During the good times, the dull rumble of the tigers in the back of his truck sounded like the rustle of cash. Jim Stephens would push on all night, motoring his big cat show -- Water Wheel Exotics -- from one county fair to another.
By noon, he'd be up selling tickets for the big-top exhibition or charging farm kids for snapshots with a genuine tiger cub. Those were the sweet years, before 1996, when federal and state agents began to close in on the man nicknamed "Top Cat."
"It was good, if you like animals, you know?" Stephens said.
On Sept. 1, 2000, more than 70 officers from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Pennsylvania Game Commission raided his ranch in Avella, Washington County. They seized 11 cats, including a pregnant tigress that would soon give birth to twins. It was the end to an era for Stephens, and an exclamation point on the long story of his economic collapse.
Raising a tiger to maturity is expensive -- costing at least $125,000 -- and Stephens conceded he had been forced to cut corners for years.
It's not a federal crime to own captive-bred tigers in America, but it's illegal to slaughter or sell their skins, skulls, bones or bowels. In high demand by Western collectors and purveyors of traditional Chinese medicines in Asia, a cat carcass can fetch up to $25,000 on the animal black market.
Taxidermists paid Stephens for dead or stillborn tiger kittens, stuffing them for wealthy collectors. Tiger claws became jewelry for Christmas gifts. He pulverized adult cats' skeletons and retailed the bone mulch for $5 a pound. An adult tiger yields about 400 pounds of bone.
"Chinese medicine. There was a guy down in the Strip District, I sold him two of them. But I never killed one. I hope to die today before I kill one."
In 1996, the USDA fined Stephens $30,000 for violations of animal welfare laws. Then the Game Commission outlawed his photo shoots with the cats. Then eBay shut down his tiger claw sales. Then came the raid, and out went his tigers.
USDA reports slammed Stephens for the deplorable life the cats led: lions and tigers mucking through inches of feces, sipping water befouled with waste, eating rancid roadkill and condemned chicken meat, living in pens infested with rats and bugs.
"I don't think everyone should have them. Maybe I shouldn't have had them," said Stephens. "But I was in the business, and I did pictures ... Not that I'm perfect. But no one is."
Conservationists and federal officers depict Stephens as the perfect example of how the only people who make money with tigers are those who breed them for sale to an unwitting public or recycle the cats' meat, bones and hides when they die.
Stephens dabbled in illegal sales, but he never made a killing. No one knows how much William Kapp made in the market, but he made a killing of a different sort.
In April, a federal jury convicted Kapp, 37, an Illinois jail guard, as a ringleader in a six-state conspiracy involving 17 seemingly legitimate breeders, "rescue shelter" operators, taxidermists and butchers, who sought to acquire, slaughter and sell tigers, snow leopards, lions, cougars and black bears.
Some Chicago diners ate the tiger meat. The skins went to wealthy hide collectors and rug salesmen. Until Operation Snow Plow shut down the conspiracy, authorities suspect other cat cuts made it to Asia, passed along the same underground highway for bear organs and turtle flesh.
"In Operation Snowplow we saw how a tiger is literally worth more dead than alive," said Richard Marks, assistant chief of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "The carcasses were being sold for large amounts of money. The meat entered the exotic food trade. That's why so many different people became involved in the criminal activity. There was money to be made."
But not for exotic pet owners, many of whom donated their tigers, cougars and lions to the syndicate because they thought their cats were going to bonafide shelters, "animal parks" or breeders. Some kittens had been purchased for rock-bottom prices, as low as $50 each, but had grown into adults eating $300 of beef every week.
And when the tigers arrived at the "Funky Monkey Animal Park" in Crete, Ill., or a warehouse in nearby Alsip, each cat faced the same fate -- a bullet from Kapp. On March 25, 1998, Kapp gunned down eight tigers in the largest documented massacre of the endangered animal in U.S. history, court records show.
It was videotaped. The tigers can be seen pawing at the slats, screaming into the night, as Kapp fires away.
Veterinarian Dr. William Sheperd wishes the tigers had ended up at his National Wild Animal Orphanage outside of Uniontown, Fayette County, where 39 big cats live out their final days, eating 300 pounds of cow daily. The $150,000 annual bill is paid partly by Sheperd, partly by donations.
"He was illegal. He was illegal. That lioness over here, she was illegal. The rest were confiscations for animal cruelty, so their treatment was illegal," said Sheperd as he moseyed past "Mr. Bigglesworth," a rare Cerval cat that escaped its owner's apartment to prowl Pittsburgh's East End two years ago.
There's also "Kimba" the cougar, bought illegally for a stripper's act. When Sheperd got the cat, every one of its bones had been broken. And "Duke," a 500-pound lion who grew up stuffed into a Fayette County pet shop's window display.
"When we first got him, it took two days for him to walk out of his pen because he didn't know what grass was. He was scared to death of grass."
Sheperd now cares for Water Wheel Exotic's cats. He feels sorry for people who get caught up in the expensive and dangerous hobby of keeping lions and tigers, and even more pity for the animals in their care. Although offered up to $75,000 for a tiger hide, he refuses to sell because he'll "do nothing that will perpetuate this industry."
He lobbies for passage of the federal Captive Wildlife Safety Act, up for consideration this summer before Congress. The bipartisan bill sponsored by Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon, a California Republican, and Sen. James Jeffords, a Vermont independent, would ban the interstate and foreign commerce of dangerous exotic animals used as "pets."
It wouldn't outlaw all private ownership of tigers, leopards or cougars, but it's designed to gut the industry that breeds the animals. It is opposed by many exotic pet owners and operators of "canned hunt" game preserves, who say most of the trade operates legally and ethically, with a big cat's welfare the top priority.
Sheperd wants the law to pass so that, someday, he can close up shop.
"If everybody did what should be done, we wouldn't even be in business," he said.
