From the outside, the Drew Hamilton Houses on West 141st Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard was just like any other public housing project in Harlem. Every day, 31-year-old Antoine Yates would return from work as a New York City cab driver to his home in apartment 5E.
But in New York City, nothing is exactly as it seems. Neighbors who lived on lower levels of Yates’s building would occasionally file curious complaints about urine cascading down the outside of their windows. Others would claim they had even heard roars.
It wasn’t until 2003 that the shocking truth came out. For nearly three years, Yates had been raising a full-grown, 450-pound, Siberian-Bengal tiger right in that very apartment—a tiger he named Ming.
Beginning in 2001, Yates brought the meaning of “concrete jungle” to life when he came home with the 8-week-old cub. Ming had originally come from an animal reserve in Ohio, but upon arriving in Harlem as a young cub, his world was transformed into a city-life.
“Consciously I knew I had a tiger, but the physical interaction and bonding, it was so natural,” Yates told a reporter at The New York Times. “He would literally lay right across me and wouldn’t fall asleep unless his body was sprawled across mine.”
In September of 2003, Yates took in Shadow, a stray black-and-white kitten who’d been abandoned at his doorstep. Ming and Shadow lived in harmony for about a week, but it wasn’t long until something within the tiger—who Yates likened to “a child with a loaded gun”—snapped.
On one particular morning, Yates noticed Ming whimpering out of what he perceived as loneliness. So, he quickly went to Ming and started up a round of their favorite play-fighting game that he called “Buddy-Buddy.” But all of a sudden, when Shadow emerged, Ming’s demeanor quickly shifted. Whether it was a hankering for breakfast or jealousy in being forced to share Yates’ attention, Ming’s relationship with the kitten quickly turned sour.
Ming lunged at the much smaller cat, but before he could reach him, Yates jumped in between them. The tiger’s fangs sunk right into his owner’s right leg, deep enough to expose the whiteness of bone. Yates recalled, “He got my leg in his mouth, and I could just see his ears pulled back, and his pupils starting to get a little bit smaller and smaller.”
By the time Yates crawled away to call 911, his right forearm had also been marred with huge claw marks. But over the phone to emergency operators, he offered a very different story, claiming the culprit had been a brown-and-white pitbull. When EMTs arrived at the scene, they were aghast to see the giant bite marks—no dog could have possibly been responsible.
As he lay bandaged in the hospital, Yates was interrogated by NYPD officers who remained skeptical that a pitbull was capable of 4 inch fang scars. Yates refused to tell on his best friend. “When they say I got mauled, that’s not true,” he later insisted. “He was just trying to get me out of the way.”
In fact, Yates bore no animosity towards the creature who’d almost killed him: “I’m not mad at Ming; I still love him.”
Two days later, on October 3rd, 2003, NYPD officer Martin Duffy arrived at the scene of the crime, rope and rifle in hand. He loaded a tranquilizer dart into the gun, harnessed himself to the rope, and prepared to be lowered down to a window where he had a clear shot at the tiger.
But as Duffy dangled from the side of the building, he must have looked awfully similar to a cat feather toy. “I hit him, and he jumps up, and he runs away, and he runs up to the far wall of the bedroom, 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 recounted to a reporter at The New York Post.
Thankfully for him, child-safety gates outside the window kept Duffy from becoming cat chow. He was able to fire the sedative into Ming, who collapsed on the bathroom floor. Animal Control and Emergency Service Unit officers quickly moved into the apartment, hauling the tiger onto a gurney and away from the only home he’d ever known.
Meanwhile, Yates was facing consequences beyond his injuries. After months of bargaining, he ended up taking the plea deal in his case and was sentenced to five months in prison for reckless endangerment and possession of a wild animal.
“It was a story that could only happen in New York City,” said Jeremy Saland, the prosecuting attorney on the case.
Today, Yates hasn’t forgotten his time with Ming. “I feel heartbroken,” he said. “I miss him a lot. He’s like my brother, my best friend, my only friend, really.”
Yates’ fascination with animals began from a very young age. When he was as young as three years old, he fell in love with fluffy Syrian hamsters—harmless enough. He began nursing injured birds and became known to neighbors as their very own “Doctor Dolittle.” But eventually, that snowballed. Reptiles, monkeys, and allegedly even a hyena, all came to live at the Yates household at one point or another.
Yates’ tenderness towards those in need of a home is a trait he inherited from his mother, Martha Yates. Growing up, Martha took in dozens of foster children and raised them in the very apartment that Ming would later call home. When questioned about what could have caused Ming’s sudden outburst on their fateful last day together, Yates simply said, ‘He was abandoned. I know how abandonment feels.’
But Yates’ desire to create an “animal sanctuary” was also more than just a boyish intrigue gone-wrong. Living alongside these animals was something of a statement, “to show the whole world that we could all get along,” as he would later put it.
As a cub, Ming was bottle-fed, and as he grew older, Yates would spoon-feed him pureed meat. But when the man’s feline friend grew to a full-sized beast, those meals ballooned. Every morning over the next few years, Yates would venture out to the supermarket and return with multiple large grocery bags hanging off of his shoulders and arms. In them was a total of 20 pounds of raw chicken. Newcomers would often joke with the tall, thin man, wondering what he could possibly be cooking up.
While Ming completely escaped the notice of housing authorities, many observant residents were aware of the tiger in their midst—and didn’t seem to mind. “It was a house pet,” said Jerome Applewhite, a neighbor who lived on the 18th floor, “To me that is cool.”
Yates makes a clear distinction between himself and other big-cat lovers of pop-culture. “Let’s take Joe Exotic, let’s take the lady from Florida, let’s take a thousand other tiger owners—I’m going to show you the difference: Most of those owners only spend a fraction of the time with the animals. You know why? They have fences and enclosed backyards. So their environment is controlled.”
Meanwhile, living side-by-side in close quarters, Yates’ bond with Ming bond was almost to be expected. He fondly remembers dozens of sweet moments, such as enjoying sunrise rooftop views with Ming. “Twenty one stories in the air, the city is quiet […] and that was an ultimate moment, like I’m on top of the world.”
Although Ming was often as affectionate as any house cat, Yates said he “didn’t want to domesticate him.” In fact, the Tiger King described himself as “a drill sergeant,” enriching Ming’s animalistic instinct. Yates frequently hid dolls sprayed with cologne for the tiger to sniff out, gave him frozen slabs of liver to play with, and even built a sandbox in Ming’s bedroom.
Owning the tiger was also a reaction to the injustice that Yates, and Black people across the U.S., had faced. He felt safer being locked away with an enormous beast than walking down the street as an African-American man. “I was sick and tired of it. So I literally locked myself in the house, and I went and bought the tiger. Animals are only going to do what they set out to do as they were designed by God. But with a human, you never know what to expect. Never ever, ever, ever.”
Yates also argued that his tiger friend was a testament to the neglect of New York City housing authorities. “Think about it—I raised a tiger in the projects,” he told a reporter at MEL Magazine. Officials, who are mandated to do quarterly inspections of city housing projects, had clearly not checked in on apartment 5E.
“Most of the time it was just me there—no family, no friends, no girlfriends,” he said. “I never put the public or another soul in harm’s way. I’m not a hard-core criminal. I’m just a person with a passion for animals.”
Ming lived out the rest of his days peacefully in Noah’s Lost Ark Animal Sanctuary. In 2019, he died of natural causes and after sixteen years, was brought home. He was buried at the Hartsdale Pet Cemetery in Westchester, just seventeen miles north from his cubhood home. His monument faces south towards New York City, and reads “legendary NYC tiger.”
After Yates jumped in and the infamous tussle ensued, Shadow, the kitten that brought it all crashing down, hid somewhere in the apartment. Even by October, as Yates appeared before the court, he was still pleading for someone to find the cat. Finally, two months after the incident, Shadow was found in the abandoned Harlem apartment, much to Yates’ joy—“Shadow! I found Shadow!”
Today, Yates’ home in Philadelphia houses a variety of eccentric animals: a snake, a chinchilla, and a snapping turtle. But Ming of Harlem proved that tigers could be man’s best friend.
When asked in an interview, “Mr. Yates, can you tell us what you were thinking by keeping these animals?”
The Tiger King’s only response was, “Love, baby, love.”
It wasn’t until 2003 that the shocking truth came out. For nearly three years, Yates had been raising a full-grown, 450-pound, Siberian-Bengal tiger right in that very apartment—a tiger he named Ming.