehab.
In one of the darker moments in the series, one of them accidentally shoots himself — fatally — in Exotic’s zoo office while playing with a gun.
Although he’s clearly a compulsive liar, Exotic had a difficult early life.
He was reportedly raped by an older boy when he was five. When his farmer father discovered he was gay, he shook his son’s hand and made Joe promise not to come to his funeral.
Deeply unhappy about himself, Exotic drove off a bridge and broke his back, spending five years in braces. During his recovery, he lived next door to a safari park owner who would bring home baby animals —sparking Exotic’s interest.
He started his GW Exotic Animal Park on an old ranch in Wynnewood, Oklahoma, in memory of his brother Garold after he died in a car accident in 1997.
Exotic would shoot horses donated to him and feed them to the cats. He later worked as a stage magician, transforming cubs into adult tigers.
As is all too clear in the TV series, Exotic is an obsessive attention seeker and broadcast his own reality show online. He filmed almost everything he did at the zoo — and much of it is in the Netflix series in all its awfulness.
Scenes include a zoo worker who has just had her arm ripped off by a cat, unqualified staff doing veterinary work, a herd of 14 tigers competing for just five buckets of meat, and Exotic using a metal rod to pull a tiger cub from its mother within moments of it being born.
In one scene, Exotic narrowly escapes being mauled after venturing into a cage to make a promotional video. He only manages to fight off a tiger and escape to safety by pulling out his gun and firing off several shots.
Many of his broadcasts, in which he occasionally sat in a huge throne he had made for himself, were devoted to foul-mouthedly attacking Carole Baskin. He repeatedly promised to kill her and once even shot an effigy of her on air. Exotic, who also fancied himself as a country music singer, mocked her in his songs and accompanying videos, one of which was called Here Kitty Kitty featured a woman supposed to be Baskin feeding the remains of her former husband, Don Lewis, to his big cats.
He didn’t concoct the scurrilous story himself. Mr Lewis, a fellow big cat collector, went missing in 1997 and the new TV series devotes an episode to the mystery.
It interviews family and friends of Mr Lewis who believe Ms Baskin (she married current husband Howard in 2004), a blue-eyed blonde who wears flowers in her hair, was in some way responsible.
She was never charged, although Mr Lewis’ daughter publicly posited that her stepmother, knowing that he was about to divorce her, killed him and used the sanctuary’s meat mincer to dispose of his body before giving it to the cats.
Ms Baskin, who has never faced criminal charges and insists she’s innocent, has accused the documentary series of over-egging the claims against her. ‘I couldn’t have run his hand through the grinder, much less his body,’ she says on camera with reference to the small size of the machine. Like her tiger-breeding bete noir, Ms Baskin also came from a tough background.
Raised in poverty, she says she was raped at knifepoint aged 14 by three men who lived across the street, left home at 15 and was married at 17 to a man who abused her. She later began an affair with Mr Lewis, a wealthy Florida businessman and notorious womaniser.
She and Exotic are not the only larger-than-life characters in this tawdry saga.
As revealed in the TV series, Exotic’s business colleagues and fellow wildlife collectors are a nefarious bunch of social inadequates, swaggering around with guns, exotic facial hair, much younger girlfriends and the conviction that posturing with big cats makes them look big, too.
They include Kevin ‘Doc’ Antle who renamed himself Bhagavan — meaning ‘mystical lord’ — and has a harem of young interns to whom he gave new names and cosmetic surgery. Another big cat collector, Jeff Lowe, to whom Exotic passed his zoo to stop Ms Baskin taking it as legal damages, would smuggle tiger cubs hidden in a Louis Vuitton bag into Las Vegas casinos to help him chat up women.
Most of them turned on Exotic as federal agents became increasingly interested in what he was up to.
By then, the inveterate self-publicist had run not only for the U.S. presidency in 2016 (claiming to be a ‘libertarian’ but admitting he didn’t understand what it meant) but also as governor of Oklahoma, for which he handed out condoms with his face printed on them.
He abruptly fled his zoo in 2018, aware that he was a wanted man after paying $3,000 to one of his staff to kill Carole Baskin on her daily cycle around her sanctuary.
The hapless assassin instead went home to South Carolina and ‘partied’. Exotic tried to hire another man to do the job but this one was an undercover FBI agent.
Convicted last year and sentenced in January, Exotic is now spilling the beans to animal rights investigators, anxious to avenge himself on other wild animal traders who helped convict him.
Their opponents, including the steely-eyed Carole Baskin, hope the whole industry could be dealt a death blow by his unsavoury revelations.
With Exotic, one senses it is all part of keeping himself in the public eye. Fans of Tiger King are now dressing up as Exotic in a contest on Instagram.
The redneck Barnum is having to savour his biggest moment of fame from behind bars. ‘Joe has called me quite a few times over the last few weeks,’ said Eric Goode.
‘One, he is absolutely ecstatic about the series and the idea of being famous. He’s absolutely thrilled. I think he is trying to be an advocate for — no surprise — criminal justice reform.
‘He is in a cage and of course he’s gonna say that he now recognises what he did to these animals.’
As with everything else that Exotic says, Goode was taking this new-found sympathy with the wild animals he abused with a ‘big grain of salt’.