The Orchid Thief

by Susan Orlean

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  Bob Fuchs’s fame peaked at the World Orchid Conference that was held in Miami in 1984. World conferences are held in a different city once every three years. They have been held in Glasgow, Tokyo, Honolulu, St. Louis, Singapore, and Long Beach. Miami hosted it only once, in 1984, and drew a record number of exhibitors from Florida and from all over the world. Scores of awards are given out at an orchid conference, but the one an orchid person would really dream about is the award given to the single best orchid in the show. To win that award at the world’s biggest show, especially in Miami—arguably the capital of American orchid growing and collecting—would be the equivalent of winning a gold medal at the orchid Olympics. The award for the best orchid at the 1984 World Orchid Conference in Miami went to Vanda Deva ‘Robert,’ owned by Bob Fuchs. Vanda Deva ‘Robert’ is a brilliant red orchid with a small blackish lip and a speck of yellow in the center and large petals that are tessellated with blood-colored veins. The flower is full and round. Its deep color is luscious and sexy, but at the same time there is something about its shape and aspect that makes it look a little like a teddy bear. ‘Robert’ is unforgettable because it is extremely pretty, and because it won the biggest award at the biggest show in the world when the show was last held in this country, and because after it won it was used to breed thousands of other extremely pretty orchids, and because it made Bob Fuchs a star. It is also unforgettable because the success of Vanda Deva ‘Robert’ probably marks the moment when ill will between Bob Fuchs and another grower named Frank Smith began.

  Frank Smith is a man about Bob’s age who owns his own well-known and successful Florida nursery, Krull-Smith Orchids, which is in Apopka, near Disney World. Frank Smith is an accredited orchid judge and has also won many awards for his plants at shows. He and Bob Fuchs are competitors, but the ill will between them was more than ordinary competition. What had happened after the World Orchid Conference was that Bob had his spectacular win with Vanda Deva ‘Robert’ and decided to quit teaching junior high and go into the orchid business full-time. From the beginning he seemed to have a way of getting on some people’s nerves. An elderly female orchid judge once sued him for a million dollars, asserting that he had defamed her in a South Florida Orchid Society memo. People took heightened delight in beating him at shows. One man whose orchid had triumphed over him at a show came up to Bob later and said, “Fuchs, do you know how long I’ve been waiting to kick your fucking ass?” Before he was growing orchids full-time, Bob had been studying to become an accredited show judge in the south Florida region. Getting accredited is a long process that involves studying and student judging for as many as six years. It is a valued position because judges are respected as great orchid authorities and through their choices they can influence trends in orchid breeding. A judge who favors small round petals, for instance, can give his awards to plants with small, round petals, and that in turn will encourage breeders to aim for small, round-petaled plants as well as increasing the commercial value of the ones that have been winners. In 1983 when Bob finished his requirements, he applied to the American Orchid Society’s judging committee for his accreditation in the south Florida region. His application was rejected. He was told that someone had sent a letter to the committee claiming that Bob had tried to bribe show judges by offering them cuttings from his best plants. The letter was written by Frank Smith. In his letter Frank said he knew exactly what he was talking about because he was one of the judges Bob had tried to bribe.

  In 1990 the big robbery took place at R. F. Orchids. The police investigated, but because there were no witnesses and few clues they told Bob that it was unlikely that the orchids or the thief would ever be found. About two days after the break-in, an orchid hobbyist named Robert Perry was touring Florida orchid nurseries with his wife. They stopped at Krull-Smith Orchids, and while they were looking around, Robert Perry noticed a bunch of exceptional-looking plants piled haphazardly in the back of a secluded shadehouse. Among them was a plant Perry fell in love with—a silvery-gray flower with a reddish-purple lip. Because of the way the plants were piled up, Perry couldn’t reach the silvery orchid, but he could see it well enough to know he had never seen anything like it. On the way out he asked a nursery worker if he could buy a pup—an orchid baby—from the plant, but the worker told him that none of the plants in the pile were for sale. A month later Perry was browsing through an old orchid magazine and saw an R. F. Orchids ad featuring a picture of a silvery flower that looked to him exactly like the flower he had swooned over at Krull-Smith. He believed that an orchid that special was unlikely to be found at more than one nursery. He remembered having heard something or other about a robbery at R. F. Orchids. Perry had never met Bob Fuchs but he decided to call him and tell him he’d seen that same rare orchid at Krull-Smith. A few days later a sheriff, Bob Fuchs, Robert Perry, and Bob’s partner, Mike Coronado, drove to Krull-Smith Orchids in the middle of the night. Perry led the men to the secluded shadehouse. It was now empty. The stack of plants, including that silvery one, was gone. Perry was dumbfounded. As the men were leaving, Mike Coronado wandered into another shadehouse. A moment later he ran back to show the sheriff a plant tag from Fuchs Orchids that he said he had found lying on the floor. The sheriff recorded all the information, but in the end there was not enough to charge anyone with anything.

  There have always been a lot of theories about what had happened to the stolen orchids. Plenty of people thought that maybe Robert Perry’s memory wasn’t entirely reliable and that even though the orchids had disappeared from R. F. Orchids, they had never reappeared at Krull-Smith. Some people thought that someone had stolen them and that Frank Smith might have bought them without realizing they were stolen. Perhaps the tag Mike Coronado found had nothing to do with any stolen plants at all—it might have been a tag from an old plant that Frank Smith bought legitimately from Bob’s father’s nursery, which is why it was a Fuchs Orchids tag rather than a R. F. Orchids tag. Frank Smith even speculated in his testimony that he might have been “set up” by Fuchs because he wanted to pay him back for blocking Bob’s application to be an orchid judge.

  During the fall and winter after the possible reappearance and disappearance of the stolen plants at Krull-Smith, someone started making threatening phone calls to several south Florida orchid growers. Frank Smith got a few of the calls over the course of several weeks. On the morning of February 20, 1991, he received two of the calls in one hour. The first call was answered by a friend of Frank’s named Jane Daugherty who was at Krull-Smith office that morning feeding pet birds belonging to her and Frank. According to her later testimony, the man on the phone told Jane Daugherty that if she cared about Frank Smith at all, she should stop him from going to the 1991 South Florida Orchid Society show, which was being held in Miami the following week. Then, she testified, the caller identified himself as Bob Fuchs. The next time the phone rang at Krull-Smith, Frank himself answered and later testified that he recognized Bob’s voice and that the caller had said, “Well, it’s like this: if you come to the Miami show you’ll get fucked up.” Smith said the call scared him because he knew that Bob was angry about the critical letter he had written to the judging committee that might have wrecked Bob’s chances of becoming an accredited south Florida judge, and he also knew that Bob was still suspicious about the stolen plants that supposedly spent time in the Krull-Smith greenhouses. Even though the phone calls scared him, Frank was determined to attend the four-day-long orchid show, so he hired two bodyguards to accompany him. Another nursery owner who said she’d also gotten threatening calls came to the show that year with bodyguards, too.

  In Florida the felony of telephone harassment is defined as more than one call placed in one day specifically to “annoy, abuse, threaten or harass any person.” Frank Smith alleged that he had received two calls that day in February, so he was entitled to press charges. Depositions were taken that July. Bob Fuchs was charged with felony harassment by telephone, and on August 27, 199
1, Judge Theotis Bronson and a twelve-member jury heard the matter of State of Florida v. Robert Fuchs. No one likes to talk about the case these days, so to learn more about it I had to listen to a tape of the trial proceedings. It made better listening than most trials because it was only a little bit about phone harassment and business competition and a lot more about passion and memorable flowers and secret love affairs. The trial began with Bob Fuchs’s lawyer questioning Frank Smith’s friend Jane Daugherty about the orchid show that launched Vanda Deva ‘Robert’:

  DEFENSE COUNSEL: Now, Miss Daugherty, you say you first became acquainted with Mr. Fuchs at the World Orchid Conference in Miami in 1984?

  JANE DAUGHERTY: Yes.

  COUNSEL: This is the grand conference of all in the world?

  DAUGHERTY: Yes sir.

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  COUNSEL: In fact, wasn’t Mr. Fuchs’ orchid the … what do you call it … the … the … champion of show? The top orchid of show?

  DAUGHERTY: I don’t remember.

  COUNSEL: You don’t remember that his orchid was the grand champion?

  DAUGHERTY: He had an orchid that won. I thought you meant his exhibit.

  COUNSEL: An orchid, that was biggest, best orchid in the whole show? Right? And boy, that got everybody’s nose out of joint, now, didn’t it? Wasn’t there jealousy?

  PROSECUTOR: Objection!

  JUDGE: Sustained.

  COUNSEL: Miss Daugherty, was Frank Smith jealous because Bob Fuchs—who in 1984 was not even a judge yet—that Bob Fuchs’ orchid was the best orchid in the world?

  DAUGHERTY: His orchid was the best one in that particular show.

  COUNSEL: Which was the worldwide show. And it kind of catapulted Bob Fuchs to everybody’s attention, didn’t it?

  DAUGHERTY: He was already in everybody’s attention at that point.

  Jane Daugherty had been feeding pet birds at Krull-Smith the morning of the phone calls. Some of the birds belonged to Frank, and the rest were hers. The defense counsel tried to suggest that Daugherty was an unreliable witness who was biased in favor of Frank Smith, since they were so intimate that they even commingled their birds:

  COUNSEL: How long have you been a friend of Frank Smith?

  DAUGHERTY: Nine years.

  COUNSEL: Would it be fair to say you love Frank Smith?

  DAUGHERTY: NO sir, I’m a friend.

  COUNSEL: NO, you do not?

  DAUGHERTY: I’m a good friend.

  COUNSEL: A good friend. And you have no romantic connection to him whatsoever?

  DAUGHERTY: NO, sir.

  COUNSEL: You don’t travel with him?

  DAUGHERTY: I help him put in orchid exhibits but I do not travel with him.

  COUNSEL: Uh-huh. Well, how long has this … this mutual bird … hobby been going on?

  DAUGHERTY: About six years.

  COUNSEL: And you keep your birds at his place?

  DAUGHERTY: I keep some of my birds at his place.

  COUNSEL: Well, how many birds do you keep at his place?

  DAUGHERTY: Approximately twenty-five of the English budgies are mine.

  COUNSEL: You keep twenty-five of your personal birds at his place! Is this a business that you and he are in together?

  DAUGHERTY: No, sir. This is a hobby.

  COUNSEL: So you have a hobby, a mutual hobby with him that you devote … twenty-five of these birds that you keep with him, and you’re just friends?

  From there, the trial became a speculative romance free-for-all. The prosecutor tried to show that Mike Coronado was in love with Bob Fuchs, his partner, and therefore could not be trusted as a witness; Coronado dismissed the suggestion. Then Fuchs’s attorney tried to show that not only was Jane Daugherty too enamored of Frank Smith to be a fair witness, another one of the state’s witnesses was also in love with Frank and therefore also unreliable. The prosecutor countered by saying that a witness who claimed he had been at R. F. Orchids the day of the phone calls and was Bob’s alibi was “very close” with Bob and therefore should be disregarded, and also that the college administrator who testified that Frank confessed to her that he didn’t think Bob was making the calls was also partial to Bob and thus one more biased witness. No one ever explained why Robert Perry, the man who’d seen the silvery flower at Krull-Smith, had gotten himself involved—whether he was motivated by being in love with anything other than the silvery flower or anyone other than his wife. Bob Fuchs didn’t testify. In closing arguments, both his attorney and the prosecutor admitted wearily that the history of suspicion between the two men was so enmeshed in enmity that it was hard to draw out any individual thread. Did Bob threaten Frank Smith because he was convinced Smith had robbed his nursery? Did Frank Smith interfere with Bob’s application to be an orchid judge out of jealousy or because he really knew Bob to be dishonest? Did Bob actually try to frame Smith for the robbery as revenge for his rejection by the judging committee?

  The jury found Bob Fuchs not guilty on all counts of felony harassment. The verdict meant that Bob Fuchs would not spend the growing season in jail. Besides that, the verdict made nothing else clear. It is impossible to know whether the jurors voted for acquittal because they didn’t believe Bob Fuchs had made threatening phone calls or because they believed he did make the calls but that the calls simply didn’t fit Florida’s narrow definition of harassment. And certainly nothing in the verdict helped solve the mystery of the stolen orchids. That night when I first met Bob Fuchs, I also met Frank Smith. He seemed pleasant and polite, but when I asked him to talk about the trial he looked at me as if my hair were on fire. He said he didn’t want to talk to me and he didn’t want to discuss the case at all, ever. He said the whole thing had come about because he’d been “talked into something” and that he had been “misled,” and anyhow, it was way in the past and everything was now all patched up. He agreed to talk to me about orchids sometime if I promised I wouldn’t ask him about the case.

  The war between Fuchs and Smith lasted more than a decade. Probably no one except Frank and Bob will ever know what really happened, and it’s possible that even they don’t know exactly what had gone on. Bob is now an accredited judge in a different region of the country, and both he and Frank are continuing to do well in orchid shows. All of the R.F. orchids that disappeared, including the unforgettable silvery one, have still never been found.

  Barbecued Doves

  Things disappear all the time in Florida, but they show up all the time, too. Florida is powerfully attractive. It is less like a state than a sponge. People are drawn to it. When white settlers arrived, they filled up the hospitable corners of the state and then they even filled up what was thought to be uninhabitable, including the “terrible strip of grass” of the Everglades, and they have never stopped coming. These days, in Collier County, where the Fakahatchee lies, a hundred newcomers set up households every single day, and urban planners say that there will be no more room in Naples—no room at all—in only eight more years. Exotic plants and animals are drawn to Florida, too. Many come in naturally—they swim ashore or are blown in on the wind—or are carried inadvertently on cargo boats or brought in legally for commerce, but a great number of the animals and plants that are brought to Florida are illegal to collect, transport, and trade. The Port of Miami is one of the biggest points of entry for smuggled plants and animals in the country. The chief of environmental enforcement in Miami told me that it was especially popular with the sort of guys who might wake up one morning and say to themselves, “Boy, wouldn’t it be nice to have a pair of reticulated boa constrietors?” In 1996, for instance, a total of seven hundred thousand iguanas were smuggled into the United States through Miami. The devices smugglers use are manifold. In recent years, customs inspectors in Miami arrested a woman trying to smuggle in a rare woolly monkey by hiding it in her blouse, and a man wearing a vest with special pockets to carry his Australian palm cockatoo eggs, and a man carrying a toy teddy bear stuffed with live tortoises, and a man with a live boa constrict
or under his shirt, and a man with pygmy marmosets in his fanny pack. They arrested a man who was trying to sneak a gibbon in by having the animal hug him around the middle and then hiding the bulge by wearing a very loose shirt. Inspectors have found falcons hidden in milk cartons, parakeets tucked in hair curlers, monkeys under people’s hats. They arrested a man named Lenin Oviedo, of Caracus, Venezuela, whose suitcase was packed with forty-seven rainbow boas, eleven redtail boas, forty-four red-footed tortoises, twenty-seven Amazon turtles, twenty-seven river turtles, and twelve pit vipers. Recently, they arrested another Venezuelan smuggler. This man had a bird-eating tarantula spider, two hundred baby tarantulas, and three hundred thumb-sized poison-arrow frogs in his carry-on bag. He also had fourteen juvenile boa constrictors in his pants.

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  Plant smuggling in general and orchid smuggling in particular are dynamic worldwide enterprises. They have gotten even more so since the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora—now known as CITES—by which more than one hundred nations have agreed to ban or restrict international trade in all wild things. The degree of restriction varies depending on the species. Orchids fall into two categories. Species that are considered rare and endangered fall under the stricter Appendix I of CITES, which forbids all collecting and trade of those plants. Every other orchid species on earth falls under Appendix II, which allows limited commercial and personal trade if the country of export issues a permit to the collector.