The zoo will be located in Thackerville, Oklahoma behind the Winstar Casino, per the zoo’s website. Source: Read Full Article. Post navigation. He said they were already working on dismantling the zoo to move the animals to the new location near the Winstar Casino. Earlier this year, the zoo was temporarily closed because of the pandemic. But according to the zoo’s Facebook posts, it has since reopened.
byNolan ClayIn his 56 years of life, Joe Exotic has gone by a lot of different names and done a lot of different things.
The Tiger King has been a zookeeper, a big cat breeder, a presidential candidate, a gubernatorial candidate, a nursing home aide and — according to him — even a police chief.
On Tuesday, he became a convicted felon.
His jury took less than four hours Tuesday to find him guilty on all 19 counts. He showed no reaction as U.S. District Judge Scott Palk read the verdict in Oklahoma City federal court.
The 12 jurors unanimously agreed he twice hired someone to kill a Florida animal sanctuary operator whose nonprofit organization successfully sued him for more than $1 million for trademark infringement and other civil wrongs.
'I am grateful justice was served,' his intended victim, Carole Baskin, said after the verdict.
Jurors unanimously agreed he also illegally killed five tigers with a shotgun, illegally offered to sell and sold tiger cubs and falsified documents involving the sale of tigers, lions and a baby lemur.
He faces up to 20 years in prison and $500,000 in fines on the two murder-for-hire counts alone. The judge will decide his punishment later this year.
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Baskin, CEO of Big Cat Rescue, said he 'hopefully will serve time in prison and no longer present a threat either to me or to his former big cats.'
Joe Exotic in 1999 founded a private zoo in Wynnewood where he bred tigers, lions and tiger-lions hybrid and allowed the public to have 'play times' with tigers cubs for an extra charge. He sold the zoo in 2016 but was left in charge of day-to-day operations.
In testimony Monday in his own defense, he told jurors the zoo's new owner, Jeff Lowe, set him up in 2017 to get rid of him for good. 'These murder-for-hire allegations were manufactured,' defense attorney, Bill Earley, said in a closing argument Tuesday.
The key evidence against him, though, were his own words.
Prosecutors put into evidence recordings of his conversation with a government informant about having a zoo worker do the killing. In a Nov. 7, 2017, phone conversation, he discussed details of the plan and said, 'As long as he don't get caught red-handed, I think we got this.'
The zoo worker, Allen Glover, testified Joe Exotic paid him $3,000 in cash for the killing, had him get a fake ID in Dallas and gave him a cellphone with Baskin's photo on it. Glover, a convicted felon, said he just took the money and partied on a beach in Florida instead.
Prosecutors also put into evidence Joe Exotic's 47-minute conversation on Dec. 8, 2017, at the zoo with an undercover FBI agent posing as a hit man. He offered to pay the agent $5,000 down to make Baskin go away and $5,000 more when it was on the news. 'Just like follow her into a mall parking lot and just cap her and drive off,' he said in the recording.
'Here's the problem with kings,' Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Green said in her closing argument Tuesday. 'They start to believe they are above the law.'
She replayed for jurors Tuesday part of Joe Exotic's phone conversation with former boyfriend, John Finlay, after his arrest last September in Gulf Breeze, Florida. In the conversation, Joe Exotic expressed shock when Finlay revealed he told the FBI he drove Glover to Dallas to get the fake ID for the Florida trip.
'Oh, so, so, you hung me out to dry? Huh?' he said.
Again, Green told jurors Tuesday, Joe Exotic's mouth 'became his own worst enemy.'
He faced 21 counts when the trial started. Prosecutors dropped two false document counts Friday.
Lowe, who is relocating the zoo to near Thackerville, called the verdict 'justice for the animals.' Lowe said Joe Exotic has committed other crimes including embezzling $88,877 in zoo funds to pay personal and campaign expenses.
Joe Exotic ran for president in 2016 as an independent. He ran for governor in Oklahoma in 2018 as a Libertarian. Last June, he was forced to leave the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park by Lowe.
About his names, he said he was born Joseph Schreibvogel. He went by the name Joseph Maldonado after marrying husband Travis Maldonado. He went by the name Joseph Maldonado-Passage after Travis died in 2017 and he married Dillon Jacob Passage two months later. He was referred to in trial most often as Mr. Passage.
He also has gone by the nicknames the Tiger King and Joe Exotic.
The president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said Tuesday 'Joe Exotic has been on PETA's radar for years as a notorious animal abuser and as the primary supplier of big cat cubs for the cruel cub-petting industry.'
'The world will be a safer place for all living beings with this man behind bars, where he can no longer harm animals or the animal advocates he hanged in effigy,' PETA President Ingrid Newkirk said.
Nolan Clay was born in Oklahoma and has worked as a reporter for The Oklahoman since 1985. He covered the Oklahoma City bombing trials and witnessed bomber Tim McVeigh's execution. His investigative reports have brought down public officials,... Read more ›
It’s been six months since Netflix’s Tiger King introduced the world to Carole Baskin, the eccentric CEO of Big Cat Rescue and Joe Exotic’s longstanding rival. In a confluence of events that could only happen in 2020, Baskin is now set to compete on the upcoming season of Dancing With the Stars. But her life has changed significantly since viewers last saw her on Tiger King.
Baskin told Entertainment Tonight that after the show, over 190 media outlets reach out to her for an interview, most of which she turned down. It was her daughter, Jamie Veronica, who talked her into doing DWTS. “[The big cats] were the real losers in Tiger King. There was [little] attention paid to what those cats go through,” Baskin told ET. “I have always been strictly focused on protecting big cats and saving them in the wild. The editors of Tiger King chose not to focus on that part of what I do. I'm really hoping the editors of Dancing With the Stars do.”
Baskin still runs Big Cat Rescue, but in an ironic turn of events, she also now owns Joe Exotic’s Oklahoma zoo. (Exotic is currently in prison). As reported by CNN, a judge granted her ownership in June as part of her lawsuit against his former company, Greater Wynnewood Development Group, LLC. The judge also awarded Baskin cabins and vehicles on the premises, in addition to ordering GWDC to vacate the property within 120 days and remove “all zoo animals from the Zoo Land.”
Winstar World Casino And Resort
It’s unclear what Baskin’s plans are for the zoo, which has been permanently closed. “I know everyone is going to bombard me with the question we all want answered; 'What about the animals?' and we don't know yet what will happen but will alert you the minute we do,' Baskin wrote on Facebook in August.
Similar to Exotic’s zoo, Big Cat Rescue started out as a tourist attraction when Baskin founded it in 1992. However, according to Longreads, she changed course a few years later after realizing that the business was inhumane (they were breeding the exotic cats and treating them as pets). Big Cat Rescue instead began neutering and spaying all of their animals, and any time someone brought in a cat for them to rescue, they required them to sign a waiver saying they would never own exotic cats again. 'We're the only place that absolutely insists that if you're going to dump an animal here, you are never going to own another exotic cat,' Baskin told Longreads.
Zoo Behind Winstar Casino
It costs about $50 per person to visit Baskin's sanctuary. 'It's not like a zoo…you can't just walk around,' Baskin told Vanity Fair. “We take you out for a guided tour for an hour and a half. We tell people why these cats don't belong in cages and why there shouldn't have to be an organization like Big Cat Rescue to rescue cats from horrible situations.'
In fact, Baskin’s ultimate goal is something that would put her out of business: ending wild cat ownership altogether. On Big Cat Rescue’s website, Baskin urges readers to help pass the Big Cat Public Safety Act, which will end both 'owning big cats as pets and stopping exploitative roadside zoos from offering cub petting and photo ops.'
Per Congress.gov, the bill has been introduced but has yet to be passed through the House or Senate. 'We've generated over 16,000 calls from people in the past year and a half and stand poised to get that bill passed this year,' Baskin told Vanity Fair. She hopes that Tiger King will help spread awareness of the dangers that this kind of exotic entertainment inflicts on the animals. 'Everybody who pays to pet a cub or have an interaction with a big cat, is enabling all of this criminal activity that they're seeing in this documentary,' she said.
In addition to Baskin's activism and daily duties at Big Cat Rescue, she also has a YouTube channel where she regularly uploads video diaries. She’s still married to Howard Baskin, who she met in 2002, per Longreads, and her daughter Jamie also works at the sanctuary.
Soon, Baskin will be back on TV: first making her DWTS debut with a dance to “Eye of the Tiger” (yes, really) and then in a TV adaptation of the Wondery podcast, Joe Exotic: Tiger King, albeit in a much different form: SNL's Kate McKinnon is slated to play her.
Winstar Casino And Resort Oklahoma
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