The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession

The Millionaire's Hothouse\ John Laroche is a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth. He has the posture of al dente spaghetti and the nervous intensity of someone who plays a lot of video games. Laroche is thirty-six years old. Until recently he was employed by the Seminole Tribe of Florida, setting up a plant nursery and an orchid-propagation laboratory on the tribe's reservation in Hollywood, Florida.\ Laroche strikes many people as eccentric. The Seminoles, for instance, have two nicknames for him: Troublemaker and Crazy White Man. Once, when Laroche was telling me about his childhood, he remarked, "Boy, I sure was a weird little kid." For as long as he can remember he has been exceptionally passionate and driven. When he was about nine or ten, his parents said he could pick out a pet. He decided to get a little turtle. Then he asked for ten more little turtles. Then he decided he wanted to breed the turtles, and then he started selling turtles to other kids, and then he could think of nothing but turtles and then decided that his life wasn't worth living unless he could collect one of every single turtle species known to mankind, including one of those sofa-sized tortoises from the Galapagos. Then, out of the blue, he fell out of love with turtles and fell madly in love with Ice Age fossils. He collected them, sold them, declared that he lived for them, then abandoned them for something else—lapidary I think—then he abandoned lapidary and became obsessed with collecting and resilvering old mirrors. Laroche's passions arrived unannounced and ended explosively, like car bombs. When I first met him he lusted only for orchids, especially the wild orchids growing in Florida's Fakahatchee Strand. I spent most of the next two years hanging around with him, and at the end of those two years he had gotten rid of every single orchid he owned and swore that he would never own another orchid for as long as he lived. He is usually true to his word. Years ago, between his Ice Age fossils and his old mirrors, he went through a tropical-fish phase. At its peak, he had more than sixty fish tanks in his house and went skin-diving regularly to collect fish. Then the end came. He didn't gradually lose interest: he renounced fish and vowed he would never again collect them and, for that matter, he would never set foot in the ocean again. That was seventeen years ago. He has lived his whole life only a couple of feet west of the Atlantic, but he has not dipped a toe in it since then.\ Laroche tends to sound like a Mr. Encyclopedia, but he did not have a rigorous formal education. He went to public school in North Miami; other than that, he is self-taught. Once in a while he gets wistful about the life he thinks he would have led if he had applied himself more conventionally. He believes he would have probably become a brain surgeon and that he would have made major brain-research breakthroughs and become rich and famous. Instead, he lives in a frayed Florida bungalow with his father and has always scratched out a living in unaverage ways. One of his greatest assets is optimism—that is, he sees a profitable outcome in practically every life situation, including disastrous ones. Years ago he spilled toxic pesticide into a cut on his hand and suffered permanent heart and liver damage from it. In his opinion, it was all for the best because he was able to sell an article about the experience ("Would You Die for Your Plants?") to a gardening journal. When I first met him, he was working on a guide to growing plants at home. He told me he was going to advertise it in High Times, the marijuana magazine. He said the ad wouldn't mention that marijuana plants grown according to his guide would never mature and therefore never be psychoactive. The guide was one of his all-time favorite projects. The way he saw it, he was going to make lots of money on it (always excellent) plus he would be encouraging kids to grow plants (very righteous) plus the missing information in the guide would keep these kids from getting stoned because the plants they would grow would be impotent (incalculably noble). This last fact was the aspect of the project he was proudest of, because he believed that once kids who bought the guide realized they'd wasted their money trying to do something illegal—namely, grow and smoke pot—they would also realize, thanks to John Laroche, that crime doesn't pay. Schemes like these, folding virtue and criminality around profit, are Laroche's specialty. Just when you have finally concluded that he is a run-of-the-mill crook, he unveils an ulterior and somewhat principled but always lucrative reason for his crookedness. He likes to describe himself as a shrewd bastard. He loves doing things the hard way, especially if it means that he gets to do what he wants to do but also gets to leave everyone else wondering how he managed to get away with it. He is quite an unusual person. He is also the most moral amoral person I've ever known.\ I met John Laroche for the first time a few years ago, at the Collier County Courthouse in Naples, Florida. I was in Florida at the time because I had read a newspaper article reporting that a white man—Laroche—and three Seminole men had been arrested with rare orchids they had stolen out of a Florida swamp called the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve, and I wanted to know more about the incident. The newspaper story was short but alluring. It described the Fakahatchee as a wild swamp near Naples filled with exceptional plants and trees, including some that don't grow anywhere else in the United States and some that grow nowhere else in the world. All wild orchids are now considered endangered, and it is illegal to take them out of the woods anywhere, and particularly out of a state property like the Fakahatchee. According to the newspaper, Laroche was the ringleader of the poachers. He provided the arresting officers with the proper botanical varietal names for all the stolen plants and explained that the plants were bound for a laboratory where they were going to be cloned by the millions and then sold to orchid collectors around the world.\ I read lots of local newspapers and particularly the shortest articles in them, and most particularly any articles that are full of words in combinations that are arresting. In the case of the orchid story I was interested to see the words "swamp" and "orchids" and "Seminoles" and "cloning" and "criminal" together in one short piece. Sometimes this kind of story turns out to be something more, some glimpse of life that expands like those Japanese paper balls you drop in water and then after a moment they bloom into flowers, and the flower is so marvelous that you can't believe there was a time when all you saw in front of you was a paper ball and a glass of water. The judge in the Seminole orchid case had scheduled a hearing a few weeks after I read the article, so I arranged to go down to Naples to see if this ball of paper might bloom.\ It was the dead center of winter when I left New York; in Naples it was warm and gummy, and from my plane I could see thick thunderclouds trolling along the edge of the sky. I checked into a big hotel on the beach, and that evening I stood on my balcony and watched the storm explode over the water. The hearing was the next morning at nine. As I pulled out of the hotel garage the parking attendant warned me to drive carefully. "See, in Naples you got to be careful," he said, leaning in my window. He smelled like daiquiris. It was probably suntan lotion. "When it rains here," he added, "cars start to fly." There are more golf courses per person in Naples than anywhere else in the world, and in spite of the hot, angry weather everyone around the hotel was dressed to play, their cleated shoes tapping out a clickety-clickety-clickety tattoo on the sidewalks.\ The courthouse was a few miles south of town in a fresh-looking building made of bleached stone pocked with fossilized seashells. When I arrived, there were a few people inside, nobody talking to anybody, no sounds except for the creaking of the wooden benches and the sound of some guy in the front row gunning his throat. After a moment I recognized Laroche from the newspaper picture I'd seen. He was not especially dressed up for court. He was wearing wraparound Mylar sunglasses, a polyblend shirt printed with some sort of scenic design, a Miami Hurricanes baseball cap, and worn-out grayish trousers that sagged around his rear. He looked as if he wanted a cigarette. He was starting to stand up when the judge came in and settled in her chair; he sat down and looked cross. The prosecutor then rose and read the state's charges—that on December 21, 1994, Laroche and his three Seminole assistants had illegally removed more than two hundred rare orchid and bromeliad plants from the Fakahatchee and were apprehended leaving the swamp in possession of four cotton pillowcases full of flowers. They were accused of criminal possession of endangered species and of illegally removing plant life from state property, both of which are punishable by jail time and fines.\ The judge listened with a blank expression, and when the prosecutor finished she called Laroche to testify. He made a racket getting up from his seat and then sauntered to the center of the courtroom with his head cocked toward the judge and his thumbs hooked in his belt loops. The judge squinted at him and told him to state his name and address and to describe his expertise with plants. Laroche jiggled his foot and shrugged. "Well, Your Honor," he said, "I'm a horticultural consultant. I've been a professional horticulturist for approximately twelve years and I've owned a plant nursery with a number of plants of great commercial and ethnobiological value. I have very extensive experience with orchids and with the asexual micropropagation of orchids under aseptic cultures." He paused for a moment and grinned. Then he glanced around the room and added, "Frankly, Your Honor, I'm probably the smartest person I know."

The Millionaire's Hothouse3Cloning the Ghost20A Green Hell34Orchid Fever42A Mortal Occupation55Gorgeous86The Good Life103Anyone Can Grow Orchids134Plant Crimes153Barbecued Doves184Osceola's Head203Fortunes244A Kind of Direction262Bibliography283

\ From Barnes & NobleBarnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers\ Whatever the reason for their particular appeal, orchids, since their arrival in America in 1838, have come to symbolize elegance. Yet essayist Susan Orlean uncovers the rough drama behind the flower's history, recounting tales of paid professional hunters who met their deaths through drowning, fever, and murder in locales like Bhamo, Myanmar, Panama, and Ecuador. Contemporary Florida, it turns out, is a hotbed for the shady side of orchid mania, and it is there that Orlean meets the "thief" of her title, John Laroche. A reckless iconoclast, Laroche is an orchid breeder who gleefully cooks seeds in his microwave. After the wealthy Seminole tribe hires him to run a nursery, he concocts a grandiose scheme to obtain a rare "ghost" orchid from the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve and clone it. The slight hitch is that, under Florida's Endangered Species law, it's illegal to collect wild orchids. The Seminoles, however, consider themselves at war with America, and Laroche enlists a few members to commit the actual theft, assuming that Native Americans are exempt from government law. After stuffing 200 orchids into pillowcases, Laroche and his cohorts are arrested, and Laroche is convicted. \ Orlean hopes Laroche will offer her insight into orchid mania, and he makes a lively, contrary companion as he guides her through Florida's often bizarre botanical subculture. In Palm Beach mansions and low-rent bungalows, at conferences, galas, and greenhouses, she is introduced to devotees who regale her with accounts of rivalries and discoveries, of lives both ruined and enlightened by a passion for "the most compelling and maddening of all collectible living things." In the end, Orlean herself succumbs to orchid mania and makes a heart-of-darkness trek into the frightening Fakahatchee swamp, taking the reader on a fascinating journey in which obsession ultimately becomes, in her vision, an optimistic belief in "the perfectibility of some living thing" and its power to transform our lives.\ \ \ \ \ \ USA TodayA lesson on the darkdangeroussometimes hilarious nature of obsession...You sometimes don't want to read onbut find you can't help it.\ \ \ Detroit Free PressDeliciously weird...luscious and oozy as a caramel left to sweat in the Miami sun.\ \ \ \ \ NewsdayDamp heat, bugs, wild hogs, snapping turtles, poisonous snakes — and orchids...Wouldn't have missed it.\ \ \ \ \ Salon.comSusan Orlean, a New Yorker essayist, is fond of leafing through small-town newspapers. She knew she was on to something when she tripped over the following odd combination of words in a Florida daily: "swamp," "orchids," "Seminoles," "cloning," "arrest." The tiny news item, about an upcoming hearing for an accused rare-plant poacher, had "cool story" written all over it. And so, Orlean, a pale and completely unpretentious redhead who makes Maxfield Parrish's models look like she-bears, took off for Naples, Fla., to investigate. The scene was not exactly what she expected. Soon she was standing hip-deep in the steaming Fakahatchee Swamp beside the very man the fuss was all about, a driven, eccentrically charming weirdo who struck her as handsome despite his lack of teeth. Their quarry: the rare polyrrhiza lindenii, or ghost orchid, which is federally protected and grows nowhere else in the world. \ John Laroche, the orchid thief, had been trying to spirit several pillowcases full of ghost orchids out of the swamp when he was arrested. That's how he first made the papers. His three Seminole assistants were supposed to legitimize the theft, since the Fakahatchee is Seminole land. It's not surprising that he'd risk his neck in order to snag such booty. Propagating and selling ghost orchids -- as the botanically savvy Laroche was fully able to do -- would have made him very rich. What's especially strange about The Orchid Thief -- and it becomes increasingly fascinating as the story progresses -- is what a big deal orchids are. There's a rollicking history of orchidmania in here, if you can imagine such a thing, and a series of cameos depicting nurserymen and international smuggling. Ultimately, Laroche turns out to be just another nut in a long line of orchid nuts.\ Orlean's buoyant, self-assured style makes the journey fun, especially when she's looking at the plants themselves, which are astonishing in their variety. "There are species that look like butterflies, bats, ladies' handbags, bees, swarms of bees, female wasps, clamshells, roots, camel hooves, squirrels, nuns dressed in their wimples, and drunken old men," she writes, particularly dazzled by a flower that looks like a pig on a swizzle stick. "People say a ghost orchid in bloom looks like a flying white frog -- an ethereal and beautiful flying white frog." Are we going to get to see one? There's real suspense around this question, and it lasts until the very last page.\ — Sally Eckhoff\ \ \ \ \ \ Sally EckhoffSusan Orlean, a New Yorker essayist, is fond of leafing through small-town newspapers. She knew she was on to something when she tripped over the following odd combination of words in a Florida daily: "swamp," "orchids," "Seminoles," "cloning," "arrest." The tiny news item, about an upcoming hearing for an accused rare-plant poacher, had "cool story" written all over it. And so, Orlean, a pale and completely unpretentious redhead who makes Maxfield Parrish's models look like she-bears, took off for Naples, Fla., to investigate. The scene was not exactly what she expected. Soon she was standing hip-deep in the steaming Fakahatchee Swamp beside the very man the fuss was all about, a driven, eccentrically charming weirdo who struck her as handsome despite his lack of teeth. Their quarry: the rare polyrrhiza lindenii, or ghost orchid, which is federally protected and grows nowhere else in the world. \ John Laroche, the orchid thief, had been trying to spirit several pillowcases full of ghost orchids out of the swamp when he was arrested. That's how he first made the papers. His three Seminole assistants were supposed to legitimize the theft, since the Fakahatchee is Seminole land. It's not surprising that he'd risk his neck in order to snag such booty. Propagating and selling ghost orchids -- as the botanically savvy Laroche was fully able to do -- would have made him very rich. What's especially strange about The Orchid Thief -- and it becomes increasingly fascinating as the story progresses -- is what a big deal orchids are. There's a rollicking history of orchidmania in here, if you can imagine such a thing, and a series of cameos depicting nurserymen and international smuggling. Ultimately, Laroche turns out to be just another nut in a long line of orchid nuts.\ Orlean's buoyant, self-assured style makes the journey fun, especially when she's looking at the plants themselves, which are astonishing in their variety. "There are species that look like butterflies, bats, ladies' handbags, bees, swarms of bees, female wasps, clamshells, roots, camel hooves, squirrels, nuns dressed in their wimples, and drunken old men," she writes, particularly dazzled by a flower that looks like a pig on a swizzle stick. "People say a ghost orchid in bloom looks like a flying white frog -- an ethereal and beautiful flying white frog." Are we going to get to see one? There's real suspense around this question, and it lasts until the very last page.\ — Salon\ \ \ \ \ \ London Review of Books...[F]ull of twists and turns....a fascinating account of one remarkable life form in pursuit of another, the cast of fanatics being as weird and wonderful as the hybrids themselves.\ — Richard Rudgley\ \ \ \ \ New York Times...[A]rtful....her orchid story turns out to be distinctly "something more"....Ms. Orlean's portrait..allows the reader to discover...acres of opportunity where intriguing things can be found. \ —Christopher Lehmann-Haupt\ \ \ \ \ Entertainment Weekly...[T]he portraits here are finely drawn and certainly a pleasure to read... \ —Vanessa Friedman\ \ \ \ \ New York Times Book ReviewStylishly written, whimsical yet sophisticated, quirkily detailed...It shows Orlean's gifts in full bloom. —Ted Conover\ \ \ \ \ Fine GardeningThievery is one thing, but any gardener swept away by the beauty of a plant can understand obsession, especially when it takes the form of an absolute, unbearable need to possess some delicate charm. And that obsession to own runs deep in those consumed by the surreal beauty of orchids. Susan Orlean explores the obsessive nature of those passions in this fascinating story of treachery, greed, jealousy, and lust among orchid hunters and collectors in South Florida. It's a tale rife with fascinating characters, exotic locales, and oddities of all kinds. \ — Steve Silk\ \ \ \ \ Publishers WeeklyFor listeners seeking to learn something new, Orlean offers a whimsical look at the sexy, mysterious world of orchids. Perfect for anyone who wants to know a little bit about a lot of things, this quirky, quintessential New Yorker story pulls back the curtain on a community of people who are driven by a passion to collect and cultivate some very exotic plants. New York journalist Orlean first learned about orchid "thief" John Laroche by reading a story about him in a local Florida newspaper. He (along with his henchmen, three Seminole Indians) had been taken to court for removing an endangered species of orchid from the state's Fakahatchee Swamp. Orlean hightailed it down to the Sunshine State to investigate and wound up immersing herself in the wacky world of orchid maniacs, intrigued more by their passion than by the orchids themselves. Myers's reading vacillates between the inspiring and the pedagogical. When reading passages about the over-the-top nature of some eccentric orchid collectors, her tone borders on the affected. But during the book's more introspective moments, as when Orlean wishes she could be as passionate about something as her subjects are about orchids, Myers turns quiet and pensive. Overall, Myers's enthusiastic performance is a perfect complement to Orlean's book and the new motion picture loosely based on it, Adaptation. Based on the Random hardcover. (Sept.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.\ \ \ \ \ Library JournalThe thief in question and offbeat genesis for New Yorker writer Orlean's book is ever-quotable eccentric John Laroche, whose craving for the rare orchid eventually lands him and three Indian accomplices in a Florida courtroom--and allows Orlean to write her appreciative and lyrically funny profile of obsession and Florida. (LJ 1/99) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\ \ \ \ \ Brill's Content...[A]n engrossing tale of eccentric ambitions....[A] vivid, sympathetic account.\ — Matthew Heimer\ \ \ \ \ Entertainment Weekly...[T]he portraits here are finely drawn and certainly a pleasure to read...\ — Vanessa Friedman\ \ \ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsExpanded from a New Yorker article, this long-winded if well-informed tale has less to do with John Laroche, the "thief," than it does with our author's desire to craft a comprehensive natural and social history of what the Victorians called "orchidelirium." Orlean (Saturday Night) piles anecdote upon detail upon anecdote—and keeps on piling them.\ Laroche, who managed a plant nursery and orchid propagation laboratory for the Seminole tribe of Hollywood, Florida, was arrested, along with three tribesmen, in 1994 for stealing rare orchids—"endangered species"—from the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve. He had intended to clone the rarer ones (in particular, the so-called "ghost orchid") and sell them on the black market. Always a schemer and an eccentric hobbyist (old mirrors, turtles, and Ice Age fossils all fascinated him), Laroche figured he'd make millions. Found guilty, he was fined and banned from the Fakahatchee; the Seminoles, ostensibly exempt under the "Florida Indian" statute concerning the use of wildlife habitats, pled no contest.\ But Laroche's travails form only the framework for Orlean's accounts of famous and infamous orchid smugglers, hunters, and growers, and for her analyses of the mania for "the most compelling and maddening of all collectible living things." She traces the orchid's arrival in the US to 1838, when James Boott of London sent a tropical orchid to his brother in Boston. That collection would eventually be housed at Harvard College. Orlean includes passages on legendary hunter Joseph Hooker, eventually director of the Royal Botanical Gardens; on collectors, such as the man who kept 3,000 rare orchids atop his Manhattantownhouse; and of other floral fanatics.\ \ \