Jungle Mike

9:40 PM

I've been away for too long.

I'm back in school as of this week. This semester I'm taking Multimedia Writing and Precalculus with Trigonometry. Maybe I'll learn how to write and how to do simple math.

Just maybe.

I got off of work early, while I was pretty busy at the beginning of the shift, things slowed down and I went home. I have been thinking for months about a pitch I've wanted to send to This American Life, and I finally jumped on it today.

This evening my mother approached me about a radio project she wanted my help on. I'm a journalism student, not a telecommunications student, so my experience is all writing. However, I consider myself fairly tech savvy, and I would hope my countless hours spent editing video over the years would help me in learning to edit audio.

While this story I plan to do with my mother is not the one I pitched today, it is what got me in the radio mindset.

I pitched a story about this man:

Photo courtesy of http://locuspublicus.blogspot.com/2008_05_01_archive.html


Mike Tsalickis, also known as Jungle Mike, was an exotic animal trader who grew up with my grandfather in Tarpon Springs Florida.

Photo courtesy of http://i157.photobucket.com/albums/t63/turamazonas/DSC00278.jpg

Tsalickis opened the Tarpon Springs Zoo as an Eagle Scout project when he was scoutleader as a teenager. After joining the Army, he travelled the world collecting specimens for the zoo. Eventually he settled in Leticia, Colombia. He put the town literally on the back, building its airstrip.

Photo courtesy of http://i157.photobucket.com/albums/t63/turamazonas/DSC00276.jpg

What most people know about Tsalickis now was that he was arrested for the second largest cocaine bust in United States history. I'm not going to talk about that right now. I might later, but I'm not educated enough on it to talk confidently. I want to talk about why Tsalickis is a real inspiration to me. 



A blog post I eventually hope to write, maybe in the coming weeks, is about the fact that many of the people I've idolized have been men. I don't know why, as I consider myself a feminist. It's likely because the people I idolize the most are adventurers, many of whom have been men.

My father visited Tsalickis in Leticia when he was fifteen. I was always fascinated as a child by these stories, especially about the island of monkeys that my father's monkey George came from.

Photo courtesy of http://i157.photobucket.com/albums/t63/turamazonas/d480f953.png

My grandfather was always catching animals, especially snakes, a hobby he shared with Tsalickis and the other boys in Tarpon. This fascination with wild animals was passed on to me, a girl who still keeps dozens of pets, and prefers the company of animals over people.

Tsalickis, a man that lived in the jungles of Colombia for nearly thirty years, who wrestled snakes and captured wild animals has always seemed super human to me. He travelled the world and saw so many amazing things. I like the idea of a wild man legend that lives on in my head. He was an inspiration to a generation  I don't like to dwell on the crime that he spent twenty years in federal prison for.

When I met him three years ago, he was still sharp as a tack.


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16 comments

  1. If you want a female inspiration, ask Mike about Trudie Jerkins. She was his friend and his business partner at the zoo. When he was down in Leticia she ran the operation in Tarpon and at the port. She died on 03/10/2013.

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  2. Replies
    1. Trabaje con Mike entre 1968 y 1971. Le respectaba mucho. Todavía vive y si donde está? Me di cuenta hace unos años que Asteropi todavía está en Leticia y trabaja en Turismo. Por muchos sños pensaba regresar. Te recuerdo Max y tu hija em la hoja de Victoria!
      Un abrazo fuerte,
      Dina (Dsle Nelson) Tanners

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  3. Excelente ser humano. Lo queremos mucho en leticia amazonas.

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  4. Excelente ser humano. Lo queremos mucho en leticia amazonas.

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  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  6. Amazing history. Is he still alive? Is he still arrested?

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    1. Died two months before realesed of a heart attack..

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  7. Where is living? I'm florida, I want to see you,I was born n leticia,Amazonas my father talked about Mike when I was a toddler ☺☺

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  8. I knew Mike as I worked for him in 1970 for six months in Leticia through my college. I got the job because I spoke Spanish and he liked to employ American college students to help with his tourist business he ran alongside his animal business. I hadnt thought of him for years until a few years ago I was reading about how dangerous the Amazon was becoming in terms of lawlessness and I thought maybe if Mike was still around I could write him and ask his thoughts. I was shocked to within an inch of my life to read about his cocaine bust and imprisonment. Id been reflecting on him a little bitlately and cosidering writing him as a federal prisoner just to say hi and offer a few thoights Id had. That is how I stumbled on thiis page. I dont know anything about his guilt or innocence in what transpired later. But life has taiught me that there is some mixture of good and bad in most people. One memory I have is that he had an old boatman named Bautista who would fall asleep sometimes when out riding around at noght with tourists on alligator hunts. They were about seeing alligators not killing them but once in a while one of his other men he sent would catch a small one with his bare hands and bring it back for his compound. Anyways Bautista would doze off while driving the launch and the bost would veer into the tall grass or reeds where we were. I remembee being freaked out but no one was harmed. But where Im going with this story was that I found out it wasnt the first time it had happenned but that Mike didnt want to fire him because he was old and had been with him a long time and I guess had no other way of supporting himself . That might have been Bautistas last ride as driver but I think it says something about the kind of person he was. He was also I was told revered by many of the Indians who lived around there becsuse he had been generous with help with money or medicine in his years there. He also treated me OK personally snd of course we were in awe of him because of his skills with wild creatures. He used to keep some anacondas in his compound and on one occasion one was dragged out so a bunch of people could get their picture taken with one. I was terrified of that godamn thing how Mike could ever get in the water with one of those things is beyond belief. David Paris

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  9. In 1983, Mike Jr. took to their Leticia house a woman he pick up, and he though was a prostitute, she spent the night with him, and he took her places, she was in fact an B-2 under-cover Army Intelligence agent (Cali) posing as prostitute to investigated all operations related with Mike Tsalikis, She fall for him, and she will never betrayed him if he no broke her heart. Neither she knew that Mike (father) was a kind, great man.

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  10. I'm reading Nicole H Maxwell's Witch Doctor's Apprentice. In Chapter 20, Ms Maxwell arrives in Leticia and meets Mike Tsalikis who loans her any amount of money she needs to continue on her journey. She writes only glowingly of him and how the town loved him. She is another adventurer woman to be greatly admired. She died May 5, 1998, nearly exactly 3 years after my daughter, Nicole M. Maxwell, was born and who is headed to Leticia and the Amazon next month.

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  11. I'm greek who visited the jungle at the past years and still people who were talking about Tsalikis.

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  12. I did not know Mike Tsalikis but I did know his brother George. He was my 6th grade math and science teacher at CNG in Bogota. He told our class that he and Mike trapped exotic animals for zoos until a jaguar tied to remove his face. He decided to try a safer profession.

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  13. I bought animals from Mike and George in 1973 on 2 trips and shipped them back to the states. Mike also flew me and 2 other friends into the Brazilian Amazon, in his floatplane, to Igrape Pedro Lopez, dropped us for a week with the indians that lived there and came back a week later and picked us up. We teased him about carry his pistol he said "You never know about these people out here" but we were some wacked out hippies with balls of steel.

    There's a lot more to that story, but I was tickled to find a story about Mike with a picture of George as well. We spent over a month in Leticia collecting animals.

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    1. I was working with a seismic company in the Brazilian Amazon from 1976 until ~1983. Mike had a floatplane service in Manaus that we used from time to time. My first IFR flight in a small plane was in the co-pilot's seat of his C-182 float plane on a flight from Manaus to near Tefe. I wish I knew then what I know now. What a character.

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Author

Kali Kavouklis is a journalism student with a focus on photojournalism. She also minors in entomology and nematology and wildlife ecology and conservation.