The Orchid Thief

by Susan Orlean

  The idea of starting a Seminole nursery had been kicking around for a while. It was a natural plan. The tribe owned thousands of acres of land covered with plants indigenous to Florida, sabo palms and foxtail grass and finger grass and pop ash trees, the kind of native plants that developers in Florida are required to use on all state-funded projects and many private ones. There were successful nurseries all around, some even on land rented from the tribe. The Florida Seminole reservations are in Hollywood, Brighton, Immokalee, Tampa, and Big Cypress. Hollywood is the most urban of them all, but Buster knew of a spot near tribe headquarters that he thought would be perfect—two and a half acres near the big commercial strip that were empty except for electric towers belonging to Florida Power and Light. The tribal council agreed, and Buster called the local newspaper and placed an ad for a nursery manager. Laroche was still at loose ends when he saw the ad. He had hardly recovered from the hurricane. He was happy to get the job, although now he likes to say he wonders why.

  —

  Setting up a nursery can be simple if you want it to be, but Laroche managed to make it complicated. He couldn’t bear the thought of having an ordinary nursery with cactus planters and potted palms and Christmas trees. He wanted the Seminole nursery to be dazzling, full of extraordinary things. He wanted odd plants from around the world—spiral juniper bushes, cracker roses, confetti shrub, teddy bear palms. He wanted a hundred varieties of what he called “weird-ass vegetables”—spinach that grows on vines, African pumpkins that can be trained onto trellises, carrots that grow in pots, Chinese fuzzy gourds, yard-long green beans, pink Zairean hot peppers shaped like penises.

  He had big plans for orchids. He told the tribe that he wanted to build a laboratory where he would propagate fifty or sixty different species. “Sure, the Seminoles could just go into their backyard and dig up grass and twigs and sell it at the nursery,” he once said. “Well, big fucking deal. On the other hand, a lab is a fucking great idea. It is a superior idea. I explained to the tribe that if you have a lab you can take just one or two plants and from that you can grow billions. Once we got the lab running we could just clone huge numbers of orchids and sell them. I could have hundreds of tribe members working in there, learning about cloning and propagation. We could come up with some really cool new hybrids! And we could work with Florida orchids and really blow some minds. I wanted to bring some flair to the place. Screw wax myrtles! Screw saw grass! A lab is the way to make real money, not growing grass.”

  Many wild orchids don’t like to live away from the woods. They will usually flourish and produce seeds only if they are in their own little universe with their favorite combination of water and light and temperature and breeze, with the perfect tree bark at the perfect angle, and with the precise kind of bugs and the exact kind of flotsam falling on their roots and into their flowers. Many species of wild orchids aren’t propagated commercially, either because they aren’t that pretty or because no one has been able to figure out and reproduce exactly what they want and need to survive. The Fakahatchee has several species of orchids that either live wild or die. The prettiest of them is Polyrrhiza lindenii, which is also classified botanically as Polyradicion lindenii and is commonly known as the ghost orchid. The ghost orchid grows nowhere in this country but the Fakahatchee. If you could figure out how to housebreak any wild orchid, especially a pretty one like the ghost orchid, you would probably become a rich person. You would be able to grow the plants in a greenhouse and then clone hundreds in a lab—hundreds and hundreds of a variety of orchid almost no one on the planet would have. It would be as if you had figured out how to multiply Siberian tigers or gemstones. Orchid fanciers who like to have as many species as possible in their collections would seek you out, and orchid breeders looking for new gene pools would come to you, too. People who bought your plants could eventually grow their own by taking cuttings from their plant, but you would still be acknowledged as the master of growing them from seed, and you would have a seven-year head start, seven years of monopoly, because it takes seven years before a new orchid plant produces its first flowers. The biggest hindrance to all this is that it is now illegal to collect any wild orchids. They are protected under Florida’s endangered species law and also the federal endangered species law, and those that are growing in Florida parks and preserves are also protected under administrative rules governing state lands. International buying and selling of wild orchids is severely restricted under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. A few people have had small-scale luck growing wild orchids they’d collected before the laws took effect, but almost anyone who wants a wild orchid now has to steal it from the woods themselves or buy it on the black market from someone else who had.

  —

  Laroche had a Laroche-style plan in mind. He knew that Florida Indians were exempt from the state laws protecting endangered species. Once he started working for the tribe he believed he would be exempt as well. He would hike into the Fakahatchee with some of the Seminoles working at the nursery, point out the plants he wanted, and have the crew collect them so he wouldn’t even touch any plants himself. That was for insurance: even if he wasn’t covered by the Indian exemption, he could protect himself by keeping his hands off the plants, and then if they were stopped by rangers he could argue that he’d just gone along for the hike and hadn’t done any collecting himself. After he got the plants he would take them to the Seminole plant lab and start cloning them. He’d been fooling around with ghost orchids for years, and he claimed he was one of the only people in the world who’d solved the puzzle of how to clone and grow them. As soon as word got out that he had mastered the cultivation of Polyrrhiza lindenii, he would be celebrated in the plant world. The nursery would sell millions of the plants and make millions of dollars, which would please him and impress the tribe. His success with the ghost orchids would also ruin the black-market trade in them because once the species became available commercially there wouldn’t be any reason to buy those that had been poached from the wild. This was Laroche’s traditional dash of altruism. Finally, the plan would end with a flourish: He would time everything to take place during the Florida legislative session so that as soon as he had gotten what he wanted out of the woods, he would address the legislators and chide them for leaving laws on the books that were too loose to protect endangered plants from cunning people like him. The legislators, shamed, would then change the laws to Laroche’s specifications, and thus the woods would be locked up forever and no more ghost orchids would be spirited away. Environmentalists who had despised him for poaching would be forced to admire him. At first he would seem like a demon, but he would end up looking like a saint. Best of all, Laroche thought, was that when everything was settled he would at last end up with his million-dollar plant.

  As soon as he started working for the tribe Laroche’s new passion became Indian law. He spent a few hours each day ordering materials for the lab and clearing the way for greenhouses and the rest of the day in the University of Miami law library, examining the state of Florida’s legal history with Native Americans. Two cases in particular heartened him. The state had prosecuted Miccosukee Indians three times for poaching palm fronds. The Miccosukees and Seminoles use the fronds to thatch the roofs of their chikee huts. Palms are protected trees, but the state lost the cases because the judges ruled that the Miccosukees had a traditional cultural use for the fronds and therefore were entitled to them. The other case that encouraged him was State of Florida v. James E. Billie. Chief Billie is the longtime chairman of the Seminole tribe. In 1983 he was arrested for killing a Florida panther on the Big Cypress reservation. The Florida panther is a protected species under both Florida and federal law. The issues of Indian hunting rights and religious freedom snarled the case for years, and eventually neither the state nor the federal government managed to convict the chief.

  Laroche was encouraged by both the palm fronds and Chief Billie’s panther. He also came acro
ss some clumsy contradiction of the state code that made it sound as if laws forbidding removal of plants and animals from Florida state land were overridden by the laws that allow Florida Indians to collect endangered animals and plants for their own use. In Laroche’s opinion this was the tool he’d been looking for. He was convinced that this mess of laws allowed him to go with his Seminole crew anywhere he wanted and take anything at all.

  —

  A few days after Laroche and I went to the orchid show in Miami I drove to Hollywood to visit him at the nursery. I turned on the car radio and tried to find a music station I liked but ended up listening to a talk show about how to keep pet snakes and iguanas happy, and when that was over I listened to an hour-long infomercial for some money-management audiotapes. The announcer had a big, hollow voice and every few minutes he would boom, “My friends, you are about to enter the promised land of financial independence!” I drove past Carpet-Marts and Toy-Marts and Car-Marts and the turnoff for Alligator Alley and a highway flyover that leads to the stadium where the Super Bowl is sometimes played, and past signs for all those dreamy-sounding Florida towns like Plantation and Sunrise and Coconut Creek and Coral Springs. The highway median was a low-lying cloud of pink hibiscus bushes. The shoulders were banked with broom grass and sumac and sneezeweed and pennywort, and the road itself looked as if any minute it might just crack and buckle and finally disappear as things grew over it and under it, pushing the roadbed away. As it is, amazing things live on the highway now. Laroche once discovered a rare orchid species growing along an I-95 off-ramp, and so far no one has found it growing anywhere else in the world.

  The reservation is midway between Laroche’s house and the American Orchid Society headquarters, on a cube of land a few miles west of I-95. People driving by might not realize they are on tribal land. The only hint is a few tax-free tribal smoke shops and tribal gas stations and the low gray Seminole casino that takes up an entire block. From the road you can’t see the tribe headquarters or the rodeo arena or the blocks of neat white reservation houses where most tribe members live. I ended up at the reservation many times during my trips to Florida, and every time I almost accidentally passed it by.

  I was developing mixed feeling about spending time with Laroche. I didn’t enjoy driving with him but I did enjoy hearing his version of his life. We weren’t natural friends. He struck me as the late-sleeping, heavy-smoking, junk-food-eating, law-bending type, whereas I am not, but I am the sort of person who finds his sort of person engaging. Many things he said were incredible or staggering or cracked or improbable, but they were never boring. The current of his mind and behavior was more riptide than rivulet. I didn’t care all that much whether what he said was true or not; I just found the flow irresistible. That day I wanted to get a tour of the nursery and he had promised that was what he would give me, but when I arrived he was waiting near the nursery’s front gate and said that it was very important that we leave immediately because there was something he absolutely had to do. I parked and got into his van and asked him where the fire was. He snorted at me and said that he needed to go visit a friend he’d given some plants to a few years earlier because he had just decided, based on nothing in particular, that he wanted to repossess the plants.

  We drove off, and he started talking about his orchid plans to me, and then suddenly he pulled over onto the shoulder of the road under a palm, put the van in neutral, and hauled on the hand brake. He patted himself down for cigarettes and then dug around under his seat and at last unfolded with a triumphant grin on his face and a crushed pack of Marlboros in his hand. His match hissed. The palm fronds made scratchy sounds on the roof of the van. “Look,” he said at last, “I don’t think you ought to have a bunch of Indians just running through the Fakahatchee pulling up plants. I mean, someone like Buster—well, Buster’s pretty belligerent. In the meantime, though, someone is going to figure out how to benefit from the law the way it is now and I just figured it might as well be me.” He shifted in his seat and leaned back against the window. His knees bracketed the steering wheel. He had the longest, skinniest lap I think I have ever seen. “I figured we’d get what we needed out of the swamp and then the legislature would change the laws. That’s what I wanted to say in court: The state needs to protect itself. I’m working for the Seminoles but I’m really on the side of the plants. Is what I did ethical? I don’t know. I’m a shrewd bastard. I could be a great criminal. I could be a great con man, but it’s more interesting to live your life within the confines of the law. It’s more challenging to do what you want but try to do it so you can justify it. People look at what I do and think, Is that moral? Is that right? Well, isn’t every great thing the result of that kind of struggle? Look at something like atomic energy. It can be diabolic or it can be a blessing. Evil or good. Well, that’s where the give is—at the edge of ethics. And that’s exactly where I like to live.”

  He started the van and drove down the block into the parking lot of a nursery. Laroche said the owner of the nursery was a man he met when he and his wife still owned the Bromeliad Tree. He mentioned that the man was gay. “You don’t have any problems with homosexuals, do you?” he asked me.

  “Of course not,” I said. “What are you talking about?”

  “I just needed to check,” he said. “Because whatever your personal issues are, when you’re in the plant business you realize that gay people are your friends.”

  After the hurricane Laroche hadn’t had anywhere to keep his few remaining plants and he had no stomach for trying to care for them, so he had given them to the nursery owner. None of the plants were orchids—those had all died; they were mostly hoyas, a species of plant with tough, rubbery leaves and long, loopy vines. Laroche hadn’t been especially fond of the hoyas back then and he wasn’t especially fond of them now, but for some reason he had decided that he wanted the plants back. He seemed to think there was nothing wrong with taking them. We got out of the van and walked down a crunchy gravel path to a shadehouse. Along the path there were enormous tropical trees with pimply bark and flowers the color of bubble gum, the kind of trees you would draw in a tropical cartoon. The hoyas were hanging by themselves in a small shadehouse with a padlock on the door, and for a moment I wondered if the nursery owner had ever worried that Laroche might someday come back for them. We waited next to the shadehouse looking in at the hoyas and smacking mosquitoes. The plants were in pots suspended from the ceiling. The tips of the vines dusted the floor. “They were pretty good plants to begin with,” Laroche said. “It looks like he’s kept them happy.” It had gotten dopey and warm, an afternoon with a lazy pace, and the light in and around the greenhouses was peculiar and still, as if it were captured inside a bubble, and all the sounds—the crackling of the gravel paths, the mumbling of leaves in the wind, the squeak of doors, the abstract tropical animal sounds of ticking and cheeping and crying—all the sounds were clear but blunted, like sounds inside a covered bowl. I don’t know how long we just stood there before the nursery owner drove up in one of those little golf carts that nurserymen use to survey their property. When he saw Laroche he looked mildly pleased. “Well, John,” he said. “My goodness, if it isn’t John.” He turned off the cart, cracked a few of his knuckles, and stepped out. He was a bald, muscular guy with a pruned beard and a cashew-colored tan. Laroche said hello and that the nursery looked terrific and that I was hanging around because I was writing a book about him. The nursery owner looked alarmed and said he didn’t want his name in any book about Laroche. Laroche chuckled and then motioned toward the plants and said that for sentimental reasons he wanted to visit them. The man fished around on a key ring and then unlocked the shadehouse. A toucan sitting on a perch near the door glared at us with a yellow eye and then without opening its beak it yelled like a jackhammer. Laroche stepped into the shadehouse and twirled one of the long hoya vines. “By the way,” he said, “I’m here to get my plants back. I’ll even buy them back or whatever.”

  “Not intere
sted,” the owner said, stroking a leaf.

  “I’ve come back for them,” Laroche repeated. “Hey, come on, buddy.”

  The man stroked another leaf and then said, “No, John. I love them now. At this point they’re really mine, not yours.”

  They quarreled for a few minutes. Finally Laroche persuaded him to give him some cuttings in a couple of months, and that seemed to satisfy both of them. We left the shadehouse and walked through another one that smelled like ripe bananas. The nursery owner petted each plant as we passed. “Hey, John,” he said. “You know, I have hardly any orchids anymore. You know, I decided that orchid people are too crazy. They come here and buy an orchid and they kill it. Come, buy, kill. I can’t stand it. Fern people are almost worse, but the orchid people are too—oh, you know. They think they’re superior.” He looked at Laroche. “You collecting anything now, John?”