The Orchid Thief

by Susan Orlean

  The arguments in Billie’s defense were diverse. His lawyer contended that the Endangered Species Act did not apply to noncommercial hunting on the reservation, and that the charges violated Billie’s freedom of religion because panther claws were used by medicine men and panther hides and skulls were used as Seminole power tokens, and that the panther hide had been seized unlawfully because the game officers had no warrant when they first came to his lodge in Big Cypress, and that, finally, Billie didn’t know he was shooting a panther—he thought he was shooting a deer, and even if he had known it was a panther he had no way of knowing it was one of the endangered Florida subspecies rather than merely an ordinary panther. Moreover, Chief Billie’s attorney argued, the government couldn’t definitively prove that the animal really was a protected Florida panther, since the protected subspecies Felts concolor coryi is almost impossible to distinguish from other subspecies. This was not a novel legal tactic in Florida. For years, accused hog thieves had defended themselves in court by claiming that they thought the domesticated hog they’d stolen was actually a wild razorback and therefore ownerless and therefore they hadn’t stolen it from anybody, and if they had, they certainly hadn’t meant to—it was just an honest case of zoological misidentification. Eventually, the Florida legislature in 1937 did away with the I-didn’t-know-it-was-a-farm-hog-I-thought-it-was-wild defense by decreeing that as a matter of law, particularly laws applying to pig theft, there were no wild razorback hogs in the state. The federal jury in the Billie case deliberated for two days and then informed the judge that they were hopelessly divided over the question of whether the prosecution had absolutely proved that the animal was a Florida panther. Consequently the federal district judge declared a mistrial. The state prosecution—State of Florida v. James E. Billie—went to trial the following month. After less than two hours of deliberation the state jury acquitted him, and jurors later said that they were not convinced that the animal had been positively identified as a Felts concolor coryi. The day after the state acquitted him, the federal charges against Billie were dropped, probably because federal prosecutors took the state acquittal as a bad omen. At that point, Chief Billie demanded that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service return the panther hide to him, but his demand was refused because according to the Fish and Wildlife agents the hide was contraband. The flurry of prosecution was finally over at the end of October. In May, Chief Billie was reelected to a new four-year term as chairman of the Seminole Tribe. Shortly after, the federal government announced that it would be applying the Endangered Species Act’s Similarity of Appearance provision to any big cats in Florida; that is, anything in the state that could possibly be mistaken for an endangered Felts concolor coryi was now also protected under federal law.

  —

  While his band was warming up, Chief Billie told jokes to the crowd. He was speaking either Hitchiti or Muskogee—I don’t know which because I don’t speak either one. It was a brilliant morning and the grandstand seats were as warm as griddles. After the jokes Billie said in English, “Now, you Indians better be careful about buying bear claws here at the fair! I hear a game warden’s looking to give you a hard time!” He let his guitar dangle against his hip and winked to the crowd. His hair was longish and choppy and he had high cheekbones and black eyebrows and a foxy, sharp-chinned face that looked good onstage. That morning he was dressed in a fancy cowboy shirt, black jeans, and a string tie. He winked again. “Boy, I’d sure love to have some sardines and crackers right now,” he said in an intimate tone. “Funny with us Seminoles, isn’t it? Now we got a casino and we got big dividends but instead of having a new lifestyle, we’ve just elevated our old lifestyle. We grew up on sardines and crackers. Now we have all our newfound wealth and what do we do with it? Well, we just buy lots of sardines and crackers, right?” He laughed. “As long as I can remember, I was always out in the swamp with my grandparents. What we killed that day we ate that night. It’s kind of hard to get that out of your system. It’s just the way I am. It’s the way we are.” The band started playing “Down in the Boondocks.” The crowd clapped along through the entire song. Toward the end of the final verse, a little boy—Chief Billie’s youngest son—ran out into the middle of the arena followed by a small, fat alligator whose jaws were held shut with duct tape. The boy was slight, bare-chested, and barefoot. In a moment he cornered the alligator and then straddled it. The crowd cheered and Chief Billie smiled, brushing his lips against the microphone. The boy arched his back. The alligator arched his back. With one hand the boy grabbed the alligator’s snout and raised it in the air. With his other hand he reached up and flashed a victory sign.

  —

  In the middle of the afternoon I ran into Vinson Osceola near the front gate. Vinson was the only one of the defendants in the orchid case besides Laroche I’d gotten to know a little bit and I liked him a lot, even though he was quiet and sardonic and had never been particularly friendly. I happened to have met his girlfriend, Sandy, at the Little Mr. and Miss Seminole talent contest the first day of the fair, and between the Little Mr. Seminole who performed “Jailhouse Rock” and the Little Mr. who sang a squeaky, rueful version of “It’s My Desire to Live for Jesus,” she told me what it had been like to grow up on the Big Cypress Reservation in a shack with her grandparents and uncles, what it had been like hearing the Florida rain strike the tin roof like buckshot and staying up all night, all of them, making up stories about what the rain was trying to say. Now she lived in Hollywood, which she said was nice but too fast—too much of an urban place, too many cars and drugs and bars and street corners that made it too hard to have kids grow up in the Indian way.

  When I ran into Vinson he was waiting for Sandy so they could go together to the community dinner. She was helping set up the dinner and he had agreed to oversee the grilling of two thousand steaks. As usual, Vinson was wearing mirror sunglasses, so I couldn’t tell whether he was looking at me or through me or around me, although he seemed to at least be listening to me. I asked him whether he had been back to the Fakahatchee since the judge’s decision, and he said, “Nah, nah, not since then.” I wondered if he’d seen or talked to Laroche since Laroche had left the reservation. “Nope, haven’t seen or talked to the dude,” he said, running his finger back and forth under his chin. “He’s what got us in trouble.” Had he collected any orchids since Laroche left? “Nah, none, no way,” he said. “Before we got in trouble with Crazy White Man, the orchids are what got us into trouble in the first place.” I wanted to go to the community dinner, but it was Indians-only, and no one I appealed to for permission would budge. Vinson explained that it would bother the older people to have a white person at the dinner—that no matter how many years they’d been mixing in the non-Indian world, they still felt separate and suspicious. “White people, it’s your job to make money,” he said to me. “Indians, we have our own job. Our job is to take care of the earth. We are different from you and we always will be.”

  Instead I went to watch the end of the rodeo. The first night’s rodeo had been restricted to Indians, but Saturday night was open to any kind of cowboy or cowgirl, and a lot of the roping teams were made up of one Seminole and one non-Seminole. I watched the team of Wildcat Jumper and Sean John storm around after a thick-necked bull named Jimmy Lee while the sun fell behind the palm trees. I had a long drive ahead of me and it was late, so I watched one more team try to rope a bull named Risky Business and then I walked back to my car. I passed the Seminole Casino on the way, the acres of parking lots with guard towers raised like hackles here and there, the plain gray facade of the casino building. There was not one empty parking spot in the place. It was nearly midnight, but people were still streaming in—couples in dinner clothes, a broad-backed older woman with an aluminum walker, a pair of white-blond big-breasted girls in cowboy shirts and boots, a man with thick plastic glasses and the heedful face of a night watchman. The casino wasn’t much to look at inside, except for the painting of Chief Billie on the wall wit
h the Seminole greeting “Sho-naa-bish” in giant script beside him. Otherwise it was a big, quiet cavern with tables and tables of men playing Texas Hold-Em and 7-Card Stud beside a sign that said POKER IS FUN AND RELAXING. The only sound was the clicking of poker chips. It was a room filled with a million precise, intense, noiseless movements, like an operating theater during brain surgery. In another room, hundreds of people seated at long tables were playing bingo. Many of them had collections of lucky totems next to their bingo cards—rabbits’ feet, plastic elephants, statuettes of the Virgin Mary, snapshots, small plush toys, rosaries—and they were silent, too, until the man at the head of the room called out “B-twenty-three” or “O-seven,” and then there would be a murmur and a shifting, like the sound of water running out of a tub, and when someone yelled out “Bingo!” there was the sound of hands slapping down on cardboard game cards as the exasperated losers swept their chips away so they could start again. The waiters and the waitresses and the poker dealers and the bingo callers and the valet parkers and the casino cashiers were all white people, all with fluorescent-tinted skin and stiff hairdos, and all the customers were white and some had tourist tans and bloodshot eyes, and even though the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Seminole tribe’s annual powwow was being celebrated only a few yards away and the chief of the Seminole tribe was peering down on every single table of Texas Hold-Em and 7-Card Stud, you felt nothing of that world at all in here—you felt only the fever and focus of the games and the hard heat of people wanting to win.

  Fortunes

  As much as I marveled at Laroche’s devotion to the things he was devoted to, I marveled even more at his capacity for detachment. For instance, my account of the tribal fair and the new nursery barely registered with him since he had now completely renounced the Seminoles. For two years he had been absorbed by them. He had sunk himself deep. I could understand that he was angry with the tribe for firing him and stung by realizing he was never part of it and never would be, but it was something more than that—for him, it was as if the tribe had disappeared from the face of the earth.

  He had also completely renounced the kingdom of plants. He hinted that he was fed up with the orchid world when I had first talked to him about the powwow, but I hadn’t believed him. But that is just what he had done. He was no longer devoted to the ghost orchids he’d poached from the Fakahatchee or the hoyas he’d tried to wheedle out of his friend at the nursery or the Cattleya mutants he had created in the microwave or the collection of exceptional bromeliads and orchids that he’d been assembling since his first collection was wrecked in Hurricane Andrew or the plants he’d saved from being bulldozed at construction sites or the rare ones he’d traded for or had nearly gone broke to get his hands on. He had forsaken them all. When we first met, he had told me that this kind of finish was his style, but I had never pictured that his transit from one passion to another would be so complete. “Done,” he said to me the day after the powwow, after I’d been going on for a while about Chief Billie’s band and the fried alligator. “I told you, when I’m done, I’m done.” From the first time I’d heard of Laroche, I had been fascinated by how he managed to find the fullness and satisfaction of life in narrow desires—the Ice Age fossils, the turtles, the old mirrors, the orchids. I suppose that is exactly what I was doing in Florida, figuring out how people found order and contentment and a sense of purpose in the universe by fixing their sights on one single thing or one belief or one desire. Now I was also trying to understand how someone could end such intense desire without leaving a trace. If you had really loved something, wouldn’t a little bit of it always linger? A couple of houseplants? A dinky Home Depot Phalaenopsis in a coffee can? I personally have always found giving up on something a thousand times harder than getting it started, but evidently Laroche’s finishes were downright and absolute, and what’s more, he also shut off any chance of amends. He had the same emotional pitch as the kind of guy who would permanently misplace his ex-wife’s phone number, which as a matter of fact Laroche had done: he had no idea of where his ex-wife was living and no clue of her phone number and he claimed he didn’t care. He really seemed to mean it, although he made a habit of insulting her favorite flowers whenever we saw them at orchid shows.

  How this came up was that the South Florida Orchid Society Show was scheduled shortly after the Seminole tribal fair, and I assumed that Laroche and I were going to go together until he informed me that these days he couldn’t care less about orchids and orchid shows and therefore wasn’t planning to go. He had a new preoccupation. In the time between his dismissal by the Seminoles and the powwow, he had taught himself everything there was to know about computers and was now making money by building websites for businesses and, as a private sideline, posting pornography on the Internet. He was in love with computers. He even loved the pornography part of his computer work. This was not because he loved pornography; it was because being an Internet pornography publisher was, in his mind, another opportunity to profit from human weakness, something he especially liked to do. He said that he couldn’t believe people were paying him to post pictures of naked fat people on the Internet, just the way he couldn’t believe people had paid to buy the worthless guide to growing marijuana he was selling when we first met. “People spend a fortune on this junk, and I just keep charging them more and more,” he explained to me one morning on the phone. “Maybe at some point it will dawn on these shitheads that they’re wasting their money posting these lousy pictures and they’ll cut it out. I’m doing them a favor by helping them realize how ridiculous it is. That’s why the more I charge, the more helpful I’m being. Anyway, in the meantime, I’m making a shitload of money.” He happened to sound awful that day, as if he were dying, but he assured me that it was just kidney trouble from his pesticide poisoning and that he’d been sick for about four months but was probably getting better. Anyway, he said, he was in a great frame of mind. “Look, the main thing is, the Internet is cool,” he said. “It’s not going to die on me, like some plant, and it’s not going to fuck me over like the Seminoles.” He worked building legitimate businesses’ websites for a company called NetRunner. His Internet alias was Sabercat. I found his website one day, which said: “Some of you may know me as Sabercat: Lord and Master of the now dead SaberSpace.… If you’ve called the NetRunner office and spoken to a somewhat arrogant and ‘different’ individual, that would be me. Unlike most of the ‘strange’ characters you may run across on the Internet, I am not strange because of the anonomity of the Internet, I’m just bizarre, period.”

  We talked for another few minutes, and once again I raised the idea of our going together to the orchid show. He wouldn’t change his mind, but he finally agreed that I could keep him posted about my plans and that he might meet me for a few minutes if I was really desperate for his company. That’s the way it was with Laroche. Everything with him was extremes. The regular world was too modulated for him. It wasn’t enough for me to merely want him to go, the way an ordinary person might want another ordinary person to do something. On the other hand, if I was really desperate, then perhaps he would keep it in mind.

  —

  Except for Laroche, nearly everyone I’d met in Florida was going to the show, including Martin Motes, Tom Fennell, Bob Fuchs, Frank Smith, and all the American Orchid Society people I’d been introduced to at the gala. The South Florida Orchid Society show is the biggest show in Florida, and except for the orchid show in Santa Barbara, California, it is the most important one in the country. I didn’t have much hope that it would finally afford me a chance to see a ghost orchid in bloom, but I still wouldn’t have missed it for the world. A few days after my conversation with Laroche I called my vanda-breeder friend Martin Motes and told him how Laroche was bucking my invitation, and Martin said I should forget about Laroche and come hang out at the show with him instead. I knew it would be fun to go with Martin in spite of my recent unhappy experience with his dog, because he had always shown me interesting things
. Besides, he swore that lately the dog had been in a better mood.

  I went over to his house the next day. “Bless my heart, I have a million things to do,” Martin said in greeting. He and his wife, Mary, had been English professors before devoting themselves to orchids; in fact, Martin returned from a senior Fulbright lectureship in Yugoslavia in 1976 to set up Motes Orchids. Even in the greenhouse, dressed in his worn-out khakis, up to his knuckles in moss and vermiculite, he looked like a man who would be at ease in front of a chalkboard spinning theories about Yeats. His house, his yard, his wardrobe all were academically shabby. His one nonprofessorial accessory was a BMW sedan. It was a Benlate BMW. Martin, like many other Florida orchid growers, lost a lot of plants after using the Du Pont fungicide Benlate, and even though Du Pont still insists that Benlate was not responsible, it settled with hundreds of growers for millions of dollars; the company’s payments were almost $400 million in Florida alone. Martin had a droll attitude toward catastrophe. When he bought the BMW with his settlement money, he put a bumper sticker on it that said BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY. Du Pont is still settling Benlate claims. Orchids are risky business. In some cases, Benlate settlements have been far more remunerative. Some growers took their Du Pont money and retired on it, and it was rumored that people were selling half-used bags of the fungicide to growers who might or might not have actually used it but wanted credible-looking evidence to present to Du Pont.