The Orchid Thief (15 page)

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:

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 investment. 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.

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.”

—

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.

—

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.