The Orchid Thief (22 page)

There have always been a lot of theories about what had happened to the stolen orchids. Plenty of people thought that maybe Robert Perry’s memory wasn’t entirely reliable and that even though the orchids had disappeared from R. F. Orchids, they had never reappeared at Krull-Smith. Some people thought that someone had stolen them and that Frank Smith might have bought them without realizing they were stolen. Perhaps the tag Mike Coronado found had nothing to do with any stolen plants at all—it might have
been a tag from an old plant that Frank Smith bought legitimately from Bob’s father’s nursery, which is why it was a Fuchs Orchids tag rather than a R. F. Orchids tag. Frank Smith even speculated in his testimony that he might have been “set up” by Fuchs because he wanted to pay him back for blocking Bob’s application to be an orchid judge.

During the fall and winter after the possible reappearance and disappearance of the stolen plants at Krull-Smith, someone started making threatening phone calls to several south Florida orchid growers. Frank Smith got a few of the calls over the course of several weeks. On the morning of February 20, 1991, he received two of the calls in one hour. The first call was answered by a friend of Frank’s named Jane Daugherty who was at Krull-Smith office that morning feeding pet birds belonging to her and Frank. According to her later testimony, the man on the phone told Jane Daugherty that if she cared about Frank Smith at all, she should stop him from going to the 1991 South Florida Orchid Society show, which was being held in Miami the following week. Then, she testified, the caller identified himself as Bob Fuchs. The next time the phone rang at Krull-Smith, Frank himself answered and later testified that he recognized Bob’s voice and that the caller had said, “Well, it’s like this: if you come to the Miami show you’ll get fucked up.” Smith said the call scared him because he knew that Bob was angry about the critical letter he had written to the judging committee that might have wrecked Bob’s chances of becoming an accredited south Florida judge, and he also knew that Bob was still suspicious about the stolen plants that supposedly spent time in the Krull-Smith greenhouses. Even though the phone calls scared him, Frank was determined to attend the four-day-long orchid show, so he hired two bodyguards to accompany him. Another nursery owner who said she’d also
gotten threatening calls came to the show that year with bodyguards, too.

In Florida the felony of telephone harassment is defined as more than one call placed in one day specifically to “annoy, abuse, threaten or harass any person.” Frank Smith alleged that he had received two calls that day in February, so he was entitled to press charges. Depositions were taken that July. Bob Fuchs was charged with felony harassment by telephone, and on August 27, 1991, Judge Theotis Bronson and a twelve-member jury heard the matter of
State of Florida v. Robert Fuchs
. No one likes to talk about the case these days, so to learn more about it I had to listen to a tape of the trial proceedings. It made better listening than most trials because it was only a little bit about phone harassment and business competition and a lot more about passion and memorable flowers and secret love affairs. The trial began with Bob Fuchs’s lawyer questioning Frank Smith’s friend Jane Daugherty about the orchid show that launched
Vanda
Deva ‘Robert’:

Jane Daugherty had been feeding pet birds at Krull-Smith the morning of the phone calls. Some of the birds belonged to Frank, and the rest were hers. The defense counsel tried to suggest that Daugherty was an unreliable witness who was biased in favor of Frank Smith, since they were so intimate that they even commingled their birds:

From there, the trial became a speculative romance free-for-all. The prosecutor tried to show that Mike Coronado was in love with Bob Fuchs, his partner, and therefore could not be trusted as a witness; Coronado dismissed the suggestion. Then Fuchs’s attorney tried to show that not only was Jane Daugherty too enamored of Frank Smith to be a fair witness,
another
one of the state’s witnesses was also in love with Frank and therefore also unreliable. The prosecutor countered by saying that a witness who claimed he had been at R. F. Orchids the day of the phone calls and was Bob’s alibi was “very close” with Bob and therefore should be disregarded, and also that the college administrator who testified that Frank confessed to her that he didn’t think Bob was making the calls was also partial to Bob and thus one more biased witness. No one ever explained why Robert
Perry, the man who’d seen the silvery flower at Krull-Smith, had gotten himself involved—whether he was motivated by being in love with anything other than the silvery flower or anyone other than his wife. Bob Fuchs didn’t testify. In closing arguments, both his attorney and the prosecutor admitted wearily that the history of suspicion between the two men was so enmeshed in enmity that it was hard to draw out any individual thread. Did Bob threaten Frank Smith because he was convinced Smith had robbed his nursery? Did Frank Smith interfere with Bob’s application to be an orchid judge out of jealousy or because he really knew Bob to be dishonest? Did Bob actually try to frame Smith for the robbery as revenge for his rejection by the judging committee?

The jury found Bob Fuchs not guilty on all counts of felony harassment. The verdict meant that Bob Fuchs would not spend the growing season in jail. Besides that, the verdict made nothing else clear. It is impossible to know whether the jurors voted for acquittal because they didn’t believe Bob Fuchs had made threatening phone calls or because they believed he did make the calls but that the calls simply didn’t fit Florida’s narrow definition of harassment. And certainly nothing in the verdict helped solve the mystery of the stolen orchids. That night when I first met Bob Fuchs, I also met Frank Smith. He seemed pleasant and polite, but when I asked him to talk about the trial he looked at me as if my hair were on fire. He said he didn’t want to talk to me and he didn’t want to discuss the case at all, ever. He said the whole thing had come about because he’d been “talked into something” and that he had been “misled,” and anyhow, it was way in the past and everything was now all patched up. He agreed to talk to me about orchids sometime if I promised I wouldn’t ask him about the case.

The war between Fuchs and Smith lasted more than a decade. Probably no one except Frank and Bob will ever know what really happened, and it’s possible that even they don’t know exactly what had gone on. Bob is now an accredited judge in a different region of the country, and both he and Frank are continuing to do well in orchid shows. All of the R.F. orchids that disappeared, including the unforgettable silvery one, have still never been found.

Things disappear all the time in Florida, but they show up all the time, too. Florida is powerfully attractive. It is less like a state than a sponge. People are drawn to it. When white settlers arrived, they filled up the hospitable corners of the state and then they even filled up what was thought to be uninhabitable, including the “terrible strip of grass” of the Everglades, and they have never stopped coming. These days, in Collier County, where the Fakahatchee lies, a hundred newcomers set up households every single day, and urban planners say that there will be no more room in Naples—no room
at all
—in only eight more years. Exotic plants and animals are drawn to Florida, too. Many come in naturally—they swim ashore or are blown in on the wind—or are carried inadvertently on cargo boats or brought in legally for commerce, but a great number of the animals and plants that are brought to Florida are illegal to collect, transport, and trade. The Port of Miami is one of the biggest points of entry for smuggled
plants and animals in the country. The chief of environmental enforcement in Miami told me that it was especially popular with the sort of guys who might wake up one morning and say to themselves, “Boy, wouldn’t it be nice to have a pair of reticulated boa constrietors?” In 1996, for instance, a total of seven hundred thousand iguanas were smuggled into the United States through Miami. The devices smugglers use are manifold. In recent years, customs inspectors in Miami arrested a woman trying to smuggle in a rare woolly monkey by hiding it in her blouse, and a man wearing a vest with special pockets to carry his Australian palm cockatoo eggs, and a man carrying a toy teddy bear stuffed with live tortoises, and a man with a live boa constrictor under his shirt, and a man with pygmy marmosets in his fanny pack. They arrested a man who was trying to sneak a gibbon in by having the animal hug him around the middle and then hiding the bulge by wearing a very loose shirt. Inspectors have found falcons hidden in milk cartons, parakeets tucked in hair curlers, monkeys under people’s hats. They arrested a man named Lenin Oviedo, of Caracus, Venezuela, whose suitcase was packed with forty-seven rainbow boas, eleven redtail boas, forty-four red-footed tortoises, twenty-seven Amazon turtles, twenty-seven river turtles, and twelve pit vipers. Recently, they arrested another Venezuelan smuggler. This man had a bird-eating tarantula spider, two hundred baby tarantulas, and three hundred thumb-sized poison-arrow frogs in his carry-on bag. He also had fourteen juvenile boa constrictors in his pants.

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Plant smuggling in general and orchid smuggling in particular are dynamic worldwide enterprises. They have gotten even more so since the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora—now known
as CITES—by which more than one hundred nations have agreed to ban or restrict international trade in all wild things. The degree of restriction varies depending on the species. Orchids fall into two categories. Species that are considered rare and endangered fall under the stricter Appendix I of CITES, which forbids all collecting and trade of those plants. Every other orchid species on earth falls under Appendix II, which allows limited commercial and personal trade if the country of export issues a permit to the collector.

CITES is not universally admired. Many orchid people told me they think CITES is too broad because the real threat to endangered plants is not collectors but rather the loss of wild habitat. Collectors complain that developing countries are plowing down forests as fast as they can, destroying rare plants in the process, and collectors who will retrieve plants out of these areas are the only chance to preserve species that otherwise might vanish forever—the plants could then be cultivated and multiplied, the way endangered animals are put in breeding programs in zoos. In 1992 the International Orchid Seed Bank was established to preserve rare seeds. Orchid seeds can live for thirty-five years, so they can be preserved in the Seed Bank and someday be germinated and perhaps reestablished in the wild. The Seed Bank has storage facilities in Texas and California—according to the director, they need to spread the seeds among several locations in case one is sabotaged by, I guess, anyone on a mission to destroy orchid seeds. CITES has many supporters among orchid people, too, who argue that throughout history collectors have stripped the woods bare whenever they’ve had the chance, and orchids are so valuable that they have to be guarded against people motivated by profit rather than conservation. When I first heard impassioned speeches deriding CITES in my journeys in the orchid
world, I was shocked that any orchid lovers would oppose an environmentally protective treaty. Then I heard story after story of collectors who said they watched forests in places like Java and Belize burned down to make way for farmland, and rather than let the collectors go in and retrieve the orchids first, the CITES enforcers ordered that they stand back and watch the plants go up in smoke.