Meet Antoine Yates, The Man Who Lived With A Tiger In A New York Apartment For Years

Every day, Antoine Yates came home to his Harlem apartment carrying a few large bags. The part-time cab driver was a tall, thin man and so his neighbors liked to joke with him. How could he eat all that raw chicken he brought home every day?

Every day, Yates would bring those plastic bags, stuffed with twenty pounds of raw meat from the local supermarket, to his five-bedroom apartment, pause at the front door, and then enter swiftly and silently. What was going on in there?

From 2000 to 2003, Yates made a reputation for himself in spite of his mild-mannered appearance and quiet demeanor. What started as a rumor soon blossomed into an urban legend, and then, one tragic day, was confirmed as fact. A 425-pound Siberian-Bengal tiger named Ming was living with Yates in his apartment.

Yates had bought Ming from the BEARCAT Hollow Animal Park in Racine, Minnesota when he was just a cub. He’d always been drawn to exotic animals and claimed that he’d kept a monkey and scorpion as pets in the past.

He also had an alligator — named Al, of course — who he’d raised from a hatchling. But Ming was special. “He’s like my brother, my best friend, my only friend, really,” Yates later told a New York court, according to the New York Times.

“We’d just have a natural day. It’s like you having a dog,” Yates told MEL Magazine in 2020. “It’s no different. If I’m laying down, he’s laying down right next to me. If I’m getting up to go to the bathroom, he’s getting up to follow me to the bathroom. If I said, ‘Hey-yo, Ming, sit down and chill out,’ he’d sit down and chill out. If I said, ‘Ming, go lay down and go to sleep,’ he’d go lay down and go to sleep.”

Still, Yates knew there were risks. “There’s no choice. It’s like playing a game of Russian Roulette. Put a bullet in it, spin it and click it,” he added in his interview with MEL. Those risks came to a head on September 30, 2003. Yates had brought home a stray black cat, named Shadow, which got Ming’s attention. Whether it was jealousy, a predator instinct, or the culmination of all the strangeness, something in Ming snapped and he became violent for the first time in his life.

The real Tiger King. Antoine Yates of Harlem. pic.twitter.com/WfMNus0qan

— Wil Uno (@Fueledbyair) March 30, 2020

As Ming lunged at Shadow, Yates put himself between the two cats. Ming bit his neck, forearm, and leg as the two fought. Yates, adrenaline flowing, mustered the calm confidence to pull his leg free and gently scold the tiger. Ming went into the apartment’s bathroom, and Yates closed him inside, then called 911.

While he tried to pin the blame for the attack on his pit bull, the police became suspicious because of the size of the wounds. It didn’t take long for his neighbors to turn him in. His brother, Aaron, told them he’d witnessed a live tiger in the apartment, fed by chunks of raw meat. Yates’ downstairs neighbor told police of how tiger urine would sometimes cascade down her windows, dumped from Ming’s room.

Yates was arrested after his release from the hospital where he was receiving treatment for his injuries. He pled guilty to reckless endangerment and was sentenced to five months in prison and five years probation. Meanwhile, the NYPD came up with an inventive solution to get Ming out of the apartment. NYPD officer Martin Duffy rappelled down the side of the building and hit Ming with a tranquilizer dart. It took a half-dozen officers to haul him down the five flights of stairs and out into a waiting vehicle. “We both had our freedom, but now we’re both caged,” Yates told NBC News.

Those that took care of Ming after his removal from the apartment, however, see it a different way. “He lived a really good life here,” Ellen Karnofel, owner of the Noah’s Lost Ark Animal Sanctuary told the Daily News. “He was able to run and play on the grounds. He had tiger friends. He had a swimming pool. He was able to experience the elements.”

From 2003 until his death of natural causes in 2019, Ming lived at the Ohio animal sanctuary in peace. “For over 15 years, ​he lived here side by side to other rescued big cats, chuffing his salutations to his tiger companions, lounging in the sun, and feeling grass under his paws; all things he couldn’t ​experience in the apartment where he was raised,” photographer Henry Jones told the outlet. Al the alligator faced a similar fate, ending up at a wildlife center in Indiana, according to the Taipei Times.

As for Yates, life since that fateful day in 2003 hasn’t been as charmed. His suit against the city was summarily dismissed, and the unusual life he’d built for himself, surrounded by exotic animals in the heart of the city, was torn away. He blames himself for the “risk” of bringing Shadow into his apartment but maintains that he truly cared for Ming, something that he feels the city disregarded — just as they disregarded the generally poor housing conditions in Harlem.

“Think about it — I raised a tiger in the projects,” he told MEL Magazine. “When you live in a New York City Housing Authority complex, it’s mandated that people have to come in and do inspections quarterly… And they were putting it down that they’d been in and checked apartment 5E, my apartment. So you have that lie, there in black and white: ‘You guys were checking this property all this time and you’re telling me you never noticed this man has a tiger in there?’ You see what I’m trying to say? It felt like I was going against the entire New York City. How does a person who’s never been in jail or trouble before get probation and jail time for a nonviolent crime?”

He currently lives in Philadelphia, with a variety of exotic pets. His biggest is a chinchilla, and his snapping turtle has the meanest bite. It’s a far cry from the days of Al, Ming, and their Harlem apartment — and that’s definitely for the best.