Laroche believed that if he could poach a few plants from the swamp—protected from federal endangered-species law by the Seminoles’ immunity—he could clone them using his secret cloning technique and end up with millions of ghost orchids and clamshell orchids and crooked spur orchids that would be legal for him to market anywhere in the world because they would have been produced in a lab and not taken from the wild. Collectors would then have no reason to buy from poachers because they could get a ghost orchid from Laroche, and thus he would scuttle the black-market trade in the species.
