Celebrity Lawyer Hired to Investigate the Disappearance of Carole Baskin’s First Husband
The family of Carole Baskin’s first husband, Don Lewis, has hired celebrity lawyer Alex Spiro to investigate his 1997 disappearance. Some of Spiro’s clients include New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and rapper Jay-Z. Questions of Lewis’s disappearance have resurfaced after the Netflix documentary series “Tiger King” was released last year. The series talks about the rivalry between Baskin and Joseph Maldonado-Passage, also known as "Joe Exotic." They both own animal sanctuaries for big cats like lions and tigers. Throughout the series, Joe Exotic claimed multiple times that Carole Baskin killed her husband and fed him to the tigers at her company Big Cat Rescue in 1997. Joe Exotic is currently serving a prison sentence for a murder-for-hire plot against Baskin.
Baskin claims that she is innocent. She told Fox News, "one of the silver linings of Tiger King, Murder, Mayhem and Madness was the renewed interest in finding my husband, Don Lewis. I offered an $100,000 [sic] reward for information leading to finding Don back in 1997 and would still honor it today as I know that any evidence found would exonerate me and it would finally give me closure on this sad chapter of our lives."
Baskin is currently married to Howard Baskin, her second husband. Back in January she said the following about what she would do if Lewis was found: "If he were to be found, I would take care of him for the rest of his life and my husband Howie is the kind of person who would understand that.”
Lewis disappeared on August 18, 1997. He was heading to Costa Rica that day and never came back. He was declared legally dead in 2002. Lewis made trips to Costa Rica quite often when he was married to Baskin. It is alleged that we would cheat on her and do sketchy business dealings while he was out there. According to Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister, regarding Lewis, “He had a home in Costa Rica, he had a girlfriend in Costa Rica, he had a property manager there, he had shady business dealings with individuals there."
Baskin was originally supposed to go with Lewis to Costa Rica on September 18. However, Chronister said, "per her account, he leaves that morning and that’s the last time that she sees him."
Police searched the sanctuary and interviewed his acquaintances in Costa Rica who said that he had never shown up. Cops found Lewis’s van abandoned at a nearby private airport. However, there was no missing airplane, and his passport had not been flagged, which makes it look like he did not leave the country.
“Tiger King” had a lot of theories about what happened to Lewis. Exotic claims that Baskin killed Lewis, ground up his body in a meat grinder and fed him to the tigers. There are other theories brought up that Lewis was killed and then thrown in a septic tank, that he was kidnapped, that he was killed by business rivals in Costa Rica, or even crashed his plane at sea.
“There were some things the show got right and some they didn’t get right," Chronister said.
“The meat grinders were removed from the sanctuary a period of time before he disappeared. That doesn’t mean they couldn’t have taken him and the meat grinder somewhere else, but that wasn’t made clear. Then the septic tank… that wasn’t installed until years after his disappearance. But then some things they got right. He did get an injunction against his wife a couple of months prior. He never served her with it, but he did apply for it. There’s some things that are extremely suspicious..." Chronister said.
Lewis had a large fortune but left his wealth behind. This fact makes Chronister very suspicious about the circumstances. “What wealthy person - and we believe his wealth was between $5-7million, some estimate it could be as high as 20, but we can confirm $5-7million - what wealthy person have you ever met that fled but left their wealth behind? He had a relationship with his daughters and son, and he left them behind. They weren’t included in the will either,” Chronister said.
Also strange was a document that made Baskin power of attorney, that said that if Lewis ever “disappeared,” then Baskin would get most of its money. “Who had a will that ever talked about disappearance?" Chronister said.
According to Chronister, “The only theory I feel confident in is that he was killed. Now who did it or how it was done, that’s the missing piece of this entire investigation. How do you do it [disappear]? Leaving your children behind, your wealth behind, there’s a lot of red flags in this case."
There are a lot of strange circumstances involving this case. Hopefully, this new investigation can provide some answers and closure for the Lewis family.
