WILD SEX, DRUGS AN
HE was a larger-than-life character – a gun-toting zookeeper with more than 1,200 big cats and a love of drugs and sex with multiple partners.
But the party stopped for Joseph Maldonado-passage, aka Joe Exotic, when he was last year convicted of trying to kill a rival and two months ago sentenced to 22 years in jail.
The chilling case is now the subject of a Netflix docuseries, Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem And Madness, which drops today.
For two decades, Joe, now 55, had been the face of a massive private zoo in Wynnewood, Oklahoma.
Also nicknamed the “Tiger King”, he claimed to own the largest collection of the big cats in the US.
He had a 16-acre park lined with metal cages filled with more than 100 tigers, lions and extremely rare tiger/ lioness hybrids called tiligers, as well as bears and alligators.
With his horseshoe moustache, bleached mullet and loud shirts, Joe was a flamboyant presence. His zoo was filled with pictures of him, and he even sold packaged condoms with his face on in the gift shop.
Bizarre
Occasionally referring to himself as a “gay, gun-toting cowboy with a mullet”, he enjoyed partner-swapping sex parties and in his downtime he filmed home-made country music videos.
Joe also ran in the 2018 elections for governor of Oklahoma, even confessing to taking drugs in a bizarre campaign video.
Maybe unsurprisingly, he lost. Joe was featured on a 2011 Louis Theroux documentary, America’s Most Dangerous Pets, and told the journalist that if one of his lions “got him” he’d rather be shot than mauled slowly by his pet.
Before he was Maldonado-passage, called Joe Schreibvogel.
He was born on a farm in rural Kansas, which sparked his love of animals, and after leaving home got a job at a pet shop.
He befriended a neighbour who worked at a nearby exotic animal park and allowed Joe to feed baby lions and monkeys by bottle.
Joe became hooked on exotic pets, and in 1986 he moved to Texas and started his own business with his brother Garold, where they sold
Joe Exotic or Joseph was
■ smaller exotic species such as armadillos and opossums.
In 1997, Garold was killed when he was hit by a drunk driver. The family won £120,000 in a lawsuit, which Joe partly used to buy his land in Oklahoma and start his own zoo.
Two years later, the Garold Wayne Exotic Animal Memorial Park opened.
Word of the new zoo quickly spread, and Joe began receiving donations of animals – the first inhabitants were a deer and buffalo.
In 2000, Joe received his first tigers, which had been abandoned in a back yard. He named the pair Tess and Tickles and they bred, with the zooowner raising their cubs.
But as the animal park grew, Joe started attracting attention from the authorities, and in 2006 he was fined £20,000 for various violations, which included failing to provide adequ for his
Anim PETA video, the b mistre being butt of Joe’s em
One Baskin local p the lio due t legitim ary w happe
It w bitter herself
Caro anima