IF NOTHING ELSE... (profanity alert):

Jeff Lowe had eyes the color of snowmelt and a neatly trimmed gray goatee. He wore leather jackets, fancy jeans, and a black do-rag wrapped around his balding head. He once worked as Robbie Knievel's manager and now ran a liquidation business. He drove a red Ferrari and a white Hummer. He was once arrested for assaulting his wife. Another time, he was arrested for, and later pleaded guilty to, falsely posing as an employee of Citizens Opposed to Domestic Abuse so he could receive donated goods, which he then resold.

Lowe owned 12 big cats, which he kept in a warehouse in his hometown of Beaufort. He had tried to open a cub-petting operation in a flea market but was shut down by county officials. He believed Carole had been a catalyst behind the protests against him. He referred to her as "the devil incarnate."

Joe and Jeff had made an agreement: Joe would effectively sign ownership of the zoo over to Jeff, and Jeff would help pay to fight Carole. To raise more funds, Jeff moved to Vegas. He began sneaking tiger cubs, hidden inside a Louis Vuitton dog carrier, into hotel rooms along the Strip and charging high rollers $2,000 to pet them.

Meanwhile, back at the zoo, Joe was going through yet another, Pokémonic evolution. Inspired by the unlikely ascension of Donald Trump, Joe launched his own campaign for the presidency in 2015 and then for governor in 2018; he was planning to run for president again, this time on the Libertarian ticket. (This despite the fact that Joe was not a libertarian, nor did he even seem to know what the word meant. He was more of an idiosyncratic populist; one of his campaign pledges was to bring back spanking in schools. Josh Dial, who ran Joe's campaign, likened him to "Donald Trump on meth.") Joe printed his name on the side of a stretch limo and on hundreds of yard signs. His staff was baffled by the amount of money he was wasting on these doomed campaigns, but Joe insisted they were not merely vanity projects. He often asked, rhetorically, "How do a normal person like me ever get heard in this country?"

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