Operation Everglades stands out in Everglades City's problem-plagued past
Brent Batten
Ray Barnett can trace the origins of Operation Everglades to a powder-blue leisure suit.
Barnett, the former chief deputy of the Collier County Sheriff’s Office, said he was at a law enforcement conference in Louisville in the 1970s wearing what was the height of fashion at the time.
“I thought I looked fantastic,” he said.
A featured speaker was the head of the federal agency that would soon become the Drug Enforcement Administration. He was wearing the same suit.
It was enough to start a conversation in which the administrator asked Barnett what drug problems he was seeing back home.
Barnett quickly thought of the smuggling that deputies knew to be going on in and around Ten Thousand Islands.
Smuggling
Dating back decades, smugglers had been bringing rum, cigarettes, sugar and people into the nearly unpatrollable maze of waterways and mangrove islands along Collier’s southern coast.
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The commodity of the day was marijuana. Cargo ships from South and Central America would moor offshore and small boats, fishing vessels often, would go out at night, take on a load of bales, and bring them ashore.
Dubbing themselves “saltwater cowboys,” boat owners from all over South Florida were getting in on the action, earning thousands of dollars for a single night’s work.
But the activity was especially prevalent in Everglades City, where fishing boats were almost as common as passenger cars, Barnett said.
And where it was especially tough to investigate.
“The problem was, everyone in Everglades City was interrelated,” Barnett said.
Those not involved in smuggling wouldn’t give up information on their friends and relatives who were.
The Sheriff’s Office was also small, drawing its deputies from the same familiar population of Fort Myers and Naples.
“They knew all the deputies we put in there,” Barnett said.
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Signs of the activity were everywhere. Fishermen were paying cash for new cars.
“You’d go by this little house and there'd be a big power boat by their mullet skiff.”
One man gave his son $1,000 in cash to go to the county fair, Barnett recalled.
“But you couldn’t prove it," he said. "Nobody down there was going to talk about it."
Barnett outlined a strategy for the federal officer.
“They’d have to put somebody in there without telling us. Without telling me.”
At some point down the road, the DEA did just that.
“To this day, I don’t know who they had in there. I don’t think anybody does,” Barnett said.
The undercover agent or agents must have lived and worked in the community for a year or more, infiltrating smuggling rings and gathering evidence, Barnett said.
Only when the cases had been made did the DEA contact the Sheriff’s Office for help in making mass arrests.
Mass arrests
Those arrests began July 7, 1983, when some 200 federal and local officers descended on the town before dawn.
More than two dozen people were arrested that day. An additional 125 or so, hailing from other parts of Florida and beyond were arrested in the weeks and months that followed.
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Boats used in the smuggling were seized, threatening the town’s fishing economy.
Operation Everglades became Operation Everglades II a year later, yielding more arrests. Smaller investigations based on information obtained through Operation Everglades brought arrests into the late 1980s.
Dark days
Everglades City has seen dark days, including Hurricane Donna in 1960 and Hurricane Irma last year.
Its economy has been rocked by fishing bans and restrictions in Everglades National Park. Last week the former mayor was arrested for allegedly misusing city money.
But Operation Everglades stands out as a self-inflicted wound to a town that turned to the easy money of drugs.
Barnett says, given the history of smuggling along Florida’s west coast, you can understand how it happened.
“It was just a way of life,” he said. "In some ways, you had empathy for them."
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