Zoo Story Page 25

  The statement was curious. It felt disingenuous, because over the years Lex had proved to be a skilled politician, someone who knew the system and had the judgment to manipulate it to Lowry Park’s advantage. He could never have carried out the zoo’s transformation had it not been for his gift for wooing county commissioners and mayors and governors and legislators, not to mention corporate executives and society mavens and assorted multimillionaires. And yet the statement essentially proved that whatever political instincts he once possessed had slipped away. To suggest that his mistakes had been merely political, not substantive, was guaranteed to raise the eyebrows of even those who wanted to keep faith in his best intentions.

  Early on, when he was still giving interviews, Lex pointed out that his dealings with the zoo had been vetted for any potential impropriety. After all, he had signed the memorandum of understanding with Lowry Park’s executive committee to avoid the very accusations he now faced. True enough. But then it came out that the zoo’s board had reviewed the memo over the summer and had been concerned enough to dissolve the agreement.

  It did not advance Lex’s case when Fassil Gabremariam, who had approved many transactions between the zoo and the game park, turned out to be listed in Safari Wild’s incorporation papers as an officer in the game park’s conservation fund. The water grew even muddier when it was revealed that two of the white rhinos that Lowry Park had loaned Safari Wild were pregnant, and that the original agreement had called for the first rhino calf to be given to the zoo and the second to the game park. It was roughly at this point that Pam Iorio, Tampa’s mayor, got mad enough to jump in. Iorio publicly reminded Lex that the zoo operated under the oversight of the city of Tampa; according to a lease, both the land under the zoo and the animals were owned by the city. She ordered an audit of Lowry Park’s dealings with Safari Wild, insisting that the zoo and the game park sever all ties and that the park return any of the zoo’s animals it was still holding.

  At first Lex tried to argue with the mayor—more proof that his instincts were failing him. But then he learned to be quiet and agreed to most of the mayor’s demands. He announced that he would take a leave of absence from the zoo while the city conducted its audit.

  A couple of months later, the audit came back loaded with bomb-shells. The report said that Lex had charged the zoo almost four thousand dollars in reimbursements for a three-day trip to Paris that he and Elena had enjoyed on their way back from an international conference in South Africa. It also cited Lex’s divisive management style and confirmed, after interviews with the staff, that he had created a climate of fear where employees hesitated to speak out. But the most damning findings detailed the rampant conflicts of interest. The bottom line, the report said, was that Lex’s pattern of improper dealings had cost the zoo more than $200,000.

  Fundamentally, Mr. Salisbury appeared to treat the operation at Lowry Park Zoo, his for-profit venture Safari Wild, and his residence ranch as one. . . . He seems unable to differentiate between his role as CEO of the Zoo and the role he plays with his business and his ranch . . .

  The audit was sixty pages long. Once Mayor Iorio heard what it contained, all restraint fell away. She demanded that Lex be fired and that he repay the $200,000. She also seconded the audit’s recommendation that the case be turned over to law authorities to decide if criminal prosecution was warranted.

  Lex, no longer willing to be silent, returned fire with a statement released through his attorney. He blasted the city auditors for ignoring his side of the story and called them “minions” of the mayor. He said that in reality, the zoo owed him $403,117 for housing their animals for free or at discount and for loaning his own animals to the zoo. And he vowed to fight for his job at an upcoming meeting of the zoo’s board.

  Ultimately, it was up to the board and not the mayor whether Lex stayed on. Judging from the reactions of board members to the audit, his chances did not look good. One member offered him a piece of advice: “Plead for mercy.”

  The debacle was already tarnishing both Lex and the zoo itself. As the revelations mounted, the AZA temporarily suspended Lowry Park’s accreditation, which it had held for twenty years. Without the AZA’s seal of approval, the number one family zoo in America tumbled toward disgrace. It stood to lose its lease with the city, which required that it maintain the accreditation, and as long as the suspension held, it could not trade animals with other accredited institutions. The AZA had also suspended Lex’s individual membership. He was officially persona non grata.

  Lex made an easy target. For years he had reveled in the scorn of others and nurtured a cult of his own oversized personality. It was obvious that he loved the zoo, but his love had brought not just increased revenues but devastation. He was both creator and destroyer. Even so, whatever had gone wrong at Lowry Park was not his fault alone. Though he had perpetuated an illusion of limitless authority, in reality he served at the discretion of Lowry Park’s board. The thirty-some directors on that board were hardly powerless. Among them were a former governor of Florida and a former mayor of Tampa, plus an assortment of other public officials, corporate execs, and high-powered lawyers. Not exactly a timid bunch. Surely a few of them had heard some of the alarming reports on staff morale. It must have penetrated their consciousness that two of the zoo’s most famous animals had died bloody and unnecessary deaths. Any of these directors could have stepped outside their comfort zones and wandered the zoo on their own and talked quietly to the staff. And if they didn’t like what they learned, the board members had the authority to fire the CEO whenever they pleased.

  Obviously Lex had a talent for dazzling this council of alphas who held his future in their hands. He knew when to listen respectfully, when to bathe them in praise, and when to inspire them with another sermon about an independent zoo fighting against the tide of extinction. Over the years he had invited many of the zoo’s most crucial supporters to join him on trips to Kenya and Tanzania. He had taken them to Swaziland to see the elephants eating their way through the trees. He had taken them to the palaces of Ethiopia and introduced them to what remained of the royal lions. Until now, it had worked. Even the deal with Safari Wild had been approved by Fassil Gabremariam and the rest of the board’s executive committee. Lex had asked for their blessing, and they had granted it. Now he had been cast as the scapegoat. It was hard to feel sorry for him, given how much damage he’d caused, but still it made no sense. Fassil had already resigned quietly, and it was difficult to understand why the rest of the executive committee hadn’t resigned with him. If the memorandum of understanding with Safari Wild was the font of all outrage, how did those who voted for it keep their positions?

  The truth was, many of the audit’s findings about Lex should not have shocked anyone. His plan to build Safari Wild—and the likelihood of it generating controversy—had been reported in the St. Petersburg Times months before the monkeys escaped or the scandal broke. His intimidation of keepers had been reported as well. His habit of transferring animals back and forth between his ranch and the zoo, meanwhile, had not been a secret. He’d talked about it openly for years; the staff routinely saw him driving a trailer onto the zoo grounds, carting zebras or warthogs from his ranch. He had not acted as though he thought any of this was wrong. As the audit had noted, he seemed to view the zoo’s animals and those on his ranch and at the game park as part of one big traveling collection.

  Even the transfer of the white rhinos had been conducted in the open. Iorio had dubbed it Rhinogate. But months before the scandal broke, the transfer had been featured on The Mayor’s Hour, Iorio’s own cable TV show. An episode that had aired in April showed a city Parks and Recreation crane lifting a crate holding one of the white rhinos onto the back of a flatbed truck in preparation for the move to Safari Wild. Lex smiled and waved at the camera as he drove the truck away, taking the rhinos to their new home.

  Now that Lex was cornered, Iorio was giving interviews saying she couldn’t understand how so many things c
ould have gone wrong without someone raising a flag. But in the years before, the flag had already been publicly raised on the Kremers’ Web site and in news reports published after the deaths of Herman and Enshalla. Clearly, Iorio had not been paying attention, even to what was happening with the zoo on her own TV show. For years, the mayor and a long list of other public officials and local luminaries had cozied up to Lex, rejoicing as he brought in the elephants, dancing in the conga line with him at the black-tie fund-raisers, standing beside him and cheering for the TV cameras when it was time to cut the ribbon on another new wing. At Karamu, Iorio had even worn her zebra-print jacket.

  Only a few months before the scandal, the rich and powerful had treated Lex like a prince of the city. Then, in an instant, they had turned on him. Whether or not he deserved their scorn, there was something savage about the reversal. It was a primal reckoning that had nothing to do with audits or memoranda of understanding. Lex had been strong once. He had been useful to their purposes. Now that he was wounded and trailing blood through the grass, the pride was ready to finish him off.

  That September, just as the onslaught against Lex was beginning, five of the monkeys were still at large. The others had been captured alive and returned to human custody. The island at Safari Wild obviously was not a good idea, so instead they were shipped to Lowry Park for safekeeping. At the time, that fact did not yet seem ironic.

  The next chapter was chronicled by St. Petersburg Times reporter Ben Montgomery. A rancher who lived near Safari Wild told Montgomery that he’d been in his truck one morning, headed out to feed his cows, when he caught a glimpse of an unidentified animal in the distance. It was big and reddish, and Trent Meador thought maybe it was a coyote. He stopped his truck, grabbed his rifle, and studied his prey through the scope. The animal, hiding behind a wild palmetto, seemed to be looking back at him. Meador saw white fur on the animal’s face and decided it was not a coyote but a raccoon. He pulled the trigger and went to retrieve the body and picked it up by its tail. Then he stuffed the carcass into a feed sack and put it in the back of his truck and called his wife.

  “Shot a what?” she asked.

  “Shot a monkey,” he said.

  “You didn’t either.”

  Once Meador showed his wife the proof inside the feed sack, he wondered if it might have been a mistake to kill the monkey. Without giving his name, he called the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

  “If I saw one of those monkeys, and I shot it, would I be in trouble?” he asked.

  The answer was no. Patas monkeys were a non-native species and were not protected. No charges would be filed.

  Afterward, Meador kept the carcass in a freezer. Sometimes he took it out and snapped photos with his cell phone. He showed them to so many friends that people began to call him, asking to see his dead monkey.

  Someone asked if he felt any remorse.

  “Not at all,” he said. “You seen the teeth those jokers got on ’em? Teeth an inch and a quarter long.”

  Eventually, he took the monkey’s body to a taxidermist to have it stuffed. He wanted it on the wall of his game room.

  The final four fugitives remained on the loose. They were the most elusive and presumably the smartest. By now their exploits were legendary. Through all of that summer and fall they had made fools out of every human who pursued them—and a mockery of human ascendancy over other species. Their subversive freedom had even managed to bring infamy upon the man who had sought to imprison them. Sightings grew so rare that they began to seem like puckish phantoms, haunting the shadows at the edge of the swamp.

  Lex Brown, a sod farmer, initially dismissed the reports he kept getting from his foreman, who insisted the famous runaways were lurking in the field behind his back porch.

  “Señor!” cried the foreman. “The monkeys! The monkeys!”

  “You’re loco,” Brown said. “They’re raccoons.”

  The man would not budge.

  “No,” he told his boss. “Monkeys, monkeys, monkeys.”

  Finally the farmer drove over to the foreman’s house and peered across the meadow and glimpsed a quartet of monkeys bobbing. The farmer still didn’t quite believe it—maybe his eyes were wrong—and so he and the foreman started leaving out oranges and other fruit, just to see what happened. When the fruit disappeared, Brown was finally ready to believe. Monkeys? On his farm? That was new. It was funny, his having the same first name as the guy who’d accidentally let the monkeys out in the first place. But no matter. Through binoculars, he saw them taking cover in clumps of cypress trees and chasing one another across his sod fields and climbing on his corn feeders. He noted that there was a big male and a smaller male and a mother with a baby, and that the big male was the lookout. Whenever Brown drove toward them, the male would let out a warning and they would all scatter. It was a primitive alarm system, but effective. The farmer’s truck never got within a quarter-mile before they fled.

  At first all of it was entertaining. Then came the Sunday morning in December when he discovered that one or more of the monkeys had defecated on his John Deere tractor. He realized that the monkeys were potentially serious pests. If somebody didn’t stop them, they would reproduce, and suddenly there would be all these new monkeys, just as hard to catch and just as ready to befoul his beloved John Deere and cause all other manner of minor havoc. “It was war,” he said. He was neighbors with Trent Meador and knew that Meador had shot one of the monkeys. But Brown didn’t want to kill them. Instead, he determined to build a better monkey trap, outfitting a big dog kennel with a trapdoor and dangling a bunch of purple grapes inside as bait. If a monkey entered, he’d have to stand on a pipe to reach the grapes, and the weight would release the trapdoor with a loud hiss and a bang. As he welded the pipe into place, his four targets huddled together on a motor grader off in the distance and studied his handiwork.

  “You’re not going to catch those monkeys,” said his wife, Deana.

  Brown set the trap later that day. The next morning, the big male was dancing inside the kennel, chirping angrily as he scrabbled along the walls to find a way out. Triumphant, Brown texted Deana:

  GOT MONKEY #1

  They named him Clarence and left him there to lure in the others. The next day they caught Casper, the other male. Then they caught Hazel and Hazel’s baby, Lola.

  Containing the four of them in the kennel was a challenge. The monkeys had already proven to be good swimmers. Now they turned out to be restless diggers, as well, continually trying to claw their way out. Brown and his workers patched the damage, but the monkeys kept at it. Meticulous, they searched every square inch of the mesh, testing the wire for weak spots where they might push through. Repeatedly, Clarence hurled himself against the door with the operatic fervor of a professional wrestler.

  Deana devoted herself to making sure the monkeys were well cared for. When it rained, she draped ponchos over the kennel so they wouldn’t get wet. She emptied her kitchen cabinets in search of Craisins and other morsels. She allowed the monkeys to reach through the mesh with their slender fingers and take the food from her palm, gentle as babies. She loved feeding them so much that she made special trips to the grocery. Usually she shopped at Publix, but on the monkey runs she went to Winn-Dixie, not wanting anyone she knew to see her and ask why her cart was filled with bananas and grapes. Enthralled with her new charges, she would sit beside their kennel and chat with them, delighting in the way they mimicked her expressions. She even let them hold her fingers.

  “It’s different looking in a monkey’s eyes than in a cat’s or dog’s eyes,” she said. “There’s a connection.”

  The love that Deana felt for the monkeys was overpowering. It was exactly the kind of bond that zoos hope for—that moment of recognition when an animal and a guest recognize something in each other. Deana wanted to keep the monkeys or else turn them loose again. But her husband said no.

  “They’re not our monkeys,” he told her.

  So on
December 15, a trapper backed his truck up to the kennel and loaded the four monkeys up for their transfer. Eight months after they swam to freedom, the last handful of runaways was returned to Safari Wild.

  The board meeting to decide Lex Salisbury’s fate was three days away.

  Chapter 17

  Cull

  That Thursday broke bright and clear and unseasonably warm, even for Florida. A sense of karmic justice shimmered in the sunlight. After a lifetime of consigning other animals to captivity, Lex had become the hunted. Newspaper editorials demanded his firing. Letter writers recited the litany of his alleged crimes against nature, from the murder of Enshalla to the heartless removal of the wild elephants from the savanna. Now the mayor had raised the possibility of criminal charges, a suggestion that evoked the remarkable image of a zoo director ending up caged.

  Lex felt as though he had been invited to his own execution. Even so, he was not about to surrender. That morning, as he dressed and shaved and steeled himself to face the judgment of the other alphas, he believed he still had a fifty-fifty chance—a testament either to the strength of his character or the depth of his denial. There was no reason to stand before the board and make his case unless some part of him thought he could work his magic one more time and escape the trap in which he’d become so thoroughly enmeshed. It did not matter that he had laid the trap himself. He insisted that the audit was a sham that would never stand up in court. He saw himself as wrongly accused, misunderstood, persecuted. He wanted his moment.

  He and Elena drove into Tampa together in their ’92 Nissan Pathfinder, so old and faded it was hard to tell it had once been gold. They had brought Pippi along for the ride, as well as another little terrier mix named Grub, possibly because he and Elena longed for the comfort of two creatures who still loved them. Lex was not about to explain such choices. He was in no mood for trifling questions. He no longer answered reporters’ phone calls, except to tell them never to call again. Whatever he had to say was for the board alone.