The Orchid Thief

by Susan Orlean

  CITES is not universally admired. Many orchid people told me they think CITES is too broad because the real threat to endangered plants is not collectors but rather the loss of wild habitat. Collectors complain that developing countries are plowing down forests as fast as they can, destroying rare plants in the process, and collectors who will retrieve plants out of these areas are the only chance to preserve species that otherwise might vanish forever—the plants could then be cultivated and multiplied, the way endangered animals are put in breeding programs in zoos. In 1992 the International Orchid Seed Bank was established to preserve rare seeds. Orchid seeds can live for thirty-five years, so they can be preserved in the Seed Bank and someday be germinated and perhaps reestablished in the wild. The Seed Bank has storage facilities in Texas and California—according to the director, they need to spread the seeds among several locations in case one is sabotaged by, I guess, anyone on a mission to destroy orchid seeds. CITES has many supporters among orchid people, too, who argue that throughout history collectors have stripped the woods bare whenever they’ve had the chance, and orchids are so valuable that they have to be guarded against people motivated by profit rather than conservation. When I first heard impassioned speeches deriding CITES in my journeys in the orchid world, I was shocked that any orchid lovers would oppose an environmentally protective treaty. Then I heard story after story of collectors who said they watched forests in places like Java and Belize burned down to make way for farmland, and rather than let the collectors go in and retrieve the orchids first, the CITES enforcers ordered that they stand back and watch the plants go up in smoke.

  Hot orchids have gotten higher-priced and harder to find all over the world since CITES was established. Henry Azadehdel, an Armenian plant fanatic and UFO scholar who moved to England in 1979, claimed recently that in one year he made more than four hundred thousand dollars dealing in black-market orchids. He sold one Rothschild’s lady’s slipper, poached in Borneo, for nineteen thousand dollars. He sold several specimens of another lady’s slipper species for six thousand dollars per plant and boasted that he’d bought them from locals for just two dollars a piece. These facts and figures emerged when Azadehdel pleaded guilty in 1989 to four counts of “smuggling, harboring, and selling endangered orchids.” Before his sentencing, Azadehdel declared, “I have been shipwrecked, chased by drug traffickers, and fed by the chief of a clan of head hunters. I’ve been to places where no white man has ever been. I’m proud to have extended the boundaries of science.” His defense lawyer argued that Azadehdel’s “life-long hobby of orchids has ceased.… He no longer has a collection and has no desire to collect,” but Azadehdel was nevertheless fined thirty thousand dollars and sent to jail for a year. After his release he disappeared. His lawyer insisted that he had professed that he never wanted to see another orchid as long as he lived. Since then Azadehdel has adopted several pseudonyms, including Dr. Armen Victorian, Dr. Alan Jones, and Kasaba Ntumba, is promoting a UFO conspiracy theory involving an alien spacecraft landing in South Africa, and is said to be continuing his quest for new species.

  An especially spectacular bust took place a few years ago at the Japan Grand Prix in Tokyo, an orchid show that attracts more than a half-million visitors. The flower in question was one of the lost orchids, a North Vietnamese species that had been discovered in the early 1900s and had then become extinct in the wild. Just a few years ago, orchid hunters rediscovered the plant and smuggled thousands of them to Hong Kong and Taiwan and Japan—more particularly, to several high-ranking judges at the Tokyo Grand Prix. It was a worldwide orchid scandal. The smugglers were caught; the plants were confiscated, the judges resigned in disgrace. In 1990 Belgian authorities launched Operation Nero Wolfe, in which they seized thousands of smuggled orchids from Thailand. Recently, the forestry department in Thailand estimated that nearly six hundred thousand wild orchids are illegally exported each year, mainly to Japan and Europe. Soon after, Suman Sahai, an Indian environmentalist, called for India to patent its native flora and fauna because “India’s biological wealth is being plundered … whether it is seeds of special varieties of rice going to American seed companies or orchids from which European firms are earning millions.” Internationally plundered orchids often make their way to the United States. Houston customs agents recently apprehended two men who each had sixteen orchids, worth ten thousand dollars apiece, wired onto various parts of their bodies. One of the most famous American orchid-smuggling arrests took place in 1994, when a twenty-eight-year-old man named Harto Kolopaking sold 216 rare lady’s slipper orchids to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife undercover agent for nearly thirteen thousand dollars. Kolopaking had been shipping the orchids to California since 1993 in packages that he marked “Sample Material.” In court, he admitted that in 1992 he had smuggled in another thousand orchids to a wholesaler in Malibu. Kolopaking was well known in the orchid world. His family owns a distinguished nursery in East Java, and Paphiopedilum kolopakingii is named for his father. Kolopaking was the first person in the United States to face a jail term for smuggling orchids. In a San Francisco courtroom, he pleaded guilty to all charges and was sentenced to five months in federal prison.

  Just before I first met Laroche, federal agents had landed a catch of two thousand rare lady’s slipper orchids being smuggled into Miami from China. The orchids were exceptionally desirable. The federal government donated the seized orchids to Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota, and after the plants arrived, the director of Selby installed new locks and a security system in the orchid compound. A few weeks later I went to a hearing at the federal courthouse in West Palm Beach in United States v. Michael Cohen, a case against an exotic plant dealer in Lake Worth accused of smuggling in carnivorous pitcher plants from Malaysia. Cohen had labeled the plants as something common and unprotected, but a government plant inspector identified them as rare pitcher plants and intercepted a fax Cohen had sent to his Malaysian supplier saying: “Remember, we are not going to identify them correctly.” Mr. Cohen looked a little depressed at the hearing, which began with the judge saying, “Mr. Cohen, are you under the influence of any drugs?” I assume it is a standard question a judge asks before accepting a defendant’s plea, but I found myself thinking that the passion for plants was, for many of the people I was getting to know, more potent than any drug at all.

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  Laroche’s ghost-orchid scheme made more sense to me once I understood the nature of international smuggling. CITES has made it illegal to export or sell wild orchids—which obviously includes all native Florida species, including ghost orchids. Most wild species are not being commercially raised. Since CITES, anyone who wanted a wild orchid would have to poach it out of the swamp or buy it from someone who had. Laroche was convinced that there was a big market for Fakahatchee orchids. He told me that he knew lots of people in Australia who were dying for any native American orchids, and that the English were crazy for them, too. To support his theory he sent me a newspaper article about an English nurseryman who was arrested at Heathrow airport with almost nine hundred wild American lady’s slipper orchids in his hand luggage. Laroche believed that if he could poach a few plants from the swamp—protected from federal endangered-species law by the Seminoles’ immunity—he could clone them using his secret cloning technique and end up with millions of ghost orchids and clamshell orchids and crooked spur orchids that would be legal for him to market anywhere in the world because they would have been produced in a lab and not taken from the wild. Collectors would then have no reason to buy from poachers because they could get a ghost orchid from Laroche, and thus he would scuttle the black-market trade in the species. He seemed so fluent in the laws and prohibitions regarding international plant trade that I had to ask him if he’d ever done any outlaw collecting outside Florida—in other words, if he’d ever smuggled things in to Florida rather than smuggling them out. I believe we were driving to the swamp at the time, and he stared at the road for a mile or so before answering. At last he said
he had been “involved in some activity in South America,” but he refused to say anything more about it. He said that his father didn’t know anything about this “activity in South America” and he didn’t want him to. He said that someday he might tell me about his activities, but he wouldn’t say anything more while his father was still alive.

  Since Laroche wouldn’t talk to me, I asked other orchid people in Florida if they could introduce me to an international smuggler. All of them suggested I call a man named Lee Moore the Adventurer, an orchid collector and smuggler, a former pre-Columbian-art collector and smuggler, an anarchist, and onetime pot smoker, who was on the brink of leaving south Florida forever and moving to Peru. Someone showed me a photograph of Lee Moore before I met him. The picture had been taken in Iquitos, Peru, and in it he was standing with two Peruvian kids, and the three of them were holding up a staghorn fern that is as big as a Volkswagen Beetle. Lee was twenty-two when the picture was taken, and he looked like a jubilant and beautiful boy, long-stemmed, lean, sandy-haired, tanned. He was from a family of Washington blue bloods. His father, Phillips Moore, had been Truman’s assistant secretary of commerce, the director of the Federal Aviation Administration, and at one time a congressman. The Moores moved to Florida when Lee was still a kid. Lee took right to it; while his high school classmates were riding around in their hot rods, he was running around in the Everglades. For spending money, he collected water moccasins to sell to the Miami Serpentarium and rattlesnakes to sell to a venom-extraction company. After high school he got in his car and drove to Central America. A friend of his was already there, setting up a tropical-fish importing business, so Lee began flying back and forth from Central America to Miami with him, and later he went to Peru with another friend, Ronald Wagner, who planned to start a snake-venom business, collecting poison from snakes that could then be processed into snakebite antidote. Lee’s own dream was to discover new plants. He used to tell the old south Florida orchid growers like Fred Fuchs and Tom Fennell that he was going to venture into the jungles and find new species. “They would mock my folly,” he likes to say. “They would say, ‘Oh, here’s Lee, the adventurer.’ That’s how I got my name.”

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  I called Lee one humid afternoon when Laroche and his Seminole crew were out collecting waterweeds. Lee sounded careworn on the phone and gave me painstaking directions to his apartment. When he was done he said, “By the way, you better come right away. I’m moving to Peru soon. I hate living here.”

  At the time of my visit, Lee and his wife, Chady, were living in Miami’s Kendall neighborhood, in a small apartment in a shadeless clump of townhouses that had the pebbly walls and hollow doors of places that are built on the fly. The apartment’s front yard was a non-yard, just a concrete landing behind an iron gate. The landing was smaller than a picnic table. There was no garden at all, but the day I went to visit there were a dozen potted bromeliad plants near the front door. According to the United States government and CITES, Lee’s chief line of work was plant smuggling. When I met him, he was awaiting trial in a case titled United States of America v. 493 Orchids, more or less (Orchidaceae) from Virero “Agro-Oriente” Moyobamba, Peru; 680 Orchids, more or less (Orchidaceae) from Vivero “Agro-Oriente” Moyobamba, Peru, which involved some cattleyas he brought from Peru. The government claimed he had collected them illegally in the wild and purposely mislabeled them as nursery plants. Lee, in turn, was suing the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Miami’s Plant Protection and Quarantine Facility for a million dollars. According to his complaint, USDA inspectors had wrongly seized and then neglected another shipment of his Peruvian plants and while the disputed plants were in detention they died. He’d tried to get a law firm to take the case pro bono but had no luck, so he was going to represent himself.

  —

  Lee was now close to sixty and his sandy hair had turned silver, but otherwise he still looked like the boy with the staghorn fern I’d seen in the photograph—long-stemmed, lean, tanned. The day I came by he was wearing some sort of loose trousers and the type of light-colored short-sleeved shirt that Cuban men favor. His wife was at home when I arrived. She was about half Lee’s height, dark-haired, action-packed, and dressed in a hot-pink button-front blouse, achingly tight white Capri pants, and white high-heeled pumps. As soon I stepped into the apartment, she positioned herself in the middle of the living room and started talking a mile a minute. She had an excess of verbal energy. Even unexciting things she was saying sounded very exciting. “Lee, you should tell her about the art! About our pre-Columbian!” she declared, pointing at me. “Tell her about all the back and forth and, oh my God, the situations we were in!”

  “I’m telling her now, Mama,” Lee said.

  “We were very big, very big, very very big into art,” she said to me. “We were always smuggling something! Or paying someone to smuggle for us!”

  Lee turned to me and said, “Would you like to sit down?” I nodded and sat down.

  “We were on the Ten Most Wanted list in Mexico!” Chady said. “We had more adventures, more situations, oh my God!”

  “We were making a fortune with the pre-Columbian art,” Lee said. “It was just getting harder and harder with plants. It used to be that you would pick an orchid in the jungle, pack it, fly it, and have it inspected once you got to Miami. Then they got in these goddamn yuppie types as administrators, and now they make you wash the plants and fumigate them and have them inspected while you’re still in the jungle, and then I had to transport them by truck to Lima, and because it’s in a drug area they’d inspect you for drugs, then you’d get inspected again by a botanist, and then you have to get your CITES permit and your phytosanitary certificate. By then about a third of your plants would be dead. These customs guys were always giving me a hard time because my plants are real rough-looking. They’re jungle plants. They look wild but they’re not. I work with a nursery in Moyobamba that has the plants growing in rough conditions, almost like naturalized conditions. Collecting the pre-Columbian art was so much easier. We started in about 1966 and it just … took off. We got started and then in a minute we were selling in Europe and Australia to all the top collectors.”

  Chady stamped one of her high-heeled feet. “We had so many adventures, you wouldn’t believe. Lee, you should tell her about being fugitives in Mexico!”

  “I am telling her, Mama,” Lee said.

  “Policemen, agents, smuggling, everyone coming after us, it was unbelievable!” Chady said. “You know what? Indiana—what’s his name?—Indiana Jones, you know him? Well, Indiana Jones is, is bullshit! Butch Cassidy is bullshit compared to the adventures we had. Isn’t that true, Lee? We had more going on, more situations than Indiana Jones! Oh my God!”

  Lee got up and said he was going to find some newspaper clippings about his current legal battles. He said the reason he’d been so determined to sue the government for killing his plants was that one of the Cattleya mooreana had formed a seedpod and could have produced millions of seedlings for him. “It took me more than thirty years to find one with a seedpod,” he said. “I was the only person in the world with a mature seedpod from the mooreana. I would have had fifty thousand plants that would have sold for a hundred or a hundred and fifty dollars a piece. I would be making a fortune now, if it weren’t for those goddamn yuppies.”

  “Well, we were making a fortune on the art,” Chady said. “Millions! Lee had a Lincoln, no, two Lincoln Continental cars! But you know, it was patrimony we were taking. It was illegal to take it out of the country of origin!” Outside the apartment, a truck squealed by and blasted its air horn. A screen door slammed, making a shimmery clatter. A bored-sounding dog barked once and then quit. Inside the Moores’ apartment it felt flat and plain and hemmed in. “We were outlaws!” Chady said, tapping her foot. “Oh my God, you wouldn’t believe.”

  —

  In fact, Lee Moore the Adventurer did have adventures and he did discover new plants. He found the last species of Cattley
a to be discovered—a fantastic chartreuse orchid with red splashes and wavy edges that he named Cattleya mooreana. He discovered Catasetum moorei and Encyclia lemorea, two orchid species that are now used regularly in commercial hybridizing. He found an almost black bromeliad, Aechmea chantinii, and a striking crimson one he named Neoregelia moorei and one shaped like a firecracker explosion that he named Guzmania bismarkii. While on a collecting trip in Peru with a Baptist minister from Japan, he rediscovered a species of giant-sized staghorn fern, Platycerium andinum, that hadn’t been seen in a hundred years. In 1962 he was the Bromeliad Society’s Man of the Year. In 1965 he discovered a tall, branching bromeliad with powder-pink and light blue flowers. He named it Tillandsia wagneriana in memory of his friend Ronald Wagner, the snake-venom entrepreneur, who died in a plane crash on one of their collecting trips in Colombia. According to Lee, the doomed plane had had only one empty seat, so he and Ronald had flipped a coin for it and Ronald won. All that survived the trip was Lee’s dog, Buck, and a metal box containing Lee’s customer list. The accident inspired Lee to start a newsletter. He called it Lee Moore’s Armchair Adventurer, and it included chronicles of his collecting trips, his life in the jungle, and photographs of unusual plants, indigenous jungle people, spiders, tapirs, and Amazon scenes. The first issue contained a photograph of his then wife, Helen, wearing a luncheon dress and playing with a parrot, and a photo of Lee’s baby daughter stroking her pet capybara, the largest species of rodent in the world. He devoted the entire first issue of the newsletter to the story of the plane crash that killed Ronald Wagner. Sometimes in the newsletter he included travel suggestions. In his second issue he explained how blowguns work and that the only antidote to their deadly poison was a sugar solution: “So if you are ever hit by a poison dart … remember, drink sugar water … if you have time.” Lee Moore’s Armchair Adventurer had a limited life span. By the third issue Lee wrote that he was suspending publication because “I find I am so far behind in my work due to disasters.” One of those disasters happened to be another plane crash in Peru in which seven friends of his died. Once again he had intended to be on the flight, and this time he missed it because he got delayed en route. Because his name was on the airplane’s manifest he was listed as one of the casualties. His friends and family were surprised when he showed up alive. He devoted his final issue to telling the story of the crash. In the editor’s note he wrote: