Curtis Blackledge, proprietor of the newly established Sunshine Alligator Farm in Arcadia, Florida, an hour’s drive north of Fort Myers, was a friendly sort. Eager to learn how to raise gators, he sought others in the business, peppering them with questions, swapping tall tales over a few cold ones and tagging along on expeditions into the swamps to harvest eggs. It was not long before one of Blackledge’s contacts leased him a modest farm, which he transformed into a state-of-the-art facility for hatching alligators and exporting them to Louisiana to be butchered for meat and hides. Along the way, game laws were broken and conservation limits were flouted.
As Blackledge’s new friends soon discovered, this profitable partnership was too good to be true. The alligator-farming newbie’s real name was Jeff Babauta, and he was an officer with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. A lucrative interstate alligator poaching ring was exposed and broken up in an elaborate sting operation codenamed, fittingly, Operation Alligator Thief.
Florida writer and first-time author Rebecca Renner tells the story of Babauta’s undercover exploits in Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades, an impressive debut that draws readers into a shadowy world where nature’s defenders match wits with poachers but the line between the good guys and the bad guys is not always clear-cut.
“The truth is the vast majority of poaching is not perpetuated by high-profile hunters or even criminal syndicates,” Renner discovered, but by poor people struggling to survive. “Most illegal fishing and illegal wildlife hunting is done for subsistence.”
Most of the poachers Babauta arrested over the years were one-time offenders whose actions posed little threat, even to endangered species. But large-scale egg gathering operations like the one he infiltrated could sharply reduce local alligator populations and do irreparable harm to an entire ecosystem.
Renner, who has written for National Geographic, The New York Times, Outside Magazine, The Guardian and other major publications, tells Babauta’s story in tandem with her own search for the lowdown on Clarence “Peg” Brown, a legendary Everglades poacher who was reputed to have shot thousands of alligators and eluded game wardens for decades. Brown, it turns out, was a war hero and devoted family man who had served as a guide for visiting celebrities, Christopher Plummer and Gypsy Rose Lee among them. Again, Renner finds that the line between good and evil can be murky. Brown’s family had called the Everglades home long before it was preserved as a national park, transforming them from hunters to poachers. And water-diversion projects and urban development, she notes, pose a far greater threat to the fragile habitat that sustains alligators and a host of other vulnerable species.
The author’s reporting is impressive. Faced with a wall of bureaucratic silence when she first inquired about Operation Alligator Thief, Renner spent months tracking down Babauta and convincing him to trust her with his story. He provided a trove of reports and recordings that enabled her to recreate the undercover sting in immersive, real-time detail. She reveals his inner turmoil as his lies became ever more elaborate and he betrayed the trust of those he caught breaking the law, including people he had come to like and even respect. Her descriptions of the South Florida landscape are cinematic. Her fondness for her home state, its people, and even the menacing reptiles that rule its swamps, is evident on every page.
In her last interview with Babauta for the book, she asked him if his greatest fear had been that his cover would be blown or that his life might be in danger as he gathered evidence. No, he assured her. “It was that nobody would care.”
He need not have worried. Renner’s formidable storytelling skills and passion for her subject ensure that readers will care deeply for the Everglades, its hard-to-love alligators and the fate of all wild places.
NONFICTION
Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades
By Rebecca Renner
Flatiron Books
Published November 14, 2023
Southern Review of Books 