The Orchid Thief

by Susan Orlean

  No elegant Mediterranean buildings were ever built, no Golden Gate Inn, no Le Petit Gourmet; maybe thirty houses. The land was waterlogged, inaccessible, unserviced by telephones and electricity, buggy, sandy, unfriendly. The nearest convenience store was ten miles away and the nearest hospital was twenty. In spite of the drainage canals, most of the land was still underwater six or eight months a year, and when it was dry it was so dry that it would burst into flame as if it were paper. Golden Gate was sort of the end of the world, gloomy and remote, a checkerboard of roads that went nowhere and houses that were never built. In a 1970 lawsuit brought against Gulf American, a disgruntled customer claimed that Gulf American had told him that the land he’d bought was in the path of development of the city of Naples, and that meant its value would soar and he would be able to sell it in a few years and “make a fortune.” In his opinion, the presiding judge wrote: “In fact, the land is not in the path of development of Naples and is, instead, in The Big Cypress Swamp.” According to the Federal Trade Commission consent order in 1974: “Golden Gate is not a developed community. Golden Gate consists primarily of vacant land, and has shopping facilities which are incomplete and inadequate, and resort facilities which are incomplete. There are few amenities and public services available.”

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  Florida land is unusually fertile. One thing that has always grown well on it is real estate schemes. Until the mid-1950s the state didn’t even regulate large-scale land sales. The Florida land scam is generally thought to have been inaugurated in 1824. That year General Lafayette was given a tract near Tallahassee in appreciation of his help in the Revolution. Everyone assumed he would sell it back to local farmers, and indeed he did, but he demanded a price that was at least twice the land’s actual value. In the 1830s a New Yorker named Peter Sken touted land near St. Augustine “covered with genuine Florida crabgrass.” He was able to make crab-grass sound so rare and wonderful that he managed to sell hundreds of crabgrassy acres even though he didn’t happen to own the land he was selling. Then came John Whitney, who sold swamp lots to Northerners after assuring them that in Florida “insects are neither numerous nor troublesome”; and Hamilton Disston, who in the 1880s sold underwater lots in the Everglades and then, when his scheme fell apart, committed suicide by shooting himself in his bathtub; and Richard Bolles, who marketed his underwater lots at the turn of the century with the slogan “A good investment beats a lifetime of labor”; and Barron Collier, who took a million acres of marshy scrubland near the Fakahatchee and set out to build a replica of Paris; and Charles Rodes, who felt there wasn’t enough premium-priced waterfront property to sell, so in the 1920s he built narrow banks of land out into lakes and sold it as waterfront property, and then he dug wide canals and sold the land adjacent to the boggy canals as waterfront property too—a practice that became known as “finger-islanding”; and of course Carl Fisher, a Detroit automobile mogul who came to Florida right after World War I and poured three million cubic yards of sand onto an expanse of mangrove swamp and created Miami Beach.

  Scams and real estate schemes flourish because land in Florida is not like land anywhere else in the country. For one thing, Florida land is elastic. You can make more of it. The Florida peninsula is the last part of the continental United States to have emerged from the ocean; most of it is just settling in, and some of it—the swamps and marshes and wetlands—is still only half emerged. With a load of soil and a few canals you can dry out a half-emerged swamp and make a new piece of land. You really can turn a Florida swamp into real estate. A lot of the state is man-made. In 1850 a state survey estimated that two thirds of Florida was wetlands that were unfit for development or cultivation. Since then the water has been drawn off more than 75 percent of those wetlands and most of the newly created land is already built up or is marked for development. There are more vacant zoned lots in Florida than in any other state. Currently there are two million vacant lots in twenty-six hundred subdivisions, most of them on land that hadn’t even been land until someone drained and filled it. If every one of those available lots were developed, the state’s population could reach ninety-one million.

  What is compelling about Florida is not just its ever-expanding quantity of land—it is the qualities that the land has come to represent. In the 1800s, agriculture was dominant in American life, and Florida was the American farmer’s dream because of its cheap acreage and a ten-month growing season. By the 1900s, American ambitions shifted from good farming to “the good life,” and Florida shifted with it—it still represented the farmer’s dream, but it now also represented the middle-class dream of a place you could find health and warmth and leisure. Florida wasn’t grimy or industrial or hidebound or ingrown. It wasn’t seared and dry like the desert—it was luscious and fruitful. It felt new and it looked new, with all its newly minted land and all the billboards pointing to new developments and the bright new sand that had been dredged up and added to the beach. Florida was to Americans what America had always been to the rest of the world—a fresh, free, unspoiled start.

  Florida is a wet, warm, tropical place, essentially featureless and infinitely transformable. It is as suggestible as someone under hypnosis. Its essential character can be repeatedly reimagined. The Everglades soil that is contaminated by intractable Brazilian pepper trees is now being scraped up in order to kill the invader trees, and then the sterilized soil is going to be piled high, covered with plastic snow, and turned into a ski resort. Any dank Florida cypress swamp can be drained and remade as a subdivision, and that subdivision can be made to look like a Tuscan village or a New England town, and the imitation Tuscan village or Vermont town can be filled with people from New York or Chicago or Haiti who have remade themselves into Floridians. The flat plainness of Florida doesn’t impose itself on you, so you can impose upon it your own kind of dream.

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  In 1967 Gulf American pleaded guilty to using “false, misleading, deceptive, and unfair practices” to sell its Florida land. The next year Leonard Rosen sold Gulf American to a Pennsylvania finance company called GAC Corporation; he and his brother each received stock in GAC worth $63 million. Leonard eventually started up another land company that marketed desert wasteland in Nevada to German investors. In 1977 he was indicted for tax fraud, and a grand jury investigated secret offshore bank accounts that he controlled; he pleaded no contest and received a $5,000 fine and three years’ probation.

  GAC had given the Rosens stock worth almost $ 115 million in exchange for Gulf American. GAC marketed the Gulf American property until 1975. By then GAC was $350 million in debt. The subsequent bankruptcy took thirteen years to settle and is considered the biggest and most complex reorganization in Florida’s corporate history, involving more than nine thousand creditors, twenty-seven thousand lot owners, and five hundred thousand acres of land. After the bankruptcy, the Gulf American hotel was sold to a group of chiropractors, who soon went bankrupt themselves. Then it was sold to a South American company called International Wholesale Products of Hollywood whose security guards used the hotel to store bales of marijuana. The Gulf American airport where planes carrying prospective customers landed was used as a landing strip for cargo planes that were transporting drugs.

  As part of a settlement over the wetlands it destroyed at Cape Coral, GAC donated almost ten thousand acres in the Fakahatchee to the state of Florida; the state then began buying up the privately held Gulf American lots, acre by acre. This land eventually became the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve. There are still thousands and thousands of inholdings within the preserve that the state continues to buy, but since most of the lots are less than two acres, there are thousands of individual owners, and each purchase means a slow negotiation with an individual owner who often lives far away. The acquisition project is the most complex, controversial, and litigious of Florida’s land-conservation program. One hundred families did eventually move into Golden Gate Estates. They live in isolated houses without telephones or electric
ity or city water supplies, and the vacant lots all around them are slowly reverting back to swamp. Many people who bought land in Golden Gate probably never even visited it, and most of them have been happy to sell as soon as the government has offered to buy. Living in Golden Gate appeals to a highly independent individual. Many independent individuals in Golden Gate have mightily resisted the government’s acquisition plans. A while ago, one homesteader declared himself chairman and director of research of the East Collier County Landowners Improvement Committee. The committee’s slogan was “God promises to kill with the sword government men which take the land from widows and fatherless children.”

  The grid of Golden Gate streets is still in place. People drag-race on them now and dump trash on them and land airplanes carrying drugs on them and stash smuggled goods alongside them, and now that the swamp is repossessing the land they also chase bears and panthers across them and go fishing for snapper and needlefish in the drainage canals. Half of the emergency calls to the Collier County fire department are reporting fires on the old Gulf American land. Some of the fires are caused by lightning strikes. The rest are what is called “hunters’ lightning.” These are fires set by deer hunters to burn out a section of woods so that in a few weeks there will be tender new growth on the burned land and the hunters know that new growth is a sure way to attract deer. The only way into the area from the highway is a barely marked road called Miller Road Extension. Collier County doesn’t maintain Miller Road Extension, and left alone the road would be quickly overgrown by weeds and bushes or buried under accumulated trash. But, for years now, some unknown person comes with a bulldozer or a road grader every month or so and clears the road, smashing plants that have crept across it and nosing trash off to the side of the road. The anonymous bulldozer has been nicknamed the Ghost Grader. The property the Ghost Grader clears is no longer known as Golden Gate Estates or Remuda Ranch Grants. Officially, it is now referred to as Collier County Parcel 197, and the people who live nearby just call it the Blocks.

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  A ranger named Mike Owen met me at the Fakahatchee Strand headquarters, and before we went to see the stolen orchids we went for a drive around the Blocks. The roads were chalky and heat-beaten, and hip-high weeds knit an edge along them that shut off almost anything other than a straight-ahead view. The blocks were straight and squared, like blocks in a real suburb, and the roads were wide and white, like suburban streets, and some of the intersections had street signs with ordinary-sounding street names and stop signs that jutted up out of a mesh of wild pine and salt grass and poison ivy. Driving around the Blocks wasn’t like driving through a jungle—it was like driving through a suburb that had had all its houses and people erased. Every once in a while we passed a shaved-down patch in the thick growth, probably the start of what would have been a driveway that would have led to what would have been somebody’s home. Some of these clearings were dotted with piles of junk—old rusted-out refrigerators missing their doors, a black heap of tires, a lawn chair. In one clearing I saw a pickup truck that looked as if it was operational. The bed of the truck was loaded with a dozen beekeeper boxes, but there was no beekeeper around. Far ahead, on the horizon, miles down the road, I noticed a shimmer, and then the shimmer became a blot and then the blot became a bigger blot and then it became a black sedan that looked as if it was growing rather than moving. In an instant it was in front of us and then in an instant it whooshed past and the road was blank again. It was spooky not to see any other cars or people but it was almost spookier to finally see one—it was like an intruder intruding on an intruder. I opened my window and stuck my head out. There were only a few sounds, and each of them was amplified—the thunking of the ranger’s car, the whirring and whining of invisible insects, the whistle of a bird. It was a weird unquiet stillness, and yet the place had a weird overfull emptiness. It was more ghostly than a ghost town. In a ghost town only the people are missing. Here the buildings were missing, too. It didn’t seem like a peaceful place where nothing ever happened—it was full of the feeling of a million things planned on and never done.

  On a culvert over a drainage canal a man was lining up fishing rods and a little boy crouching beside him had his arm wrist-deep in a bucket of bait. The ranger slowed his car down as we passed them and opened his window. “Hot out here,” he said to the man. Watery waves of heat rippled up from the hood of the car.

  “Hot, yes, sir,” the mah said, nodding. The little boy stood up and waved at us with a hand full of worms.

  The ranger turned at the next corner so we could start back to headquarters. Every stop sign we passed was punched with dozens of buckshot holes. After a couple of blocks we came upon a Ford Bronco. The driver was a large man with a long black beard. He stopped his Bronco and waved the ranger over. The bearded man was wearing khaki pants and a belt with a shiny buckle but no shirt at all. He was sweating on his forehead and along his collarbone, and his chest looked like damp rising dough. He told the ranger he had just passed a black bear that was being chased across a street by two hound dogs and a man carrying an assault rifle. The ranger had his hand on his gun the whole time the bearded man was talking. He took some notes and then said to the man, “Now, where did you say you saw the bear?”

  The man pulled his beard and screwed up his face. After a minute he said, “Honest, sir, it’s kind of hard to describe in this jungle, but I think he was near the intersection of Stewart and De Soto.” It was odd to hear someone using street names to describe a place in a swamp that a bear would run past. It was odder to realize that years ago it was going to be someone’s address.

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  We went back to the preserve headquarters and I got myself ready to go into the swamp on foot. When I’d first walked into the Fakahatchee I hadn’t known what to wear; I just knew that I wanted to cover as much of my body as I could but still avoid getting parboiled. Finally I settled on a longsleeved shirt, a pair of cotton and Lycra leggings, some tube socks and a pair of cheap sneakers. The outfit actually worked pretty well but it didn’t last long. When I got back to the ranger station at the end of that hike, I grabbed some spare clothes out of my car, ran to the restroom and washed my face for about ten minutes straight, and then stripped off every piece of my swamp outfit and threw it all out. My shirt was soaked with bug repellent and sunscreen, and my leggings were stiff with mud, and my shoes and socks were blackened by the silt I’d walked through in the sinkholes. Anyway, I was so happy to get out of them that I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more than to pull everything off and stuff it into the wastebasket. On my way back to my hotel I stopped at a Kmart and stocked up on cheap long-sleeved shirts and leggings and sneakers to use on future walks in the swamp. When I got back to New York everyone I talked to about the hike asked what I wore, and they seemed surprised when I described my outfit. I suppose they expected that I would have worn something more heavy-duty and protective. It would be great if you could walk in a swamp wearing something secure-feeling like chest-high waders or a head-to-toe wet suit, but if you did you would die of heat prostration, and if your waders filled with water you would die of heat prostration and on top of that you would drown. Some of the Fakahatchee rangers wear their Park Service uniforms and regular leather boots in the swamp. I preferred wearing sneakers rather than boots, because even though boots feel safer and more substantial I thought that wearing sneakers would allow me to feel around on the bottom of the sinkholes to see if there were alligators in them or not. This was something Laroche had advised me to do, but when I came upon my first sinkhole I realized that he had never told me what to do if I thought I had found an alligator. The fact is that the swamp is so grabby that even though I was covered from neck to foot I felt stark naked. The water was freezing cold, and mosquitoes sneaked in and out of my shirt by way of my collar and sleeves, and every plant with prickers snatched at my leggings, and the gritty sinkhole muck passed right through my socks and sneakers and stained my ankles and toes. I had mosquito bites
on my stomach and my face, and toward the end of that first hike I got so nervous and exhausted that I broke out in hives for the first time in my life.

  Mike Owens, the ranger who drove me through the Blocks, was going to drop me off near the big sinkhole lake where some of Laroche’s orchids had been wired up. He said that he was not going to go into the swamp with me—he was going to leave me there because he had some other things to do, and Katherine, the other ranger, was already out near the lake and would walk me in. He mentioned that Katherine might have a few volunteer workers with her who would join us so they could see the stolen orchids too. After I changed into my swamp clothes we drove a couple of miles down the Fakahatchee’s only road. Every mile looked like every other mile to me—profuse and green and impenetrable. After a few minutes we pulled over and parked at a profuse, green, impenetrable-looking spot, and in a moment Katherine emerged from the woods. She was solidly built and had flushed cheeks and curly brown hair that had frizzed into a nimbus around her head. Her ranger uniform was soaking wet up to her waist. Behind her were two huge men, the biggest men I have ever seen, as big as sides of beef, shoulders like sirloin roasts. I had once read that the Skunk Man who supposedly lives in the Fakahatchee is seven feet tall and weighs seven hundred pounds. These huge men were dressed in shapeless pastel prison uniforms and they had rags wrapped jauntily around their hair. “Come on in,” the ranger said, waving to me. Mike Owens said he’d see me later and got back into his car and drove away.