It was on a morning 15 years ago that a new Emergency Services Unit cop named Martin Duffy reported for work, and one of the late-tour guys told him, “Listen, you’re getting a call for a tiger job.”

Yeah, right, Duffy remembered thinking.

“No, seriously,” the other cop told him. “They think there’s a tiger in an apartment.”

In fact there was — a 300-pound tiger named “Ming.”

Before Duffy’s day was through, he had clambered down the side of a Harlem housing project on a rope, aimed a gun into a fifth-floor window, and blasted a tranquilizing dart into the rump of the roaring beast — in a bizarre, urban version of big game hunting.

Fifteen years later, Duffy still can’t entirely wrap his head around the story of Ming. Neither can the man called in to supervise the sedating, Dr. Robert Cook, then head veterinarian at the city’s zoos.

And neither — perhaps least of all — can Antoine Yates.

The then-resident of the Drew-Hamilton Houses had managed to raise Ming from a cub to full size over the course of three years without injury or discovery.

Until the day in October, 2003 when Ming sank his sizeable fangs into Yates’ leg, and wouldn’t let go.

In big ways or small, Ming still has a kind of grip on all three men. Here are their stories today.

Ming, in Yates’ fond remembrance, was a big, sweet pussycat.

“He would literally lay right across me and wouldn’t fall asleep unless his body was sprawled across mine,” on a mattress on the floor of his five-bedroom NYCHA apartment,” Yates remembered in a recent phone call.

Yates had bought Ming at age six weeks from a wild-animal dealer out west, starting him on a bottle, then on pureed meat lovingly spooned from Gerber baby food jars, then on chickens, liver and bones from the supermarket, from which, by 2003, he was lugging home about 20 pounds of big-cat food a day.

On the day Ming turned on him, Yates had tried to step between the tiger and a small black cat, named “Shadow,” that he’d taken in as a rescue, but which had escaped from its closed bedroom.

“When they say I got mauled, that’s not true,” he insisted. “He was just trying to get me out of the way.”

It was while Yates was hospitalized for what he claimed, unconvincingly, was a “pitbull bite,” that his neighbors finally dropped a dime on him.

As the city’s chief veterinarian, Cook had himself had fired tranquilizer darts into quite a few tigers. It was the only way to safely render medical care.

“We would have to vaccinate our tigers once a year,” Cook recalled.

Confronted by a human, a tiger’s first instinct is to rear up, roar, and charge.

But if that doesn’t work, a tiger will retreat, Cook warned the team of cops assigned to the case, advising them during the hours they spent planning the operation with him and two other zoo experts.

“You’re going to get one shot,” Cook warned the NYPD, “because the tiger would then run out of the room” and out of sight.

Officers from the Technical Assistance Response Unit had drilled holes through a neighbor’s wall, “to try and gain a visual,” as Duffy explained it.

“At that point, TARU confirms that they see the tiger in the apartment, in the back bedroom,” Duffy remembered.

To get a better look, “they lowered a pole camera from a floor or two above” down into the back bedroom window. Now they all could see Ming, as he reclined on the bedroom floor.

It took a lot of planning — “table topping,” as Duffy called it — to get to the point where he was lowered down with a darting gun carefully prepared by Cook.

“I get lowered and at one point I stop, I’m trying to wipe the window off with my boot,” Duffy remembered.

“And I hear the tiger roar and that’s when I got a little uptight … He looks at me, but he doesn’t make any noise at that point. He turns his head, he’s laying away, so his rear is closer to me and he looks back at me. And as he looks at me I realize now is the time and I have to try to tranquilize him.

“I introduced the rifle into the window. I make sure the barrel isn’t blocked by the child safety gates and I shoot one dart and I’m successful in hitting him. I hit him and he jumps up and he runs away and he runs up to the far wall of the bedroom and he turns around and he comes running back at the window at me.

“He actually comes up and charges the window and breaks the window.”

Duffy speaks quickly, as if reliving the adrenaline rush.

“I’m hoping that he doesn’t come out through the window and possibly survive the fall and injure the police officers or the public, because now, it’s been a media circus – the word had gotten out, people apparently knew he had a tiger,” Duffy said. “He’d been seen walking the tiger cub through the projects.”

But although Ming had been raised in the projects, “he acted just as we were used to,” said Cook.

On the grainy camera footage, Cook could see Ming retreat out of sight. He was laying down again, this time obscured behind a pile of bulging plastic trash bags the tiger appeared to use as a kind of nest.

“About 12 minutes or so later, Ming rose up again,” Cook remembered. “You could see he was feeling the first effects.” After another five minutes, Cook and another zoo staffer entered the apartment, guarded by a group of ESU officers, shotguns drawn.

“I saw the tiger in the corner,” Cook said. “We had a restraint pole I use and we put it around his head. I gave him a little bit more sedative by injection, just to kind of top things off, and make sure he was anaesthetized enough to transport.”

Ming was lifted onto a gurney. An FDNY oxygen mask was affixed to his face. He was taken down an elevator. It took a half dozen men, or more, to hoist Ming into to a waiting Animal Care and Control truck.

“It so impressed me,” Cook said of the first responders’ calm and professionalism.

“There was a great amount of empathy for the tiger. They were looking for a solution that would keep people safe and keep the tiger safe. In that order. Because if there had come a time where it was unsafe, they had the ability to do what had to be done.”

It was “a crazy job,” said Duffy, who still works with ESU’s Squad 2, which covers from 59th Street in Manhattan north to The Bronx, from river to river. And it succeeded, Duffy is sure, because of teamwork.

Cook is retired now, and working as a adjunct professor at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

He still gets angry when he thinks of Ming, a beautiful wild animal, being raised in a city apartment.

‘I remember thinking, who’s ever going to get to touch this unless you work in a zoo?’ - Martin Duffy

“These are not domestic cats,” he said. “Wild animals do not make good pets. This is just wrong from so many angles,” he said.

“There are so many dogs and cats that need homes,” he added.

“Let’s do that. They need good homes — Let’s do that.”

Ming has stayed with Duffy, too — not just the tiger’s fearsomeness, but his beauty.

“I just remember seeing him in the hallway and thinking, what a magnificent creature he was and how big he was, and I just remember all of us struggling to lift this giant tiger into the back of the box truck.

“I just remember looking at the size of his head, and I remember thinking, who’s ever going to get to touch this unless you work in a zoo? I touched his side, his front shoulder. It sounds corny, but you’re never going to get a chance to do this again so you have to touch him.”

Most haunted by Ming, though, is Antoine Yates.

“I’m going full blast to get Ming back,” Yates insisted in a recent phone call. “I’m launching a full-blast attack to get Ming back.”

Over the years, Yates has told some pretty tall tales about getting Ming back from Noah’s Lost Ark wildlife sanctuary in Ohio, where the tiger, now 18 years old and near the end of his life, has lived since his rescue.

Yates has told Newsweek, New York Magazine, Animal Planet, among others, that he’s living on an animal compound in the Nevada town of Pahrump, just outside of Vegas. Depending on which account, he claims to have as many as 22 lions and tigers, or, as he tried to tell The Post, recently, that he’s raising a half dozen ocelot-like wildcats called servals.

‘A while back, I just stopped taking [Yates] seriously. It sounds like Antoine may be living in a little different world than the rest of us.’

But he repeatedly declined to give The Post his address, and there is no record of him living in the town.

“He’s never lived here,” said Karl Mitchell, who actually does keep eight tigers, legally, in Pahrump. He said he knew Yates only briefly, in 2011, when they appeared in the same Animal Planet episode on raising tigers.

“Antoine has called around to all the professional animal people I know, asking for an apprenticeship, or can I hang out with you and learn your technique,” Mitchell said. “We don’t want this guy here.”

Yates also told The Post earlier this month that he was about to purchase Thornhill Farm in western North Carolina, to open up an animal sanctuary. “I’m actually in negotiations, and going to close hopefully by the end of next week,” he said in mid-October.

The realtor for the $2 million property confirmed that Yates has called him about the farm over the past year. But Yates never visited the property, and claimed to have investors who never materialized.

“I’ve never met the man, and he does not have this property under contract,” said the realtor, Ben Wolfe. “A while back, I just stopped taking him seriously,” he said, adding, “It sounds like Antoine may be living in a little different world than the rest of us.”