As Netflix’s 'Tiger King' premieres, revisit our profile of Joe Exotic, a modern Barnum who found an equally extraordinary nemesis
Joe Exotic at his zoo in Wynnewood, Oklahoma, in 2015. Photo: Josh Welch This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
Joe’s mother likes to say that Joe’s father, whom people called Francie, had “itchy feet.” When Joe was 11, Francie decided he would rather raise racehorses than crops, so his family began roaming north and south along the plains from Kansas to Wyoming to Texas. Few of Joe’s classmates from those years remember him, and his photo is often missing from his junior-high yearbook. In high school, he got bullied by the jocks because he preferred to hang around with girls.
Joe remembers that Tim’s friend would sometimes bring home baby lions and let Joe play with them on their peach-colored carpet. In the drear of his life up to that point, these animals fluoresced. Imagine: to roll around on the living-room floor with a lion cub, something from so far away brought close enough to smell its warm, beasty fur. Joe liked to say he was broken and those little critters helped put him back together.
There was already a little ranch house on the property. Joe and Brian moved in. When new animals were born at the zoo, the babies lived in the house with him and Brian. As the years went by, Joe built more cages and fences all around the house, which he filled with lions and tigers and dogs until, almost without noticing, he became just another animal living inside a cage, inside the zoo.
One night, during a particularly bad argument, Carole could tell that Mike was going to beat her again, so she threw a potato at his head and ran out of the house barefoot. She ducked between houses to evade him. She was 19 years old, with blonde hair, big blue eyes, and a big smile; people were always confusing her with “that woman on TV.” While she was walking down the road, a car pulled up alongside her and rolled down the window.
Whenever she called him at work, she would ask his secretary if she could speak with Bob Martin. One day, a different secretary answered the phone. Visitors who were accustomed to these big-city zoos were sometimes shocked, upon entering the G.W. Zoo in Wynnewood, Oklahoma, to find row upon row of steel cages. But the naked-steel cages at the G.W. Zoo struck other visitors as refreshingly honest. After all, enclosure is a zoo’s essential quality: Children will run screaming in terror from a bee aloft, but put it under glass and they will gather round, transfixed. Joe just made the ugly truth visible.
Joe made it very clear that his “park” was a sanctuary, not a zoo. Over the years, he had discovered that a shocking number of exotic animals were living in backyards and basements all across the country, many of which had grown too large or too dangerous for their owners. The laws on big-cat ownership were, and remain, lax. All that is needed to buy a tiger cub is a USDA exhibitor’s license, which costs $40.
Don could be a cruel man. The word Carole used in her diary was venomous. Their fiercest fights were about money. Don — who had clawed his way up from a hardscrabble childhood to build a successful business selling and scrapping metal and machine parts, then buying distressed real-estate assets — was notoriously stingy. He bought Carole a cubic-zirconia wedding ring and refused to pay her daughter’s cable bill. He was also notoriously promiscuous, and Carole knew it.
Joe at his zoo in 2015. Photo: Josh Welch For Joe, there was never enough money; the cats just ate it up. To make more, he began traveling to local flea markets with a full-grown tiger named Clint Black. For $5, people could pose for a Polaroid with him. Then, when that became too dangerous, he switched to using baby tigers, which were cuter anyway. He began taking his petting zoo to shopping malls and flea markets in ever-widening orbits.
On their honeymoon in the Virgin Islands, Carole — who was an avid believer in the cosmic-wish-fulfillment doctrine known as the Secret — began typing out her dream: a 20-year plan to end the captive ownership of big cats in America. By 2025, she aimed to end the breeding, sale, and public display of big cats, including in zoos. With no more big cats being bred, sanctuaries too would eventually close as their stock died off.
By this point, Joe Exotic had begun to mutate into a new body more befitting his name. His mullet was dyed blond. He dressed in spangly shirts and leather chaps. On his left hand grew a long, carefully manicured pinkie nail. He was covered in tattoos: one of a monkey named Ricky, one of a tiger named Sarge, one of a peacock, deer antlers, tiger stripes, and later three fake bullet holes in his chest, forever dripping, like modern-day stigmata. Permanent eyeliner was tattooed around his eyes.
A behind-the-scenes look at Joe taping one of his reality shows. Photo: Rick Kirkhan With Howard’s help, Carole reinvented Wildlife on Easy Street. They renamed it Big Cat Rescue. But rather than rescuing more cats, which is a hydra-headed struggle — the more cats you rescue, the more people breed, secure in the knowledge that they can simply off-load them once they become dangerous — they focused on fund-raising and building their online following. Carole proved to be a wizard at the latter.
Joe felt hunted. Over the years, animal-rights groups like PETA and the Humane Society had begun sending spies to film his road shows and even to infiltrate his staff at the zoo, but Joe was always able to shake them off. His war extended beyond the internet. One day, he decided that if Carole was going to attack him for doing cub petting, then he would simply change the name of his company to the name of her company. That way, her fans would come to believe that she was a hypocrite. He instructed his employee Aaron Stone — a magician who had joined him on his road show and one of the few computer-savvy members of his staff — to replicate her logo.
The zoo increasingly took on the queasy, paranoiac quality of a walled kingdom run by a mad king. At night, according to his staff, Joe locked the gates, which meant the employees couldn’t leave. The workers couldn’t always afford food on their pay — they made between $150 and $300 a week, far below the minimum wage — so they resorted to eating the expired steaks and hot dogs that Walmart had donated to the cats.
The worst incident occurred in October 2013. An employee named Saff was moving a tiger from its main cage to a smaller one called a shift pen. Rather than using a bull hook to close the door, as he normally would, he impulsively reached his arm into the tiger cage. Within seconds, the tiger had bitten down on his hand, breaking his middle finger. Saff looked up at the employee next to him and said, “This is going to be bad.
One night, Joe took a rapper named Radio Raheem and his entourage out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Paul’s Valley. Hunched over his plate of fajitas and a big red plastic cup of Coke, Joe looked both haggard and wired, like a movie hooker. He claimed to be dying from prostate and bone-marrow cancer.
Jeff Lowe had eyes the color of snowmelt and a neatly trimmed gray goatee. He wore leather jackets, fancy jeans, and a black do-rag wrapped around his balding head. He once worked as Robbie Knievel’s manager and now ran a liquidation business. He drove a red Ferrari and a white Hummer. He was once arrested for assaulting his wife.
One dark day in October 2017, Travis Maldonado, Joe’s 23-year-old husband, accidentally shot himself in the head with a pistol and died. In the following weeks, Joe became untethered. He began having visions. First, he sensed Travis’s presence in a honeybee that landed on his finger when he was about to fire his AR-15. Then he sensed Travis’s spirit in a blue-heeler dog. He spent a lot of time staring at the clouds.
By this point, a new employee named Alan Glover was at the zoo. Alan was a hulk of a man with a shaved head, a sailor’s deeply reddened face, and a voice as low and grumbly as a motorcycle engine. He had a teardrop tattoo under his left eye. He had previously worked for Jeff Lowe back in South Carolina. Lowe persuaded him to move to Oklahoma to help out with basic maintenance and yard work. He had arrived carrying nothing but a small suitcase and a chain saw.
Unbeknownst to Joe or Alan, James Garretson was secretly recording their conversations for the FBI. Over the course of many months, what had begun as a Fish and Wildlife Service investigation into Joe’s animal crimes had evolved into a murder-for-hire case. The final thread snapped on June 15. Joe was attempting to euthanize ten tigers when Lowe intervened and ordered him to get off the property. Joe thought, The hell with it, and left that day, then posted a farewell video on Facebook Live from the back of his stretch limo. His voice croaky, his eyes welling with tears, he said, “The animal industry has sucked the life out of me for the past 20 years. I need a break. That’s about all I have to say.
Unbeknownst to Joe, the FBI had finally tracked down Alan Glover, who had told them all about the plot thanks in large part to the cooperation of Jeff Lowe.
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