COLOMBIA, South Carolina –
“Tiger King” star Bhagavan “Doc” Antle has been charged with buying or selling endangered lemurs, cheetahs and a chimpanzee without proper documentation, federal prosecutors in South Carolina said Thursday.
The latest charges are in addition to money laundering charges, where authorities said Antle tried to hide more than half a million dollars earned in an operation to smuggle people across the Mexican border into the US.
Antle is featured prominently in “Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness,” a 2020 Netflix documentary miniseries that focused on tiger breeders and private zoo operators in the US mistreatment and was convicted of a plot to kill a rival, Carole Baskin.
The U.S. Endangered Species Act requires permission to purchase or move any captive endangered species, and prosecutors said Antle, two of his employees and owners of safari tours in Texas and California violated the law. law.
Charles Sammut, the operator of the Vision Quest Ranch in Salians, California, traded two red ruffed lemurs with Antle in June 2018, federal prosecutors said.
The allegations in the indictments are “riddled with misinformation,” Sammut told The Associated Press by phone on Thursday.
Sammut said he would not specify what was wrong because he now had a pending criminal case, but added that he felt the issues “would be resolved soon”.
Antle was also accused of trading a chimpanzee with the Franklin Drive Through Safari in Franklin, Texas. Owner Jason Clay did not return a phone message and an attorney was not listed in court records.
Sammut, 61, and Clay, 42, are charged with wildlife trafficking and violating the Endangered Species Act. If convicted, they face up to five years in prison.
Court documents say Antle, 62, and Myrtle Beach Safari employee Meredith Bybee also bought or sold two juvenile cheetahs, though details about who else was involved in the alleged transaction were not listed in the federal indictments.
Antle’s attorneys did not respond to an email Thursday and court records did not list an attorney for Bybee, 51.
Antle and another employee, Andrew Jon Sawyer, 52, were charged in early June with money laundering.
Prosecutors said the men wrote $505,000 worth of checks that were supposed to be for construction work at Myrtle Beach Safari but were actually payments to help smuggle people from Mexico into the United States.
Antle tried to cover up the scheme by inflating the number of tourists at his 50-acre (20-hectare) tropical wildlife reserve, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors also said he had previously used bulk cash receipts to purchase animals for which he could not use checks.
Animal rights advocates have long accused Antle of mistreating lions and other wildlife. He was indicted in Virginia in 2020 on animal cruelty and wildlife trafficking charges.
In Virginia, Antle faces two felony counts of wildlife trafficking and wildlife trafficking conspiracy, as well as 13 misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to violate the Endangered Species Act and animal cruelty charges related to lion cub trafficking. Those charges are scheduled to go to trial next month.
Antle has a history of recorded violations dating back to 1989, when he was fined by the US Department of Agriculture for abandoning deer and peacocks at his zoo in Virginia. Over the years, he has more than 35 USDA violations for mistreating animals.