Public Employee Press

Gatorman

Local 375 retiree Mike Gimbel has turned his home into a steamy tropical ecosystem filled with lizards, frogs, jungle plants — and four toothy alligators.

By GREGORY N. HEIRES

Most pet owners in the United States are content to share their homes with loyal dogs and cats.

But not Local 375 retiree Mike Gimbel. When you step foot into his house, you’re likely to be greeted by one of his four caimans — sharp-toothed members of the alligator family that can eat a wild boar alive.

“I love reptiles,” said Gimbel, who designed his Pennsylvania home to be what he calls a “tropical paradise.”

Gimbel’s spacious single room is in the middle of the house, which has two wings for his creatures and plants — each with picture windows, three ponds 10 feet across, 10 skylights and the heat and humidity of the tropics. “It is a botanical and zoological garden,” Gimbel said.

In one wing, he keeps turtles, fish, frogs and lizards. The frogs and lizards from Haiti and other Caribbean countries enjoy a scrumptious diet of crickets and beetle grubs.
The four spectacled caimans live in their own wing with small reptiles, which they won’t bother to eat. They eat mainly chicken necks. Panama and Liberty have their own ponds while Louie shares his abode with the only female, Buena. Small walls separate the pond areas and ensure peaceful coexistence.

“There’s Panama,” said Gimbel with a wide smile and beaming eyes as he welcomed visitors to his home, pointing to a tail sticking out from beneath a chair.

“I let the others roam around too, but I can only let one caiman out at a time because they fight,” he said.

Indeed, one evening, Gimbel spent an hour trying to separate Panama and Louie, who were having a brawl, by grabbing their tails. He had inadvertently left the door to Panama’s pool suite ajar, and the 6-foot-6-inch, 200-pound Louie snuck in from the human quarters and headed for Panama “like a freight train.” Gimbel succeeded in stopping the fight by plunging the bottom part of a crutch in Louie’s mouth after he’d crunched the other end.

Apartment raid
Gimbel and his late wife, Betsy, moved into their Saylorsburg, Penn., home in 1998 after the New York City Fire Dept. raided their fourth floor loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. FDNY charged that the apartment — with its gators, iguanas, lizards and turtles — violated the city’s zoning rules.

But the Gimbels contended that the Firefighters were doing the bidding of the police, who they said were retaliating against them for their political activities. Fed up, the Gimbels eventually exiled themselves to Pennsylvania, where there’s no issue about boarding gators. The caimans found a temporary home in the Reptile House in the Bronx Zoo until the Gimbels finished construction on the house in Pennsylvania.
Treated properly and with caution, the gators don’t pose a danger, Gimbel claims; however, he acknowledges that after owning Louie for 15 years, he has only recently felt he could pet the creature without concern about losing his hand.

The sweet 35-year-old, 6-foot-long and 150-pound Panama is a different story. He allows himself to be petted by children, and he’s so docile that Betsy once let him crawl into bed with her.

“You have to be nice to them,” Gimbel said.