On the morning millionaire Jack Donald Lewis disappeared, he was wearing a $1 T-shirt from Kmart and blue jeans bought at a yard sale. He left behind an 8-year-old Dodge van with a broken window and a battered grill.

 

He also left behind Wildlife on Easy Street, (now known as Big Cat Rescue) the 40-acre sanctuary in northwest Hillsborough County where he lived and kept more than 100 animals, from lions and leopards to llamas and lemurs.

 

A month ago, authorities found the van, the keys on the floorboard, at a private airport in Pasco County, where Lewis, who has crashed planes in the past, was known to buy aircraft impulsively - with cash.

 

Lewis' disappearance has worried his friends and family, knotted his business affairs and mystified law enforcement. Volunteers from his big-cat sanctuary have distributed more than 1,000 missing person fliers. A psychic has visited his house. His wife and his children from another marriage have squared off in court over his money, and the Hillsborough Sheriff's Office has taken a keen interest in his whereabouts. Detectives say that while there are no obvious signs of foul play, it hasn't been ruled out.

 

On Wednesday, authorities received an unconfirmed report that Lewis, 59, was in Costa Rica, where he owns 200 acres near a volcano. They do not know if someone took him there, if someone killed him, or if he left on his own.

 

He may have had reason to go.

 

In June, Lewis told a Hillsborough circuit judge that his wife threatened to kill him, but the judge did not see a danger. That same month he visited a psychiatrist at his wife's urging, but did not return for follow-up visits, she said.

 

He's been his own man all his life, boot-strapping himself from Depression-era childhood to financial success through trucking and real estate. But his latest vocation, Wildlife on Easy Street, may have been bringing on more publicity and financial drain than the modest animal lover wanted.

 

Lewis was born in Dade City to a single mother of three, who sold fresh bread and worked as a seamstress. His father was a drunk she never married who used to ride the corpses out to the cemetery in a horse drawn wagon.  Fortunately, the horse knew the way there and back.  His last name was never known to Don Lewis who was born at an abortion clinic at 305 W. South Ave. in Tampa, FL.  The doctor there was a friend of his crippled mother and her latter marriage to a man named Lewis was later attributed to Jack Donald.

 

In high school, he had several jobs, including mechanic and farm hand. He graduated from Pasco High School a year ahead of schedule in 1955. He used to joke that the only school he ever graduated from was reform school.  Girls adored him.

 

"He always seemed to know where he was going," said Gladys Cross, Lewis' first wife.

 

The couple met at the A&P when Lewis, a bag boy, winked at her.

 

Two years after their first date, they married. She was 14; he was 17. Eleven months after that, their first daughter, Donna was born.

 

"We were both so poor it was terrible," Gladys Cross said in a deposition last year.

 

That would change. Lewis started hauling rock and sand in Dade City, then bought five dump trucks. In the early 1960s, he began driving tankers for Texaco and Red Wing Carriers in Tampa. On the side, he bought washing machines, repaired them, and resold them at profit. He invested in used cars, making money at auctions.

 

His bank account swelled.

 

He kept hustling as though he was still dirt poor, according to those who knew him. His E Broadway Avenue office was a trailer with newspapers covering the windows.

 

His next big move was into real estate. While standing in line at a bank one day he heard a banker exclaim that he would sell a $22,000. mortgage that was in foreclosure for ten cents on the dollar.  He asked his friend, Carole Stairs to read the deal for him, as he could barely read, and they did the deal.  Lewis and Stairs bought bad mortgages from other lenders,