Zoo Story (26 page)

Obviously Lex had a talent for dazzling this council of alphas who held his future in their hands. He knew when to listen respectfully, when to bathe them in praise, and when to inspire them with another sermon about an independent zoo fighting against the tide of extinction. Over the years he had invited many of the zoo’s most crucial supporters to join him on trips to Kenya and Tanzania. He had taken them to Swaziland to see the elephants eating their way through the trees. He had taken them to the palaces of Ethiopia and introduced them to what remained of the royal lions. Until now, it had worked. Even the deal with Safari Wild had been approved by Fassil Gabremariam and the rest of the board’s executive committee. Lex had asked for their blessing, and they had granted it. Now he had been cast as the scapegoat. It was hard to feel sorry for him, given how much damage he’d caused, but still it made no sense. Fassil had already resigned quietly, and it was difficult to understand why the rest of the executive committee hadn’t resigned with him. If the memorandum of understanding with Safari Wild was the font of all outrage, how did those who voted for it keep their positions?

The truth was, many of the audit’s findings about Lex should not have shocked anyone. His plan to build Safari Wild—and the likelihood of it generating controversy—had been reported in the
St. Petersburg Times
months before the monkeys escaped or the scandal broke. His intimidation of keepers had been reported as well. His habit of transferring animals back and forth between his ranch and the zoo, meanwhile, had not been a secret. He’d talked about it openly for years; the staff routinely saw him driving a trailer onto the zoo grounds, carting zebras or warthogs from his ranch. He had not acted as though he thought any of this was wrong. As the audit had noted, he seemed to view the zoo’s animals and those on his ranch and at the game park as part of one big traveling collection.

Even the transfer of the white rhinos had been conducted in the open. Iorio had dubbed it Rhinogate. But months before the scandal broke, the transfer had been featured on
The Mayor’s Hour
, Iorio’s own cable TV show. An episode that had aired in April showed a city Parks and Recreation crane lifting a crate holding one of the white rhinos onto the back of a flatbed truck in preparation for the move to Safari Wild. Lex smiled and waved at the camera as he drove the truck away, taking the rhinos to their new home.

Now that Lex was cornered, Iorio was giving interviews saying she couldn’t understand how so many things could have gone wrong without someone raising a flag. But in the years before, the flag had already been publicly raised on the Kremers’ Web site and in news reports published after the deaths of Herman and Enshalla. Clearly, Iorio had not been paying attention, even to what was happening with the zoo on her own TV show. For years, the mayor and a long list of other public officials and local luminaries had cozied up to Lex, rejoicing as he brought in the elephants, dancing in the conga line with him at the black-tie fund-raisers, standing beside him and cheering for the TV cameras when it was time to cut the ribbon on another new wing. At Karamu, Iorio had even worn her zebra-print jacket.

Only a few months before the scandal, the rich and powerful had treated Lex like a prince of the city. Then, in an instant, they had turned on him. Whether or not he deserved their scorn, there was something savage about the reversal. It was a primal reckoning that had nothing to do with audits or memoranda of understanding. Lex had been strong once. He had been useful to their purposes. Now that he was wounded and trailing blood through the grass, the pride was ready to finish him off.

That September,
just as the onslaught against Lex was beginning, five of the monkeys were still at large. The others had been captured alive and returned to human custody. The island at Safari Wild obviously was not a good idea, so instead they were shipped to Lowry Park for safekeeping. At the time, that fact did not yet seem ironic.

The next chapter was chronicled by
St. Petersburg Times
reporter Ben Montgomery. A rancher who lived near Safari Wild told Montgomery that he’d been in his truck one morning, headed out to feed his cows, when he caught a glimpse of an unidentified animal in the distance. It was big and reddish, and Trent Meador thought maybe it was a coyote. He stopped his truck, grabbed his rifle, and studied his prey through the scope. The animal, hiding behind a wild palmetto, seemed to be looking back at him. Meador saw white fur on the animal’s face and decided it was not a coyote but a raccoon. He pulled the trigger and went to retrieve the body and picked it up by its tail. Then he stuffed the carcass into a feed sack and put it in the back of his truck and called his wife.

“Shot a what?” she asked.

“Shot a monkey,” he said.

“You didn’t either.”

Once Meador showed his wife the proof inside the feed sack, he wondered if it might have been a mistake to kill the monkey. Without giving his name, he called the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

“If I saw one of those monkeys, and I shot it, would I be in trouble?” he asked.

The answer was no. Patas monkeys were a non-native species and were not protected. No charges would be filed.

Afterward, Meador kept the carcass in a freezer. Sometimes he took it out and snapped photos with his cell phone. He showed them to so many friends that people began to call him, asking to see his dead monkey.

Someone asked if he felt any remorse.

“Not at all,” he said. “You seen the teeth those jokers got on ’em? Teeth an inch and a quarter long.”

Eventually, he took the monkey’s body to a taxidermist to have it stuffed. He wanted it on the wall of his game room.

The final four fugitives remained on the loose. They were the most elusive and presumably the smartest. By now their exploits were legendary. Through all of that summer and fall they had made fools out of every human who pursued them—and a mockery of human ascendancy over other species. Their subversive freedom had even managed to bring infamy upon the man who had sought to imprison them. Sightings grew so rare that they began to seem like puckish phantoms, haunting the shadows at the edge of the swamp.

Lex Brown, a sod farmer, initially dismissed the reports he kept getting from his foreman, who insisted the famous runaways were lurking in the field behind his back porch.

“Señor!” cried the foreman. “The monkeys! The monkeys!”

“You’re loco,” Brown said. “They’re raccoons.”

The man would not budge.

“No,” he told his boss. “Monkeys, monkeys, monkeys.”

Finally the farmer drove over to the foreman’s house and peered across the meadow and glimpsed a quartet of monkeys bobbing. The farmer still didn’t quite believe it—maybe his eyes were wrong—and so he and the foreman started leaving out oranges and other fruit, just to see what happened. When the fruit disappeared, Brown was finally ready to believe. Monkeys? On his farm? That was new. It was funny, his having the same first name as the guy who’d accidentally let the monkeys out in the first place. But no matter. Through binoculars, he saw them taking cover in clumps of cypress trees and chasing one another across his sod fields and climbing on his corn feeders. He noted that there was a big male and a smaller male and a mother with a baby, and that the big male was the lookout. Whenever Brown drove toward them, the male would let out a warning and they would all scatter. It was a primitive alarm system, but effective. The farmer’s truck never got within a quarter-mile before they fled.

At first all of it was entertaining. Then came the Sunday morning in December when he discovered that one or more of the monkeys had defecated on his John Deere tractor. He realized that the monkeys were potentially serious pests. If somebody didn’t stop them, they would reproduce, and suddenly there would be all these new monkeys, just as hard to catch and just as ready to befoul his beloved John Deere and cause all other manner of minor havoc. “It was war,” he said. He was neighbors with Trent Meador and knew that Meador had shot one of the monkeys. But Brown didn’t want to kill them. Instead, he determined to build a better monkey trap, outfitting a big dog kennel with a trapdoor and dangling a bunch of purple grapes inside as bait. If a monkey entered, he’d have to stand on a pipe to reach the grapes, and the weight would release the trapdoor with a loud hiss and a bang. As he welded the pipe into place, his four targets huddled together on a motor grader off in the distance and studied his handiwork.

“You’re not going to catch those monkeys,” said his wife, Deana.

Brown set the trap later that day. The next morning, the big male was dancing inside the kennel, chirping angrily as he scrabbled along the walls to find a way out. Triumphant, Brown texted Deana:

GOT MONKEY #1

They named him Clarence and left him there to lure in the others. The next day they caught Casper, the other male. Then they caught Hazel and Hazel’s baby, Lola.

Containing the four of them in the kennel was a challenge. The monkeys had already proven to be good swimmers. Now they turned out to be restless diggers, as well, continually trying to claw their way out. Brown and his workers patched the damage, but the monkeys kept at it. Meticulous, they searched every square inch of the mesh, testing the wire for weak spots where they might push through. Repeatedly, Clarence hurled himself against the door with the operatic fervor of a professional wrestler.

Deana devoted herself to making sure the monkeys were well cared for. When it rained, she draped ponchos over the kennel so they wouldn’t get wet. She emptied her kitchen cabinets in search of Craisins and other morsels. She allowed the monkeys to reach through the mesh with their slender fingers and take the food from her palm, gentle as babies. She loved feeding them so much that she made special trips to the grocery. Usually she shopped at Publix, but on the monkey runs she went to Winn-Dixie, not wanting anyone she knew to see her and ask why her cart was filled with bananas and grapes. Enthralled with her new charges, she would sit beside their kennel and chat with them, delighting in the way they mimicked her expressions. She even let them hold her fingers.

“It’s different looking in a monkey’s eyes than in a cat’s or dog’s eyes,” she said. “There’s a connection.”

The love that Deana felt for the monkeys was overpowering. It was exactly the kind of bond that zoos hope for—that moment of recognition when an animal and a guest recognize something in each other. Deana wanted to keep the monkeys or else turn them loose again. But her husband said no.

“They’re not our monkeys,” he told her.

So on December 15, a trapper backed his truck up to the kennel and loaded the four monkeys up for their transfer. Eight months after they swam to freedom, the last handful of runaways was returned to Safari Wild.

The board meeting to decide Lex Salisbury’s fate was three days away.

That Thursday broke bright and clear and unseasonably warm, even for Florida. A sense of karmic justice shimmered in the sunlight. After a lifetime of consigning other animals to captivity, Lex had become the hunted. Newspaper editorials demanded his firing. Letter writers recited the litany of his alleged crimes against nature, from the murder of Enshalla to the heartless removal of the wild elephants from the savanna. Now the mayor had raised the possibility of criminal charges, a suggestion that evoked the remarkable image of a zoo director ending up caged.

Lex felt as though he had been invited to his own execution. Even so, he was not about to surrender. That morning, as he dressed and shaved and steeled himself to face the judgment of the other alphas, he believed he still had a fifty-fifty chance—a testament either to the strength of his character or the depth of his denial. There was no reason to stand before the board and make his case unless some part of him thought he could work his magic one more time and escape the trap in which he’d become so thoroughly enmeshed. It did not matter that he had laid the trap himself. He insisted that the audit was a sham that would never stand up in court. He saw himself as wrongly accused, misunderstood, persecuted. He wanted his moment.

He and Elena drove into Tampa together in their ’92 Nissan Pathfinder, so old and faded it was hard to tell it had once been gold. They had brought Pippi along for the ride, as well as another little terrier mix named Grub, possibly because he and Elena longed for the comfort of two creatures who still loved them. Lex was not about to explain such choices. He was in no mood for trifling questions. He no longer answered reporters’ phone calls, except to tell them never to call again. Whatever he had to say was for the board alone.

A swarm of TV news crews
awaited them at a hotel near the airport. Usually the board meetings were convened at the school attached to the zoo, where young children attended classes and camps, but the board chairman had decided he didn’t want the kids being disturbed by the stampeding media.

There had been a debate over whether the zoo should allow the press and public to attend the meeting. Pointing out that Lowry Park relied at least partially on public funding, Mayor Iorio and other officials argued it was only right that the meeting should be open. Instead, Lowry Park stonewalled. In a move that would make it clear that the zoo’s image problems could not be blamed solely on Lex, the zoo had hired five uniformed Hillsborough County sheriff’s deputies to keep reporters under control and away from the boardroom. The decision reinforced the impression that Lowry Park had a great deal to hide and offered fodder to critics who pointedly asked how the zoo could justify spending tax dollars to hire guards to keep the public out.

Even before the meeting began, the scene at the hotel descended into farce. A spokeswoman, with a smile pasted on her face but with panic behind her eyes, waded into the crowd of reporters and photographers, trying to herd them into an upstairs room. The journalists, who knew a cage when they saw one, ignored her. They planned to maintain their vigil until Lex made his grand entrance—they needed the footage—and now they called out questions at board members who were trying their best to slip into the hotel unnoticed.

The savage nature of the moment kept surging to the surface. As the journalists grew more impatient with the efforts to corral them and more frustrated with how long it was taking Lex to arrive, their aggression mounted.
We are sharks
, one reporter told herself,
waiting to be fed
.

Lex and Elena were en route
when word reached them about the mob out front. So they swung around to a back entrance. Lex got out and strode inside, ignoring the one or two reporters covering that door. Any thought of following him was rendered moot by the uniformed deputies.

With nothing else better to do, some of the journalists reluctantly retreated to the confinement of the media room and poured themselves coffee. A deputy stood outside the door, making sure they didn’t get close enough to the meeting to snoop. A couple of reporters drifted back toward the parking lot, hoping Elena would make an offering to the beast of their daily news cycle—a quote, a denial, even a muttered insult. Anything was better than the nothingness of the hotel corridors.

Elena parked the Pathfinder and hurried past them without a word, looking angry and disheveled. The reporters walked over to the SUV and noticed the vehicle had a bumper sticker in front:
eat more beef
. Peering inside, they saw one of Lex’s safari hats on the backseat, along with Pippi and Grub, who clamored by the window, barking at the strangers.

“Oh my God,” said one reporter. “There’s dogs in the car.”

By now it was midday and sweltering, with the sun bouncing off windshields. The reporters, sweating, looked at the terriers and knew they had a story. In Florida, dogs left in hot cars died all the time. Surely the wife of a zoo director would know that.

Someone inside the hotel warned Elena that reporters were lurking near the Pathfinder, so she came back out and moved it to a parking lot a couple of blocks in the distance. She wanted to hear Lex’s speech to the board, and she thought Pippi and Grub would be fine, because she’d left the SUV in the shade of a live oak and rolled the windows down a few inches. Undeterred, the reporters hiked over and kept an eye on the dogs. They called their editors, and soon the news appeared online. A reader, worried about Pippi and Grub, called Hillsborough County Animal Control.

“You can’t possibly be serious,” a spokeswoman for the agency said when she heard the news.

Inside the hotel, Elena was frustrated because she had been blocked from hearing Lex’s defense or even sitting with him outside the meeting. Like the journalists, she wasn’t allowed near the proceedings. Finally she gave up and made the long walk back to the Pathfinder and the dogs. An animal control investigator was waiting. By this point Pippi and Grub had been locked inside for anywhere from an hour to two hours. They were panting, but did not appear in serious distress.

The investigator confronted Elena.

“Would you leave your baby in a car with the windows cracked?”

Elena was tempted to reply that she wouldn’t put a dog collar on her baby, either, or have her baby neutered. Instead she looked at the investigator and said, “You’re absolutely right. I’m sorry.”

The investigator, Elena recalls, told her she was lucky not to be on her way to jail. If Elena had left the dogs in the heat any longer, the investigator said she would have been forced to break into the car and rescue the animals and have her arrested. Around them, the craziness kept escalating. A sheriff’s deputy pulled up, ready to take Elena into custody if necessary. Reporters hovered. A TV cameraman recorded Elena’s moment of shame. Pippi and Grub barked and barked.

“Welcome to my world,” Elena told the investigator.

Using a thermometer, the investigator determined that the temperature inside the SUV had climbed to ninety degrees. The investigator told Elena the dogs needed water. But when she brought some back, Pippi and Grub were more interested in declaring themselves to the cameraman. The investigator wrote Elena two tickets for improper confinement of animals, and two more for failure to have tags or vaccination records. Elena took the tickets, took the dogs, and drove away. Somehow, while her husband was inside fighting for his job, she had managed to get herself charged with animal cruelty.

The journalists scattered to call their editors again. Lowry Park’s efforts to muzzle the press had backfired. The whole thing was an embarrassment not just for Lex and Elena, but for the institution that had employed Lex for the past twenty years. Already, news of the cruelty charges was attracting hits on the news sites and spreading to animal lovers and zoo haters around the world.

The glee was unmistakable.

The afternoon dragged on.
Inside the media room, the captive journalists bristled. One reporter had to ask for permission to use the bathroom. The others kept poking their heads into the hall, watching for board members coming or going. They texted officials inside the meeting, begging for updates.

Whatever transpired in the room—the arguments and counter-arguments, the vote itself—was supposed to remain a secret. Inevitably, though, details trickled out. The city auditor delivered a detailed accounting of Lex’s manifold sins, an indictment so scathing that it rattled at least one board member who had been inclined to think favorably of the CEO. The mayor, through a representative, made ominous suggestions about the dire consequences that would rain upon the zoo if Lex was not driven from their midst. One board member, a retired president of an insurance brokerage firm, defended the accused and cautioned against rushing to condemnation. As the man spoke, he had the impression that none of his fellow board members was paying him the slightest attention.

Through it all, Lex waited in a nearby room, sequestered from the general proceedings—an odd requirement, given that even defendants in criminal trials are allowed to sit in court and hear the testimony and evidence arrayed against their future. When the board finally allowed Lex entrance into the inner sanctum, he was confronted by rows of faces, many appraising him with a detachment that caught him off guard. Others appeared livid. In the past, some of the directors had called him their friend, and before he entered the room, he had hoped that at least a few would remember the world they had created together at the zoo.

Lex tried to make his case. He had prepared a bound volume of documents refuting the charges in the city audit and had made sure that a copy was placed before every board member. He was ready to demolish the audit, line by line. But as he stood there, he realized most of the board had not even glanced at his documents and had no intention of doing so. Looking them in the eye, he apologized for his part of what had happened, but insisted that the blame was not entirely his to shoulder. All he’d ever wanted to do, he told them, was build a zoo that mattered.

“Don’t judge me completely by the past year,” Lex said. “Judge me by all twenty-one years I’ve given.”

One of the board members, a woman he’d danced with at Karamu, aimed a dagger of a question at his jugular.

“Did anybody ever tell you no?” she asked.

“Sure,” said Lex.

When they were done with him, he was shown the door. By then all of his cautious hopefulness was gone. The hearing had been a well-designed piece of stagecraft, but the outcome had obviously been decided long before. Making matters worse, the news of Elena’s debacle with the dogs had spread through the hotel. If there had truly been hope of Lex holding on to his job, surely the animal cruelty charges had shattered it. Here was a man allegedly incapable of protecting his own pets. Could the board really trust him at the helm of an ark?

No. Lex would either step down, or they would fire him. The vote was unanimous. Even Lex’s defender went along with the motion, since it allowed his friend a measure of dignity. The board chairman went to the room where Lex was churning and laid out his options. Lex agreed to resign. Afterward, he emerged from the hotel, stony-faced and silent, and caught a ride to a friend’s house where Elena awaited with the dogs and the citations and her new infamy.

It was unlikely that they would ever be invited back to the garden again.