Gator Country, page 1
Begin Reading
Table of Contents
About the Author
Photos
Copyright Page
Thank you for buying this
Flatiron Books ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
For my dad,
who taught me how to tell a story.
Ken Renner
(1958–2014)
INTRODUCTION
OPERATION ALLIGATOR THIEF
The first time I saw an alligator up close in the wild, I was seven years old. Before I ventured into the swamp by our house, my dad made sure I was prepared.
“The sun rises in the…?” he asked.
“East,” I said.
“And it sets in the…?”
“West,” I answered.
His call-and-response questioning ran me through the features of the wild country right outside our back door. That area of Central Florida, from the Mosquito Lagoon south by Cape Canaveral, north to the mouth of the St. Johns River in Jacksonville, and west out to Orlando, is one of the most biodiverse places in the country. It’s home to temperate forests, savannas, grasslands, marshes and swamps, pineland scrub and hardwood hammocks, estuaries, rivers, beaches, and springs. My home is a place where you’re just as likely to see cacti as two-hundred-year-old water oaks dripping with moss, where you’re just as likely to get stuck behind a tractor on the back roads as a fanboat towed on a trailer.
“And when it starts getting dark, you…?”
“Come home,” I said.
“Atta girl,” he said. “Be back in time for dinner.”
I set out into the swamp with an empty jam jar, looking to catch something. The twin pair of sinkhole ponds at the edge of the woods teemed with tadpoles. I plunged my jar into the muddy water up to my elbow and brought it up to the light to see two or three tadpoles thrashing among the swirls of duckweed. A pitiful catch. Maybe, I thought, I would do better in the creek.
To get there, I had to hike down through the scrub into a gully where I would find the deepest part of the swamp.
At seven, I was beginning to understand the richness of my world. I had petted baby alligators on display, their jaws taped shut, at the entrance of the new Walmart that had been built on swampland. I had swum with manatees and dolphins, watched in the tide as skates darted away from my feet in a plume of sand. Still, I hadn’t quite grasped the majesty and the danger of the natural world that surrounded me. Down at Spruce Creek, I crossed a muddy stream on a fallen palm log. A foot below me, the water was black, dyed like tea by oak leaves. I was set on reaching a sandy peninsula, half hidden by saw palms, that jutted out into the creek proper. Stepping down at the end of the log, I slipped. When I tried to catch my balance, my other foot landed in the water, and I sank up to my thigh. Was this that ubiquitous childhood danger, quicksand? Would I sink deeper if I struggled?
Then a reflection, like a ray of light on the polished gems I collected, drew my eye to the peninsula. Now in full view, I saw that the small stretch of sandy beach was already occupied by a half-ton alligator. The creature had a hide like an old tire and eyes like fossilized amber. He blinked lazily, sunning himself, and I imagined him sighing at the interruption I had brought. I scrambled up onto the log, mud clinging to my legs. Scared, but also curious and eager for a better look, I scampered up the bank, leaving the jam jar, and when I peered down, I could see a sliver of the gator’s glossy snout in the sunlight. Of course, he hadn’t moved. He was far less interested in me than I was in him. You don’t live to be that big by making unnecessary trouble with humans, even small, loud ones.
This encounter would prove to be the beginning of a lifelong fascination with reptiles, especially alligators. At every chance I got, I would troll the creek for them, hoping to find the same magnificent gator that first lit up my imagination. But gators didn’t only pop up in the backyard ponds of my childhood. They took up residence everywhere in popular culture. In cartoons such as All Dogs Go to Heaven, fat and zany alligators provided comic relief. Although alligators can be dangerous, there is something in the way they move about the world, and especially in the way we react to them, that is inclined toward the slapstick. Explorers once thought of them as living dragons. They represented the wild, untamable swamps of the so-called New World. Now these extraordinary beasts have been reduced to toothy jesters. Alligators’ association with the more recent Florida Man meme takes their inherent humor over the top. It doesn’t help that all young Floridians are taught to run in zigzags to escape gators, leading to many a humorous scene where a panicked swamp visitor runs wildly from a stationary and unamused reptile.
But for me, and for many others who grew up in the swampy Deep South, gators are just a part of life, no more extraordinary than a raccoon pilfering seed from your bird feeder. Yet they have appeared in my life when I least expect them. My friend quit the high school swim team to take an after-school job as an alligator wrestler. On visiting my family in New Orleans, Louisiana, I glimpsed alligator heads and claws used as talismans. Sometimes I’ll stop at a backwoods outfitter for some boiled peanuts only to be greeted by a head-high specimen, stuffed by a taxidermist to stand like a man and hold a tray of bagged pork rinds. I can’t help but think, You must be so embarrassed, friend. I wonder what it’s like to be such a regal predator, reduced in the afterlife to a junk-food display.
To my northern acquaintances, my relationship to alligators is often unusual. I grew up eating gator meat, a fact that elicits shock and disgust. But gator is fantastic breaded in cornmeal and immersed in peanut oil to fry. (And it’s much more sustainable than chicken, even with the alligator industry’s minimal regulations.) My family has been eating gator since before much of the South was part of the United States. On the Florida side, I come from a long line of Crackers, the local name for Florida cattlemen, and Floridanos, descendants of the first Spanish colonists to arrive in St. Augustine in 1565. These Floridanos may have been the ones who gave the alligator its name, begat by the term for lizard, el lagarto. Later in another southern swamp, my French Acadian forebears took up residence on the vast bayou at the mouth of the Mississippi River. It’s been a long time since my family has lived out on that swamp: My great-grandmother, a Gibson Girl, was a famed debutante in the Big Easy. Generations of my family lived in the Garden District. Every once in a while, I visit and confuse my friends by slipping into French conversation with locals in the Quarter. The swamp is in my blood, just as alligators and primordial bayous, hoary with moss and alive with shadows, are a part of the mythos that is America.
So it was no surprise that a line about “Operation Alligator Thief” casually dropped by one of my twelfth-grade students caught my attention. It was 2017, and I was still working as a high school teacher and living in an apartment-size house wedged between the swamp and a railyard. Teaching in the place where I grew up meant that I was privy to my kids’ struggles even when they hadn’t told me the exact details of their stories. I had lived a version of them, and they knew that. Even as an English teacher, I understood that my students might not be able to afford books, and that the time they might have spent reading was instead focused on more dire needs: helping raise siblings, working after- school jobs to pitch in for rent, sleeping on friends’ couches during family quarrels, trying to kick drug habits, or starting families of their own, accidentally or otherwise. These kids—sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old—already knew that sometimes you have to do questionable things in order to survive. It’s easy to speak in terms of black and white, but most of us live in the gray. They knew, too, that like them, I had big dreams for my life even though I was still stuck in that little town. I wanted to be a writer, and I was just getting my first publications. I was surprised that they encouraged me like I encouraged them, but I shouldn’t have been, because in viewing my future with hope, they maintained hope for themselves just as I had when I was their age.
The first time I heard one of my students talk about poaching, I was walking by the desk of a young man, eighteen, who came to school clad from head to toe in camouflage in the winter because those were the only warm clothes that he owned. He loved the woods, and all of his writing journal assignments were nature stories. Of course I stopped, because the conversation sounded interesting but also illegal. I was intrigued and concerned. He looked at me sideways and asked straight-out, “Would you narc if I told you somebody who isn’t me is picking palmetto berries and selling them to a guy from a drug company for $60 a bag?”
“Well, Somebody-Who-Isn’t-You better hope I won’t,” I said, “with that detailed hypothetical you just gave me.” But of course, I reassured him. My dad didn’t raise a snitch. “And don’t write about that stuff, either,” I said, pointing to his paper. “You never know who’s going to find something.”
He looked down at his paper, which he had already laboriously filled with chicken scratch, and then he looked up at me. “What if I call it fiction?” he said.
“Sure,” I said with a laugh. “Looks like a good start to a short story.”
Ours was also a storytelling culture down in Florida, and soon I would discover that this was doubly true for the ones among us who were poachers.
For those of you who imagine all poachers to be rich big-game hunters, the idea that high schoolers are out there poaching may come as a surprise. The fact is that the typical poacher has very little to do with glamour or the elephant-gun-toting villains we might imagine. By its simplest definition, poaching is the act of illegally taking flora or fauna from the wild. This is a broad umbrella, meaning the term encompasses everything from criminal syndicates hunting critically endangered rhinos to freegans foraging on public land where taking natural products is against local statutes. The definition gets even muddier from there, particularly when discussing legality, as I would see when I delved further into the tangled and confusing web of wildlife law. Sometimes the laws that govern these practices are difficult to understand, even by some of the people enforcing them. But the truth is that the vast majority of poaching is not perpetrated by high-profile hunters or even by criminal syndicates targeting charismatic megafauna. Those are just the ones you hear about. No, most illegal fishing and illegal wildlife hunting are done for subsistence. These poachers are usually living under the poverty line and hunting, fishing, or foraging to survive. You may not have realized it, but you’ve talked to poachers before. You may even be one yourself.
But that isn’t the narrative the poachers I’ve known have spun around themselves. According to them, they’re taking what should already be theirs. They believe nature is a resource that we all share, and the lawmakers and the officers cordoning off the wild for use by a select few are the ones in the wrong. These poachers see themselves as Robin Hoods. They are protesting the imbalances of power that have left them on the bottom. And interestingly enough, the poachers in my life would balk at the idea that they’re hurting nature. They love nature. The wild belongs to all of us, they say. They take no benefit from destroying their world. Instead, they are often the ones with the closest view to witness our wildlands’ destruction. All the best poaching stories share an intimate knowledge of nature.
Knowing then that he had an interested listener, my student wove a yarn—a veritable poacher tradition—about the lengths he went to while collecting palmetto berries. He went poking through the scrub with a big stick to whack the berries free inside a trash bag. Oh, the snakes he encountered, the spiders, the hogs, the bears. He even knew where the berries were going: Drug manufacturers turn them into men’s health supplements. His berry buyer, according to him, was a researcher investigating the use of palmetto berry extract as a treatment for prostate cancer. To my student, this pricked at the tangled nature of morality. “I’m breaking the law,” he mused to me, “but it could end up saving people’s lives. How weird is that?”
“Pretty weird,” I said, and again trying to redirect him to the assignment at hand: “You should write about it.”
“Naw, you should,” he responded.
Should I have reported my student? I don’t know. There are people who would say yes. But I was far more interested in keeping his ass in class so he could learn to read and write well enough to graduate. My silence over a few palmetto berries seemed an infinitesimally small price to pay for that.
From that day on, anytime he had a good poaching tale, he practiced it on me. There weren’t too many. Both of us saw our world as a bit mundane. Then one day, he said, “Miss Renner, you’ll never believe what I heard.
“You know how I’ve told you about the berries and fish and ferns and stuff,” he continued, talking animatedly with his hands. “This one is about alligators.” He had heard from a friend of a friend who had just been arrested that the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, more commonly called FWC, was putting people so deep undercover that they were practically shapeshifters. You’d never know who they were until it was too late.
“There was this FWC guy down south that made this whole big fake alligator farm, but it was a trap. They had the whole place bugged like they were spies, and they arrested a whole bunch of people—like forty people—for catching alligators. My friend’s friend was one of them. They hauled him off to county [jail], and he’s over here like, ‘For what?’ He didn’t think he was doing anything illegal.” He was talking, of course, about Operation Alligator Thief, a multiyear undercover sting that led to the arrests of eleven alleged alligator poachers in one day alone, one of the biggest operations in the agency’s history.
“Who knows how many others there are.” Fake farms, he meant. Fake businesses. Fake people. Maybe even the researcher buying palmetto berries from him. There could be a face behind that face. Nothing was as it seemed.
“Don’t worry, Miss Renner,” he reassured me. “I’m not doing that stuff anymore. It’s not worth it.” He had gotten a job washing dishes at a steak house instead. “It’s just—” he said, as I turned to walk away. “What if it was me? It doesn’t seem right, what FWC did. Nobody’s doing this because they want to. It doesn’t seem fair.”
As all good stories do, this yarn stuck with me. It stuck with him, too. We both did some research, and we updated each other as we learned more. I told him I would try to write about it, but when I pitched the story to magazines—me with my scant publications and nonexistent reputation as a writer at the time—I didn’t get very far. After stories came out about Operation Alligator Thief a few months later, I read them, and in all but one, the writer treated Florida like an exotic backdrop. I couldn’t help but feel that something major was missing, but I didn’t have the time or the money to figure it out.
Yet the story came back to me again and again. I became obsessed. I needed to dig deeper. I couldn’t let it go. So many people had insinuated that FWC broke the law, but details on that were minimal. What had they done? And no one, it seemed, knew anything about the men who ran the operation, not even their real names. Who were these shadowy figures, these puppet masters who had bent reality to work their scheme? I hustled and learned and grew, entering the world of journalism. In a matter of three years, I went from churning out clickbait for content mills to writing for National Geographic and The New York Times. I wrote about invasive species, pollution, imagination, neuroscience, and dreams. I had all but given up on Operation Alligator Thief, but every so often, it would return to me. I would daydream about it, but then I would refuse its call. Even when I pursued the story, obstacles leapt into my way. Chief among them was having to pay my bills. I was scraping by on tenacity.
When I requested information on Operation Alligator Thief, the state had only a few files to share. Thinking they were holding out on me, I got on the phone with the public information officer and tried to charm more out of her. I wanted recordings, pictures, logs. I knew they must exist. They had to. I wanted to see what happened. I wanted to be there. Had FWC really set up a fake alligator farm? Was it just a trap, an empty set, or was it real? Who was this officer, the main man in the sting, whose fake name had been Curtis Blackledge?
“I’d give it to you if I had it,” the PIO said. “The undercover officer with the sting is the only one who has what you’re asking for.”
I had already looked for the officer. Using the scant information I’d gleaned from asking around—Blackledge, appropriately, had black hair; he had been a canine officer; he was perhaps Asian or a Pacific Islander—I combed through old social media posts by FWC until I found pictures of an officer who matched that description. There was only one. His name was Jeff Babauta. I dug up phone numbers that matched the name. I called each one, becoming more and more sure it was him as every line I reached came up disconnected. But a feeling, no matter how strong, is nothing without solid evidence. I couldn’t find an address or any social media profiles. No voter records. Nothing.
Whoever this guy was, he had done his job well. He’d vanished before the sting even started. And he was still gone.
I wanted to talk to him more than ever.
