TIGER BY THE TALE
How cop faced, & pet, Harlem beast
It was on a morning 15 years ago that a new Emergency Service Unit cop named Martin Duffy reported for work and was told something unbelievable: “They think there’s a tiger in an apartment.”
The report turned out to be true, and Duffy was about to become the focus of one of the most bizarre and hair-raising New York stories of the 2000s, as he confronted a 300-pound tiger named Ming inside a Harlem housing project.
Before Duffy’s day was through, the city watched as he aimed a tranquilizer gun into a fifth-floor window and sedated the roaring beast so that officers and Dr. Robert Cook, then the head veterinarian at the city’s zoos, could safely put him in a cage.
“I just remember looking at the size of his head, and I remember thinking, who’s ever going to get to touch this unless you work in a zoo?” Duffy recalled about coming close to the tiger after he had darted it.
“I touched his side, his front shoulder. It sounds corny, but you’re never going to get a chance to do this again so you have to touch him.”
Duffy isn’t the only one who can’t forget the story of Ming — neither can Antoine Yates, the resident of the Drew-Hamilton Houses who thought it would be a good idea to raise the jungle cat inside a Manhattan apartment.
“He would literally lay right across me and wouldn’t fall asleep unless his body was sprawled across mine,” Yates remembered of his days living with Ming.
Yates bought the cat at the age of 6 weeks from a wild-animal dealer. He started feeding Ming from a bottle, before moving onto pureed meat and eventually chickens and bones.
On the day in October 2003 that Ming finally turned on him, Yates had tried to step between the tiger and a black cat named Shadow that he’d taken in as a rescue.
“When they say I got mauled, that’s not true,” he insisted.
“He was just trying to get me out of the way.”
Yates claimed at the hospital that he suffered a “pitbull bite.” But his neighbors reported him — and Duffy wound up at his window with a gun.
“And I hear the tiger roar and that’s when I got a little uptight,” Duffy said. “I shoot one dart and I’m successful in hitting him.
“And he turns around and he comes running back at the window at me. He actually comes up and charges the window and breaks the window,” Duffy recalled.
“I’m hoping that he doesn’t come out through the window and possibly survive the fall and injure the police officers or the public, because now it’s been a media circus.”
About 20 minutes later, Cook and another zoo staffer entered the apartment, guarded by a group of ESU officers, shotguns drawn.
“We had a restraint pole I use and we put it around his head,” Cook said. “I gave him a little bit more sedative by injection, just to kind of top things off.”
Ming was lifted onto a gurney, taken down an elevator and hoisted by six men into an Animal Care and Control truck.
“It so impressed me,” Cook said of the first responders’ calm and professionalism.
Cook, now an adjunct professor at Columbia University, still gets angry when he thinks of Ming.
“This is just wrong from so many angles,” he said of a beautiful wild animal being raised in a cramped apartment.
The big cat is now 18, and lives at the Noah’s Lost Ark wildlife sanctuary in Ohio.
Antoine Yates, meanwhile, still dreams of once again owing the tiger. He told The Post that he’s about to purchase a North Carolina farm and turn it into a sanctuary — though the owner of the property said no deal was in the works.