New York City has plenty of folklore, from alligators in the sewers to buried treasure on Liberty Island, but the story of Ming, a 400-pound Siberian Bengal tiger living in a Harlem apartment building, is far from a tall tale. Just ask NYPD Detective Martin Duffy.

The saga unfolded when the tiger’s owner, Antoinne Yates, went to the hospital claiming a pit bull had bitten him. But doctors quickly realized it was no dog bite, and police responded to Yates' five-bedroom apartment in the Drew Hamilton Houses.

What You Need To Know

  • Twenty years ago, Ming the 400-pound tiger was rescued from the Drew Hamilton Houses in Harlem

  • Ming was not alone: He was found with a 5-foot-long caiman living in the same apartment

  • Detective Martin Duffy looks back at what it was like to make that daring and dramatic rescue

“We first heard about it at the change to the midnight. Guys were joking with us and saying we were going to take a call for an animal job,” Duffy said of the October 2003 police call.

“We eventually cut some holes from the neighboring apartment into the fifth-floor apartment, and they confirmed that they had the tiger and the caiman on camera in a back room,” Duffy added.

That's right: Ming the Tiger was not alone. He was living alongside a 5-foot-long caiman named Al. On Oct. 4, 2003, the NYPD was tasked with removing the giant cat and lively alligator.

After much strategizing and discussion, the team decided the best plan of action was to repel from above rather than breach the apartment.

"We anchored our rope system on the seventh floor inside this apartment, and I was lowered from the seventh floor down to the fifth floor,” Duffy said.

During the descent, Duffy experienced a tense encounter with Ming. "I heard the tiger roar when I was like halfway down. And it was definitely a little unnerving," he said. 

While hanging by a single rope, Duffy took aim and fired a dart through the window bars.

“I took the shot. I hit him. When he got hit by the tranquilizer dart, he jumped up and he ran, and he ran away from me and hit the wall. And when he turned back and kind of started lunging, that's when I could feel the building shake,” Duffy said. “I saw that giant head and the teeth.”

That was the exact moment photographer John Roca took an iconic photo.

“I didn't want the tiger to come out and attack me. I didn't want the tiger to get out and possibly get down on the ground and be loose here in the neighborhood," Duffy recalled. 

Duffy was immediately lowered to the ground, where he took a deep breath and ran right back up to see Ming. Cops loaded the tiger onto a gurney and carried him and Al the alligator down in a small confined elevator.

“I wasn't afraid he was going to wake up. It was honestly, it was magnificent to be like, we will see tigers on TV or maybe at the zoo, but to be closer than you and I are right now to a 500-pound tiger was an amazing experience,” he told NY1.

Ming, the tiger of Harlem, was transported to Noah’s Ark Animal Sanctuary in Georgia after being rescued from the Drew Hamilton Houses in 2003. (Photos by Noah’s Ark Animal Sanctuary)

Ming's owner, Yates, pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment later that year and served five months in prison. Ming and Al were both sent to animal sanctuaries.

Ming died of natural causes in 2019. Duffy says it was a team effort that day, and looking back, he would only change one thing.

"Probably, not be as uptight as I was that day, but that. But that's natural. You're, you're you're a young emergency cop, and you don't want embarrass yourself with the unit. Everything else, I would have done the same," he said. 

Duffy has now been with the department 26 years, but on that day 20 years ago, he certainly earned his stripes.