The story of "The Home Game" - TL;DR
04-11-2019
, 10:01 PM
05-19-2019
, 11:50 PM
Halfway Crooks, Part 1
I will start these plant stories with one of my most recent experiences with Ken and other related plant people I will name as they become relevant.
December 4th, 2016 - South Tampa, Florida
I had gotten a call from Ken who had been telling me he had a big client with deep pockets. It was mostly a lot of talk that passed in one ear and out the other, but he asked if I would come and price out a collection of plants, cycads in particular. Cycads as a whole are pound for pound the most expensive plants bought and sold on Earth, with some fetching well over $500K for the rarest specimens. Many celebrities have cycad collections, and I have sold specimens to people you have seen in the movies and possibly in concert. I have not met them personally have dealt with their personal garden managers who manage their purchases. Cycads look very similar to palms in visual appearance but are actually ancient coning plants that emerged during the Jurassic period, whereas palms are flowering grasses. Almost all of them are spiny, tough as nails, and live in rough climates throughout the world. Their slow growth, hard propagation, and poaching in sketchy areas of countries such as South Africa, Colombia, Honduras, et cetera. They are the blood diamonds of the plant trade, and having a lot of them is a huge status symbol for those looking to climb the "socio-botanical" ladder as I like to call it. Although palms will always be my first passion, cycads are highly profitable and hard to steer away from the incentives of making large quantities of money just by brokering them.
We had left Cape Coral around 5am, and met Ken in Punta Gorda off the interstate, and took the backroads up to Tampa. Ken had brought his GTI with 400 bhp and the backroads were way more fun to drive through. We were going to look at a 30 year old collection owned by a friend of a friend, a person I only knew as Crazy Kevin. Kevin had worked for a cycad collector and was given cycads as payment often for his services. The collector had traveled the world looking for new species and buying large specimens off locals and bribing government officials to get them out of the country with paperwork so they would be accepted into the United States legitimately. Because almost all cycads are on CITES (Convention of International Trade of Endangered Species), moving them through countries was as hard as moving exotic pets, but money always greases the wheels of business. I was getting paid $50 an hour for my work including travel just to put some prices to the plants.
We arrived around 830am and we were met by a young landscaper fellow named Jay. Jay was apparently a recovering meth head and Ken gave him the nickname Meth Mower Boy. He was a friend of Kevin's, and was the broker for this job, as he had contacted Ken about this garden for sale. He was quite excited as it was his first time brokering cycads and felt like it was a step forward in life. The garden was situated in the industrial part of South Tampa with salt water filling the ditches as it was very low lying and probably should never had been built upon. We started to walk around and I see a group of people doing yoga in the garden. We had the chance to meet Kevin as he ran towards us and shooed us away from the group. He didn't want to interrupt the "mood of the session", which stank of low tide and rotting fruit from the various wild vegetables growing around. We avoided him and went for the plants, I saw them in the distance and they are unmistakable - spiny, floppy tropical green Encephalartos from The Congo, DRC, Angola, Uganda and Kenya. These are large like a palm, and though they are from some pretty rugged areas, the ones that have made it here grow fast and reproduce well. I had really been hoping for some South African species to really jack up the price, and possibly dig up for myself. I was the one who really had the pulse on the market, I was looking to to extract max value from this endeavor. There was $100K sitting on this property and I wasn't going to be paid $400 to watch Ken make all the money off my back.
Jay showed us around in quite a giddy fashion, I had even seen a post on Instagram that he was going to make the largest sale of his life and how excited he was. He was trying to talk to me as I was starting to price things out and Ken was telling him to stay away from me, that I was on the clock. People will often try to extract information for free in this business and I didn't mind Ken making my job a little easier. I was the I brought out the pen and paper, wrote down all the sizes, species, any notes I needed. I came up with about $83,000 in plants as a wholesale price, something that could be sold individually for around $150K. We were finally able to get Kevin's attention, and I sat to the side while Ken and Kevin had a conversation. Things quickly got heated and I watched Ken walk over to the car and started to talk to me.
"It doesn't look like we are going to make a deal here, he just wants too much money."
"How much does he want?"
"$75,000 was his counterprice."
"How much did you offer?"
"$20,000."
"That's one quarter of the wholesale price, I would have told you to piss off as well."
"My client wanted to pay a fraction of the wholesale price." Ken was never known for being a shrewd negotiator. Cycad collectors were like car collectors - rarely hard up for money, have a ton of pride in their collection, and easily offended. There are almost no fire sales in this world of rare plants, if someone really was going broke, they would privately sell off a collection or put it on commission to a nursery. He thought he could wield around his clients buying power and lowball people on their personal collections. It was going to get him on a blacklist in this small plant group really fast. Jay showed up with a worried look on his face.
"You guys need to get out of here, Kevin is pissed and he wants everyone gone. I've never seen him so mad." Jay was clearly depressed he wasn't going to make a deal today, and I was a little bit mad that Ken had taken me all the way up here if I knew he was going to waste everyone's time. We quickly got in the car and headed back down 75, the fast way home. I mentioned to Ken that we could go visit my friend Michael's garden, it was for sale, and had been turned down by Richard, my nursery landlord, just a few weeks prior. He wanted to make the most out of the day so I called up Michael and got us an invitation. Michael's garden was one of the nicest private gardens in the whole state, preserved for 35 years with his trips around the world, though he had sold many plants off during this time. Ken was hungry for a sale so when we got there, he was jovial with Michael as they had known each other for 30 years from occasional meetings.
"How much for everything?" Ken asked.
"Two hundred thousand dollars, and that's a deal." Ken had this look like he wanted to roll his eyes, looked at me, and I told him it was a half million dollar collection. The only thing that kept it from being worth many times more was the poor soil they were grown in and heavy shade, they could easily have been worth 2-3 million given better conditions. Michael was one of my mentors and I wasn't going to see him taken for a fool. Some of Michael's stories were crazy, from being in jail in Guatemala to watching his friend die in a car accident in front of him in South Africa. His partner was a well off landlord of large properties in St. Louis and they didn't need the money. That didn't keep Ken from making an idiot of himself and offering to bring a $100,000 check to him in a few days. Michael retorted that if he brought him $195,000 cash he would consider it. I walked with Michael to collect some seed to make the most of this trip and Nicole was putting on shoes to walk around the garden while Ken walked in the front of the three acres. Twenty minutes later we wrap back around to the front to see them hanging out in the driveway, Ken took some pictures and seemed ready to go. He was going to consider the offer and send it to his client.
We said goodbye, got in the GTI, and sped off down 75 to the meeting point at Wal-Mart in Punta Gorda. I said goodbye and Ken said I would get my check next week. As soon as he sped off Nicole was clearly looking to talk.
"I have to tell you something about Ken. When you were in the back with Michael, Ken propositioned me and pulled out his dick and started stroking it."
"What did you do?"
"I just stood there, frozen, I didn't know what to say so I laughed."
It definitely wasn't funny to me, twelve years I had known this guy and he tries to make an indecent proposal? My blood was boiling and a lot of thoughts were rolling through my head as we headed down 41 and back to Cape Coral.
Pictured is an example of a 200 year old cycad from Central Mexico worth approximately $1500.
I will start these plant stories with one of my most recent experiences with Ken and other related plant people I will name as they become relevant.
December 4th, 2016 - South Tampa, Florida
I had gotten a call from Ken who had been telling me he had a big client with deep pockets. It was mostly a lot of talk that passed in one ear and out the other, but he asked if I would come and price out a collection of plants, cycads in particular. Cycads as a whole are pound for pound the most expensive plants bought and sold on Earth, with some fetching well over $500K for the rarest specimens. Many celebrities have cycad collections, and I have sold specimens to people you have seen in the movies and possibly in concert. I have not met them personally have dealt with their personal garden managers who manage their purchases. Cycads look very similar to palms in visual appearance but are actually ancient coning plants that emerged during the Jurassic period, whereas palms are flowering grasses. Almost all of them are spiny, tough as nails, and live in rough climates throughout the world. Their slow growth, hard propagation, and poaching in sketchy areas of countries such as South Africa, Colombia, Honduras, et cetera. They are the blood diamonds of the plant trade, and having a lot of them is a huge status symbol for those looking to climb the "socio-botanical" ladder as I like to call it. Although palms will always be my first passion, cycads are highly profitable and hard to steer away from the incentives of making large quantities of money just by brokering them.
We had left Cape Coral around 5am, and met Ken in Punta Gorda off the interstate, and took the backroads up to Tampa. Ken had brought his GTI with 400 bhp and the backroads were way more fun to drive through. We were going to look at a 30 year old collection owned by a friend of a friend, a person I only knew as Crazy Kevin. Kevin had worked for a cycad collector and was given cycads as payment often for his services. The collector had traveled the world looking for new species and buying large specimens off locals and bribing government officials to get them out of the country with paperwork so they would be accepted into the United States legitimately. Because almost all cycads are on CITES (Convention of International Trade of Endangered Species), moving them through countries was as hard as moving exotic pets, but money always greases the wheels of business. I was getting paid $50 an hour for my work including travel just to put some prices to the plants.
We arrived around 830am and we were met by a young landscaper fellow named Jay. Jay was apparently a recovering meth head and Ken gave him the nickname Meth Mower Boy. He was a friend of Kevin's, and was the broker for this job, as he had contacted Ken about this garden for sale. He was quite excited as it was his first time brokering cycads and felt like it was a step forward in life. The garden was situated in the industrial part of South Tampa with salt water filling the ditches as it was very low lying and probably should never had been built upon. We started to walk around and I see a group of people doing yoga in the garden. We had the chance to meet Kevin as he ran towards us and shooed us away from the group. He didn't want to interrupt the "mood of the session", which stank of low tide and rotting fruit from the various wild vegetables growing around. We avoided him and went for the plants, I saw them in the distance and they are unmistakable - spiny, floppy tropical green Encephalartos from The Congo, DRC, Angola, Uganda and Kenya. These are large like a palm, and though they are from some pretty rugged areas, the ones that have made it here grow fast and reproduce well. I had really been hoping for some South African species to really jack up the price, and possibly dig up for myself. I was the one who really had the pulse on the market, I was looking to to extract max value from this endeavor. There was $100K sitting on this property and I wasn't going to be paid $400 to watch Ken make all the money off my back.
Jay showed us around in quite a giddy fashion, I had even seen a post on Instagram that he was going to make the largest sale of his life and how excited he was. He was trying to talk to me as I was starting to price things out and Ken was telling him to stay away from me, that I was on the clock. People will often try to extract information for free in this business and I didn't mind Ken making my job a little easier. I was the I brought out the pen and paper, wrote down all the sizes, species, any notes I needed. I came up with about $83,000 in plants as a wholesale price, something that could be sold individually for around $150K. We were finally able to get Kevin's attention, and I sat to the side while Ken and Kevin had a conversation. Things quickly got heated and I watched Ken walk over to the car and started to talk to me.
"It doesn't look like we are going to make a deal here, he just wants too much money."
"How much does he want?"
"$75,000 was his counterprice."
"How much did you offer?"
"$20,000."
"That's one quarter of the wholesale price, I would have told you to piss off as well."
"My client wanted to pay a fraction of the wholesale price." Ken was never known for being a shrewd negotiator. Cycad collectors were like car collectors - rarely hard up for money, have a ton of pride in their collection, and easily offended. There are almost no fire sales in this world of rare plants, if someone really was going broke, they would privately sell off a collection or put it on commission to a nursery. He thought he could wield around his clients buying power and lowball people on their personal collections. It was going to get him on a blacklist in this small plant group really fast. Jay showed up with a worried look on his face.
"You guys need to get out of here, Kevin is pissed and he wants everyone gone. I've never seen him so mad." Jay was clearly depressed he wasn't going to make a deal today, and I was a little bit mad that Ken had taken me all the way up here if I knew he was going to waste everyone's time. We quickly got in the car and headed back down 75, the fast way home. I mentioned to Ken that we could go visit my friend Michael's garden, it was for sale, and had been turned down by Richard, my nursery landlord, just a few weeks prior. He wanted to make the most out of the day so I called up Michael and got us an invitation. Michael's garden was one of the nicest private gardens in the whole state, preserved for 35 years with his trips around the world, though he had sold many plants off during this time. Ken was hungry for a sale so when we got there, he was jovial with Michael as they had known each other for 30 years from occasional meetings.
"How much for everything?" Ken asked.
"Two hundred thousand dollars, and that's a deal." Ken had this look like he wanted to roll his eyes, looked at me, and I told him it was a half million dollar collection. The only thing that kept it from being worth many times more was the poor soil they were grown in and heavy shade, they could easily have been worth 2-3 million given better conditions. Michael was one of my mentors and I wasn't going to see him taken for a fool. Some of Michael's stories were crazy, from being in jail in Guatemala to watching his friend die in a car accident in front of him in South Africa. His partner was a well off landlord of large properties in St. Louis and they didn't need the money. That didn't keep Ken from making an idiot of himself and offering to bring a $100,000 check to him in a few days. Michael retorted that if he brought him $195,000 cash he would consider it. I walked with Michael to collect some seed to make the most of this trip and Nicole was putting on shoes to walk around the garden while Ken walked in the front of the three acres. Twenty minutes later we wrap back around to the front to see them hanging out in the driveway, Ken took some pictures and seemed ready to go. He was going to consider the offer and send it to his client.
We said goodbye, got in the GTI, and sped off down 75 to the meeting point at Wal-Mart in Punta Gorda. I said goodbye and Ken said I would get my check next week. As soon as he sped off Nicole was clearly looking to talk.
"I have to tell you something about Ken. When you were in the back with Michael, Ken propositioned me and pulled out his dick and started stroking it."
"What did you do?"
"I just stood there, frozen, I didn't know what to say so I laughed."
It definitely wasn't funny to me, twelve years I had known this guy and he tries to make an indecent proposal? My blood was boiling and a lot of thoughts were rolling through my head as we headed down 41 and back to Cape Coral.
Pictured is an example of a 200 year old cycad from Central Mexico worth approximately $1500.
06-18-2019
, 06:27 AM
