The Orchid Thief

by Susan Orlean

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  By the time everyone finished testifying at the orchid-poaching hearing, the judge looked perplexed. She said this was one of her most interesting cases, by which I think she meant bizarre, and then she announced that she was rejecting the defendants’ request to dismiss the charges. The trial was scheduled for February. She then ordered the defendants—Laroche, Russell Bowers, Vinson Osceola, and Randy Osceola—to refrain from entering the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve until the case was concluded. Then she excused the orchid people and turned her attention to a mournful-looking man who was up on drug-possession charges. I caught up with Laroche right outside the courthouse door. He was smoking and standing in a huddle with three other men: the Seminole tribe’s lawyer, Allan Lerner, and the vice president of the tribe’s business operations, Buster Baxley, and one of the codefendants, Vinson Osceola. The other two Seminoles hadn’t come to the hearing; according to Allan Lerner, one of them was sick and the other was nowhere to be found.

  Buster looked as if he was in a bad mood. “I’m going right now into that swamp with a chain saw, I swear to God,” he fumed. “God damn.”

  Laroche ground out his cigarette. “You know, I feel like I’ve been screwed,” he said. “I’ve been fucking crucified.”

  Allan Lerner dribbled his briefcase from hand to hand. “Look, Buster,” he said, “I did try to make our point. I reminded the judge that the Indians used to own the Fakahatchee, but she’s obviously got something else in mind. Don’t worry. We’ll deal with all of this at trial.” Buster scowled and started to walk away. Vinson Osceola shrugged at Allan and walked off after Buster. Allan looked around and then said good-bye to me and followed Buster and Vinson. Laroche lingered for another minute. He drummed his fingers on his chin and then said, “Those swamp rangers are a joke. None of them know anything about the plants in there. Some of them are actually dumb—I mean really dumb. They were lucky to have arrested me so I could give them the names of the plants. Otherwise I don’t think they would have even known what they were. I really don’t care what goes on here in court. I’ve been to the Fakahatchee a thousand times and I’m going to go in there a thousand more.”

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  John Laroche grew up in North Miami, an exurb you pass through on the way from Miami to Fort Lauderdale. The Laroches lived in a semi-industrial neighborhood, but it was still pretty close to the swamps and woods. When he was a kid, Laroche and his mother would often drive over and hike through the Big Cypress and the Fakahatchee just to look for unusual things. His father never came along because he really wasn’t much for the woods, and then he had broken his back doing construction work and was somewhat disabled. Laroche has no siblings, but he told me that he had a sister who died at an early age. Once, in the middle of recounting the history of the Laroches, he declared, “You know, now that I think about it, I guess we’re a family of ailments and pain.” During the months I spent in Florida I met Laroche’s father only briefly. I would have loved to have met his mother, who is no longer alive. Laroche described her as overweight and frumpy, and claimed that she was Jewish by birth but at different times in her life she experienced ardent attachments to different religious faiths. She was an enthusiast, a gung ho devotee. She was never the first to call an end to a hike or to chicken out when she and Laroche had to wade into sinkholes. She loved orchids. If the two of them came across an orchid in bloom, she insisted that they tag it and come back in a few months to see if the plant had formed any seeds.

  When Laroche was a teenager he was fleetingly obsessed with photography. He decided he had to photograph every single species of Florida orchid in bloom, so every weekend for a while he loaded his mother with cameras and tripods and the two of them would trudge for hours through the woods. He wasn’t content for very long with merely photographing the orchids—he soon decided he had to collect the orchids themselves. He stopped bringing cameras on his hikes and started bringing pillowcases and garbage bags to carry plants. In no time he gathered a sizable collection. He considered opening a nursery. He did some construction work after high school to make a living, but just like his father he fell and broke his back and had to take a disability leave. He considers breaking his back a stroke of luck because it cleared the way for him to devote himself to plants. He got married in 1983, and he and his now ex-wife did open a nursery in North Miami. They named it the Bromeliad Tree. They specialized in orchids and in bromeliads, the family of dry, spiny air plants that live in trees. Laroche concentrated on the oddest, rarest stuff. Eventually he gathered forty thousand plants in his hothouses, including some that he claims were the only specimens of their kind in cultivation. Like a lot of nursery owners, Laroche and his wife managed to just get by on their earnings, but he wasn’t satisfied with just scraping by. What he wanted was to find a special plant that would somehow make him a millionaire.

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  A few days after the hearing, Laroche invited me to go with him to an orchid show in Miami. He picked me up in a van dappled with rust. As I opened the door and said hello, he interrupted me and said, “I want you to know that this van is a piece of shit. As soon as I hit the orchid jackpot I’m buying myself an awesome car. What are you driving?” I said I had borrowed my father’s Aurora. “Awesome,” Laroche said. “I think I’ll get one of those.” I leaned in and dug through all sorts of stuff to try to get to the passenger seat and then sat down on a few inches of the edge of it, resting my feet on a bag of potting soil that had split and spilled all over the floor. Laroche started down the road with great alacrity. I thought maybe I had suffered whiplash. Each time the van hit a pothole it squeaked and shuddered, and a hundred different trowels, screwdrivers, terra-cotta planters, Coke cans, and mystery things rolled around the floor like steel balls in a pinball machine.

  I kept my eyes glued to the road because I thought it would be best if at least one of us did. “See, my whole life—that is, my whole life in the nursery world—I’ve been looking for a goddamn profitable plant,” he said. “I had a friend in South America—he just croaked, as a matter of fact—anyway, this guy was a major commercial grower and had just endless amounts of money, and he wanted this fantastic bromeliad I had, so I told him that I’d trade it to him for just a seed or a cutting from the most valuable plant he had. I said, ‘Hey, look, I don’t care if the plant is gorgeous or butt-ugly.’ I just wanted to see the plant that had given him his life of leisure.”

  “So what was it? What does a profitable plant look like?”

  Laroche laughed and lit a cigarette. “He sent me this big box. In the big box was this little box, and then inside of that there was another little box, and then another box, and in the last box was a square inch of lawn grass. I thought, This guy’s a real joker! Fuck this guy! I called the guy. I said, ‘Hey, you son of a bitch! What the hell is this?’ Well, it turns out that it was a special kind of lawn grass that was green with some tiny white stripes on the edges. That was it! He told me what an asshole I was and said I should have realized what a treasure I was holding. And, you know, he was right. When you think about it, if you could find a really nice-looking lawn grass, some cool new species, and you could produce enough seeds to market it, you would rule the world. You’d be completely set for life.”

  He crushed out his cigarette and steered with his knee while he lit another. I asked him what he had done with the square inch of grass. “Oh, I’m not into lawn grass,” he said. “I think I gave it away.”

  In 1990 Laroche’s life as a plant man changed. That year the World Bromeliad Conference was held in Miami. World plant conferences are attended by collectors and growers and plant fanciers from all over. At most shows growers build displays for their plants, and they compete for awards recognizing the quality of the plants and the ingeniousness of their displays. Maybe at one time show displays were uncomplicated, but nowadays the displays have to reflect the theme of the show and usually involve major construction, scores of plants, and props as substantial as mannequins, canoe
s, Styrofoam mountains, and actual furniture. Laroche suspected he had a knack for display building, and he was certain he had the best bromeliads in the world, so he decided to enter the competition. He designed a twelve- by twenty-five-foot exhibit using hardwood struts and tie beams, Day-Glo paint, a black light to make the Day-Glo paint glow, strings of Christmas lights arranged correctly in the shape of constellations, and dozens of a species of bromeliad that looks like little stars. The display got a lot of attention. This was a turning point for Laroche. As a result of the conference he became well known in the plant community and became even more determined to have a spectacular nursery. He began calling all over the world every day, tracking down unusual plants; his phone bills were thousands of dollars a month. Lots of money flew in and out of his hands, but he put most of it right back into his nursery. He tended to the extravagant. Once he spent five hundred dollars on an air-conditioned box for one little cool-weather fern he had gotten from a guy in the Dominican Republic. The fern died anyway, but even now Laroche says he doesn’t regret the expense. He wanted the best of everything. He accumulated what he says was one of the country’s largest collections of Cryptanthus, a genus of Brazilian bromeliad. He bought a spectacular six-foot-tall Anthurium veitchii with weird, corrugated leaves. He still enjoys thinking about that Anthurium. He says it was “a gorgeous, gorgeous son of a bitch.”

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  About ten miles outside of Miami Laroche reached the part of his life story that featured orchids. He and his wife had hundreds of them at the Bromeliad Tree, and even though he had been at one time completely fascinated with the bromeliads, he found himself seduced away by the orchids. He became obsessed with breeding them. He especially loved working on hybrids—cross-pollinating different types to create new orchid hybrids. “Every time I’d make a new hybrid, it felt so cool,” he said. “I felt a little like God.” He often took germinating seeds and drenched them with household chemicals or cooked them for a minute in his microwave oven so that they would mutate and perhaps turn into something really interesting, some bizarre new shape or color never seen before in the orchid world. I guess I was a little shocked as he was describing the process, and when he glanced at me and caught my expression he took both hands off the wheel and waved them at me dismissively. “Oh, come on,” he said. “Mutation’s great! Mutation’s really fun! It’s a great little hobby—you know, mutation for fun and profit. And it’s cool as hell. You end up with some cool stuff and some ugly stuff and stuff no one has ever seen before and it’s just great.”

  I asked what the point of it was. “Hey, mutation is the answer to everything,” he said irritably. “Look, why do you think some people are smarter than other people? Obviously it’s because they mutated when they were babies! I’m sure I was one of those people. When I was a baby I probably got exposed to something that mutated me, and now I’m incredibly smart. Mutation is great. It’s the way evolution moves ahead. And I think it’s good for the world to promote mutation as a hobby. You know, there are an awful lot of wasted lives out there and people with nothing to do. This is the sort of interesting stuff they should be doing.”

  The more orchids he collected, the more orchid collectors Laroche got to know. He was in the middle of the orchid world, but at the same time he was not really a part of it. Orchids are everywhere in Florida, wild and domesticated ones, natural and hybridized ones, growing in backyards and in shadehouses, being shipped in and out all over the world. The American Orchid Society, which was founded in 1921, is headquartered on the former estate of an avid collector in West Palm Beach, and many of the biggest and best orchid nurseries in the country—R. F. Orchids, Motes Orchids, Fennell Orchid Company, Krull-Smith Orchids—are in Florida. Some of these nurseries have been around for decades, and some Florida breeders are the third or fourth generation of their family to grow. Orchids have grown in the Florida swamps and hammocks since the swamps and hammocks have existed, and orchids have been cultivated in Florida greenhouses since the end of the 1800s. By the early 1900s, the great estates of Palm Beach and Miami had their own orchid collections and orchid keepers; orchids were considered a rich and romantic accessory, a polished little captive, a bit of wilderness under glass.

  Laroche was not at all rich or romantic or polished, so he didn’t fit into the Palm Beach plant lovers’ world at all, but he did have a wealth of orchids. Day and night, people dropped by his nursery to talk to him about orchids and to admire his collection and to be impressed by him. They came and just hung around so they could be among his plants, or they brought him special flowers in exchange for leading them on hikes through the Fakahatchee, or they invited him over to see their collections and pumped him for advice, or they offered him truckloads of money to help them find the world’s most unfindable plants. He thinks some of them called just because they were lonely and wanted to talk to someone, especially someone who shared an interest of theirs. The image of this loneliness seemed to daunt him. He stopped talking about it and then started explaining to me why he loved plants. He said he admired how adaptable and mutable they are, how they have figured out how to survive in the world. He said that plants range in size more than any other living species, and then he asked if I was familiar with the plant that has the largest bloom in the world, which lives parasitically in the roots of a tree. As the giant flower grows it slowly devours and kills the host tree. “When I had my own nursery I sometimes felt like all the people swarming around were going to eat me alive,” Laroche said. “I felt like they were that gigantic parasitic plant and I was the dying host tree.”

  Cloning the Ghost

  Near the entrance to the Seminole reservation in Hollywood, Florida, there is a large wooden sculpture of a Seminole man wrestling a bowlegged, bucktoothed alligator. Laroche told me once that his father had been the model for the Seminole wrestler. I found this improbable, since the Laroches have no Indian blood at all, but Laroche explained that the sculptor had been a friend of his father’s and had asked him to pose because he thought the elder Laroche possessed a quintessential Seminole build. I still found the story improbable, so I asked Laroche about it several other times, including once when we were on the phone and I knew his father was in the room with him. I had counted on his father to act as a sort of lie detector, but instead the two of them launched into a discussion of whether the carved Seminole was life-size or larger than life-size, and whether it had a penis, and what the scale of the penis implied about Laroche’s father’s penis. This was not what I was hoping would happen, so I dropped the topic and never brought it up again.

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  Before he came to work for the Seminoles Laroche had been on the reservation only now and again, when he was just passing through or when he was buying tax-free cigarettes at the tribal smoke shops. In a sense, it was bad luck that brought him to the reservation full-time. The years right before he went to work for the tribe went miserably. He was in an awful car crash that knocked out his front teeth, put his wife in a coma for weeks, and killed his mother and uncle. Shortly after the crash he and his wife separated. The next year there was a calamitous frost in south Florida that killed a lot of nursery stock, including much of Laroche’s. Then in 1991 a contaminated batch of a Du Pont fungicide called Benlate was suspected of killing nursery plants around the country. Orchids seemed especially sensitive to the tainted Benlate, and several commercial orchid nurseries in Florida lost so many that they went out of business. Many of Laroche’s plants that hadn’t frozen got poisoned. Finally, in August of 1992 Hurricane Andrew hit Florida. The worst of the storm crossed over the part of Dade County south of Miami that was home to a large military base, citrus farms, and nurseries that produced more than a quarter of all the orchids sold in the United States. The towns of Homestead, Naranja, and Florida City were nearly blown away. Most of the nurseries were gone in a minute: greenhouses folded, shade cloth sailed off, pots of flowers tumbled and shattered. Before the hurricane, Laroche had some of his remaining plants at home and
the rest in three different rented greenhouses in Miami and Homestead. In the hurricane two of the three greenhouses vanished entirely. The third more or less exploded. A few days after Andrew had passed, Laroche went to check the third greenhouse. On the way there he came upon a green hash lying on a road three blocks from where the greenhouse had been. He stopped to examine it and realized the hash was one of his plants. He dreaded going to the greenhouse. Nothing in it was living—saltwater carried inland by the storm had ruined all the plants that hadn’t blown away. Laroche had been in the plant business for about twelve years. He had been a famous plant person. He was now homeless and plantless and alone. He knew then and there that he would die of a broken heart if he ever opened his own nursery again.

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  The Seminole Tribe of Florida has sixteen hundred members; five reservations covering ninety thousand acres; ten thousand Hereford-cross beef cattle; twenty-six thousand acres of pastureland; twelve hundred acres of Burriss lemons; six hundred acres of red and white grapefruit; a catfish farm and a shrimp farm and a turtle farm. The tribe also owns casinos and cigarette businesses. Most of the businesses do well; their reported annual earnings a few years ago were $65 million. The casino is especially profitable. Right now it is limited to poker and video pull-tag machines and a bingo hall, but the tribe would like to add Las Vegas—style gambling, including Superpick Lotto and Touch 6 Lotto machines. So far the governor of Florida has opposed this, even though the tribe has offered to pay the state $100 million a year just to permit the change. Whenever people figure out that the Seminole tribe has a lot of money, they feel inspired. Usually they then approach the tribe with investment proposals—say, a shredded-tire-recycling business or a quarter-horse racetrack or a shopping mall. Usually the Seminoles politely decline, but on occasion they do form partnerships with people outside. The day I first visited the reservation, for instance, Buster Baxley, who was the vice president of planning and development for the tribe, was meeting with a group of Japanese businessmen about a possible Japanese-Seminole lemon-farm deal. Most of the time the tribe does business on its own, although it often hires white people with expertise in the business to set it up and get it running. Unemployment among the Seminoles is about 40 percent. The white managers of tribe businesses are expected to hire tribe members as assistants and teach them as much about the business as possible. When the system works, the Seminoles end up with training and experience and can eventually put the white managers out of a job.