John Laroche is a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth. He has the posture of al dente spaghetti and the nervous intensity of someone who plays a lot of video games. He is thirty-four years old, and works for the Seminole Tribe of Florida, setting up a plant nursery on the tribal reservation near Miami. The Seminole nicknames for Laroche are Crazy White Man and Troublemaker. My introduction to Laroche took place last summer, in the new Collier County Courthouse, in Naples, Florida. The occasion was a hearing following Laroche’s arrest for illegally taking endangered wild orchids, which he is passionate about, from the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve, which is a place he adores. Laroche did not dress for the occasion. He was wearing wraparound Mylar sunglasses, a cotton-blend shirt printed with some sort of scenic design, and trousers that bagged around his rear. At the hearing, he was called forward and asked to state his name and address and to describe his experience in working with plants. Laroche sauntered to the center of the courtroom. He jutted out his chin. He spoke in a rasping, draggy voice. He stuck his thumbs in his belt loops and said, “I’ve been a professional horticulturist for approximately twelve years. I’ve owned a plant nursery of my own. . . . I have extensive experience with orchids, and the asexual micropropagation of orchids under aseptic cultures.” Then he grinned and said to the court, “I’m probably the smartest person I know.”

Laroche grew up in Miami. He says he was a weird kid. This is not hard to believe. When he wanted a pet, he bought a little turtle, then bought ten little turtles, then tried to breed them, then started selling turtles to other kids, then decided his life wasn’t worth living unless he acquired one of every species of rare turtle, including a three-hundred-pound exotic tortoise from the Galápagos Islands. Suddenly, another passion seized him. He became immersed in late-Ice Age fossils. Then he dropped turtles and Ice Age fossils and became obsessed with lapidary, and then after a while he dropped lapidary and got into collecting and resilvering old mirrors. His passions boil up quickly and end abruptly, like tornadoes. Usually, the end is accompanied by a dramatic pronouncement. When he was in his teens, he went through a tropical-fish phase, and he had sixty fishtanks in his house. He even went skin-diving for the fish himself. Then the end came. He didn’t merely lose interest in collecting fish: he renounced it, as if he had kicked a habit. He declared that he would stop collecting fish forever. He also declared that he would never set foot in the ocean again. That was fifteen years ago. He lives a few miles from the Atlantic, but he has not gone near it since.

Laroche has the conversational manner of a Mr. Encyclopedia. This is not the result of rigorous and extensive formal education. He went to high school in North Miami, but beyond that he is self-taught. In fact, it is almost impossible to imagine him in a classroom. On occasion, he gets wistful about the life he might have had if he had applied himself conventionally. He believes he could have gone to medical school and become a brain surgeon. He would have become distinguished and rich. Instead, he lives at home with his father and has mostly made a living in uncustomary ways. For instance, he once sold to a gardening journal an article he called “Would You Die for Your Plants?” This was after he had spilled granular pesticide into a cut on his hand—an incident that left him with permanent heart and liver damage and the persistent feeling that his experience would make a good and salable story. He is now writing a guide to tissue-culturing plants at home, which he plans to advertise in High Times, the marijuana magazine. The ad will ask for a lot of money for the guide but will neglect to mention that any marijuana grown following Laroche’s precise methods will never mature enough to have any psychoactive properties. He defends this by saying that it will earn him money, it will teach kids how to grow plants, it will keep them from actually getting high, and it will give them an object lesson in how crime doesn’t pay. The spiral of logic entwining altruism and rule-breaking around a possible financial outcome is a Laroche specialty. Just when you think you’ve figured out that he’s a crook, he reveals an ulterior and principled but lucrative reason for his crookedness. He loves doing things the hard way, if it means he gets to do what he wants and leaves you wondering how he got away with it. He is the most moral amoral person I’ve ever known.

When he was growing up, Laroche and his mother would hike through the Fakahatchee Strand and other South Florida swamps, looking for unusual things. At the time, Laroche and his parents were living in North Miami. Laroche’s father, a construction worker, had broken his back in a fall from a building and was disabled. Laroche was the only surviving child; a sister had died at an early age. “We’re a family of ailments and pain,” Laroche says. He describes his mother, who died in 1988, as overweight, frumpy, Jewish by birth but serially passionate about different faiths. She doesn’t sound like someone who would tramp through sloppy, sweaty backcountry, but that is how she and John spent many days. Sometimes they would tag orchids that were in bloom and come back a few months later to see if they had formed any seeds. For a while, Laroche’s passion was to photograph every single species of orchid in bloom in Florida; he and his mother would trudge through the swamp, carrying cameras, for hours on end.

As he got older, Laroche went from wanting pictures of orchids to wanting orchids themselves. He got married in 1983, when he was twenty-three, and that same year he and his wife opened a nursery in North Miami. Before that, he worked in construction but, just like his father, he broke his back in a fall and went on disability leave. He and his wife called their nursery the Bromeliad Tree. (Bromeliads are spiny plants that usually, like epiphytic orchids, attach themselves to tree limbs instead of sprouting in soil. Some of them grow wild in the Fakahatchee.) Laroche’s nursery specialized in the oddest, rarest stuff. He had forty thousand plants, including some that were the only specimens of their kind in cultivation. Laroche says that in 1990 he showed up at the World Bromeliad Conference with an astonishing twelve-by-twenty-five-foot display featuring star-shaped bromeliads, Day-Glo paint, black light, and Christmas lights arranged in the shape of actual constellations.

The conference was a turning point for him. He became well known in the plant community and began calling people all over the world for leads to unusual plants; his phone bills were sometimes close to a thousand dollars a month. Lots of money flew back and forth, but he kept almost none of it. Once, he spent hundreds of dollars building a little air-conditioned box for a rare fern he got from a friend in the Dominican Republic. The fern died. Laroche has never regretted the expense. He accumulated one of the country’s largest collections of Cryptanthus, a genus of Brazilian bromeliad. He had a startling, six-foot-tall Antherium veitchii with corrugated leaves that he says was “a gorgeous, gorgeous son of a bitch.” He had dozens and dozens of orchids. He particularly enjoyed cloning them and mutating them. He also figured out how to propagate certain species that had rarely been propagated in a lab.