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Suckers for Florida

In a memoir that reads like a tall tale but isn't, Dennis Covington takes readers on a rollicking good ride through the swamp of a Polk County land scam.

In his latest work, Dennis Covington (Salvation on Sand Mountain) might be accused of ripping off a Carl Hiaasen plot with this Florida-based tale of an outrageous land scam involving pit bulls, swamp buggies and gun-toting hog hunters but for one small, significant detail: It's based on his own life.

Covington gives his memoir the provocative title Redneck Riviera after the stretch of beach in Florida where his Alabama-born father spent many a family vacation. To purists, he points out, "The term "Redneck Riviera' refers only to that stretch of Alabama Gulf Coast between Fort Morgan and Flora-Bama, a lounge that straddles the state line." But to restrict it to just the Alabama side of the coast is a case of splitting hairs, says the author. "I mean, we were all from Alabama anyway."

The heart of Covington's story, however, takes place nowhere near either state's coast. Most of the action evolves farther south and inland on a sprawling piece of Polk County property with the kind of romantic moniker favored by developers: River Ranch Acres. That's where 16,000 suckers in the '50s bought 44,800 acres of raw, unsurveyed and unimproved land at exorbitant prices, paying on an installment plan.

Covington's dad was one of the people who got hoodwinked. Those lazy summer vacations on the Redneck Riviera of Florida's Panhandle, it turned out, had made the elder Covington an easy mark for two land-scamming brothers. Former carnival pitchmen who made their fortune convincing people that Formula No. 9 would grow their hair back, the brothers were, after all, not really offering Covington land. They were selling him an American dream.

The land scam in Polk County was frighteningly simple: The brothers' land company, called Gulf American, which had bought the vast acreage, promised the local county commissioners that it would never develop the area. Then, while Gulf American subdivided the land into 100,000 useless parcels and sold them to unsuspecting dreamers like Covington's dad, the county commissioners simply looked the other way. The land, after all, would provide millions in property taxes from the mostly absentee owners.

"The parcels at River Ranch not only had no roads but also had no electricity, no drinking water and no sewage system," Covington explains. "Twenty percent of the parcels were underwater. But that did not seem to discourage potential buyers, few of whom ever saw the actual piece of property they were buying and some of whom were never sent, or overlooked, the fine print in the public offering statement."

And, as if things couldn't get worse, the land was eventually squatted on. Locals moved in and turned it into "a landscape of beat-up tin shacks with dog runs and outhouses, junked appliances and swamp buggies that loomed beneath the trees like the intact skeletons of steel dinosaurs," writes Covington. Forming a hunt club (enter the wild hogs and the pit bulls, as well as suspected prostitution, illegal gambling and drug dealing), the "members" posted armed guards around the fenced-off property and charged admission, even to those who could prove they owned the land inside.

The elder Covington never saw this dream-turned-nightmare property, but his son did. His father left the land to him in his will, and Covington went down to claim it, just as his father must have known he would. As Covington puts it, "I think he wanted me to have an adventure on his behalf. It was one of the enduring themes of the westerns he'd loved to watch - the reclaiming of family land that had been stolen by gunslingers and cattle barons - and I think he must have smiled inwardly with the thought that I might ride into Polk County, Florida, one day demanding justice, even if it meant riding into an ambush."

But, alas, Redneck Riviera is not a Hiaasen novel. These developers don't get ground up in a threshing machine. They are not eaten by alligators. The canvas cabin Covington sets up on his inherited property is shot at and vandalized. His truck is torched. Covington finally abandons the idea of fighting for his inheritance.

And, when Covington decides to go to the real West and chase after his own dream of buying land, he doesn't do any better than his dad. Ending up in bankruptcy, he loses both the land out West and the Florida property.

Now you might be thinking what I was thinking when I got this far in the book: Did the author also inherit his father's guilelessness? "It's not exactly the way I would have liked the story to end," Covington admits, "but it seems to me that the good part of a story doesn't have much to do with the way it ends. The good part comes earlier than that. Sometimes the good part is not even in the story. Sometimes the good part is what has been left out."

Besides, Covington hardly came up empty-handed. In this story of "outlaws chewing tobacco and chewing up the world," he has a priceless intellectual property to pass on to his two children, and to us. And a rollicking good story it is.

-- "Redneck Riviera: Armadillos, Outlaws and the Demise of an American Dream," by Dennis Covington, Counterpoint, $25, 181 pages.

Dennis Covington will be at a book signing at 6 p.m. Wednesday at Inkwood Books, 216 S Armenia Ave., Tampa.