Tiger Traffickers, Narco Zoos and the (Even Darker) Truth Behind Joe Exotic
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It's the late 1960s and British twins and vicious crooks The Krays, Ronnie and Reggie, want to branch out. They've already made a name in London's underworld and they set up a meeting with US Kingpin Meyer Lansky, the so-called mob accountant, who's in the process of establishing something called the National Crime Syndicate. Kind of loose federation of mobsters and ne'er-do-wells. Another massive story for another episode.

So Ronnie and Reggie get on a jet and they land in Sin City, alongside Scottish-born Essex boy James Campbell, their friend and PR guy. Yes, Britain's most notorious gangsters have their own travelling hype man. While there, the Krays meet superstar Frank Sinatra and they barter a deal to protect the singer's son while he's touring Europe.

A good deal seemingly made, the twins and Campbell are invited out to a giant mansion owned by one of Vegas' many underworld figures. When they arrive, there's a shock. According to Campbell, the trio are shown a basement beneath the villa where he says, quote, there was this huge metal cage with tigers in it. There was blood on the floor. They told him this was where the enemies were disposed of. They had a bone collector who would take any remains to the Hoover Dam and throw them in.

When Ronnie came back, he was really impressed with the way they operated over there. It was on a different scale. So, these being three of London's hardest geezers, the Brits lap up the experience. And in actual fact, the grisly scene they've just witnessed, it isn't really unique at all.

For centuries criminals have used big cats to intimidate, prove their worth or even eat their enemies. From ancient warlords to cavalier animal traders, jungle drug dealers and more recently Colombo crime family capo Joey Gallo. Ah yeah, Crazy Joe, the schizophrenic murderer who started a mafia war. He liked big cats too, particularly a pet lion called Cleo.

Cleo got folks to pay their debts even better than the barrel of a gun. She'd been part of Gallo's crew since she was a cub, and she grew up in the basement of their social club in the maritime neighborhood of Red Hook. All it took was a little false visit to Cleo, and most punters emptied their pockets in moments. Said ex-mobster Frank DiMatteo, the lion would rattle the chain and roar a little bit, and that was enough. Nobody needed to know more. That was enough.

They get scared and say, come on, and they pay. Yeah, I reckon I would too, Frank. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast. ♪

Welcome to the Underworld Podcast. It's the show that each week delves into tales of shysters and shit talkers, flaneurs, finaglers, and flim-fan men. I'm your host in ROTRO New Zealand, Sean Williams, and I'm joined as I am most weeks by famed reporter and filmmaker Danny Gold in New York City. We are journalists who've been all over the world, been in the pandemic hit, and now we're podcasters, and I for one could not be happier. Yeah, just shining beacons of positivity right here. Never ends.

Anyway, quick housekeeping, guys. The Patreon's still lighting up with new stuff. I spoke to Rype McKenzie about this Chinese plot to take over a Pacific atoll. It was a really mad story. And I'm chatting to the brilliant Ed Caesar about his New Yorker story on EncroChat. And a week today, I'm also heading out to India for a couple weeks, leaving my partner with our month-old baby, which is really good parenthood. And I'll be recording a bunch of cool stuff for the pod out there, too.

Oh, yeah. And if it's getting hotter or colder wherever you live, we've still got tees, hats, hoodies up for grabs. That's at underworld.com slash merch. So go check that out. underworldpod.com slash merch, buddy. underworldpod.com. Yeah, I've been checking the website tons lately. And by my calculation, there is almost 11,000 miles between here and Moldova. But I am still getting some weird Telegram messages, guys. So keep it up.

Yeah. And we also might be on a break for a couple of weeks while Sean is in India, as we once again, try to actually figure out how to make money off this podcast, which despite it being better than pretty much every other podcast that's ever existed in the history of podcasts, we still haven't figured out. So I don't know. I mean, I can understand why anyone listens to like a three hour podcast where some guy tells you that sleeping is good for you. Come on, like, you know that already. And that like, don't drink coffee after 6pm, that'll help.

You don't need a fucking brain doctor from Stanford to tell you that stuff, okay? You figure it out. Listen to the On The World podcast instead. And...

Yeah, let's get it going. All right, a punchy start this week. Anyway, this is something a little bit different, right? So a fortnight ago, I did this show on the dying rainforest, drug cartels, mass death in the Amazon. It's all important stuff, right? But it's pretty dark. And then you did one on the Andrangheta and Coke Kings. That was really cool too. But I think we're going to need a bit of light entertainment on this show. I mean...

about as light as anything about organized crime really gets. And given I'm knee deep in deadlines and baby shit at the moment, I wanted to take you on a ride down memory lane all the way back to 2019 when I hopped in my ex-mother-in-law's Lincoln, cheers for that Valerie, by the way, and took a road trip from Oklahoma City to Miami and back on the trail of this guy named Joe Exotic.

Talking of shysters in the pandemic. Yeah. And I mean, true story for anyone who doubts Sean. He was on Joe Exotic way before that show and anything else. I mean, he might have broken that story wide open, but he doesn't get the love that he deserves. And we're here to give that to him. Oh, also, guys, a company I'm working with on these other podcasts just launched, I think, tomorrow.

Tomorrow, if you're listening to this when it comes out, Brokers, Bagmen, and Moles, go subscribe to that on Spotify. It's like a wild tale involving the FBI and criminals and stock traders and all that kind of shit. And we're going to be making a lot of good stuff there. So go subscribe to that right away. So they get free advertising, do they? All right. Where's that? Yeah. I mean, they're paying me, dude. So they need to keep doing that. So we need to advertise for them. You need a runner? Anything? I don't know.

Anyway, guys, if you don't know who Joe Exotic is, well, I don't really know what to do for you. But if you watch Tiger King on Netflix, like about 99% of the global population at the time, I'm going to tell you something. A lot of it is complete BS. And I know because I wrote the only account of the guy that is actually true. Tell him, Sean. I'm fired up. Yeah, I'm ready. Now, you might be listening to this thinking, all right,

That all sounds like sour grapes from some guy who didn't get a massive bunch of money from Netflix right as COVID was about to kill his career. And he passed up a small fortune in the Berlin divorce court to have some misplaced sense of pride. And to those thinking that, yeah, all right, fair point. We're really just learning a lot about you this week, the audiences, huh?

Yeah, I feel like what people really want is psychodrama and a breakdown. So I can give that to you guys. But truly, Tiger King was this complete journalistic disaster for a bunch of reasons. Not only did it exploit its subjects, it lied to them and in some cases paid for really flawed information. It painted a narrative of its protagonist that gave him the Hollywood character arc that he'd been shaping for decades and which, I promise you, is utter crap.

Okay, but counterpoint, tigers are cool and it was really entertaining. Yeah, I mean, the counterpoint won. But I want to put some of that record straight on this show, which is going to be a bit of a menagerie itself, right? We're going to go into ancient gangsters and their exotic pets, Vegas tiger cells, Miami murders, and of course, Pablo Escobar's hippos. Not big cats, I know, but you can't really pussyfoot around it. And yeah, they did actually have sex with the animals at Joe Exotic Zoo.

Whoa, hold on. You can't... Alright, I mean, I don't even know. I wonder if you'd jump in there, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I don't even know what to say, but I'm sure you'll have plenty to add. Yeah, I'm flustered, dude. I'm a little... I don't know if we can go down this direction, but okay. Well, I mean, shout out to Justin Miller for keeping some of the weirdest, most gory parts of the story out. I reckon they just wouldn't have worked, but...

We'll get into some of the darker side of that story a bit later on. For now, let's have a brief history lesson. It's well documented that Assyrian kings loved slaughtering big cats so much that they're thought to have gone extinct in parts of the Middle East as a result. Many were kept captives as symbols of the king's might.

For the purposes of the exercise, by the way, guys, I'm going to need you all to consider ancient kings as gangsters. Thank you very much. One of the greatest works of ancient art is a lion hunt of Ashurbanipal at the British Museum, where else? In the palace of Nineveh, which is modern day Mosul, where dozens of Asian lions are speared or shot to death with arrows. If you're in London, check it out. It's like completely stolen, but what isn't? I'll

Archaeological evidence also shows that lions were kept and displayed in ancient Macedonia and warlords would amass great collections of big cats, elephants, bears, giraffes and other creatures from the widest extents of their empires.

Now most of us are going to know that the Romans stepped it up a few notches. They collected big cats to duke it out in Rome's Circus Maximus, or even feed the Christians to them, which did happen, according to this University of Washington paper I found. Quote,

Were Christians really fed to the lions? Yes. So thank you, University of Washington. Christians were fed to half-starved lions, burned alive, hacked to death. But the most interesting aspect of this was that the Christians who died in the Coliseum wanted to die there as martyrs. So kind of like an ancient suicide by cop, only torn to ribbons instead of shot.

Almost as gruesome as Friday Night Football, am I right? Look, I mean, I love animals, right? And I hate big game hunting and all that. But it was back in the day and Herodotus was like, man, I have an extra ticket to the Bears versus Lions death match. Like, I'd probably go. Yeah, I would 100% go. How's Herodotus doing these days, by the way?

But hey, the middle ages, guess who is up to their necks in all this exotic animal shit? Yeah, that's right. The Brits. In fact, the Tower of London, which is the thousand-year-old Norman keep that's right in the middle of the city,

That had its own menagerie topped up by a 1204 expedition by King John, who brought back three shiploads of lions and leopards. Sounds pretty dangerous, that. To the city which, just to get really geeky, had only just become the capital city after Winchester, home of the Round Table. Sorry.

getting too into this but this is going a little off piste right in those early days the english monarchy had all kinds of wild cats mostly from race to west africa and by the 1700s when the east india companies rampaging through the indian subcontinent its own nabobs are nicking all kinds of exotic animals from piratical campaigns in the punjab and beyond

Clive of India, who we're definitely going to do a show on because he's like one of the biggest gangsters in the whole of history. He sent something called a caracal cat, which is kind of a big eared lynx, back to the prime minister to let him carry on killing, starving and maiming Indians. And that cat is still in the tower. Apparently it's stuffed. Obviously, it takes another century or so for private zoos to really kick on in the West. And things go kind of across the Atlantic, right from London to New York.

There's this great Slate article by Betsy Golden Kellum that dives into this history and I'm going to quote a bit of it here. The Van Amburg Menagerie performed in New York in 1862 with a show that featured lions, tigers, and quote, performing ponies who fire off pistols. What the fuck? In the 1890s even, the Siegel Cooper department store housed a live elephant for a month until a local zoo bought it for $2,000.

Is the story somehow incomplete without a good fringe-leather jacket? You can have that too. John C. Grizzly Adams arrived in New York City in 1860, wearing a hunter's suit of fringe-leather, festooned with the hanging tails of small Rocky Mountain animals for a sight, and performed for visitors under a canvas tent in Lower Manhattan with nearly 30 grizzly bears,

one of whom wore a bonnet and glasses. Who was the lucky bear? The famous P.T. Barnum, most people are going to know who that guy is, kept his own menagerie in the city too. But perhaps the biggest Tiger King precursor of that time is this German animal dealer called Karl Hagenbeck.

He's the son of a Hamburg fishmonger, but he's got dreams a little bit more exotic than trout and salmon. Writes Kellum, the family would grab any weird creatures that came off the docks of the Elbe River, quote, seals, raccoons, or monkeys, and show them off for additional income.

Not content to simply display or resell animals already on the European continent, young Carl began to build relationships and a supply chain to bringing himself to the animals from Africa for circuses and menageries and solidified his reputation with one 1870 shipment to Europe that included a rhinoceros, four buffaloes, five elephants, 14 giraffes,

30 hyenas, more than a dozen big cats, 26 ostriches, 20 crates of monkeys and birds, and 72 goats that supply the animals with milk and meat. I mean, that is full on. But as the 20th century looms and drug barons south of the border get fame, money, and power, a new kind of phenomenon appears. That is the narco zoo.

And these things aren't just shoddily thrown together shitholes either. Pablo Escobar's Hacienda Napolis, around 120 miles east of Medellin along the Magdalena River, it was home to smuggled rhinos, giraffes, zebras, and of course hippos. In fact, the narco-terrorist had over 200 beasts at the Hacienda by the time he was shot dead on a Medellin rooftop in December 1993, and authorities haven't quite known what to do with the place since.

The biggest problem are the so-called cocaine hippos, of which there were four in the 80s when Escobar smuggled them in. But now there are 80 of the things, dangerous and prolific at mating, thriving in the jungle waterways and threatening local species.

Experts fear there'll be 1,500 cocaine hippos in Colombia by 2040. So a lot of folks want to kill them. True story. Hippos are the most dangerous animals in Africa. They kill the most people out of everything there. Yeah. I mean, you can see how they go at small plastic balls on the table. So it's pretty scary stuff. Scientists, though, they've got another idea than killing them. Writes the Guardian, quote,

Castrating a hippo is no small feat, I mean no shit Guardian, and costs about $7,000 for each animal. Hippos spend most of their time submerged in rivers, grazing on underwater flora, and they only emerge at night, so the surgery would have to be performed after dark. A hippo's reproductive organs are internal, so veterinarians have to carry out invasive procedures in order to neuter the animals.

Guys, new kind of dream job just dropped. Hippo sterilizer. The Head Guardian speaks to a Colombian vet named Gina Paula Serna, who says, quote, the surgery itself isn't the most complicated part. The tricky thing is anesthetizing them.

She has castrated six hippos from the herd, knocking them out with tranquilizer darts that can pierce two-inch-thick skin. There was a joke advice when I was there because Pablo Escobar's hippos was like the most pitched story ever in the history of the company. People just kept pitching that. We got to do a story on Pablo Escobar's. I don't think we ever... They might have did it later on, but when I was there, they were just like... I can tell you from YouTube that they definitely got past the pitching process a couple of times. Yeah.

That's just like one of the, it's one of those stories that everyone's like, oh, you hear about Pablo Escobar's hippos? Ah, yes. Yeah. And,

Pablo Wright, he is hardly the only Latino camping with a penchant for exotic animals. El Chapo owned a Guadalajara narco zoo that had a train to move him around the various enclosures. Although not on the scale of Southeast Asia, for example, Sonora Market is still supposedly the HQ of illegal exotic trading in the Americas. So friend of the show and long-time narco reporter Toby Mews, he actually did a story on the exotic animal rehabs in Colombia.

I think it's one particular one that rescues the animals drug lords have. Oh, cool. They treat them terrible and they all get arrested or get killed. And this place rehabilitates them. I think it was a woman. She has all these tigers now and exotic animals. You'd probably have to Google that because I'm not even sure who he did it for. But Toby Mews and exotic animal

narco animal whatever you'll figure it out I tell you what we'll do our subscribers a massive favor and I'll put it on the Patreon reading list how about that for value add quote drug lords like charismatic animals that symbolize power and strength

Big cats such as lions, tigers and jaguars, along with big snakes, monkeys and nice-looking birds, Mexico-based WWF expert Adrian Reuters told Al Jazeera, adding, quote, in some cases, 20 or 30 animals have been found in pretty impressive facilities. Nice-looking birds.

Juarez cartel leader Amado Carrillo Fuentes, or the Lord of the Skies, and of course subject of a recent-ish episode of this show, he had a collection of pet tigers too. And when authorities raid Sinaloa guy Jesus the King Zambada in 2008, they confiscate over 200 animals, including monkeys, peacocks, and ostriches. Oh yeah, and AKs and Berettas and cocaine, but who doesn't have that kicking around on a central Mexican ranch?

There are tons of stories about the Zetas feeding people to tigers too, which would be pretty much the most humane way they kill people. University of Texas professor Howard Campbell believes that, quote, the role models for these big drug lords are the Hacienda owners from colonial times. They like to be the lord of the manor and they have huge ranches. They are rural people by and large. So there you go. It's all the rednecks form. Sorry, guys.

But let's move this episode a little closer to Joe Exotic, namely to Miami, where if you watch the show, you may just be familiar with a big cat owner in the city called Mario Tabraui. Tabraui has had a pretty colorful life, to say the least. A Cuban-American, he grows up in Little Havana, where his father Guillermo works as a jeweler.

But it's other valuable items the family is really interested in. And from 1976, the Tsa Brawys run a father and son weed and cocaine empire that's smuggling around half a million pounds of marijuana into the States. That's the weight, not the currency. As well as millions of dollars of powder and quaaludes. Quaaludes, man. I mean, they're the ones that got away. You know, we never really got to... Sean, we were just too young for them. And the way that people speak about them in such reverent tones, I just feel like...

We missed out, you know? Sad times. I mean, it looks so fun in the Wolf of Wall Street. I really wouldn't mind doing that. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with the world's best counterfeiter.

How long does it take to print $250 million? Five months. It needs to be worthwhile. It's going to need to be perfect. 12,500 kilos or over eight Toyota Camrys or six Ford F-150s. That is multiple metric tons of cash. You must have been stoked, man, because you knew you were going to put $20 bills all

all over all of that and then just never work again. Yes. By design, there are people specifically looking for you all the time. This is all they do. You can tell them whatever you want. They're not dummies. I mean, this is as high as it goes. This is top of the line. For more on how Frank Barasa printed his own fortune and got away with it, check out episode 488 on The Jordan Harbinger Show anywhere you get your podcasts.

Anyway, here's a men's health article about Mario. Quote, "In the late 1970s, Tabrawi was reportedly distributing the drug money to Miami police officers. By then, he had also opened an exotic animal store and ranch. He kept everything from cheetahs to cobras, and was later charged with illegally acquiring endangered animals."

And the story goes on, quote, throughout the 1980s, Tabrawi, according to federal prosecutors, served as, quote, chairman of the board of the drug trafficking operation. He allegedly stored 10,000 pounds of marijuana at Parrot Jungle, a Miami tourist attraction. His

His drug network was worth some $75 million at its height. Dude, holy fuck. I used to go to Parrot Jungle when I was a kid and we like went on family vacations to Miami. Yeah, ruled. There was parrots everywhere. I love that shit. And there was like another, there was another animal theme park that we used to go to called like Monkey Jungle or Monkey World. And, uh,

It was like that, except they had monkeys. Oh, really? There was a scandal. Yeah. There was a scandal because the employees trained the monkeys to pickpock visitors, like tourists that were there. Oh, man. I shit you not. That is right. God, I got to look that up. But yeah, dude, South Florida is just out of control. That place is the best. Oh, yeah. I mean, I saw a story quoting 79 million for Mario's Empire, but-

Yeah, whatever. He's a big player, right? And he's rumored to be the inspiration behind Scarface's Tony Montana.

Mario is barely hiding his mob tires, like he's just outwardly telling folks he's a cocaine importer on the street, and he's using the animals to traffic gear by stuffing it in the bodies of rare snakes, for example. And he's paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to ship exotic tigers, lions, cheetahs, leopards into his compound just outside the city, which he wouldn't let me go into, by the way, which was a shame. Yeah, we should do an entire episode on this guy. I mean, this is fantastic.

Yeah, we should actually, because he's fucking nuts. Oddly enough, there's even a broad tie to Republican Senator Marco Rubio. His brother-in-law, Orlando Sicilia, works alongside Zabrari during his most lucrative years, which is pretty nuts. Anyway, in July 1980, it gets a bit darker. A bit.

members of Tabrawi's gang find out that one of their guys, Larry Nash, is actually informant with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the ATF.

They take Larry for a ride in Mario's car, shoot him twice with a .38-0 Beretta, and then they cut up the body and set it on fire. By 1987, the feds come down on Mario after an operation named Cobra, after all his exotic pets on the ranch, of course. And when they raid it, Mario's wife allegedly tosses a bundle of 50 grand out the back window, which, I don't know, might be a bit of a red flag.

Mario is given a 100-year sentence, but he only serves 12 before turning state witness. He gets out in 2001, and he carries on with his big cat dreams. Now, he's president of the Zoological Wildlife Foundation, and he lobbies hard against tighter big cat laws. So, to be fair, those guys do have an incredible Instagram account.

As do we, if anyone's interested. Have you seen it? I mean, it's remarkable. I would go. No. I mean, you can go. I mean, it's all open. He just doesn't let any journalist in, which is fine. But those laws that he's pushing back on, they are sorely needed. There are around 10,000 tigers in captivity in the US, which is more than double the amount of them in the wild across the world.

which is pretty depressing and weird. And it's completely true that in the majority of US states, it's easier to buy a tiger than a dog. All you need in most places is a USDA conservation label, which, I mean, Joe Exotic had one, right? And a $30 license and Bobcat's your ocelot or something. My older brother, he used to work for political campaigns. And I remember him telling me he was in Gary, Indiana, which for you non-Americans is south of Chicago and just has been a really...

one of the more dangerous cities in America for a long time. And I think Indiana is like one of those places that doesn't have exotic animal laws or didn't back then. And he'd be like, you know, door knocking and they'd walk around and someone would just have a tiger in their backyard, like in not a great neighborhood. Like now I'm not talking about like Vegas mansions. I'm talking like, you know, like, like drug dealer type shit.

Yeah. Like not good drug dealer. Like very low level drug dealer. I think that one of the main guys in Joe Exotic's story is based on some like sweeping parkland in Indiana. A guy called Tim Stark I think comes up a bit further down this show as well but he's a...

Absolutely lunatic. Yeah, Indiana, like low key nuts, right? Isn't Gary really, really bad right now? I've seen loads of TV shows about it as well. I think it was. I don't think it's as bad as it was, but in like, you know the Jacksons are from there, but in the 90s I think it was the go to place for dangerous America, maybe early 2000s too. Ah, okay. Maybe a trip out there for the show then soon, Danny? Yeah.

Most of this, of course, and with it, the vast majority of trafficking in Southeast Asia, in places like the King's Romans Casino, where I also was in 2019, serves the Chinese market, which is hungry for tiger products in a number of traditional medicines and remedies that, well, of course, they don't work. Yeah. I mean, all the exotic animal trade stuff is predicated on grinding up their body parts for like...

to help old men get erections. I'm serious. If you look into what they use exotic animal, the trade for, it's all ancient Chinese medicine that are trying to be Viagra, which a good black market hustle is to crush up Cialis and then sell it to

you know, people looking for Chinese traditional medicine and pretend it's like rhino horn. I'm just throwing that out there. It's a good idea. Yeah. I mean, we welcome all advertisers on the show. A lot of private breeders, they say that they're helping to conserve the species, but well, they're not. Quote, public contact with big cats fuels every component of the trade, says Nicole Paquette of the Humane Society.

Beyond that, hundreds of these creatures, probably more likely thousands, are killed or handed over to sanctuaries. Because people love tiger cubs, right? But they don't really know how to look after a grown one.

A captive tiger lives for 20 years and it costs 10 grand for each of them. Writes the Guardian quote, grown up, they're hard to manage and less lucrative. That sounds like me. Adopters with good intentions but little training do not know what they're getting into and they fork over $500 for a cub.

A baby mocker can star on social media for an $80 photo op at an ersatz zoo or petting venues that claim to breed tigers but in fact encourage trafficking. I'm going to make a call out to all journalists never to use the word ersatz either, it's a rubbish word. Anyway, that's how you get these crazy macabre stories of illegal tiger dealers. In 2003, a guy in Harlem, NYC had to visit the ER for a severe wound on his arm and leg. He

He claimed it was a pit bull, not Ming, a 400-pound tiger he had cooped up in his apartment. There's a really famous photo of that, at least in New York, of when they raided the apartment. And it's an NYPD officer hanging by the window, and the tiger is just right there. Jesus. Yeah, dude. I think there was a story that goes back to where the woman underneath the apartment was always complaining about...

about like the noises and claiming there was a wild animal up there and no one believed her. Yeah. I mean, there's a couple of times they found like exotic animals in like the projects in East New York. I think there was like a wolf once and those little, um, came in alligators and things like that. Oh, they're cute. Can you take them out on the leash? I mean, you can, but not if they're illegal. People take snakes out all the time though. Like I'll see snakes in my neighborhood around someone's neck, but you know, I think the alligators would attract a little too much attention. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, isn't the Harlem apartment going to be about 10 square feet as

as well. Like how on earth are you keeping a tiger in that? Anyway, in 2005, a breeder in Colton, California, he's convicted on a bunch of wildlife and child endangerment charges when cops raid his home and find, seriously, 11 tiger and leopard cubs in his attic, two tigers on the porch, 58 dead tiger cubs in a freezer, and about 30 dead tigers decomposing on the property. And how about this one? I know, right? Grim.

How about this one from February 2018, as told by wildlife reporter Rachel Neuer for Longreads. Quote, A group of people had snuck into a deserted house in Texas's largest city, Houston, to smoke marijuana when they stumbled upon a full-grown tiger in a cage. A cage secured by just a nylon strap and a screwdriver. Sergeant Jason Alderetti of Houston Police Department's Animal Cruelty Unit later told a local TV station,

It wasn't the effects of the drugs. It was an actual tiger.

The animal was given a name, Loki, and sent to an animal sanctuary in the country run by the Humane Society of the United States. And like, the Humane Society of the United States must be the most overrun organization ever because these things are flooding in. Neuer says that the current boom of big cat ownership began in the 70s and 80s with something called Zoo Babies. These were commercials and interstate billboards offering the chance for families to get their photos taken.

This was lucrative stuff, of course, but the kittens then became cats, which are so-called zoo surplus, and then sold to private buyers at auction. And then just a few years later, of course, you get this giant free-for-all where any batshit 3%-er is showing up in some warehouse buying bobcats and tigers for a few hundred bucks. It's complete madness. And even though it's illegal to sell these things across state borders, it goes on everywhere all the time. The laws are really flimsy.

There's a February 2022 study in the journal Conservation Science and Practice, I know you guys want to get up on that one, that lays the role of the US in the illegal tiger trade bear. Of 624 seizures globally between 2003 and 2012, the US accounts for almost half.

Of course, your Lauses and your Myanmar's are going to hardly report illegal trafficking in the same number. And the true number of tigers shipped and smuggled across Southeast Asia is likely way, way higher than the figures we have now. I got to imagine too, I mean like, you know, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, anywhere there's crazy oil money. You know, those are the guys with like the Instagram accounts with all that stuff. Like that's got to be, I mean, I'm sure it's not even once they get there, I'm sure they're technically illegal, but it's definitely...

definitely like way higher numbers I would say than here. Yeah, these are the guys like driving down Abu Dhabi roads on two wheels with a tiger hanging out the back or whatever. Yeah, it's a, what a great place to buy is. It's still a massive number of cases in the US, right? And even more crazy, wild tigers were listed as two thirds of exotic animals recovered during that period. I'm

I mean, my little dog gives me enough of a headache. I mean, I don't even get it. What are these idiots playing at? Experts are calling on US legislators to pass something called the Big Cat Public Safety Act. There's a bill that would improve the welfare and protection of tigers in captivity, and it would galvanize the country's tiger conservation matters. But...

This thing has been going through iterations for over a decade now, and while Tiger King brought huge attention to the subject, the show itself didn't really do much to help the issue at large. Quote, I would have hoped a show like that with such a large viewership would highlight the issue of captive tigers in the US, Lee Harry of the WWF has said.

We've been working for 15 years to try and get the US to clamp down, but everything is up in the air because of COVID. Well, there's some other stuff too. So it's about time to hop back in my former mum-in-law's Lincoln, and I'll tell you why Tiger King shit the bed so badly.

First and most importantly, it is not true. Expose them. Yes. I wrote a follow-up piece to The Daily Beast where I first reported the story and it went into some of the myths about the guy that are just that. Tiger King did a terrible job. It was full of holes and lies and it allowed the guy to sell himself as some kind of a tragic figure when the truth is anything but. And I'll run through some of them.

For example, Joe claimed his brother, who he named his zoo after, Gerald Wayne or GW, was killed by a drunk driver and that's not true. Now that might seem like a small white lie and Gerald was killed on a wreck on I-45 outside Dallas, Texas, but this alcohol thing, Joe,

Joe used to build a sobriety campaign and he leveraged his brother's story to build the zoo in Winnewood, Oklahoma. Actually, Gerald left it in his will that he wanted to build a soccer stadium in the town. And Joe never turned off his brother's life support machine. That is complete crap.

And key to this for me was that I managed to find Joe's brother, Yari, who lives in a wood cabin near the Texas-Louisiana border. Seriously, it took me a day to drive to his place. He told me that Joe's like a quote, "Goddamn Charles Manson," and he's not far off the mark. So here is the true story of Joe Exotic's background. He actually gets his big break in 1999 when a Plano, Texas rancher lets out a hundred of his emus loose on a highway.

I mean, these things are getting shipped over to the country in huge number for their oil at the time. But then apparently the bottom falls out of the market and people are just shooting the things, letting them go. It's pandemonium. This one time Joe shows up with a pal and he shoots six emus dead on this Plano highway, some of which a local newspaper says, quote, flopped and jumped, requiring several shots. I don't know. I might be getting this wrong, but it's a pretty tough shot to headshot an emu, right? That thing's moving about a lot.

But Joe somehow wriggles off the hook with a grand jury and that is when he really starts to build his zoo. And also they dialed down the animal abuse and human abuse massively in Tiger King, like not even close. I'll quote a bit of this Daily Beast piece that I did.

As drug use on the park increased, its animal abuse turned vaudevillian. Crew members tossed live animals into tiger enclosures for fun. Many exulted starved to death. Cubs were hit, a staffer bit the head off a live snake, and another smoked a joint with a monkey. Wait, I'm sorry, can you repeat that? Yeah, I mean, that's not even the weirdest thing. I'm going to carry on. Joe ran over emus in a four-wheeler so he could sell bones to a local museum, and he shot animals on camera for fun.

A big cat burial pit smelled so bad, Joe's father said it reminded him of killing fields during the Korean War. Quote, I saw brutality against some animals that I almost can't speak of. Rick Kirkham, Joe's one-time reality show producer, told me. Joe abused his staff too, cutting off their food or throwing them off the park altogether. Many compared it to a cult. And it definitely, 100% still plated was a cult.

Here is another bit from my story. Quote, Joe escaped into fantasy worlds. He wandered about shooting animals with BB guns, then he injected them with water-filled syringes to heal them. This is a young Joe Exotic, by the way. He turned Pamela, that's his sister's, playhouse into a, quote, vet center. When the family moved to Texas, he worked at a local nursing home. He wore full scrubs with a fanny pack and a stethoscope.

On breaks, he told convenience store clerks he'd emerged from successful surgery. During a stint in Wyoming, Joe hitched a flashing light to his old Buick and he pretended to be a cop. So, yeah, the guy is far more psychopathic and pathological and cruel than the show makes out.

And now something a bit more fun, the music. I mean, I cannot tell you how many times I listened to that ridiculous Here Kitty Kitty song while I was on the road. I kind of feel you going a bit mad diving into a story with people like that 24-7, which I've kind of been doing the past couple months with this piece I'm finishing up in around a week. More on that soon, but...

I don't think Tiger King made it clear. Joe never sung any of those country tunes. I managed to find a guy in Washington State called Vince Johnson, who Joe's hired to put them all together. Then, of course, he built him on the payment. And Joe was getting up in Vince's shit about Carole Baskin the whole time, too. He told me in an email, quote, Joe called her a crackhead murdering two bit whore. Jesus, can't say this stuff in a straight face, among other things. But I never thought he was nuts enough to try and kill her.

And he did. Now, I'm not even going to go into Jeff Lowe, who's the guy who took over the GW Zoo when Joe got done for Murder for Hire. But let's just say he's a proper piece of work too. He's stolen money from all kinds of folks. He's beaten his ex-wife. He's not a good dude at all.

But basically all these zoo guys are like this. It tracks like the worst men and they're always, always men into this weird animal trading underbelly underworld, whatever you want to call it. It's really, really crazy. The thing is, I can't get over how underhand Tiger King was like,

Besides all of this, besides making up this kind of Hollywood tale to suit the narrative, I mean, I was rocking up to people's homes all over the state, in Oklahoma and beyond, actually. And they're telling me that this doco guy, some rich hotel industry air, who's running around Oklahoma, paying folks hundreds, thousands of dollars a pop for interviews with a specific intent on getting this Hollywood-ish narrative about Joe that is complete rubbish. Typical. Very, very.

Here is Joe Exotic's ex-boyfriend, John Finley, who I messaged about during an interview for this show, but I guess he just wants to disappear, which is fair enough. Quote, a lot of people don't know the truth and a lot of people don't care to know the truth. They want the nice story about the guy with the tigers.

And he's right. It's complete bullshit. And I should probably at this point tell you that, yes, there are videos and accounts and I have it on record that people were doing things with deer and goats and other animals on the park. Jesus. That is, yeah. I don't think Netflix would have signed off on that if they'd

been approached with that story and hey look I haven't even got into all the batshit conversations I had with Doc, Bagavan, Antor he calls himself Tim Stark I mean these other guys who featured in Tiger King 2 which I'm not going to watch

Jeff and Lauren Lowe, she screamed, actually screamed down the phone at me, Lauren Lowe, which is pretty weird. They don't own the GW Zoo anymore. In January 2021, the Justice Department shut it all down, placed the animals in care, that's more work for people, and declared that the Lowe's had, quote, showed a shocking disregard for both the health and welfare of their animals. Oh shit. But

But they are just the tip of the iceberg. There are literally hundreds of places like this all over America. I mean, I didn't even go into Zanesville on this episode. We could do a whole show on that as well. And nobody seems to give a shit about changing it either. So I guess more guys in Harlem are going to get half eaten by Bengals in studio apartments. I mean, sounds totally legit.

There it is. A random bunch of stuff about big cats and gangsters. Bit of a weird show, but let us know if you've got any cool ideas for episodes two, by the way. We've had some real belters lately and they're really fun messages to get. And yeah, look for us to do another episode about something culturally relevant, maybe three or four years after it's popular. So what, 2028, we'll do a succession episode or something like that. But yeah, patreon.com slash underworldpodcast for bonus episodes, which we're going to keep going.

And subscribe on iTunes as well. And yeah, learned a lot about you this episode, Sean. Thanks, please.