The Orchid Thief

by Susan Orlean

  Before I got to the road that leads into the Fakahatchee, I stopped at a fork to read another sign. I was heading to the right. The sign was pointing to the left: BIG CYPRESS SEMINOLE INDIAN RESERVATION. RECREATIONAL AREA. BILLIE SWAMP SAFARI. AIRBOAT RIDES! WILD BOAR HUNTS! ECO-TOURS! BIG CYPRESS RODEO! The Billie of the this Billie Swamp Safari was Chief James E. Billie, whose acquittal on the Florida panther case had been a great inspiration to Laroche. The Seminoles set up the safari after Chief Billie visited a private exotic big-game preserve in Texas and had such a good time that he thought the tribe should set one up, too. A two-thousand-acre site on the Big Cypress reservation was stocked with European fallow deer, black buck antelope from India, sika deer from China, Corsican sheep from the Mediterranean, and scimitar-horned oryx from Africa. For a fee of one thousand dollars, tourists were guided through the safari and could take home whatever they killed. The outcry was speedy and loud. Chief Billie told a reporter that Seminole kids were even being taunted in school as Bambi killers. Moreover, the tribe had to construct big, expensive fences around the safari—not to keep the imported animals in but to keep native animals out, because Florida panthers and alligators had discovered a taste for exotic meat and had killed dozens of the safari animals within the first few weeks. Finally Billie conceded that the safari wasn’t worth the trouble it was causing, and it was repackaged as a photographic hunting ground. Laroche and Chief Billie had never met, but there was an echo in their personal stories: both were men who seemed to thrive on controversy and have a preternatural talent for landing on their feet.

  State Road 29 went through the town of Immokalee, past a Kuntry Kubbard and a Melon-Pac factory, past a Citrus Belle packing plant and Brahma cattle ranches, past orange groves and the Hendry Correctional Institution; beyond Hendry it was nearly wild except for traffic signs warning of panther crossings and a couple of bungalows and the small buildings that made up Copeland Road Prison Number 27. Near the prison was a small store that looked abandoned, but a man was in front of it, sweeping the dirt driveway, so I decided to take a chance. It had been eighty-one degrees when I left Palm Beach. Now it was at least fifteen degrees warmer, and I was desperate for something to drink. The store’s door was stiff and made a horrible sound when I pushed it open. Inside it was nearly lightless. The wooden floors sloped and buckled. The shelves were set at funny angles and the refrigerator cases had almost nothing in them except some sticky cans of soda and dusty brown bottles of beer. Two stocky women were sitting behind the cash register with tart expressions on their faces. I bought a Coke and went outside to drink it, but it tasted weird and for a moment I entertained the thought that it might be poisoned, so I poured it out and went back to get something else. I didn’t see anything I wanted to drink, but I did notice a plastic container of raspberry Jell-O that appealed to me. The women had been following me with their eyes the whole time. Neither of them moved when I put the Jell-O down and took out my wallet. Finally the bigger one picked up the Jell-O and twirled it around in her hand for a moment and said at last, “Nope, miss. This one’s not for sale.”

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  “Fakahatchee” is a Seminole word that means “forked river” or “hunting river” or “river of vines” or “river of clay” or “muddy creek.” “Strand” is local slang for any long, narrow swamp forest. The Fakahatchee Strand is a wedge of land containing dozens of smaller strands and a chain of sinkhole lakes connected by natural channels cut into the south Florida limestone floor that are watered by a sixty-mile-long drainage that starts to the north at the Okaloacoochee Slough and the Caloosahatchee River. The Fakahatchee has an exceptional character. Some of its sinkholes are nearly a hundred feet deep. Otherwise the land is so level that wherever there is even just an inch or two of elevation the habitat completely changes. Elevated land shifts from mushy marsh to crumbly soil. On these elevated inches trees have taken hold and formed clusters—cypress islands, oak heads, pine islands, royal palm hammocks. The rise determines what kind of trees congregate on the rises, depending on how much water they need. A few inches can make the difference between a mangrove clump and a buttonwood hammock. Some of these clusters have only a dozen trees, but others have thousands of trees. More than half of the Fakahatchee’s trees are tropical, but it is essentially a temperate forest. The two coexisting environments mean there are things living within the Fakahatchee that aren’t usually found together—for instance, it is the only place in the world where royal palm trees, which are tropical, and cypress trees, which are found in temperate regions, live side by side. The Fakahatchee’s central royal palm hammock has three thousand trees and is the biggest, healthiest such hammock in the world. The royal palms are one of the treasures of the Fakahatchee. They are a rare sort of palm with a monumental cement-gray trunk and a tuft of slim green leaves—the form of a hundred-foot-tall feather duster. Royal palms are related to a Cuban palm and are accustomed to warm weather; the Fakahatchee is about as far north as they can grow. Explorers remarked on the swamp’s royal palms as early as 1860, but the palms didn’t become famous until the 1920s, when the owners of Hialeah Race Track in Miami transplanted some from the Fakahatchee to the infield of the race track. Bromeliads also flourish in the Fakahatchee. In some of the deep sloughs, every tree is weighed down with Guzmania monostachia—huge, flaring bromeliads in green and brown and red. More different kinds of native North American orchids grow in the Fakahatchee than anywhere else, and eleven species in the Fakahatchee are found nowhere else in North America.

  The Fakahatchee looks utterly wild, but it is in fact a corrupted wilderness. It has been meddled with and invaded. For a while, people cleared and plowed parcels of its wet prairies and tried to grow oranges, grapefruits, tangerines, tomatoes, mangoes, and winter vegetables. The swamp made for lousy farming. The farmers eventually left, but their produce lingered. Even now you can still see crop rows under the native grass and a few weather-beaten citrus trees amid the palm and cypress. Melaleucas and Brazilian peppers and Australian pine trees, non-natives, have roamed into the strand and multiplied. So have walking catfish, who swam in through the sinkhole lakes and stayed. And so have armadillos, the offspring of armadillos used in leprosy experiments in a Jacksonville hospital that managed to get away. And so for a while did wild cows, who were normal cows that escaped nearby ranches and lived comfortably in the swamp until the state of Florida hired marksmen in 1948 to do away with them. The biggest unnatural success in the Fakahatchee has been pigs. Hunting clubs used to raise and fatten ordinary pigs on local farms and then let them loose in the swamp so the club members could then have fun tracking them down and shooting them. Some of the pigs didn’t get shot, and some of those adapted to swamp living. Their offspring are now thriving in the Fakahatchee and have been transformed from mild barnyard animals into gigantic, nasty swamp pigs who are totally mad and totally wild.

  The Fakahatchee would be inaccessible if it weren’t for the Tamiami Trail, the road that runs from Fort Meyers to Miami and crosses the southern end of the preserve. Before the trail was built, a trip across the Fakahatchee was an obstacle course. In 1908 a traveler described such a trip: “We began the trip in canoes, but ended it in an oxcart. We paddled and wallowed through two hundred miles of flower clad lakes and boggy, moccasin-infested trails, zigzagging from border to border of the Florida Everglades, and were hauled for five days on pine-covered stretches of sand, across submerged prairies, and through sloughs of the Big Cypress Country, but we failed to reach the big lake by twenty five miles.”

  It took three tries to build the Tamiami Trail. The first attempt was in 1915, when a road crew tried to cut through the slough and failed. In 1923 a group calling itself the Trail Blazers set out from Fort Meyers vowing they’d get through. Most of the twenty-five Trail Blazers were Florida businessmen who hoped that a good road to Miami would make the southwestern coast less of a businessless hinterland. They expected the trip to take three days. After two days they vanished. It was assumed they had been
captured by the Miccosukee Indians who lived in the swamp and considered the Trail Blazers intruders. Almost a month later the worn-out Trail Blazers showed up near Miami. It was five more years before a real road crew made it through.

  In 1947 the Lee Tidewater Cypress Company began logging the Fakahatchee for cypress. To penetrate the strands, the company built dozens of tramways, each exactly 1,650 feet from the next. The tramways had to be elevated. Dirt was scooped out and piled into a bank and the tracks laid on top of that, which meant that every elevated tramway created a carved-out trench beside it. Every trench filled with water. Some of it was collected rainwater, but most was surrounding swamp water that drained into the trenches. After the tramways were built and the trenches filled up, the water level in the Fakahatchee dropped by more than two feet. Crews rode in on cabbagehead locomotives that ran back and forth along the tramways. Once a mature cypress tree was sighted, it was grooved, sawed, dragged down, and hauled out by chains to a double-saw mill in Perry, Florida, where it was cut up for paneling, shingles, caskets, and pickle tanks. The timber cruisers and groovers and sawyers and dragline operators and skidder crews lived in tent villages on the edge of the swamp. The groovers were mostly Seminoles. The other workers were black and white and had a tendency to get into fights. Some of the workers didn’t like the quality of life in the swamp. Several of the sawyers claimed they kept coming across skeletons in the woods, and a few even quit because they said it gave them the creeps, even though at a wage of eight hundred dollars a month, sawing down the Fakahatchee was a lucrative job. Anyhow, the work got done: Lee Tidewater took one million board feet of cypress out of the Fakahatchee every year.

  By 1952 the Fakahatchee’s cypress was almost entirely logged out, so Lee Tidewater closed up its operation and left the area. In the five years of logging the tramways had cut up the woods; the trenches had drained it; the falling timber had pulled down brush; the logs that were dragged out had gouged long deep channels into the swamp floor. After Lee Tidewater left, surveyors described the Fakahatchee as looking like “a green Hell.”

  In 1966 Lee Tidewater sold seventy-five thousand acres of the Fakahatchee and the surrounding land. The purchasers were two brothers, Julius and Leonard Rosen, who called their company Gulf American Corporation. The Rosens were born in Baltimore and had begun their business lives selling pots and pans. In the late forties they concocted a homemade shampoo and named it Formula Number 9 and claimed it could restore hair to bald men. They advertised Formula Number 9 on television with ads that lasted anywhere from five minutes to thirty minutes; it was one of the first television ads of all time. The main ingredient of the shampoo was lanolin. Most of the ads began with Leonard Rosen extolling the virtues of lanolin, saying, “Have you ever seen a bald-headed sheep?” The Rosens made a fortune from Formula Number 9 and, more important, discovered how easy it was to mass-market anything. Eventually they hooked up with a real estate salesman named Milt Mendelsohn, who convinced them that land could be marketed just like baldness shampoo. Like the Rosens, Mendelsohn was an innovator—he had dotted Florida with billboards that said FLORIDA LAND: $10 DOWN AND $10 A MONTH and had sold hundreds of overpriced parcels on the strength of that pitch. The Rosens wanted to join Mendelsohn in a similar venture, so Leonard Rosen and Mendelsohn flew together over south Florida looking for pieces of vacant land they could buy and sell. Their first project was Cape Coral, a 114-square-mile peninsula bordered by the Gulf of Mexico and the Caloosahatchee River. They platted 138,000 lots and paved 1,700 miles of roads but made no provisions for schools, shopping, water, sewer, or landfills, although they did build Cape Coral Gardens, a tourist attraction featuring a Porpoise Pool, a Garden of the Patriots with busts of every American president, and a fountain called Waltzing Waters with jets of water that shot eighty-five feet into the air.

  During the Rosens’ ownership, only 25 percent of the Cape Coral lots were ever sold, and Cape Coral Gardens was soon abandoned and reduced to a pile of dirt, but the brothers had managed to make a fortune and wanted to market even more Florida land. They worked out a deal with Lee Tidewater Cypress Co. and set out to develop the deserted area on the southwest coast that included the Lee Tidewater property and what is now the Big Cypress Swamp. The Rosens never actually bought most of the land they were selling—they just bought a little and then took out options on the rest—but their sales brochure nonetheless described Gulf American as “the largest marketer of land of its kind in the world.”

  Gulf American drained the land by building two hundred miles of canals. It was hard going; unlike Cape Coral, which was mostly sandbar, the Lee Tidewater property was low swamp underlaid with a layer of solid rock that wouldn’t budge unless it was dynamited. Then the land was platted and subdivided and surveyed and overlaid with a grid of three hundred miles of roads on top of the dried-out swamp. The water table dropped fourteen feet. Emptied of water, the swamp transformed from grass plains and cypress strands into an upland ecosystem of underbrush and trashy trees and tough invaders like Brazilian pepper. The Rosens named one section of the property Golden Gate Estates and another Remuda Ranch Grants. Near Golden Gate, Gulf American built a two-hundred-room hotel and an airplane landing strip. No houses were put up in either Golden Gate Estates or Remuda Ranch Grants, although if you had read their sales brochure you would have gotten a different impression:

  Wherever one goes in this vast Gulf American Country, he finds atmosphere, appeal, and delights of a rich man’s paradise, yet within the financial reach of almost everyone.

  Beautiful homes set back from the wide streets and boulevards. Impressive is the fact that Golden Gate homes, just as the community of Golden Gate itself, were created and built to fit the incomes of people of average means.

  At Golden Gate one may visit and relax at the Golden Gate Country Club … one of the finest, with a professional golf course, scene of important tournaments. One may dine at the Country Squire or at the elegant Le Petit Gourmet—have cocktails at the intimate Beau Brummel Room. He may stay at the Golden Gate Inn, a handsome hostelry. There are opportunities to swim, boat, fish, play tennis and take part in a wide variety of social events. An entirely new and wonderful way of life at Golden Gate is offered.

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  Remuda Ranch Grants features elegant Mediterranean-styled buildings towering over the horizon like Spanish castles … but nowhere in Spain, not even on that famous plain, will be found such an abundance of good living!

  Golden Gate Estates was the bigger of the two properties. If it had ever been developed by Gulf American, it would have been the largest subdivision in the world.

  The Gulf American land was offered in five-acre lots that were priced at $1,250 and could be paid off at a rate of ten dollars a month. The lots were advertised as waterfront property with boating access to the Gulf of Mexico—which it wasn’t, unless you planned to paddle to the Gulf by way of the drainage canals. The Rosens wanted to attract people who had little opportunity to inspect the property before they bought it so that they wouldn’t have an opportunity to raise issues like how close to the water the land actually was. Gulf American pictured its perfect customers as people without much money who lived far from Florida or were members of the armed forces who were heading home from overseas and could get mortgages through the GI Bill or were just big dreamers. To attract those kinds of customers Gulf American had a battery of different sales tactics. They gave away houses on The Price Is Right. They set up sales offices around the country and sent out millions of invitations to “friendly dinners,” which often featured a local sports star or celebrity. Some invitations suggested that the dinner was a celebration of the recipient’s anniversary or birthday or promotion. The invitations sent to enlisted men stated that Gulf American was affiliated with the U.S. armed forces. The sales dinners usually began with a movie about the beauty and affordability of Golden Gate Estates and suggested that the smart customer would buy one of the lots for his dream house and then several more lots as an i
nvestment. According to Gulf American, the land’s value was about to fly, thanks to Disney World and proposed airports and highways in the area, so in a few years the customer certainly could sell his extra lots at a huge profit. Gulf American provided instructional booklets for the more ambitious customers called How to Make Money from Florida Acreage and Your Golden Gate Way to a Prosperous Future.

  After dinner, salesmen sat down with each customer and started to work with an air of urgency. According to the salesmen, land prices were creeping upward and very soon land in Florida would be unaffordable. Gulf American pledged that anyone who bought land at the dinner would be flown to Florida for free and put up with all expenses paid in the Gulf American hotel. When a customer at one of these dinners did decide to buy, the salesman assigned to him would jump up and shout, “Lot Number Twenty-three is sold!” Or ringers hired by the company would jump up now and then and shout, “I bought one!” If a customer was interested in a parcel of land but was wavering, his salesman would offer to put the parcel on hold while the customer was considering it. A few minutes later the manager would jump up and shout, “I can’t keep this on hold much longer!” and force the customer into a decision on the spot.

  Not every buyer took the free flight to Florida. Some buyers were satisfied enough with having seen the movie of the property, so they just signed a contract and probably decided it would be soon enough to see their lot when they were ready to retire to it. Anyone who did take the free Florida trip was flown over the swamp in a little buzz plane, and his salesman would lean out of the plane and drop a ten-pound sack of flour to mark the customer’s lot. If the client saw other pieces of property he liked, the salesman would drop more sacks of flour on those, too. Some salesmen would drive the prospective buyer miles out in the far swampy ends of the property and then suggest that he either sign the land contract or walk back on his own. The rooms at the Gulf American hotel were bugged so salesmen could listen in on hesitant customers and adapt their sales pitch to each customer’s specific concerns. Gulf American marketed its land from the mid-1950s until 1970. The cheapness of the land and the prospect of living in warm Florida and the promise of the good life to be found there turned out to be enthralling. More than forty-six thousand people flew over the swamp and dropped a flour bag on their favorite acre; more than 470,000 acres of land were sold. The Rosens’ initial investment in Florida, at Cape Coral, had been $125,000. In a few years the value of their company was $450 million.