Gator Country, page 30
David nodded. “Yep.”
“Then go on to the next one.”
“Yep.”
I need you to say it! Jeff shouted in his head.
“Harvest that one and skip that one,” Jeff said. “We didn’t do that.”
“We did not do that,” David said emphatically.
That was it. That was enough. David had confirmed Jeff’s suspicions. He hadn’t only been supervising the egg collections when he said he wasn’t paying attention; he also knew that the crew had been breaking the law, and had just stood by and let them. His job had been to speak up for the state of Florida, for the alligators, and he hadn’t. It wasn’t a slip. It wasn’t a little mistake. He let all of this happen. The revelation came as a blow to Jeff’s heart. Oh, Dave, he thought. He tried not to let the disappointment play across his face.
“Did we not do 100 percent?” Jeff laughed, hoping that the bittersweetness of that victory did not carry over into his voice. “How is Robert going to justify that?”
“You look at Robert’s records, and you’ll see.” Now David laughed, too. “Robert’s records say we only harvested half of what we did.”
* * *
For his whole career, being friendly with the folks who sometimes snatched things from the woods was part of his job, a necessary one. It was part of who he was, too. Jeff Babauta was the kind of person who cared. Try as he might to separate himself, or who he had always believed himself to be, from the man he had to become for his job—he couldn’t do it. To defy this part of himself by calling them criminals or bad guys was one part of his identity he couldn’t shake when he stepped into Blackledge’s skin. He had all but lost himself to the character—except for this. He was told that this was necessary, this loss. He had to forget. He had to be neutral to do this job. But he was starting to embrace that without this compassion he would be missing why he was here in the first place, why he’d become a game warden and dedicated his life to protecting the wild. It was the central tenet of his being. It was the thing holding him up inside on those long nights he spent alone looking after the farm, nights that could have cracked him open and left him in the dark valley of his soul. Without compassion, there was no point to him being here, doing this, not any of it. Without compassion, he would lose Jeff Babauta for good.
Even though he was about to bring charges against so many people he had gotten to know, Jeff still saw room in there for a little much-needed compassion.
“I don’t think we should arrest Robin, or any of the wives, for that matter,” he told Lieutenant Wilson over the phone.
The agency was working with the DA to put together charges, and while that was building up, Jeff’s time as Blackledge was winding down. It was December, with Christmas around the corner, and Jeff was eager to get back to being himself again, whoever that was now.
“Why not?” Lieutenant Wilson asked. “Robin was as involved as anyone else there, maybe even more so.”
“If we arrest both of them, who’s going to take care of their kids?” Jeff asked. “They have three kids, George. Do you want to leave them without a dad and a mom? I don’t.”
If they had to choose one of them to prosecute, Jeff said, it should be Robert, whom several of their crew had called the mastermind behind their schemes, on camera no less. Though Robin was no less intelligent—and perhaps even more perceptive—than her husband, she had not orchestrated any plans to defraud the wild. She had only been accessory to them.
Most of the poachers had brought their families along for egg harvesting. Husbands and wives had worked as poaching teams. Most of the wives knew what was going on. But if both husband and wife were arrested, what would happen to the kids? Jeff thought about his own family. He imagined a world where both he and Sandy were suddenly taken away, leaving their son when he was young. That’s a loss he never would have recovered from. Hurting those kids would have been wrong. All of Jeff’s career, he had tried to treat poachers as he would want to be treated. Now this was his final test. If he wanted his career to go out with a bang, he’d have rounded them all up and brought them all in, and the number of arrests would be glorious. But if he wanted the operation to reflect his career, to reflect who he was as an officer and an environmental protector, he would have to trade glory for redemption.
Jeff thought of himself as the kind of person who always did the right thing, even when it hurt. This hurt now, for sure. But he would be able to sleep at night knowing that he’d done his best for both the animals and the people. He had vowed to protect the wild. That meant protecting the people who lived there, too.
Lieutenant Wilson breathed out, and Jeff was afraid he’d veto that plan for compassion before they could discuss it. Maybe Lieutenant Wilson would say Jeff had gotten attached to the poachers and their families, and if he was being honest with himself, Jeff would agree. Maybe Lieutenant Wilson would argue that this sting was the crowning achievement of both of their careers; lowering their arrest numbers would be selling themselves short of their full glory. Things like that didn’t matter to Jeff. He didn’t need glory. He just needed to do the right thing.
“Just the men?” Lieutenant Wilson said. “I’ll run it up the chain, but—I think we can do that.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’ll see what I can do.”
* * *
As Blackledge, he made excuses to all the new people in his life, both Robert and Robin, Tommy and CW, and the harder goodbyes to Wayne and David. Lieutenant Wilson and Jeff’s team at the agency had decided that it would be too dangerous to leave Jeff in place at the alligator farm while the arrest warrants went out. So Jeff had to disappear as cleanly as he’d arrived. He needed to dismantle the farm, spirit away the spy equipment in the dead of night, sell all the alligators, and take his personal effects home, always keeping watch in his rearview mirror as he drove for cars that seemed to follow just a little too long.
“What, you dying?” Wayne had asked. He had showed up once again to drink Jeff’s beer, and they stood, looking out over the alligator pond.
“No, no, nothing like that,” Jeff answered. “I’m just—I’m done with this game.”
“I hear ya,” Wayne said knowingly.
How much does he really know? Jeff wondered. If he knows, wouldn’t he have said something by now? Then again, wouldn’t I?
With Wayne, Jeff felt caught between loyalty to his mission and loyalty to their—was this friendship? On the surface, it felt like friendship, but below that, Jeff knew you couldn’t really be friends with someone who didn’t know who you were. He liked Wayne. In another life, he and Blackledge could have continued their harebrained adventures. But this was reality. In this life, Jeff reminded himself, he had come here with a mission to protect the wild. Wayne had violated that wild, even though Jeff knew he loved it. He’d flouted the laws put in place to protect nature. Why? Some could have been simple mistakes. Others seemed to hover close to the same mentality of the gladesmen that had begotten Peg Brown, a dogged defiance spun from injustice and woven into myth. Problem was these were no longer the days of Peg Brown, nor was it the age of Robin Hood. Since then, the way we see animals has changed.
In the poacher-as-hero narrative, animals often amount to little more than props. That’s largely because this narrative hails from a time and a place, medieval Britain, when the common sentiment toward animals denied them agency. Some writers have blamed the prevalence and dominance of Christianity in that time; however, it more likely came about as a part of rejecting pagan beliefs in their entirety instead of as a wholly formed belief itself. Either way, medieval stories mark animals as beasts of burden, food, foe, or ready symbolism—though sometimes they’re pleasant scenery if they’re lucky enough. However, the further away we’ve gotten from those so-called Dark Ages, the more the general attitude toward animals has returned a selfhood to them, especially when we tell stories about them.
That is why the poacher-as-hero has seen his downfall. When his adversary is an animal, we no longer see him as David: He’s Goliath, so we want him to lose. And with loss, in this narrative scheme, comes punishment. Because that’s what we want as consumers of story. Loss isn’t enough unless we get revenge; we want that fulfillment, because revenge isn’t something most of us get (or thankfully even strive for) in our lives off the page. So poacher-as-hero narratives have gone the way of the dodo, and, unless the writer and readers gloss over his poaching acts, he is replaced generally by the poacher-as-villain.
Perhaps, in this way, the most satisfying end to a poacher-versus-billionaire story would be one in which everyone loses. But reality is never so simple and clean as it appears in stories, and the machinations of time certainly aren’t looking to create the most satisfying narrative end. People aren’t archetypes. Poachers, like the rest of us, contain multitudes, like how Peg Brown was a dedicated war hero, a good dad, a pillar of his community, and a damn good storyteller. It’s easy to forget that everyone is the hero of their own story. Most of us are just doing our best to get by however we can. Sometimes that means making difficult choices in order to survive.
The people who insist that every act is morally unambiguous are the ones who are suspect, because they fail to see the conflicts others face: A poacher may hunt to feed his family. A thief may steal because he feels powerless—from not being able to make ends meet, from the grind and hustle modern life has forced upon us—so he’s stepping out of bounds, transgressing, freeing himself for at least one act, but everything we do has a consequence. The people who think they’ve never hurt anyone or anything in their lives are the ones most oblivious to the trail of pain they’ve left behind. If you’re living—really living—there will be consequences. Even if you’re always following the law, the law isn’t always right.
Jeff, a wildlife officer, seems an unlikely person to have this realization. He spent his whole career upholding the law. Yet, through all those years, he saw that even laws that protect the innocent, the wild creatures who depend on us to be stewards of this planet, can have profound consequences for the people who break them. Jeff had watched all his career. He’d listened. By then he knew that guilt did not mean someone was beyond redemption. No one is. They were all just real people trying to survive, forced to make some of life’s most difficult choices. The small act of trying to feed your family can shatter your life. Jeff didn’t want that to happen with the poachers caught in Operation Alligator Thief. If he could, he wanted to do his job by causing the least damage. And if he admitted it, he’d come to really like the people. They had trusted him, brought him into their homes. He felt guilty, too, because of this. He was the traitor in their midst. He’d betrayed all of their trust.
“So what are you going to do with the gators?” Wayne asked.
“Sell ’em, I guess,” Jeff said. He took a swig of beer, a real one this time. “Why, you want ’em?”
“Hell yeah,” Wayne said.
They bartered a dirt-cheap price, and later, they set out on their last escapade, to wrangle the remaining alligators and put an end to Sunshine Alligator Farm.
* * *
“So, this is it,” Robert said.
“This is it,” said Jeff. They stood outside what had been Sunshine but was now a shell, their decals peeled off the walls, the alligators gone. Jeff was more than ready to be gone, too, and he was definitely done with Robert. As he gave Robert a stiff handshake, he looked him in the eyes for a brief moment. You think you’re such a mastermind, like you’re so much smarter than everyone else, Jeff thought. You think you’ve played all of us, don’t you? Jeff wondered how Robert would feel when he realized he was the one being duped all along.
Robert signed the check for $2,500, the remaining fee for using the farm. “Sure I can’t interest you in another season?” Robert asked. “Next year? We could really use you.”
I bet you’d like to, Jeff thought.
“No, I think I’ve had my fill of alligators,” Jeff said. “This is it for me. I’m moving on to something else. But I have to thank you. I really learned a lot.”
After Robert left, Jeff took out his phone. He opened David’s contact page. His finger hovered over the call symbol. No. Jeff shut the app and put the phone in his pocket. He couldn’t face the man knowing what he was about to do.
* * *
December came and went, and in the new year, the state built a case against the alligator thieves. Without the possibility of bringing Lacey Act violation charges, the DA had to come up with something else. In a twist, she decided on racketeering charges, ironic because big corporations often wield the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) statute against environmental activists, journalists, and public figures who have gotten in their way or otherwise spoken out against them. (This practice is so common that activists and journalists have a name for it: SLAPP, or strategic lawsuits against public participation.)
The warrant for Robert’s arrest charged him with racketeering, conspiracy to commit racketeering, scheming to defraud, and fourteen counts of unlawful possession of alligator eggs, a number of eggs that reached into the thousands. Tommy’s list of charges was a little bit thinner, with conspiracy to commit racketeering and six counts of unlawful possession of alligator eggs. Although CW had harvested over a thousand illicit eggs himself—earning $58,000 in only three months—his charges included only four counts of unlawful possession, and also, of course, conspiracy to commit racketeering. The charges against David said he was in on their scheme. His arrest warrant accused him of conspiracy to commit racketeering, one count of unlawful possession of alligator eggs, and uttering a forged instrument, a special law in Florida that criminalizes lies and counterfeited or forged records made with an attempt to defraud. Last, there was Wayne, who received the least of the charges. The accusations against him included three counts of unlawful possession of alligators, take (poaching) of white ibis, and attempted take of white ibis. In all, the state of Florida brought charges against eleven people in Operation Alligator Thief, including six suspects not mentioned in this book.
Before long, May arrived, and it was time for the trap to snap shut.
The day before the arrests were scheduled to take place, the agency along with the DA held a meeting to brief all the officers. Jeff sat at the side of the room, taking it all in. He was so moved that he had to record. He took out his phone and scanned it slowly over the crowd as the DA presented the case. Over sixty officers from five counties were listening to her speak. They were there because of the work Jeff had done, all of them, uniformed officers, plainclothesmen, protecting these prehistoric beasts that Jeff had come to love.
He could barely sleep that night. That morning, he told his wife that if anything happened, if anyone came after her or Chris, she should call him immediately. They reassured each other that everything would be fine. He left the house while it was still dark and drove to the command center, the secret location from which he, Lieutenant Wilson, and their team would direct the arrests. He met Lieutenant Wilson inside.
Lieutenant Wilson clapped him on the shoulder the way a coach might rouse his star player before the big game. “How you feeling?”
Nervous. Excited. Worried. “Feeling good, George,” Jeff said.
“Good,” Lieutenant Wilson said. “It’s showtime.”
The takedown clock began ticking at 6 AM. The longer it took for the field officers to make the arrests, the more likely it became that the suspects would catch wind of the sting and flee. The electric pulse of worry thrummed inside Jeff. He was safe there, surrounded by his fellow officers, but what about his wife and son? What if that car he’d seen had been following him? What if the poachers knew where he lived? What if they heard about the sting? What if they slipped away before the officers arrived? What if—
All across the state, the officers banged on doors. They shouted the suspects’ names. “Open up,” they demanded. “We have a warrant.”
One by one, the doors opened.
One by one, the suspects presented themselves to the officers.
One by one, the officers read them their rights and cuffed their wrists.
The only one who protested was David. He insisted then and kept insisting he didn’t know what he’d done.
EPILOGUE
As I explored the stories of Gator Country, a phrase in Latin kept returning to my mind: Et in Arcadia ego, roughly translated as, “And I am in Paradise.” The most famous use of the phrase appears as the title of a painting by French baroque artist Nicolas Poussin in which toga-clad shepherds and a woman examine an epitaph inscribed on a tomb, possibly Et in Arcadia ego. This instance isn’t the first use of the phrase, and it’s far from the last, with others ranging from mentions in novels such as The Sound and the Fury and Brideshead Revisited to more recent appearances such as the title of two episodes of Star Trek: Picard. With much of this book occurring in a town called Arcadia, every time I heard the name, I thought, Et in Arcadia ego, turning the phrase over like a stone worn smooth by the current of a river.
Beyond its literal translation, Et in Arcadia ego has come to mean that even in paradise, death awaits us all. Memento mori and all that. That phrase and Et in Arcadia ego were, excuse the pun, done to death by the invention of the movable-type printing press. And like every popular trope, they deserve to be subverted. Death waits for us. Sure, okay. But so does new life.
Nature’s most deathly places are where it’s most full of life, not despite that death but because of it. Dead things decay and enrich the soil. Endangered salamanders in electric hues scamper under fallen pine trunks half consumed by time and worms. Bogs mix life with life, congealing it together into its most fertile essence. Rare orchids unfurl over the mire. Death comes for all things, but so does a kind of resurrection. Death is inevitable, as those phrases remind us, but as millions of years on this planet have shown, so is the triumph of life. Life blooms from death. Life is not the victor. Death is not the enemy. Life and death are not at odds but in inseparable agreement.
“Then go on to the next one.”
“Yep.”
I need you to say it! Jeff shouted in his head.
“Harvest that one and skip that one,” Jeff said. “We didn’t do that.”
“We did not do that,” David said emphatically.
That was it. That was enough. David had confirmed Jeff’s suspicions. He hadn’t only been supervising the egg collections when he said he wasn’t paying attention; he also knew that the crew had been breaking the law, and had just stood by and let them. His job had been to speak up for the state of Florida, for the alligators, and he hadn’t. It wasn’t a slip. It wasn’t a little mistake. He let all of this happen. The revelation came as a blow to Jeff’s heart. Oh, Dave, he thought. He tried not to let the disappointment play across his face.
“Did we not do 100 percent?” Jeff laughed, hoping that the bittersweetness of that victory did not carry over into his voice. “How is Robert going to justify that?”
“You look at Robert’s records, and you’ll see.” Now David laughed, too. “Robert’s records say we only harvested half of what we did.”
* * *
For his whole career, being friendly with the folks who sometimes snatched things from the woods was part of his job, a necessary one. It was part of who he was, too. Jeff Babauta was the kind of person who cared. Try as he might to separate himself, or who he had always believed himself to be, from the man he had to become for his job—he couldn’t do it. To defy this part of himself by calling them criminals or bad guys was one part of his identity he couldn’t shake when he stepped into Blackledge’s skin. He had all but lost himself to the character—except for this. He was told that this was necessary, this loss. He had to forget. He had to be neutral to do this job. But he was starting to embrace that without this compassion he would be missing why he was here in the first place, why he’d become a game warden and dedicated his life to protecting the wild. It was the central tenet of his being. It was the thing holding him up inside on those long nights he spent alone looking after the farm, nights that could have cracked him open and left him in the dark valley of his soul. Without compassion, there was no point to him being here, doing this, not any of it. Without compassion, he would lose Jeff Babauta for good.
Even though he was about to bring charges against so many people he had gotten to know, Jeff still saw room in there for a little much-needed compassion.
“I don’t think we should arrest Robin, or any of the wives, for that matter,” he told Lieutenant Wilson over the phone.
The agency was working with the DA to put together charges, and while that was building up, Jeff’s time as Blackledge was winding down. It was December, with Christmas around the corner, and Jeff was eager to get back to being himself again, whoever that was now.
“Why not?” Lieutenant Wilson asked. “Robin was as involved as anyone else there, maybe even more so.”
“If we arrest both of them, who’s going to take care of their kids?” Jeff asked. “They have three kids, George. Do you want to leave them without a dad and a mom? I don’t.”
If they had to choose one of them to prosecute, Jeff said, it should be Robert, whom several of their crew had called the mastermind behind their schemes, on camera no less. Though Robin was no less intelligent—and perhaps even more perceptive—than her husband, she had not orchestrated any plans to defraud the wild. She had only been accessory to them.
Most of the poachers had brought their families along for egg harvesting. Husbands and wives had worked as poaching teams. Most of the wives knew what was going on. But if both husband and wife were arrested, what would happen to the kids? Jeff thought about his own family. He imagined a world where both he and Sandy were suddenly taken away, leaving their son when he was young. That’s a loss he never would have recovered from. Hurting those kids would have been wrong. All of Jeff’s career, he had tried to treat poachers as he would want to be treated. Now this was his final test. If he wanted his career to go out with a bang, he’d have rounded them all up and brought them all in, and the number of arrests would be glorious. But if he wanted the operation to reflect his career, to reflect who he was as an officer and an environmental protector, he would have to trade glory for redemption.
Jeff thought of himself as the kind of person who always did the right thing, even when it hurt. This hurt now, for sure. But he would be able to sleep at night knowing that he’d done his best for both the animals and the people. He had vowed to protect the wild. That meant protecting the people who lived there, too.
Lieutenant Wilson breathed out, and Jeff was afraid he’d veto that plan for compassion before they could discuss it. Maybe Lieutenant Wilson would say Jeff had gotten attached to the poachers and their families, and if he was being honest with himself, Jeff would agree. Maybe Lieutenant Wilson would argue that this sting was the crowning achievement of both of their careers; lowering their arrest numbers would be selling themselves short of their full glory. Things like that didn’t matter to Jeff. He didn’t need glory. He just needed to do the right thing.
“Just the men?” Lieutenant Wilson said. “I’ll run it up the chain, but—I think we can do that.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’ll see what I can do.”
* * *
As Blackledge, he made excuses to all the new people in his life, both Robert and Robin, Tommy and CW, and the harder goodbyes to Wayne and David. Lieutenant Wilson and Jeff’s team at the agency had decided that it would be too dangerous to leave Jeff in place at the alligator farm while the arrest warrants went out. So Jeff had to disappear as cleanly as he’d arrived. He needed to dismantle the farm, spirit away the spy equipment in the dead of night, sell all the alligators, and take his personal effects home, always keeping watch in his rearview mirror as he drove for cars that seemed to follow just a little too long.
“What, you dying?” Wayne had asked. He had showed up once again to drink Jeff’s beer, and they stood, looking out over the alligator pond.
“No, no, nothing like that,” Jeff answered. “I’m just—I’m done with this game.”
“I hear ya,” Wayne said knowingly.
How much does he really know? Jeff wondered. If he knows, wouldn’t he have said something by now? Then again, wouldn’t I?
With Wayne, Jeff felt caught between loyalty to his mission and loyalty to their—was this friendship? On the surface, it felt like friendship, but below that, Jeff knew you couldn’t really be friends with someone who didn’t know who you were. He liked Wayne. In another life, he and Blackledge could have continued their harebrained adventures. But this was reality. In this life, Jeff reminded himself, he had come here with a mission to protect the wild. Wayne had violated that wild, even though Jeff knew he loved it. He’d flouted the laws put in place to protect nature. Why? Some could have been simple mistakes. Others seemed to hover close to the same mentality of the gladesmen that had begotten Peg Brown, a dogged defiance spun from injustice and woven into myth. Problem was these were no longer the days of Peg Brown, nor was it the age of Robin Hood. Since then, the way we see animals has changed.
In the poacher-as-hero narrative, animals often amount to little more than props. That’s largely because this narrative hails from a time and a place, medieval Britain, when the common sentiment toward animals denied them agency. Some writers have blamed the prevalence and dominance of Christianity in that time; however, it more likely came about as a part of rejecting pagan beliefs in their entirety instead of as a wholly formed belief itself. Either way, medieval stories mark animals as beasts of burden, food, foe, or ready symbolism—though sometimes they’re pleasant scenery if they’re lucky enough. However, the further away we’ve gotten from those so-called Dark Ages, the more the general attitude toward animals has returned a selfhood to them, especially when we tell stories about them.
That is why the poacher-as-hero has seen his downfall. When his adversary is an animal, we no longer see him as David: He’s Goliath, so we want him to lose. And with loss, in this narrative scheme, comes punishment. Because that’s what we want as consumers of story. Loss isn’t enough unless we get revenge; we want that fulfillment, because revenge isn’t something most of us get (or thankfully even strive for) in our lives off the page. So poacher-as-hero narratives have gone the way of the dodo, and, unless the writer and readers gloss over his poaching acts, he is replaced generally by the poacher-as-villain.
Perhaps, in this way, the most satisfying end to a poacher-versus-billionaire story would be one in which everyone loses. But reality is never so simple and clean as it appears in stories, and the machinations of time certainly aren’t looking to create the most satisfying narrative end. People aren’t archetypes. Poachers, like the rest of us, contain multitudes, like how Peg Brown was a dedicated war hero, a good dad, a pillar of his community, and a damn good storyteller. It’s easy to forget that everyone is the hero of their own story. Most of us are just doing our best to get by however we can. Sometimes that means making difficult choices in order to survive.
The people who insist that every act is morally unambiguous are the ones who are suspect, because they fail to see the conflicts others face: A poacher may hunt to feed his family. A thief may steal because he feels powerless—from not being able to make ends meet, from the grind and hustle modern life has forced upon us—so he’s stepping out of bounds, transgressing, freeing himself for at least one act, but everything we do has a consequence. The people who think they’ve never hurt anyone or anything in their lives are the ones most oblivious to the trail of pain they’ve left behind. If you’re living—really living—there will be consequences. Even if you’re always following the law, the law isn’t always right.
Jeff, a wildlife officer, seems an unlikely person to have this realization. He spent his whole career upholding the law. Yet, through all those years, he saw that even laws that protect the innocent, the wild creatures who depend on us to be stewards of this planet, can have profound consequences for the people who break them. Jeff had watched all his career. He’d listened. By then he knew that guilt did not mean someone was beyond redemption. No one is. They were all just real people trying to survive, forced to make some of life’s most difficult choices. The small act of trying to feed your family can shatter your life. Jeff didn’t want that to happen with the poachers caught in Operation Alligator Thief. If he could, he wanted to do his job by causing the least damage. And if he admitted it, he’d come to really like the people. They had trusted him, brought him into their homes. He felt guilty, too, because of this. He was the traitor in their midst. He’d betrayed all of their trust.
“So what are you going to do with the gators?” Wayne asked.
“Sell ’em, I guess,” Jeff said. He took a swig of beer, a real one this time. “Why, you want ’em?”
“Hell yeah,” Wayne said.
They bartered a dirt-cheap price, and later, they set out on their last escapade, to wrangle the remaining alligators and put an end to Sunshine Alligator Farm.
* * *
“So, this is it,” Robert said.
“This is it,” said Jeff. They stood outside what had been Sunshine but was now a shell, their decals peeled off the walls, the alligators gone. Jeff was more than ready to be gone, too, and he was definitely done with Robert. As he gave Robert a stiff handshake, he looked him in the eyes for a brief moment. You think you’re such a mastermind, like you’re so much smarter than everyone else, Jeff thought. You think you’ve played all of us, don’t you? Jeff wondered how Robert would feel when he realized he was the one being duped all along.
Robert signed the check for $2,500, the remaining fee for using the farm. “Sure I can’t interest you in another season?” Robert asked. “Next year? We could really use you.”
I bet you’d like to, Jeff thought.
“No, I think I’ve had my fill of alligators,” Jeff said. “This is it for me. I’m moving on to something else. But I have to thank you. I really learned a lot.”
After Robert left, Jeff took out his phone. He opened David’s contact page. His finger hovered over the call symbol. No. Jeff shut the app and put the phone in his pocket. He couldn’t face the man knowing what he was about to do.
* * *
December came and went, and in the new year, the state built a case against the alligator thieves. Without the possibility of bringing Lacey Act violation charges, the DA had to come up with something else. In a twist, she decided on racketeering charges, ironic because big corporations often wield the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) statute against environmental activists, journalists, and public figures who have gotten in their way or otherwise spoken out against them. (This practice is so common that activists and journalists have a name for it: SLAPP, or strategic lawsuits against public participation.)
The warrant for Robert’s arrest charged him with racketeering, conspiracy to commit racketeering, scheming to defraud, and fourteen counts of unlawful possession of alligator eggs, a number of eggs that reached into the thousands. Tommy’s list of charges was a little bit thinner, with conspiracy to commit racketeering and six counts of unlawful possession of alligator eggs. Although CW had harvested over a thousand illicit eggs himself—earning $58,000 in only three months—his charges included only four counts of unlawful possession, and also, of course, conspiracy to commit racketeering. The charges against David said he was in on their scheme. His arrest warrant accused him of conspiracy to commit racketeering, one count of unlawful possession of alligator eggs, and uttering a forged instrument, a special law in Florida that criminalizes lies and counterfeited or forged records made with an attempt to defraud. Last, there was Wayne, who received the least of the charges. The accusations against him included three counts of unlawful possession of alligators, take (poaching) of white ibis, and attempted take of white ibis. In all, the state of Florida brought charges against eleven people in Operation Alligator Thief, including six suspects not mentioned in this book.
Before long, May arrived, and it was time for the trap to snap shut.
The day before the arrests were scheduled to take place, the agency along with the DA held a meeting to brief all the officers. Jeff sat at the side of the room, taking it all in. He was so moved that he had to record. He took out his phone and scanned it slowly over the crowd as the DA presented the case. Over sixty officers from five counties were listening to her speak. They were there because of the work Jeff had done, all of them, uniformed officers, plainclothesmen, protecting these prehistoric beasts that Jeff had come to love.
He could barely sleep that night. That morning, he told his wife that if anything happened, if anyone came after her or Chris, she should call him immediately. They reassured each other that everything would be fine. He left the house while it was still dark and drove to the command center, the secret location from which he, Lieutenant Wilson, and their team would direct the arrests. He met Lieutenant Wilson inside.
Lieutenant Wilson clapped him on the shoulder the way a coach might rouse his star player before the big game. “How you feeling?”
Nervous. Excited. Worried. “Feeling good, George,” Jeff said.
“Good,” Lieutenant Wilson said. “It’s showtime.”
The takedown clock began ticking at 6 AM. The longer it took for the field officers to make the arrests, the more likely it became that the suspects would catch wind of the sting and flee. The electric pulse of worry thrummed inside Jeff. He was safe there, surrounded by his fellow officers, but what about his wife and son? What if that car he’d seen had been following him? What if the poachers knew where he lived? What if they heard about the sting? What if they slipped away before the officers arrived? What if—
All across the state, the officers banged on doors. They shouted the suspects’ names. “Open up,” they demanded. “We have a warrant.”
One by one, the doors opened.
One by one, the suspects presented themselves to the officers.
One by one, the officers read them their rights and cuffed their wrists.
The only one who protested was David. He insisted then and kept insisting he didn’t know what he’d done.
EPILOGUE
As I explored the stories of Gator Country, a phrase in Latin kept returning to my mind: Et in Arcadia ego, roughly translated as, “And I am in Paradise.” The most famous use of the phrase appears as the title of a painting by French baroque artist Nicolas Poussin in which toga-clad shepherds and a woman examine an epitaph inscribed on a tomb, possibly Et in Arcadia ego. This instance isn’t the first use of the phrase, and it’s far from the last, with others ranging from mentions in novels such as The Sound and the Fury and Brideshead Revisited to more recent appearances such as the title of two episodes of Star Trek: Picard. With much of this book occurring in a town called Arcadia, every time I heard the name, I thought, Et in Arcadia ego, turning the phrase over like a stone worn smooth by the current of a river.
Beyond its literal translation, Et in Arcadia ego has come to mean that even in paradise, death awaits us all. Memento mori and all that. That phrase and Et in Arcadia ego were, excuse the pun, done to death by the invention of the movable-type printing press. And like every popular trope, they deserve to be subverted. Death waits for us. Sure, okay. But so does new life.
Nature’s most deathly places are where it’s most full of life, not despite that death but because of it. Dead things decay and enrich the soil. Endangered salamanders in electric hues scamper under fallen pine trunks half consumed by time and worms. Bogs mix life with life, congealing it together into its most fertile essence. Rare orchids unfurl over the mire. Death comes for all things, but so does a kind of resurrection. Death is inevitable, as those phrases remind us, but as millions of years on this planet have shown, so is the triumph of life. Life blooms from death. Life is not the victor. Death is not the enemy. Life and death are not at odds but in inseparable agreement.
