35,000 Take Festival’s Bait After Village Goes to Pot

--More than 35,000 visitors ate their fill over the weekend at the annual Seafood Festival in Everglades City, a quaint Florida coastal hamlet of 534 residents. And that’s a remarkable feat considering that half the village’s fishing fleet has been impounded for smuggling marijuana. They did have to import some fish from nearby Fort Myers--after all, 8,000 pounds was needed--but, as Mayor Herman Askren explained, “The fishing business hasn’t been too good this year.” The smuggling business has gone a bit sour too. “We’ve throwed a stop to it this time,” said Lt. Charlie Sanders. “I’m not saying it couldn’t start up again, but for right now it’s all over.” Sanders, a sheriff’s deputy, has lived in Everglades City for 25 of his 56 years and knows its people as well as they know the labyrinth of offshore mangrove islands that had been a smuggler’s paradise for 10 years until Operation Everglades resulted in about 150 arrests and seizures of 27 boats, four airplanes, a half-dozen trucks, two condominiums at the town dock and about 240 tons of marijuana. “This town got a bad image, and I think a bum rap,” Askren said. “Our people are law-abiding. The others are a tiny minority. We are close-knit and neighborly. We’re one of the few towns left where people don’t lock doors. The raids and all the publicity haven’t changed that.”

--”It happened real fast,” said cashier Pelton Richmond Jr. “I saw that lady panicking, screaming, ‘My baby, my baby!’ and crying.” Henrene Lindsey had just finished gassing up her car at a Chicago service station and was at the cashier’s window when a thief took off in her car with her purse, $40, 12 credit cards and her 9-month-old son. Richmond called police, then took the mother to the nearest police station. Meanwhile, the thief called Lindsey’s home and got her husband. “I may be a thief,” he admitted, “but I’m no sadist,” adding that he would keep the purse. He told the father where he could find the car and the boy. The father called police. The police, carrying the mother along, sped to the car’s location and arrested a man in the act of opening the car door. “No, no,” the man protested, “I’m the father.” Henrene Lindsey confirmed his identity while, unharmed and snug in his car seat, the infant smiled and cooed.