Sunshine State

by Sarah Gerard

  “Did the teller just not want to be involved?” I asked.

  “I’d say he was in on it,” Greg said. “Because we never did find out nothing about it.”

  “We were never able to verify another account,”141 Ralph told me. We were sitting opposite each other at a Greek restaurant across the street from a demolished shopping mall in Seminole. Three months had passed since our first conversation, and, after a stint back in Brooklyn, I’d returned to Florida looking for answers to the many questions that remained. Greg and Kellie had quit the sanctuary a month after I’d left—supposedly for health reasons,142 though Greg had told me in the garage that day that they were prepared to quit if Ralph didn’t leave.143 They’d moved back to the midwest, where they still owned a house.

  I’d discovered this after emailing Kellie at the sanctuary to request corroborating evidence for their claims of embezzlement—I was still missing important details, such as the name under which the account had been registered. Instead I received a response from Adrianne.144 She’d taken over as office manager, she said, and would not comment on Micki—who, I should note, was no longer associated with the sanctuary. Nor would she tell me whether Ralph was still director. After repeated attempts to get Greg and Kellie to corroborate their accusation of embezzlement, and Greg’s repeated promises that Kellie would respond to my email tonight, tonight, tonight, he had stopped responding, and I’d boarded an airplane south.

  “But the money went somewhere?” I asked Ralph at the Greek restaurant.

  “We never had any proof that it was in a particular account,”145 Ralph said. “We could never find any accounts where it was.”

  “So, this person arrived at the bank,” I said, “after this other person quit, and saw something unusual . . .” I waited for him to finish my thought, but his eyes had glazed over. “What exactly did they see?”

  “We were never able to find that supposed account,” he said.

  “So what was unusual?”

  “We were never able to find an account with money in it, is what I’m trying to tell you.”

  “I know, but . . .” I was annoyed. He was sidestepping the question or he didn’t understand it, and I couldn’t tell which.

  I tried again: “On the first day when this person went to the bank,” I said, “the first day after Micki quit, they go to the bank and something is unusual. What is unusual?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t handling the banking or the business there,” Ralph concluded.

  I took a deep breath and forked my spinach pie. I couldn’t fathom the director of any business having no idea what was going on with the business. Aside from his ignorance concerning the goings-on in the office, it wasn’t as if he was working every day on the sanctuary’s birds, either. In a month and a half of working there, I’d seen him maybe a handful of times. Especially in the face of alleged embezzlement, what was Ralph doing to solve the mystery?

  “We were never able to verify that account,” he said to himself.

  “Because the teller quit over the weekend?”

  “Something like that. We were never able to verify or get any proof that anything was missing like that.”

  “I see,” I said, though I didn’t, exactly.

  An old woman watched us from a table in the corner. Ralph had stopped to talk to her on the way in, leaving me waiting at the booth. He later explained she had donated many movable cages to the sanctuary over the years, by which I assumed he meant his warehouse. There were no movable cages at the sanctuary that I had ever seen.

  “Ralph, when I was here a few months ago, your sons were in town, and they were asking you to sign something that would basically nullify your association with the sanctuary.”

  “Oh, no, that was . . .” He paused. “They bought the mortgage and took it over.”146

  Four years ago, I thought.

  “But I also know that what’s been said about you in the media has impacted donations,” I said, “and more recently, your sons and others at the sanctuary decided that your further association with the sanctuary would be harmful.”

  “Well, see, that’s because people were believing the lies and not the truth.”

  I recalled what Greg and Kellie had said: that Ralph refuses to believe what people say about him is true. In the garage, I had asked them whether they truly believed he’d sign the paperwork when the time came. They told me that Beatrice and Ralph’s sons had given him two weeks to move147 out of his house and into the warehouse. But as I sat across from him in this Greek restaurant, with its tinny ethnic music and its overhead lights bright as the sun, and my spinach pie growing cold upon its plate, I listened to him say that he was not yet ready to move, now two months later; that he had to make sure his birds had everything they needed, be it food or medication. He had to make sure the warehouse was ready for them.

  “And you’re continuing to work with the sanctuary?” I asked Ralph.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, coughing. “I’m not giving up on working with the birds.”

  “But is there any way to change the minds of the public when they’ve read so much about you?” I asked. “There’s no way for you to say, ‘Hey, that won’t happen again. We’re doing things honestly now’?”

  “Well, see, that’s the problem when people either do the wrong thing or lie about you. The media, as you well know, likes sensationalism.”

  At this point, Ralph excused himself and ran out to his truck. He returned with a folded-up letter, which he handed to me. It was written by Kevin S. Doty, PA, whom Ralph explained is a friend of his, in addition to being a highly respected lawyer, who has argued cases in front of the Florida Supreme Court. The letter was dated a week prior and addressed to no one in particular, and vouched for Ralph’s character, condemning “some people” who, “for whatever reason,” have sought to trash the sanctuary’s and Ralph’s reputations.

  Doty writes, “I know that because of my inside knowledge, that people have given the media false information and the media has printed or aired it even when Ralph tried to explain the truth.” The letter doesn’t specify what the false information is, nor who printed it. “It is very hard to defend oneself after something has already been printed,” it continues. “I firmly believe that someone wants to get rid of Ralph and the birds for reasons that are not clear but appear to be nefarious.”148

  Ralph offered to let me keep the letter.

  “A major, major attorney for a newspaper years ago said, ‘You can’t fight people with either the microphone or the ink,’” Ralph said. “In other words, you can’t fight people who have either the microphone or the ink.” He coughed into his hand.

  I arrived at Micki Eslick’s South Tampa home that same sweltering day, long after sunset. We drank sweet tea out of plastic cups and chain-smoked cigarettes on beach chairs under a string of Christmas lights in her open garage. On a shelf behind me sat an urn containing Micki’s mother’s cremains. She died in January 2013, four months before Micki left the sanctuary. Micki’s friend paid $3,000 for the cremation,149 as Micki and Slick couldn’t afford a burial. Later that year, they filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy.150

  “I didn’t do any embezzling.”151 Micki laughed. “I’ve heard everything that I’ve done—supposedly done. Micki never embezzled any money. Greg was always in there when I counted it.” She sipped her sweet tea and set it on the patio table between us. “The only money I ever took out of there was forty dollars to buy postage stamps. What am I going to embezzle? Do I look like I embezzled money?”

  I’d come prepared to distrust Micki. In the car beforehand, I’d made a list of every question I needed her to answer. Why was she paid when no one else was? What about the receipts for gas and cigarettes? What about the bank account, the one that had disappeared?

  She answered the door warmly and apologized for the state of her home as I entered. They’d been flooded a few weeks back during a big storm and were still in the process of repairing the damage. Their single-story
, split-level house is carpeted in white and darkly furnished. A TV was turned down low in the den. Slick was out of town on business, Micki said, and she had just come home from her new job. I followed her through the half-lit kitchen back out to the garage.

  Ralph and Micki grew up together; they were much like siblings, always very close.152 Before Ralph was born, his father had bought a Spanish-style mansion in Tampa, a sprawling estate, and housed his practice in the front, Micki’s family in the back. All across the grounds, there were wild animals—turtles and snakes, birds and opossums—that Ralph Senior had healed and kept for his son. He built enclosures to protect the animals at night and heated pools for the turtles so they wouldn’t be cold in the winter.153 Micki loved the animals and loved where she lived. Even so, she and Ralph had very different childhoods in terms of their privilege. She wasn’t raised like Ralph. Her parents didn’t have the kind of money his parents had.

  “Why don’t you go ask Ralph how much money he’s embezzled from the sanctuary?”154 she said. In two and a half years, no one had asked for her side of the story. She kept a manila folder full of documents, which she agreed to show me before I left, including lists of sanctuary expenses she had charged to her personal credit card, totaling $6,000 for which she has never been repaid—the reason for the bankruptcy. Just after quitting, she gave copies of the papers to Kellie to fax to Ralph’s sons. She doesn’t know if Kellie sent the papers. She has never heard anything about them.

  “How much money he’s got sitting in the warehouse from all these donation boxes he’s collected and not given the sanctuary one red dime,” she continued. “You want me to get pissed? I’ll get pissed.”

  I said that I was fine with her being pissed.

  “Bullshit. Let me keep on going, what he’s done. He couldn’t sell the fucking boat that’s sitting over there. Ralph thinks that Egypt or whatever country is going to give him a bazillion dollars—”

  “The United Arab Emirates?”

  “Whatever the hell it is anymore, and Omar’s going to get it, and they’re going to ship it off to Switzerland. They’re going to put a heliport on it and redo it. And it’s sitting over there rotten, covered in bird shit, and bees, and mildew, and everything else.”

  Things were coming full circle.

  “He’s been waiting to get that money now for thirty years, from Omar,” she said, referring to Omar Bsaies, a sanctuary board member155 and former US diplomat now living in the Philippines.156

  According to Micki, not only had Ralph’s relationship with Omar never come to fruition financially, it had also soured other sources of income, including an impending contribution from the “Pog guy.” The Pog guy was the son of the maker of Pogs, those cardboard collectible toys of the ’90s. He’d arranged with his father to make a large donation to the sanctuary at a time when the sanctuary needed serious help.157 Ralph attended the meeting with Micki, Donnie, and Lisa, Ralph’s drug-addicted, on-again, off-again girlfriend.

  “We were just keeping our mouth shut, hoping Ralph wouldn’t start on this overseas bullshit,” Micki told me. But of course, he started talking. He told the Pog guy about the millions of dollars he was going to get from overseas, and his big plans for it. He was going to build a zoological park, he said. It was going to be incredible.

  “The Pog guy says, ‘Looks like you don’t need my help.’” Micki scoffed. She’d witnessed this over and over. “That’s what Ralph does with everybody,” she said. “That’s why the donations dropped off. Because everybody thought, ‘Well, if he’s going to get all this money for the park, why do I need to donate?’ We didn’t have any money.”

  Jimbo told me something similar later on. I had called him to check in. “Every time Eddie gets an opportunity to talk to a donor on his own,” Jimbo said, referring to Eddie, sanctuary’s new general manager, “somehow Ralph’s psyche wakes up and he runs over and kind of ruins it.”158

  I asked what kind of things Ralph would say.

  “‘We’ve got this under control!’” Jimbo said. “‘A couple hundred thousand more dollars and we’ll be back in business!’ That’s the best I can lie for him.”

  This wasn’t a new problem. In 1986, a woman named Anne Bywater had inherited four hundred acres of land159 in the Hudson area from her recently deceased mother. The land was mostly underwater and was environmentally protected160—there was a pair of bald eagles nesting in one of its trees—so Anne and her accountant had decided that, rather than sell the land, it would be beneficial to make a charitable donation of it. She chose to donate it to the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary.

  I had read that Ralph planned to turn the land into a zoological park like the one he’d wanted to build in the Gateway area back in the ’70s. But in 2002, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported he was selling the property and that his plans for the zoological park had been annihilated by the no-name storm of 1993.161 This seemed strange to me—the no-name storm was bad, but it wasn’t as if the park had been already under construction.

  Anne had placed the land in a trust that was handled by Sun Bank of St. Petersburg. Carolyn Wiggins was the trust administrator. I asked Carolyn what she remembered of the deal. She answered glibly, “I honestly feel that Ralph Heath always had grand ideas that he never carried through.”162

  I asked Micki if she remembered the plans for the park. “My husband was working there then,” Micki said. “Ralph wanted to make another sanctuary, for an awful lot of money. Ralph would start, ‘What I’m gonna do. I can do anything I want to. I’m Ralph Heath.’ It just went away. You don’t do business like that.”163

  Around the same time, the board decided that selling Ralph’s house would be in the sanctuary’s best interest.164 They needed money, and after all, his house was sanctuary property. At first, Ralph agreed to sell it, just as he had the Stingray. But when the man showed up to install the “For Sale” sign, Ralph stopped him, again, just as he had with the car. And he could do that, because he was on the sanctuary’s board and he had 51 percent of the vote.

  His mother also sat on the board until she died. And Omar Bsaies. And Jerry Allen, Ralph’s close friend who died in 2013. And George Marler, a wildlife photographer who lives in Texas. I emailed George to see what he thought of the current situation. “If you know the history of the sanctuary then you should understand why Ralph will never leave,” he responded. “I have never met anyone more passionate about wildlife, particularly birds, than Ralph . . . I have been with Ralph on many occasions over the past thirty-five years and he has always held the value of wildlife above that of money. Money to him, in my opinion, relates to what it takes to keep the sanctuary alive and well.”165

  “They were yes-men for Ralph to do whatever he wanted to do,” Micki said. “He’s not going to sell anything. It’s his. He thinks—maybe not so much now, but at that time, he thought the sanctuary and everything was his. Not that it was a nonprofit, not that ‘it would go to the sanctuary.’ His personally. He’s always thought that. Always.”

  I asked if she remembered when Ralph began hoarding. The question confused her. “His whole life,” she replied.

  Ralph’s father was one of the wealthiest doctors Tampa has ever seen. As Ralph put it, “money was literally no object.” Growing up, Ralph didn’t play with plastic toys, he said; he had the “real things.” When he was ten, he got his captain’s license—so his father bought him a boat. When he was fourteen, he owned eighteen cars. When Ralph entered high school, his father bought him a ’61 Corvette. When he graduated, his father offered to buy him a new one. The ’63 Stingray had just entered Florida; it was the first fuel-injected Corvette to enter the state of Florida.166 When Ralph told his father to trade the ’61 for the ’63, his father suggested he keep both.

  “Then you have the ’61 and the ’63 to go along with your other eighteen or twenty cars,”167 Ralph explained at the Greek restaurant. But he didn’t keep both cars. He insisted his father trade one for the other.

  “I was try
ing to be nice on his finances,” he said. “I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life.”

  The Stingray is today the “only triple red un-restored and all original 1963 Corvette of its kind”168 and is “irreplaceable”—it’s the same car that, in 2014, the Tampa Bay Times reported Ralph sold to two different buyers, both of whom were now suing him.

  “One of the worst mistakes, really?” I asked.

  “That pair would have probably been worth a million dollars.” Ralph laughed. “I mean any collector would have given me a million dollars for that pair of cars, instantly.”

  He continued: Because he was carrying so many classes toward his premed zoology degree, he’d spent seven years finishing his undergraduate studies. When he graduated, he still didn’t know what he wanted to do. With his degree he could have gone on to become a veterinarian, or an animal researcher, or a dentist, or a medical doctor like his father. There was no rush to make a decision, though; Ralph Sr. had always told Ralph to get his education out of the way first, because once he had it nobody could take it away from him. Application of the degree could come later.

  When Ralph graduated, his father said he should do whatever he wanted to do so long as he did it well. So, Ralph spent some time living at home with his parents to discover his calling. He enjoyed the beach-bum lifestyle and picked up a hobby making lamps out of driftwood to sell to tourists. But to a man like Ralph, the unglamorous life of an artisan wasn’t enough to keep him motivated. He needed a profession better suited to his skills, something that demanded a rigorous capacity for reason, and had the potential for fame—and supporting his upper-class lifestyle.

  One day, during this period of drift, he left the house to do some shopping. It was just before Christmas 1970. He was in the car with Linda, whom he’d married just out of high school, and would divorce three years after founding the sanctuary. On their way home, they saw the cormorant dragging a wing that would cause Ralph to abandon the lamp business for that of bird rescuing. Though, like the Stingray, he still keeps the driftwood lamps in his warehouse. He keeps everything in his warehouse.