The Orchid Thief (24 page)

“Well, we
were
making a fortune on the art,” Chady said. “Millions! Lee had a Lincoln, no,
two
Lincoln Continental cars! But you know, it was patrimony we were taking. It was illegal to take it out of the country of origin!” Outside the apartment, a truck squealed by and blasted its air horn. A screen door slammed, making a shimmery clatter. A bored-sounding dog barked once and then quit. Inside the Moores’ apartment it felt flat and plain and hemmed in. “We were outlaws!” Chady said, tapping her foot. “Oh my God, you wouldn’t
believe
.”

—

In fact, Lee Moore the Adventurer did have adventures and he did discover new plants. He found the last species of
Cattleya
to be discovered—a fantastic chartreuse orchid with red splashes and wavy edges that he named
Cattleya mooreana
. He discovered
Catasetum moorei
and
Encyclia lemorea
, two orchid species that are now used regularly in commercial hybridizing. He found an almost black bromeliad,
Aechmea chantinii
, and a striking crimson one he named
Neoregelia moorei
and one shaped like a firecracker explosion that he named
Guzmania bismarkii
. While on a collecting trip in Peru with a Baptist minister from Japan, he rediscovered a species of giant-sized staghorn fern,
Platycerium andinum
, that hadn’t been seen in a hundred years. In 1962 he was the Bromeliad Society’s Man of the Year. In 1965 he discovered a tall, branching bromeliad with powder-pink and light blue flowers. He named it
Tillandsia wagneriana
in memory of his friend Ronald Wagner, the snake-venom entrepreneur, who
died in a plane crash on one of their collecting trips in Colombia. According to Lee, the doomed plane had had only one empty seat, so he and Ronald had flipped a coin for it and Ronald won. All that survived the trip was Lee’s dog, Buck, and a metal box containing Lee’s customer list. The accident inspired Lee to start a newsletter. He called it
Lee Moore’s Armchair Adventurer
, and it included chronicles of his collecting trips, his life in the jungle, and photographs of unusual plants, indigenous jungle people, spiders, tapirs, and Amazon scenes. The first issue contained a photograph of his then wife, Helen, wearing a luncheon dress and playing with a parrot, and a photo of Lee’s baby daughter stroking her pet capybara, the largest species of rodent in the world. He devoted the entire first issue of the newsletter to the story of the plane crash that killed Ronald Wagner. Sometimes in the newsletter he included travel suggestions. In his second issue he explained how blowguns work and that the only antidote to their deadly poison was a sugar solution: “So if you are ever hit by a poison dart … remember, drink sugar water … 
if you have time
.”
Lee Moore’s Armchair Adventurer
had a limited life span. By the third issue Lee wrote that he was suspending publication because “I find I am so far behind in my work due to disasters.” One of those disasters happened to be another plane crash in Peru in which seven friends of his died. Once again he had intended to be on the flight, and this time he missed it because he got delayed en route. Because his name was on the airplane’s manifest he was listed as one of the casualties. His friends and family were surprised when he showed up alive. He devoted his final issue to telling the story of the crash. In the editor’s note he wrote:

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: