The Orchid Thief

by Susan Orlean

  This is a gruesome tale of bitter truth in which the price that is paid during the quest of bringing these exotic plants to you plant adventurers comes high, horrible, and beyond your furthest imagination. All of the facts cannot be revealed at this time because the things I know are too dangerous to publish at this time.

  Have you ever seen broken, torn, headless bodies splattered over the ground while buzzards finish what is left of the people you once knew? Seven of them, just like myself, in quest of something … I am almost ready to get off now, but before I do, I want you to know why so Lee Moore will not have reason to be called a quitter.

  My business is for sale. Are you interested?

  On his plant-collecting trips, Lee became acquainted with pre-Columbian art and pre-Incan artifacts. “In other words,” he once said to me, “buried treasure.” At the time, there was no prohibition on dealing in historical artifacts and no duty on imported antiquities. Lee thought artifact collecting would complement his plant collecting. His first project was the removal of a priceless frescoed wall from an ancient Mayan temple. The dig took three months. During the dig, Lee and his wife at the time, a Peruvian woman named Zadith who was seven months pregnant, camped at the site and lived on a diet of barbecued doves. The excavation of the temple was financed by a crooked Armenian businessman with drug and prostitution affiliations and a Hungarian art dealer, who arranged to have part of the wall shipped to his New York gallery and the rest to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The wall was in fact stolen property. One evening a Mexican government official at a reception at the Met found out that one of his nation’s precious artifacts was in the museum’s basement; he demanded its immediate return. The Hungarian art dealer had no choice but to pack up the wall and ship it back to Mexico City, where it is prominently displayed in the Museum of Anthropology. Lee was never paid for the wall job, but he wrote it off as a good learning experience. Now that he knew something about the art-smuggling business he and his new wife, Chady, planned to loot another Mayan site filled with frescoes, but they called it off when Lee discovered that federal agents planned to follow him there and arrest him. After that, Lee and Chady decided to focus their smuggling on things that could fit in a suitcase—Mayan vases, ancient Peruvian artifacts, golden death masks, antique silver. During this period Lee flew back and forth from South America to Miami hundreds of times. Art smuggling was going so well that he got out of the plant business altogether. He quickly became one of the top five pre-Columbian dealers in the world. He had his own plane, two Lincoln Continentals, a fancy house, and a million dollars in the bank.

  Now, though, Lee was back in the plant business. He had returned to it after a downturn in his art smuggling, brought about by disputes with U.S. customs, most of which customs won. He had lost a fortune on a large collection of ancient Peruvian silver because customs confiscated it and forced him to make a charitable donation of it to a museum in Peru. He lost even more money on a shipment of pre-Columbian art that he was planning to sell in Australia, which customs agents seized after identifying it as stolen property. One of his biggest investments, a two-thousand-year-old hammered-gold pre-Incan burial mask, was seized and sent back to Peru. He became convinced that customs officials had it in for him. After the Australian fiasco he had to sell his plane, sell the Lincoln Continentals, move out of the fancy house, declare bankruptcy. He fished around for work. He was willing to do anything. After Hurricane Andrew he even worked as a day laborer at local nurseries that were rebuilding their greenhouses. He gradually became a sort of plant broker, buying interesting plants from Miami nurseries and then trucking them upstate and selling them to small nurseries along the way—he would just stop in a town like Jacksonville, find a phone booth at a gas station, stand in the hot sun flipping through the Yellow Pages, and then call the local nurseries to see if they wanted any plants. It was dreary and difficult business and he made hardly any money. But it had also gotten him back into plants, which he had always loved.

  —

  Lee was leaving early the next morning on one of his plant-peddling trips, so he had to go pick up plants that afternoon and said I could come along. As we were getting into his truck I asked him if he happened to know John Laroche. They seemed as if they were cut from the same flammable cloth, but I suspected they had never met, only because I believe the universe would have exploded if they had ever been in a room together. Lee squinted and rubbed his chin. “Don’t think I know the fellow,” he said. “I’ve heard about the case, though. I don’t quite understand his passion for the ghost orchid. They’re cute, they’re cute, all right, but I just don’t think they’re that special.” He started the truck and it creaked out of its parking spot. “I do know pretty much everyone else in the orchid world,” he said. “Martin Motes? I gave him his first nursery job. He was my watering boy. And Fred Fuchs, Bob’s father, he financed my first orchid-collecting trip, the one where I drove my VW down the Panamanian Highway. And old man Fennell bought the plants I collected for Orchid Jungle.” He wiped his forehead. “Those were all the real icons of the orchid world, people like Fred Fuchs. I can’t believe I’m now in the category of those icons.”

  In the stuffy truck we drove down miles of suburban roads with gravel shoulders and no sidewalks, lined with cigar-box bungalows and chain-link fences. We stopped first at a place called Bullis Bromeliads. Lee parked and went to find the manager. “I had four Blue Moons and eight Purple Rains picked out.” Lee said. The manager led us through the greenhouse to the spot where Lee had put his plants a few days earlier. He counted them and then clucked his tongue and said, “You know, it looks like someone made off with one of my ‘Blue Moons.’ ” On to the next nursery. “Harvey, I want a case of Charms,” Lee said to this nursery’s manager. “Big, big, big plants. And not too many orchids today because I put them in the truck and they start blasting in the heat and then no one wants them and I got to eat them.” On to DeLeon’s Bromeliads. “State-of-the-art place,” Lee said to me on our way in. He pointed across the lot. “Look at this new shadehouse going up. Whew.” In the office he read a list to the manager. “Let’s see, some variegated spineless pineapple Ramosa. Oh, and I’m getting twenty-one Fascini, thirty-six Eileens, and twelve pineapples.” These were different species of bromeliads—spiky, spidery ones, and ones with wide, stiff, mottled green leaves, and little ones with a ruff of leaves with serrated edges. “I’m always looking for something new,” Lee said to me. “That’s been my goal all along. New things, really special things. If you find a prizewinner, it’ll be worth as much as five thousand dollars to you. Per plant, I mean. Some of the plants I discovered—they’re producing them by the billions now, in tissue culture. How much did I make off of it?” He shook his head. “I made a couple of bucks. I should have made millions.” He said that most of the time when he found new species he didn’t have the money or facilities to clone them and cash in, so he would sell a hundred or so, and then some major commercial grower would clone the plant and turn it into a supermarket plant, a cheapie, a Kmart product. On one hand he sounded exasperated by his near misses with big money, but on the other hand he sounded scornful of an accomplishment as tame as selling your ten-millionth Kmart bromeliad. It seemed like the story of his life, all the near misses with disaster and wealth and wrecked planes and wild animals. I suspect he would have been very happy to have held on to some of the money, but only if he had come by it adventurously, either by almost dying or almost being thrown in jail or almost losing it the moment it was in his reach. I really wondered what kind of life Lee was so afraid he would be stuck with if he hadn’t left home and driven off to South America as soon as he possibly could. My guess is that it wouldn’t have been a bad life, just a life that would have been tiresome and dry for a romantic like Lee Moore. Probably, it would have been the kind of life in which he would never have needed to pour tropical fish into a hydraulic pump to help his plane land in Colombia, and would never have had to live in a snake-infested hut
with nothing but his dog’s cage for furniture, and would never have had to elude federal agents searching for him in Peru, and would never have gotten to see living things no one else had ever seen and then get to introduce them to the world and, like Adam, name the living things himself. More and more, I felt that I was meeting people like Lee who didn’t at all seem part of this modern world and this moment in time—the world of petty aggravations and obligations and boundaries, a time of bored cynicism—because how they lived and what they lived for was so optimistic. They sincerely loved something, trusted in the perfectibility of some living thing, lived for a myth about themselves and the idea of adventure, were convinced that certain things were really worth dying for, believed that they could make their lives into whatever they dreamed.

  Lee loaded the rest of his plants into the truck and said he wasn’t going to stop at any more nurseries. He said he had to get to bed early because his plant-peddling trips start before dawn so the plants don’t get hot and start wilting. He doesn’t take that many plants with him, so the truck isn’t too crowded; if he runs out along the way he calls Chady and has her ship him more so he can continue driving north and selling. To me, roaming around the Amazon is unimaginable, but driving to a strange place and calling people you don’t know sounds imaginable and scary. I asked Lee if he thought of himself as brave. He twiddled his fingers. “Oh, I’m not brave. I’m just sure of myself. I just remember when I was a kid, I once was going on a canoeing trip in the Everglades and some of my friends decided not to go because it was going to be too much discomfort and hardship. But they did come to watch the rest of us head off on the trip, and I remember looking up as we pushed off and seeing the forlorn faces of the people left behind looking on. That’s what started my life of adventure. I knew I never wanted to be the one left on the shore.”

  In the final issue of Lee Moore’s Armchair Adventurer, published in the spring of 1966, he had written:

  Many people write letters of envy saying they wish they could be in my place traveling and exploring and that the life I am living is the type of life they have always wanted but could not have because of one thing or another. The types of problems that I have been relating to you do not have to accompany this business or even a normal life for that matter. You have been listening to the problems of an abnormal life about which nothing can be done no matter what business may be involved. A normal person would not have these difficulties. Apparently, adventure was destined to follow me in whatever I do. It is not the business; it is me. Adventure and excitement will follow me the rest of my life. Since a little boy I have escaped violent death nine times. It is in my blood to explore it all.

  Osceola’s Head

  A few weeks later, on one of those thick Florida days when the sun looks as smooth and silver as a nickel and the sky is white, Circuit Judge Brenda Wilson announced that she had reached a decision in the ghost orchid case. Earlier in the month, Laroche and the three Seminole men—Russell Bowers, Dennis Osceola, and Vinson Osceola—had entered pleas of no contest to charges of illegally removing plants from state property. Judge Wilson declared that she would withhold adjudication on the Seminoles and would fine them only one hundred dollars each, but that she found Laroche guilty as charged, would fine him five times as much as she had fined the Seminoles, and had decided to extend his exile from the Fakahatchee for six more months. The next day an article in The Miami Herald said:

  NAPLES — A case that could have determined whether Indians can treat plants in Florida public lands as their own came to a murky conclusion in a Collier County courtroom Monday.

  Circuit Judge Brenda Wilson fined three Seminole Indians and a Miami orchid grower for trying to take rare orchids and bromeliads from the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve in December.

  But attorneys for the Indians said tribal members should still feel free to take any endangered plant they please from state parks or preserves because a state statute says they can. “This really doesn’t make any sense,” said Wesley Johnson, attorney for the Seminole tribe members. “The reason we made the pleas was only for convenience. They’re not guilty of anything.”

  Orchid lovers and managers at state parks and preserves were watching the case closely because they worried a precedent could be set if the Indians and Laroche were allowed to take the plants. Laroche said he was working for the tribe because he knows about orchids and other plants. “I went along to make sure it was being done properly,” he said of last year’s plant harvesting trip.

  Buster Baxley, director of planning and development for the tribe, said based on the exemption in the statute he thought the tribe could take the plants. “But just like any other treaty you guys sign,” Baxley said, referring to government treaties with Indian tribes, “it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”

  The day after the judge’s announcement I met with the state’s attorney, Randy Merrill, who had prosecuted the case. Merrill had been a police officer before he became a lawyer and was planning to run for state office sometime after he finished the orchid case. When the men were first indicted, Merrill told me he was determined to convict all of them. He was especially eager to get Laroche, because he found Laroche so maddening. The case itself was maddening. It stretched over a messy patch of laws—two of which may contradict each other. One of the laws is a criminal statute. In Florida it is illegal for anyone to collect endangered wild plants, and there are criminal penalties attached. The only exception is for people the statute refers to as “Florida Indians,” who are exempt from this law out of respect for their traditional hunting and fishing practices. This means that under Florida criminal law Seminoles cannot be prosecuted for collecting endangered orchids. On the other hand, all state-owned parks and preserves and other lands, including the Fakahatchee, are governed by a rule that forbids the removal of any and all animals and plants, endangered or not. That means that on a state preserve like the Fakahatchee, anyone who collects anything—an ordinary blade of grass, a worm, a ghost orchid—can be arrested and prosecuted. Considering the contradiction between the criminal statute and the state-park rule, can the Seminoles collect ghost orchids out of the Fakahatchee or not? Does the “Florida Indian” exemption from the endangered species law extend to state lands or does the park rule supersede the Seminoles’ exemption?

  This ambiguity was exactly what Laroche had been looking for in the law library. He recognized that the criminal endangered-species statute and the park rule were inconsistent, and he bet that if he and the crew were caught, a judge would uphold a criminal statute over an administrative park rule—in other words, that a judge would rule that the Seminoles’ exemption from the criminal statute does extend to state park land even though nothing in the statute specifically says that it does, so that collecting ghost orchids in the Fakahatchee was within their rights. He was also betting that most judges in Florida would not want to make a ruling that abrogated Seminole rights and certainly would have created controversy.

  Merrill decided that the best way to beat Laroche’s plan was to avoid it. First, he dropped the charges against the Seminoles for taking the endangered orchids so that the question of Indian exemption from the law would never arise. But the men had been caught not just with endangered orchids and bromeliads but also with the tree branches the plants had been growing on—Laroche had insisted on taking the plants by leaving them attached to the branches rather than merely prying them off because they would be more likely to survive. The endangered-plant statute does not apply to ordinary trees, so the “Florida Indian” exemption from endangered-plant laws does not apply to ordinary trees, either. Ordinary trees are covered by the park rule that makes it illegal for anyone to take anything out of places like the Fakahatchee State Preserve. If the Seminoles had only taken endangered plants, the judge would have had to decide how to interpret the conflict between the endangered-species laws and the park rules. Taking tree limbs out of a park is a simple legal matter—no one at all, no exceptions, is allowed t
o take living things out of a state park. Merrill realized he would beat Laroche by pursuing the part of the case that would be indisputable—he would leave reconciling the criminal statute with the state rule to some other judge in some other case. The Seminoles would have to concede that they are not exempt in any way from park rules regarding live oak and pond apple trees and ordinary Florida weeds. They had no choice but to plead no contest to taking trees out of a state park, and they finally did.

  Laroche’s own personal situation was more convoluted than the Seminoles’. Since he was an employee of the tribe, he thought he would be covered by any exemptions the law made for the Seminoles. Just in case the exemption concept didn’t work, he had deliberately avoided touching any plants on the day of the poaching: the Seminoles did the actual collecting—wading close to the trees, cutting the limbs, bagging them, dragging them out—not just because Laroche was lazy, but because he wanted to be able to maintain that he was a hands-off consultant and not a perpetrator, just in case they got caught. Judge Wilson was underwhelmed by both of Laroche’s arguments. In her opinion, he was an employee of the tribe but not a member and didn’t qualify for any special consideration given to the Seminoles. Furthermore, she felt he was guilty of everything—he was guilty of taking the tree limbs and the orchids and the bromeliads, he was guilty of advising the three other men to do the same, and he was morally guilty of having concocted the whole scheme.