Surviving Joe Exotic

Man: Alright, we are speeding. You speeding?

Exotic: Okay, does sunglasses matter,

So I'm not squinting so bad?

I don't want to look old.

There you go!

You can shine that in my face all you want now.

Producer: Joe, you should probably introduce yourself.

Tell me who you are, what you do.

Okay, well, my real name is joseph maldonado-passage,

And everybody knows me as joe exotic.

We are a zoo open to the public

That takes unwanted animals.

I have to ask myself that every day now.

I don't know why the hell I'm doing this.

Give that good-looking mama a kiss.

There you go.

Get up here and pet him. Pet him.

Next group!

This is definitely not

One of those things that you do to make money.

I ain't gonna lie...

It's a labor of love.

Really have to love the animals.

- There you go! -

Get out of here!

Chase him all the way around.

Captions paid for by discovery communications

Saffery: Obviously, the animals was his demise.

It was one of his stepping stones to the top.

And it was also that broken board that he crashed

All the way through.

What you doing, you sexy tiger?

What are you doing?

Saffery: Desperation and greed, for sure, drove that.

Eastwood: I actually worked for joe twice.

In the beginning...

The end of '99, the first part of 2000...

Joe believed in his head

That there was some sort of connection

To what he was doing and conservation.

I went back in 2014,

And the only way I can describe it

Is just, my mind was blown.

It was mass breeding.

You had at least once, twice a month,

Tigers giving birth to cubs and the cubs being pulled...

50 to 60 cubs a year born.

It was a tiger mill, is basically what it was.

Exotic: I don't know how I become the tiger guy.

I rescued my first tiger in 1999,

And they've never stopped coming.

I call it a gift.

I walk among them,

Don't force them to come to me.

I don't make them do any tricks. I can walk in a cage

With 14 tigers, and if they want to come love on me,

That's their option.

If they want to stay away from me, that's their option, okay?

But anyway...

Fortune and fame. That's that's what joe wanted.

The animals were a big part of that.

But at the end of every day, joe's biggest thing was,

"I want to be famous, and I want to be rich."

That's joe exotic.

Exotic: Lightning, come on!

Let's go!

Come on. Time to go to work!

Come on, sexy man.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

I'd like to welcome you

To the greater wynnewood exotic animal park.

My name's joe exotic,

That's thunder, and this is laughing.

You're gonna get up close and personal today

With one of them fences between you and their cages.

We're gonna put tigers on the ground and you're gonna

Get on the ground and love on these little tigers

So you can understand what I do every day of my life

In order to save these majestic animals.

You know, a lot of people are against public contact

Of animals or public exhibition of animals.

You should either be closed to the public,

The animals should be locked in a little prison

And never, never loved on or never touched.

And to hell with that.

My name is matthew simmons. Navy veteran,

Co-founder of the lockwood animal rescue center.

So, we had been involved in a long lawsuit

Trying to protect wolves in minnesota.

During this long investigation,

The person owning the animals took a hard right

And just started shuffling these animals to the wind.

And 28 of those wolves were transferred to joe exotic.

So our efforts to rescue them turned to oklahoma.

We got a phone call from a lady up in minnesota.

She needed to get rid of them by that Tuesday.

So we ended up with something like 26 wolves...

That I didn't need.

Ah, hell.

Simmons: I knew very little of joe exotic.

You know, I was somewhat familiar that there was

This guy in oklahoma that had a lot of big cats,

But didn't get any more specifics than that.

Yeah, this place is interesting.

As I'm walking through the facility, I mean,

There's, like, a tiger here and a lion here, and a capuchin,

And they've got chimps and a baby kangaroo,

And there's camels licking people's faces.

And I just, you know,

At that point, I know what crazy looks like.

- How you doing, man? - Good, man.

And then here comes joe.

All I need to do is get them pliable.

We're gonna muzzle them, we're gonna pull dna,

We're gonna pull blood,

We're gonna make a health certificate.

I needed some edibles. Nobody brought no edibles?

I needed some edibles from california

Or colorado. You didn't bring me none?

We had been working our way towards picking up 28 wolves,

And we get to joe's and there aren't 28 wolves.

This is three of them. Come here, guys. Come here!

And then he goes into the used car salesman.

"well, you know, it was 28,

But then it was 26,

And it might be 25

'cause there's two of them that we can't find,"

And the whole thing.

14, 15, 16...

Where the hell did reinke get 26 wolves at?

Oh, hell, I forgot that cage over there.

Yeah, with four of them in it, right?

I forgot we chucked four back over there.

Simmons: All of them off!

Put them on rollers and let's start running them.

Oh, I'm so gonna need a joint by the end of the day.

And I don't even smoke weed.

But I'm all for selling it and making some money on it.

Simmons: This is a cluster

We'll get the wolves and get out of here.

The idea was I can send them wolves

To california, to a better facility

That's prepared to take care of wolves.

And the whole idea is not to be a hoarder, you know?

Hi!

Hi, baby!

This is way too many animals.

Hi! Ready to get the hell out of here?

So, as I'm walking around,

There's, you know, 200 cats on 50-some-odd acres.

What's up, big guy?

What's up, big guy?

You're starting to pick up the vibe that,

You know, this animal's blind

And this animal has dwarfism

And this animal is this.

I got the distinct feeling

Every animal there was on borrowed time.

You need to buy a baby liliger?

Uh, I...

Once animals become money

And once they become this barter and trade system,

Only the animal suffers.

I mean, he was trying to sell tigers

To anyone who would buy them.

When they're like five or six months old, 1,000 bucks.

I mean, he was trying to sell them to the crew.

He was trying to sell them to my employees.

He was saying we can make it a donation.

And no one there had a permit for tigers.

- These are my film people. - Oh, okay, okay.

Yep, we film y'all filming me, in case you lie...

We got the original .

Yeah, I've been down that road before.

This was a unique situation. I could see the walls coming in.

Before we even got here, he was nickel-and-diming

My lawyers to reimburse him

For every expense associated with the wolves.

It was may of 2018, and now we know

That he was trying to figure out his exit plan.

You know, rome was burning,

You know, while we were standing there.

Oh, my god.

God almighty.

I see these two female lions

That are in a 10x10.

Half the roof is off.

And when I walked by, unlike some of the other cats

At the facility, they were petrified.

Cats are one of the few animals that really feed off emotion

And really feed off of who they're around.

And these two were sisters.

I mean, they should've been playing with each other