The Orchid Thief (4 page)

Near the entrance to the Seminole reservation in Hollywood, Florida, there is a large wooden sculpture of a Seminole man wrestling a bowlegged, bucktoothed alligator. Laroche told me once that his father had been the model for the Seminole wrestler. I found this improbable, since the Laroches have no Indian blood at all, but Laroche explained that the sculptor had been a friend of his father’s and had asked him to pose because he thought the elder Laroche possessed a quintessential Seminole build. I still found the story improbable, so I asked Laroche about it several other times, including once when we were on the phone and I knew his father was in the room with him. I had counted on his father to act as a sort of lie detector, but instead the two of them launched into a discussion of whether the carved Seminole was life-size or larger than life-size, and whether it had a penis, and what the scale of the penis implied about Laroche’s father’s penis. This was not what I was hoping would
happen, so I dropped the topic and never brought it up again.

—

Before he came to work for the Seminoles Laroche had been on the reservation only now and again, when he was just passing through or when he was buying tax-free cigarettes at the tribal smoke shops. In a sense, it was bad luck that brought him to the reservation full-time. The years right before he went to work for the tribe went miserably. He was in an awful car crash that knocked out his front teeth, put his wife in a coma for weeks, and killed his mother and uncle. Shortly after the crash he and his wife separated. The next year there was a calamitous frost in south Florida that killed a lot of nursery stock, including much of Laroche’s. Then in 1991 a contaminated batch of a Du Pont fungicide called Benlate was suspected of killing nursery plants around the country. Orchids seemed especially sensitive to the tainted Benlate, and several commercial orchid nurseries in Florida lost so many that they went out of business. Many of Laroche’s plants that hadn’t frozen got poisoned. Finally, in August of 1992 Hurricane Andrew hit Florida. The worst of the storm crossed over the part of Dade County south of Miami that was home to a large military base, citrus farms, and nurseries that produced more than a quarter of all the orchids sold in the United States. The towns of Homestead, Naranja, and Florida City were nearly blown away. Most of the nurseries were gone in a minute: greenhouses folded, shade cloth sailed off, pots of flowers tumbled and shattered. Before the hurricane, Laroche had some of his remaining plants at home and the rest in three different rented greenhouses in Miami and Homestead. In the hurricane two of the three greenhouses vanished entirely. The third more or less exploded. A few days after Andrew had passed, Laroche
went to check the third greenhouse. On the way there he came upon a green hash lying on a road three blocks from where the greenhouse had been. He stopped to examine it and realized the hash was one of his plants. He dreaded going to the greenhouse. Nothing in it was living—saltwater carried inland by the storm had ruined all the plants that hadn’t blown away. Laroche had been in the plant business for about twelve years. He had been a famous plant person. He was now homeless and plantless and alone. He knew then and there that he would die of a broken heart if he ever opened his own nursery again.

—

The Seminole Tribe of Florida has sixteen hundred members; five reservations covering ninety thousand acres; ten thousand Hereford-cross beef cattle; twenty-six thousand acres of pastureland; twelve hundred acres of Burriss lemons; six hundred acres of red and white grapefruit; a catfish farm and a shrimp farm and a turtle farm. The tribe also owns casinos and cigarette businesses. Most of the businesses do well; their reported annual earnings a few years ago were $65 million. The casino is especially profitable. Right now it is limited to poker and video pull-tag machines and a bingo hall, but the tribe would like to add Las Vegas—style gambling, including Superpick Lotto and Touch 6 Lotto machines. So far the governor of Florida has opposed this, even though the tribe has offered to pay the state $100 million a year just to permit the change. Whenever people figure out that the Seminole tribe has a lot of money, they feel inspired. Usually they then approach the tribe with investment proposals—say, a shredded-tire-recycling business or a quarter-horse racetrack or a shopping mall. Usually the Seminoles politely decline, but on occasion they do form partnerships with people outside. The day I first visited the reservation, for instance, Buster Baxley, who was the vice
president of planning and development for the tribe, was meeting with a group of Japanese businessmen about a possible Japanese-Seminole lemon-farm deal. Most of the time the tribe does business on its own, although it often hires white people with expertise in the business to set it up and get it running. Unemployment among the Seminoles is about 40 percent. The white managers of tribe businesses are expected to hire tribe members as assistants and teach them as much about the business as possible. When the system works, the Seminoles end up with training and experience and can eventually put the white managers out of a job.

The idea of starting a Seminole nursery had been kicking around for a while. It was a natural plan. The tribe owned thousands of acres of land covered with plants indigenous to Florida, sabo palms and foxtail grass and finger grass and pop ash trees, the kind of native plants that developers in Florida are required to use on all state-funded projects and many private ones. There were successful nurseries all around, some even on land rented from the tribe. The Florida Seminole reservations are in Hollywood, Brighton, Immokalee, Tampa, and Big Cypress. Hollywood is the most urban of them all, but Buster knew of a spot near tribe headquarters that he thought would be perfect—two and a half acres near the big commercial strip that were empty except for electric towers belonging to Florida Power and Light. The tribal council agreed, and Buster called the local newspaper and placed an ad for a nursery manager. Laroche was still at loose ends when he saw the ad. He had hardly recovered from the hurricane. He was happy to get the job, although now he likes to say he wonders why.

—

Setting up a nursery can be simple if you want it to be, but Laroche managed to make it complicated. He couldn’t bear the thought of having an ordinary nursery with cactus
planters and potted palms and Christmas trees. He wanted the Seminole nursery to be dazzling, full of extraordinary things. He wanted odd plants from around the world—spiral juniper bushes, cracker roses, confetti shrub, teddy bear palms. He wanted a hundred varieties of what he called “weird-ass vegetables”—spinach that grows on vines, African pumpkins that can be trained onto trellises, carrots that grow in pots, Chinese fuzzy gourds, yard-long green beans, pink Zairean hot peppers shaped like penises.

He had big plans for orchids. He told the tribe that he wanted to build a laboratory where he would propagate fifty or sixty different species. “Sure, the Seminoles could just go into their backyard and dig up grass and twigs and sell it at the nursery,” he once said. “Well, big fucking deal. On the other hand, a lab is a fucking
great
idea. It is a
superior
idea. I explained to the tribe that if you have a lab you can take just one or two plants and from that you can grow billions. Once we got the lab running we could just clone huge numbers of orchids and sell them. I could have hundreds of tribe members working in there, learning about cloning and propagation. We could come up with some really cool new hybrids! And we could work with Florida orchids and really blow some minds. I wanted to bring some flair to the place. Screw wax myrtles! Screw saw grass! A lab is the way to make real money, not growing
grass
.”

Many wild orchids don’t like to live away from the woods. They will usually flourish and produce seeds only if they are in their own little universe with their favorite combination of water and light and temperature and breeze, with the perfect tree bark at the perfect angle, and with the precise kind of bugs and the exact kind of flotsam falling on their roots and into their flowers. Many species of wild orchids aren’t propagated commercially, either because they aren’t that pretty or
because no one has been able to figure out and reproduce exactly what they want and need to survive. The Fakahatchee has several species of orchids that either live wild or die. The prettiest of them is
Polyrrhiza lindenii
, which is also classified botanically as
Polyradicion lindenii
and is commonly known as the ghost orchid. The ghost orchid grows nowhere in this country but the Fakahatchee. If you could figure out how to housebreak any wild orchid, especially a pretty one like the ghost orchid, you would probably become a rich person. You would be able to grow the plants in a greenhouse and then clone hundreds in a lab—hundreds and hundreds of a variety of orchid almost no one on the planet would have. It would be as if you had figured out how to multiply Siberian tigers or gemstones. Orchid fanciers who like to have as many species as possible in their collections would seek you out, and orchid breeders looking for new gene pools would come to you, too. People who bought your plants could eventually grow their own by taking cuttings from their plant, but you would still be acknowledged as the master of growing them from seed, and you would have a seven-year head start, seven years of monopoly, because it takes seven years before a new orchid plant produces its first flowers. The biggest hindrance to all this is that it is now illegal to collect any wild orchids. They are protected under Florida’s endangered species law and also the federal endangered species law, and those that are growing in Florida parks and preserves are also protected under administrative rules governing state lands. International buying and selling of wild orchids is severely restricted under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. A few people have had small-scale luck growing wild orchids they’d collected before the laws took effect, but almost anyone who wants a wild orchid now has to steal it
from the woods themselves or buy it on the black market from someone else who had.

—

Laroche had a Laroche-style plan in mind. He knew that Florida Indians were exempt from the state laws protecting endangered species. Once he started working for the tribe he believed he would be exempt as well. He would hike into the Fakahatchee with some of the Seminoles working at the nursery, point out the plants he wanted, and have the crew collect them so he wouldn’t even touch any plants himself. That was for insurance: even if he wasn’t covered by the Indian exemption, he could protect himself by keeping his hands off the plants, and then if they were stopped by rangers he could argue that he’d just gone along for the hike and hadn’t done any collecting himself. After he got the plants he would take them to the Seminole plant lab and start cloning them. He’d been fooling around with ghost orchids for years, and he claimed he was one of the only people in the world who’d solved the puzzle of how to clone and grow them. As soon as word got out that he had mastered the cultivation of
Polyrrhiza lindenii
, he would be celebrated in the plant world. The nursery would sell millions of the plants and make millions of dollars, which would please him and impress the tribe. His success with the ghost orchids would also ruin the black-market trade in them because once the species became available commercially there wouldn’t be any reason to buy those that had been poached from the wild. This was Laroche’s traditional dash of altruism. Finally, the plan would end with a flourish: He would time everything to take place during the Florida legislative session so that as soon as he had gotten what he wanted out of the woods, he would address the legislators and chide them for leaving laws on the books that were too loose to protect endangered
plants from cunning people like him. The legislators, shamed, would then change the laws to Laroche’s specifications, and thus the woods would be locked up forever and no more ghost orchids would be spirited away. Environmentalists who had despised him for poaching would be forced to admire him. At first he would seem like a demon, but he would end up looking like a saint. Best of all, Laroche thought, was that when everything was settled he would at last end up with his million-dollar plant.

As soon as he started working for the tribe Laroche’s new passion became Indian law. He spent a few hours each day ordering materials for the lab and clearing the way for greenhouses and the rest of the day in the University of Miami law library, examining the state of Florida’s legal history with Native Americans. Two cases in particular heartened him. The state had prosecuted Miccosukee Indians three times for poaching palm fronds. The Miccosukees and Seminoles use the fronds to thatch the roofs of their chikee huts. Palms are protected trees, but the state lost the cases because the judges ruled that the Miccosukees had a traditional cultural use for the fronds and therefore were entitled to them. The other case that encouraged him was
State of Florida v. James E. Billie
. Chief Billie is the longtime chairman of the Seminole tribe. In 1983 he was arrested for killing a Florida panther on the Big Cypress reservation. The Florida panther is a protected species under both Florida and federal law. The issues of Indian hunting rights and religious freedom snarled the case for years, and eventually neither the state nor the federal government managed to convict the chief.

Laroche was encouraged by both the palm fronds and Chief Billie’s panther. He also came across some clumsy contradiction of the state code that made it sound as if laws forbidding removal of plants and animals from Florida state
land were overridden by the laws that allow Florida Indians to collect endangered animals and plants for their own use. In Laroche’s opinion this was the tool he’d been looking for. He was convinced that this mess of laws allowed him to go with his Seminole crew anywhere he wanted and take anything at all.

—

A few days after Laroche and I went to the orchid show in Miami I drove to Hollywood to visit him at the nursery. I turned on the car radio and tried to find a music station I liked but ended up listening to a talk show about how to keep pet snakes and iguanas happy, and when that was over I listened to an hour-long infomercial for some money-management audiotapes. The announcer had a big, hollow voice and every few minutes he would boom,
“My friends, you are about to enter the promised land of financial independence!
” I drove past Carpet-Marts and Toy-Marts and Car-Marts and the turnoff for Alligator Alley and a highway flyover that leads to the stadium where the Super Bowl is sometimes played, and past signs for all those dreamy-sounding Florida towns like Plantation and Sunrise and Coconut Creek and Coral Springs. The highway median was a low-lying cloud of pink hibiscus bushes. The shoulders were banked with broom grass and sumac and sneezeweed and pennywort, and the road itself looked as if any minute it might just crack and buckle and finally disappear as things grew over it and under it, pushing the roadbed away. As it is, amazing things live on the highway now. Laroche once discovered a rare orchid species growing along an I-95 off-ramp, and so far no one has found it growing anywhere else in the world.