Joe the Gator Guy
and His Granddaughter Morgan

Written by Michele Roldán-Shaw

ator Joe Maffo, founder of the company “Critter Management”, is the Lowcountry’s best bet for animal control. He and his 9-year-old granddaughter, Morgan Maffo, have been wrestling alligators around these parts for years. I first met him a few months ago when I worked as a security officer at a gated community and Joe came through the gate to check on one of his traps. I introduced myself as a journalist from Bluffton and inquired about the possibility of speaking with him and Morgan.

“Michele,” he said, putting his old beige pickup truck in neutral and sticking out his hand to shake. “I’m Joe.”

I hesitated. “I’ve just been eating barbecued ribs and corn on the cob,” I said.

He wore a stained white v-neck t-shirt with a large gold medallion on a chain around his neck, possibly depicting the patron saint of gator-wranglers. Tattoos adorned his tan, leathery arms and his weather-beaten face conserved a certain youthful handsomeness. Or maybe it was just the fu-man-chu mustache he was sporting.

“I don’t care,” he replied. “You think my hands are clean?” It was right then that I knew Joe and I would get along. “Have you handled a gator yet?” he asked me. “No, but it’s one of my life goals,” I replied truthfully.

I was already enthusiastic about the prospect of interviewing a 9-year-old gator wrangler, so you can imagine my excitement when Joe promised to bring live gators to the interview/photo shoot, as well as other creatures, such as baby raccoons. As I was to find out, his personal menagerie of pets included armadillos, snakes, turtles, snails, ducks, dogs, cats, gerbils, birds, and apparently any other critter that crossed his path

The following day, I met Joe and Morgan at a lagoon out by Rose Hill Plantation. Morgan was wearing a little pink flowery-printed summer dress and a pink straw cowboy hat. Her wrists were striped with colorful bracelets and her hands were full of rings. A real Southern Belle-to-be, only she just happened to be proficient in tackling alligators and taming unruly wildlife.

“I moved out here from Ohio in the early ‘80’s,” Joe explained. “I was a builder but I sold my business. I used to take squirrels out of chimneys and stuff like that but the guy who bought the business didn’t like doing any of that so I put an ad in the paper and that’s how I started Critter Management.

As he talked, he was busy polishing a baby gator named Savannah with a rag and wetting her down with what I assumed to be water in a spray bottle. “Oh no, this here happens to be shower cleaner,” he said. “But don’t worry, nothing gets through that hide.” Later he took some armor-all to her as well.

During the course of the interview, people passing by in cars were constantly stopping, their curiosity surely provoked by the unusual sight of a small child holding an alligator. Two women in a pickup truck were given quite a thrill when Joe stuck the gator, whose mouth was taped so that it could not bite anything, in the passenger’s side window, practically in the lap of one of the ladies. She was not particularly eager to handle the creature and recoiled back into her seat with a terrified look on her face. Joe just laughed good-naturedly.

At some point a guy walked up pushing an elderly man in a wheelchair. The older man had only one leg and not too many more teeth, and, though he appeared to have lived a rather hard-knock life, he was as jovial as could be. Just like the young kids, soccer moms, and redneck men, the old man and his son had stopped because they were intrigued by nature’s genius expressed in the form of a 200 million year old reptile. Every one that stopped seemed to be an old friend of Joe’s, until he asked them their name and I realized that he just treated everyone like an old friend. “Take the tape off his mouth and stick him on my dad,” said the young guy when Joe introduced them to Savannah. “You can forget about that!” shouted the old man happily. “I only got one leg and I really don’t care to lose the other one.”

I walked over to have a little chat with Morgan. She was rather shy and modest, but she had a straightforward way of answering all my questions.
“How long have you been in this line of work?”
“Since I was four.”

“Are there any animals you don’t like?”

“I like pretty much all animals, unless they have rabies or something.”

“Have you ever been bitten by anything?”

“Coons, but they were just playing.”

“Do you ever get scared by the gators?”

“No.”

“Do you want to keep working with animals when you’re grown up?”

“Yeah, probably.”

Born and raised on Hilton Head Island, Morgan has been helping her grandfather, whom she addresses simply as Joe, for 5 years. She admitted to having felt a little scared the first time she wrangled a gator, but, as I was about to learn, this sensation had long since been replaced by a cool, professional confidence.

“Hey, how about we simulate a capture?” suggested Joe.

In the back of his pickup truck was a 6’6’’, 100-pound gator, its mouth and legs taped and its eyes blindfolded. It had been laying there like it was dead since I arrived, but as soon as Joe started to handle it, it let out a big long warning hiss. Joe carried it down and set it near the bank of the lagoon, then he put a wire noose around its neck, the same as if it had gotten snared in one of his traps. In a real-life gator capture situation, one person would be yanking on the wire while the other person pulled on the animal’s tail until it could be subdued enough to sit on its back. In this case, Joe sat on its back and undid all but the mouth tape so that Morgan could then demonstrate how she tied them up in the wild. But first, Joe insisted that I sit on the gator’s back and hold down its front legs for a picture.

“Make sure you hold the legs down real tight if it starts to struggle, otherwise if it gets away you’ll be in a world of hurt,” he said casually.

Photo-ops aside, I was quite impressed with Morgan’s ability to handle the gator. She sat on its back and expertly bound together its legs with electrical tape, the animal equivalent of cuffing someone’s hands behind their back, until there was no way it could move other than thrashing its body back and forth, although that alone could do some serious damage. Once it was all taped up again, Joe had me hold it for another picture, and as I marveled at the sheer weight of the thing in my arms, I was struck by the notion that if it had chosen to writhe or flail about at all, I would have been in serious trouble. As Joe explained, one tiny flick of its tail and you’d have yourself a black eye or a broken nose. He himself admitted to having had his hand crushed a couple of times.

“You have to have confidence and ability to handle gators,” Joe said, referring to Morgan. “She’s very knowledgeable and cautious, but she still has the utmost respect for the animals. I would never ever endanger her by any means.”

After an ice cold root beer out of Joe’s cooler and a charming session with a baby raccoon that started getting antsy the moment anyone came so much as a foot within its cage, the interview was winding down. But not before the two of them could bestow some alligator knowledge upon me (did you know that they have a total of 80 teeth and the acid in their stomach is so powerful that they can digest almost anything while producing minimal waste?) and they also left me with the bonus parting gift of a sandwich baggie containing six gator teeth.

“Education is all I’m after,” declared Joe after coaxing Morgan into rattling off a string of alligator facts. “When people call me up and tell me they have a gator on their property, I remind them that the alligator is in his domain. If you know there’s a gator, just respect it. We can co-exist. And the most important thing is: DO NOT FEED THE GATORS!”

As Joe threw baby Savannah on the floor of the cab under the passenger seat and Morgan climbed in after, I knew I would forever cherish the memory of the hours I had spent out at the lagoon on that balmy afternoon, in the company of some amazing creatures, and also some alligators.