High Times in Everglades City

The skeletons in the closets of this tiny Southwest Florida mangrove community don't rattle. They stare, then skulk away. There are certain subjects you just don't pry into while cruising around E-City, especially during the past few decades. Money, for example. It's nobody's business but the IRS; and those agents have been here, raked through the area with souped-up calculators, grabbed millions in ill-begotten gains, and gone. But people talk the talk. They say strongboxes of cash are buried in overgrown backyards in these parts. They say sacks of 1980s money are hidden on landless mangrove islands, thousands of hundred-dollar bills stuffed inside the steel belts of old tires roasting in the sun next to rusted hulls of once-proud shrimp and mullet boats. There are fortunes mixed within the flotsam, hidden by the jetsam, covered by barnacles and rumor. It's all done under the "radar," they say, secretly slipped from the slowly squandering sunken treasures of the sea's last pirates. That's what they say.

A young fisherman tosses a 25-pound red snapper on the sidewalk: "This baby was feeding in the channel a few hours ago." He begins carving out chunks of fresh snapper sushi. He offers and we indulge. There's a cooler filled with beer. "There's people all over this island who were smart enough to hide it and not touch it for years," he loosens up. He was a baby when the feds raided the island. "There are men who will wait 'til no one's looking-they'll starve three days until the coast is clear, and then just take out what they need and leave the rest alone. You think they're bums. They're richer than the folks in Palm Beach.

"Nothing fancy. Uh-uh. No gold chains and big black dooley pick-ups and 'Vettes like the old days. Just the basics: beer, cigarettes, three-square, gas, dog food, pot and walkin'-around money."

Staples a man needs to survive out here on the godforsaken edge of Florida. That's what they say.

"They" don't have names. You really don't want to be caught knowing "their" names unless you are one of them. They might hang out at night at the Chickee Bar, just west off S.R. 29 when you're just comin' into town, where Red the bartender might ask you directly: "You folks from around here?" just to see what you might say. Best answer: "We're Florida boys, down to do some fishin'." (Bad answer: "Hey, isn't this the place where the whole town got busted for drug smuggling back in 1983?")

"Be careful," Red'll say. "People can get lost out there."

"Out there" is what this story is all about. Beyond Red's waving freckly arm is one of the most confusing places on this planet. The Ten Thousand Islands-2,000 square miles of shallow waters, identical-looking mangrove islands, clam beds, channels, bays, oyster bars, swamp forests and salty creeks, one of the most extensive mangrove estuaries in the world.

Covering the coastline from Cape Romano off Marco Island to just north of Cape Sable on Florida's tip, this mirrored hologram of green-blue reflections has been carefully manicured by God to confound and confuse mortal maritime men. By boat, every turn looks the same. Perfect mangrove islands surrounded by sparkly murky waters. Around every bend, the same postcard scene opens up. As far as the eye can see. And where the coast seems somehow clear, treacherous Gulf passes, full of shallow flats and collapsed limestone ridges, await.

Red is right. It is not hard to get lost, dehydrated, dead, picked apart by vultures, and added to the skeleton collection out here. The Ten Thousand Islands are the main reason this is called the Last Frontier. Compass, binoculars, sextant, map-none of that will really help you get from point A (land) to point B (open water).

You've got to have a local. A guide. Someone who understands what the tiny piece of red fabric tied to the black mangrove means. Someone who knows when the other locals have turned the channel markers or switched the canoe trail signs. Someone who can feel his way out of lost by instinct. And, of course, the local proliferation of such skills is what lured the trouble here in the first place.

What they call everglades city is really a state of mind within a geographical area on the wild backside of Collier County. Everglades City shares common history, fishing village characteristics and negative attitudes toward government intervention with brother Chokoloskee, seven miles to the south, and sister Good-land, about the same distance, as the crow flies over open water, to the west. Public parks and wildlife refuges take up most of the rest of the acreage in these parts. This is the remote western edge of Everglades National Park, a fresh-water drain-spout for the Big Cypress National Preserve, a paradise for sportsmen and smugglers alike.

Squatted by non-Indians for the first time in the latter part of the 19th century, these little towns first made the map in the early 1920s, when the Tamiami Trail was being built. Land baron Barron Collier, looking for a spot to house Trail builders, actually created the Everglades City one sees today. He purchased most of the land in 1923; and within five years, the sleepy trading post/fishing settlement/farming community was a bustling industrial-based company town. There were roads, a railroad, a bank, a telephone, sawmills, a boatyard, churches, a school, workers' barracks, mess halls and even a bona-fide Northern pantywaist streetcar. Seafood-especially stone crabs, mullet, snook and redfish-gained a world reputation.

To make it out here, you had to know how to fish, to use a gun, to barter, to deal with unsavory characters and hurricanes-and you had to know how to navigate those goddamn islands. Over the years, the town's resident profile morphed into a staunch, enigmatic swamp-Cracker persona. And as the government kept intervening in the way they made their living, some say decent folk either turned bad or they got out of town. The late Joe Lord, who ran the Monroe Station travel oasis a few miles east on the Trail, put it this way back in '84: "These people aren't criminals. They just act that way. This criminal activity is just a protest against the government. Uncle Sam has stomped on every schoolteacher, fisherman, librarian and Little League player in these parts. You take a nice-natured, refined housecat and throw it outside, after a while it'll climb in your dumpster. It'll steal your food."

They'll tell you the longtime trade in plumes, furs and gator hides was stopped. Panther and bear trapping were curtailed. Thousands of acres of land and water were declared off-limits to the locals. "And every time you turned around, they were passing a new law against the fisherman," says old man McMillan, a Viking who came down here from Minnesota half a century ago. "You can't fish for this one anymore. You can't fish for that one. You can't use your nets. You can only catch two. You can't go out when they're biting. They take away our livelihood. What do they expect?"

Prohibition, however, had taught Everglades City locals about another way: Bringing booze into the mainland-through the island maze, then along the back roads, in the dark of night-kept a good part of Florida supplied with Cuban rum and homemade 'shine in the 1920s and '30s. The revenuers couldn't follow or find anything in the unforgiving landscape. Nobody was hurt, the money was good and everyone went to church on Sunday. From then on, illicit activity became a tolerated part of the social fabric of the last frontier.

The KKK gathered in the woods. Poachers were everywhere, looking for gator, orchid, snook. The paramilitary had snuck around here to train on their way to Nicaragua. The authorities, headquartered faraway in county seat Naples, were powerless to apprehend daredevil locals in their go-fast boats, and probably didn't care much, anyway. The ranks of the local cops were infiltrated with lookouts and look-the-other-ways. It was only a matter of time-the late '70s, around the time the new Endangered Species Act began flexing muscle and word went out that Everglades National Park waters would be closed to commercial fishing-before the drug smuggling would begin.

It was a natural sequence of events. it worked like this. A marijuana importer, usually from Miami or Colombia, would contact someone in Everglades City with information about an airdrop or a pot-loaded "mother ship" waiting out in the Gulf. Rendezvous points, radio frequencies, times and signals were all provided. From the shore, nothing seemed unusual about E-City boats going out at all times of day or night. That was the fishing business. The bales of marijuana were eventually loaded into trucks, stored in warehouses and sheds-even the trunks of cars-until driven to distribution points north. When the mother ship was really full, some went out and back several times in a single night. A hardworking man could make $50,000 from dusk to dawn bringing dope through lower Florida's Gulfshore fringe.

The good ol' boys got sophisticated and began using marine radio frequencies to track patrolling rangers. The place began to change. Gold chains, sports cars, second stories on doublewides, even swimming pools began to appear. There were rumors of chandeliers hanging over worktables, sunken tubs in bedrooms, murals in the bathrooms. Hundred-dollar bills and a wink paid for coffee. All of this going on, night after night, in a town where crime was practically nil and folks bragged about leaving their car and front doors open. Said Everglades Echo editor Rusty Rupsis in a Miami Herald story in 1983: "The signs may have been there, but we may have been too close to see them. The smugglers aren't stealing from you; they're nice people. They don't give you any trouble. You can live next door to most of them and never know the difference."