The Orchid Thief

by Susan Orlean

  “I see,” I said.

  Storm turned back to Buster. “Can you believe it, I swear to God,” he said, shrugging. “I’ve been trying to get Lloyd’s of London to insure me and I’ll be damned but they won’t do it.”

  “Long as you don’t sue me,” Buster said. “That creature looks pretty nasty.” He looked over at the sleeping alligator, who suddenly shifted on the tailgate and snapped open one of his eyes. The eye was moss-green and had a pupil shaped like the side of a dime. He also had a big nose and a terrible underbite and claws that looked like surgical tools. “I’m not interested in wrestling gators but I don’t mind eating them too much,” Buster said. “They taste like fishy chicken. Not so great, really, but anyway, it’s a change of pace.”

  The fair was getting under way; first there was the grand opening processional of dignitaries and former Miss Seminoles, and then the booths opened, selling cowboy accessories like lariats and toy handcuffs and whips and spurs and Indian accessories like silver belt buckles and embroidered dirndl skirts, and other booths selling odds and ends like alligator feet, plastic slingshots, rubber tomahawks, silver-and-turquoise brooches, incense, and small buffaloes carved out of pine. The food you could buy was fry bread and barbecued beef and Eskimo Pies and an alligator-meat basket (seven dollars) and a frog-legs basket (seven dollars) and a frog-and-gator combo basket (ten dollars) and hot dogs and fries (two dollars, with a student discount). The biggest of the alligator-food booths was called Gator Hut, and hanging over it was a sign that said CARNE DE COCODRILOS. When I walked past, a fat man with a beard was studying the sign and then said to the salesgirl, “I’ll have a small gator and a large Coke, please.” At a small picnic table in the shade, four wrinkly old ladies wearing woolen mufflers and Seminole skirts and knee socks were sitting wordlessly and eating pumpkin bread. A young man sitting with them had on a Cleveland Indians baseball cap with its goofy Chief Wahoo insignia, and a woman standing behind the young man was wearing an Indians cap, too, as well as a Bob Marley T-shirt, a beautiful embroidered traditional Seminole skirt, and a wristwatch with a neon face. No one spoke to me and I didn’t speak to anyone; I just spent the next few hours walking through the drizzle of conversations—“I’m real busy these days. We got a Spanish ministry now,” “I heard a fella shot himself in the face!” “I’m sewing this deerskin. You got a problem with a man doing woman’s work?” “Hi, Molly, where’ve ya been? France? Or outer space?” “I’ll meet you in a minute, I’m still dressing up my tomahawk here.” Over the public-address system a solemn masculine voice boomed: “Walking Buffalo to the security booth, please.” “Red River and Otter Trail, report to the front gate immediately.” “Buddy Big Mountain to the stadium now, please.” While I was lingering at a booth selling bundles of sagebrush and lavender a girl passed by walking an iguana on a leash, and a troop of Hollywood, Florida, Girl Scouts in full uniform marched by, single file. As the morning went on, some other white people trickled in, dressed in buckskin and jeans, or Mississippi State University shirts and shorts, or pastel leisure clothes and plastic visors, and they made their way over to the rodeo arena or browsed shyly at the booths.

  In the stadium, the Little Mr. and Miss Seminole Pageant started. The Little Misses were waiting in the stands and the Little Mr. contestants were lined up onstage, a few dressed in dazzling Seminole costumes and the others in miniature business suits. In the yellow sun the little boys glowed like lightbulbs. Silver-tinsel flags rustled over the stage and somewhere out of sight a bass drum was thudding. Onstage, the master of ceremonies began: “Okay, ladies and gentlemen, this is Contestant Number Six, Randy Osceola, who is five years of age and comes to us from the Hollywood reservation.… Next is Justin Troy Osceola, three years of age. Justin is a member of the Panther clan and comes to us from the Hollywood reservation.… Keith Kelly Jumper is of the Big Town clan and comes to us from the Big Cypress reservation.…” The three judges were sitting on folding chairs in the middle of the stadium, chewing on pencils and whispering to one another. “Okay, let’s applaud these little boys,” the master of ceremonies went on. “They don’t know what’s going on, but they’re doing a great job anyway. It’s a big job for a little kid, even though they don’t know what’s going on. Some Little Miss and Mr. Seminoles travel to powwows out of state, and some don’t. It depends on moneywise. But they represent their tribe and we’re proud of them all.” Just then a couple of Little Mr. Seminoles broke rank and started chasing each other around the stage with sticks. “While the judges are tallying their scores I want to introduce Ginger Tiger, the 1980 past princess,” the master of ceremonies called out. A woman stood up in her seat and gave a wide sweeping wave of her hand. The crowd applauded. Someone behind me said, “Hey, who’s that baby who won? It’s bald-headed.”

  “Are there any more Miss Seminoles out there hiding from me?” the master of ceremonies asked. “Rita Gopher? Are you out there? Stand up and raise your hand! Stand up and give that princess wave!”

  I was sitting up in the bleachers next to one of the powwow dancers. She was a tall, lean girl, maybe sixteen or so, with wide-set eyes and long, tight braids. She said she wasn’t a Seminoie—she was an Ojibwa Indian and lived in Manitoba, Canada, but she had come to Florida with a group of Ojibwas to dance at the powwow. She said she attended some powwow somewhere almost every weekend; powwows were her passion. She was wearing an amazing dress of stiff deep-purple satin that had a high neck and long sleeves and a wide, long skirt. The entire surface of the skirt was covered with the thin silver-colored lids from Copenhagen and McPherson snuff tins. Each tin lid had one hole punched in it near the edge and was stitched onto the skirt through this hole so that the rest of the lid could hang loose and jingle. The girl said that powwow skirts are supposed to have exactly 365 jingles on them, one for each calendar day, but her skirt needed an extra 150 to cover it completely because of her exceptional height. The skirt draped as heavily as chain mail. She said it weighed more than ten pounds but that the weight didn’t bother her at all. After a few minutes she stood up to give me a better look at her costume. The purple satin gleamed, and as she twirled, her thin braids whipped around and the five hundred tin snuff lids clinked against one another, making a light, flat, icy sound that cascaded from her skirt to the ground.

  —

  Thomas Storm had unloaded the alligator beside the deepwater pit and was getting ready for his first show of the day. A half-dozen people were hanging around, watching him get ready and testing their cameras. The deepwater pit was surrounded by sand. Storm was barefoot. The alligator was trussed up and looked as if he was still napping. “Hey!” Storm suddenly hollered. “There are all sorts of ants in this sand. Anybody got any bug spray? Anybody?” No one near the pit moved. Storm’s wife, a slight woman with curly blond hair, was standing nearby holding a little girl. “Thomas,” she said, “I am going over to get something to eat and I am leaving Chelsea here. I do not want her in the water, you hear me?”

  Storm was kicking around in the sand looking for ants. “Thomas!” his wife said sharply. “You heard me! You know my temper! I do not want Chelsea in the water!” The alligator stretched one of its leathery legs. Most everyone jumped. Thomas rolled his eyes at his wife and said he had heard her. She placed the baby on the sand and walked away slowly, watching over her shoulder the entire time. From the other direction a television crew appeared, and Buster was with them, talking to the guy in a charcoal suit who looked as if he was in charge. “We need some kind of action for the background,” the guy said to Buster. “What can you give me?”

  “I can put together something for you, for sure,” Buster answered. “I’ve got all sorts of powwow dancers and my gator wrestler’s right here.”

  Storm raised his hand in salute. His daughter was dangling her feet in the alligator pit. “Okay, for the weather segment, we’ll go with the gators,” the television guy said. “We’re going to need to get the timing down. I’d like to have him get the alligator in a good
clinch right when we zoom in. I’d also really like to see some of those dancers. I think that’d be nice action.”

  “I can get you some dancers, but it’s going to take a little more time,” Buster said. He pulled a cellular phone out of his pocket and dialed a number. “Yeah, it’s me,” he said into the phone. “I need some dancers for Channel Ten … well, call Charlotte Gopher, then! Have her get them together!” He snapped the phone shut. “Done,” he said to the television guy. “I’ve also got an Indian ventriloquist, if you’re interested.”

  “That’s okay,” the guy said. “With the wrestler and the dancers, I think I’ve got all I need.”

  —

  The next morning I went back to the fair to see tribe chairman Chief James Billie perform with his country-rock band. It was the first time I’d seen Chief Billie in the flesh, although I had seen the Chief Billie portrait that covers one entire wall in the Seminole casino and his Chief Billie Swamp Safari signs on the road to the Fakahatchee and his Swamp Safari continuous-loop promotional video playing at one of the booths at the fair. He never seemed to be around, but you couldn’t talk to a member of the tribe without hearing Chief Billie’s name; he was omnipresent, fabled, but always just out of sight, sort of the human equivalent of the omnipresent, fabled, and always just-out-of-sight ghost orchid. James E. Billie was born in Hollywood in 1943 and was adopted at birth by Max Osceola, a cattle rancher and prominent member of the Seminole Bird Clan. Billie grew up in a traditional manner on the reservation but always refers to himself as a bowlegged half-breed because he is bowlegged and his biological father was Irish. After high school Billie served as a paratrooper in Vietnam. When he returned to Florida he became a hairdresser and a hunting guide. By his own description, he was a young fuzzy-headed Vietnam-veteran alligator-wrestling hippie-looking guy wearing bell-bottoms. In his spare time he tried to cook up ways for the tribe to earn money. At that point, the Florida Seminoles were poor and unemployed and received only about a hundred dollars a quarter in dividends from federal land-claim settlements and tribe businesses. One of Billie’s first notions was to set up a coin-diving tourist concession in the Everglades. In 1976 he took note of a Supreme Court ruling that confirmed the status of Indian reservations as sovereign nations. Along with a Miami lawyer, Billie researched whether sovereignty would extend to such issues as low-stakes bingo and poker. In 1979 the tribe opened a bingo hall in Hollywood and won a court decision against the state of Florida, making it legal for the tribe to set its own casino hours and jackpots, something that had never been done before on an American Indian reservation. The next year, Billie ran for the office of tribal chairman, campaigning by flying from reservation to reservation in his own four-seat Cessna. He spent election night hunting alligators with his dog, Bingo. The election was his by a landslide. During Billie’s next ten years as chairman, the tribe increased its cattle holdings, started its citrus business, established its shrimp and turtle farms, hired John Laroche to set up a tribal nursery. The Seminole casinos were built in Tampa, Hollywood, and Immokalee, and the actor Burt Reynolds, who is half Cherokee and whose first television job was playing a half-breed on Gunsmoke, agreed to be the casinos’ celebrity spokesman. The Seminole Tribe of Florida, Inc., had become a $35-million-a-year business. The average Seminole’s quarterly dividends rose from $100 to $600, and the tribe’s income from its businesses rose from $500,000 annually to more than $10 million. Chief Billie and the tribe began to be approached regularly by businesses looking for joint-venture opportunities. Donald Trump approached them in 1996 with his eye on the tribe’s casinos; Chief Billie said he would talk with Trump only if the meeting was held in the Big Cypress Swamp and if Trump agreed to spend the night watching alligator wrestling and eating Seminole fry bread and frog legs. The meeting took place on Chief Billie’s terms. No deals were made, but the next year Trump invited Chief Billie to be a judge in the Miss Universe pageant, which he owns.

  —

  Once Billie became the chairman of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, he often toured the reservations in his gold Corvette. He also recorded several albums of his particular musical hybrid of rock, bluegrass, country, and salsa. They were released on a small independent label called Seminole Records. Big Alligator and Old Ways received especially good reviews, He toured with his band the Shack Daddies, playing at clubs and at country- and folk-music festivals. Otherwise his lifestyle remained rustic. Hunting and guiding in the swamp were his principal enterprises. On the evening of December 1, 1983, Billie and a friend of his named Miguel Contu met for hamburgers at Ruby’s, a snack bar on the reservation. Because they were bored after their hamburgers they decided to go spotlight some deer. They drove Billie’s pickup into the Cowbone section of the Big Cypress Reservation. Billy got his guns ready while Contu sat in the back of the truck shining a light into the woods. On a gravel road in the thick brush, Contu spotted a pair of eyes that were the green-gold color of lightning bugs. Billie, using a pistol, shot the animal and wounded it in the shoulder.

  In the light the animal appeared to be not a deer at all but some sort of panther, probably the subspecies Felts concolor coryi, the Florida panther, which is the state’s official animal. At the time there were only twenty-six known to exist. Florida panthers once ranged throughout the Southeast, as far north as Tennessee, but around the turn of the century farmers and developers began a program of extermination—of subjugation and removal—that was so successful that by 1960 wildlife biologists believed the subspecies to be extinct. Apparently a small number managed to hide successfully in the Florida swamps, and in 1973 about thirty survivors were discovered. Their territory had shrunk from one third of the entire United States of America to just five thousand square miles of Everglades, Big Cypress Swamp, and Fakahatchee Strand, and they were so inbred that they had developed several distinct, abnormal traits: a kink at the end of the tail, a cowlick swirl of hair on the back of the neck, a compromised immune system, and in males an extremely low sperm count and a testicular defect known as cryptorchidism.

  Just two years before Chief Billie shot the panther, the state of Florida had begun to try to save the species. Panthers were captured and fitted with radio collars and treated by mobile veterinary units carrying antibiotics, vitamins, bottled oxygen, endotracheal tubes, and balloon splints. Their movements were tracked by radio telemetry and published over the Internet on the Florida panther website, http://supernet.net/chrisd/genel5/html. For a while the state planned to catch all the remaining wild Florida panthers and then move them to zoos, where scientists could oversee and assist their breeding and eventually reintroduce them to the wild. That plan was rejected when animal rights activists complained that it was too much of a gamble, and that if the species was going to die out, it should be allowed to die out with dignity in the swamp. The state then adopted a crossbreeding program. Texas cougars, close genetic relatives of the Florida panther, were released into the panthers’ habitat and encouraged to mingle. The cougar-panther offspring should have the benefit of possessing new genetic material, rather than the recycled and abnormal genes of the panthers alone; the diversity ought to strengthen the animals and eventually revive the population. Some people object to the crossbreeding program because it means the Florida panther might survive but it will no longer be genetically pure. As it happens, the Florida panther isn’t pure anyway. Scientists have studied the mitochondrial DNA of seven of the Fakahatchee panthers and traced some of their genes to Chilean and Brazilian cougars, which were imported to Florida for local menageries and then released into the wild in the 1950s and 1960s.

  —

  After Chief Billie wounded the animal, he fired his pistol again, missing. Then he took out a high-powered rifle and killed the animal with a shot to the head. Back at his lodge in the Big Cypress he posed with his dog, Bingo, and the panther, which he held up by its ears.

  On December 7 Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission officers acting on a tip went to Billie’s lodge and spotted th
e panther hide and skull hanging out to dry. On December 13, a Hendry County judge signed an arrest warrant for Chief James E. Billie, charging him with killing a Florida panther, a third-degree felony punishable by five years in jail or a five-thousand-dollar fine or both. Billie announced that he would plead innocent to the charges on the grounds that Seminoles had the right to kill endangered species on reservation land and that panther hunting was part of tribal spiritual and healing ceremonies and therefore was protected as a religious freedom. During oral arguments in May, Chief Billie told the judge he had been studying to be a medicine man for two years, and that killing a panther was required to attain such a rank. One of the tribe’s medicine men, Sonny Billie, told a reporter: “There is very powerful medicine in the panther. I will say that I am very proud of James Billie.”

  The legal story of Chief Billie and the panther spread and tangled as time went on. Soon after he was charged, Billie filed a federal lawsuit challenging the Florida laws protecting the panther because they impose on Seminole religious freedom. Then Hendry County Circuit Judge Hugh Hayes wrote a twenty-three-page order dismissing the charges against Billie, but the Florida Court of Appeals reversed Judge Hayes’s decision and reinstated the charges. Billie was then arraigned on federal misdemeanor violations of the Endangered Species Act in addition to having to face trial on the reinstated Florida charges. Federal prosecutors had been awaiting the outcome of a Supreme Court review of a South Dakota case involving a Yankton Sioux who had killed a bald eagle. Once the Supreme Court held that the Bald Eagle Protection Act overruled Indian treaty rights, they charged Billie, and the federal trial began before the state trial, in August of 1987. All this time, no one had bothered to preserve the remains of the panther. When the animal was introduced into evidence it smelled so awful that it made some people in the courtroom faint. Billie sat through the proceedings with a black kerchief over his mouth and nose because of the odor and complained to a newspaper reporter, “They ruined it! They didn’t salt it!” In fact, one of the game officers had boiled the skull and another had kept the panther’s hide in his home freezer for a year and a half. The rest of the carcass was missing because Billie had eaten it. Even though during the trial he maintained that he’d never seen a panther before the night he shot one and that he had believed he was shooting a deer, he told the St. Petersburg Times that he knew he had been aiming at a panther, and that he wanted to shoot it so he could have a sacred hide to show his children and that he thought the criminal charges and the government’s attitude were stupid. He also said that panther meat tasted fine with Progresso sauce and a little seasoning.