Off road, off limits

Polk County land that was once sold as part of a scam now seems to exist outside the authority of government, and the reach of some landowners.

By LEONORA LaPETER
Published June 5, 2005

RIVER RANCH ACRES - Forty years ago, a large Florida land developer subdivided 44,800 acres of wilderness in Polk County into 11/4-acre lots and sold them to people all over the world, many with dreams of one day retiring here.

Hard-sell land peddlers solicited prospective property owners by phone or on the streets, from New Haven and New Orleans to Rome and Hong Kong. But the 70 square miles of land, a portion of it under water, was never developed. It was one of Florida's great land scams.

Today, thousands of these land owners and their descendants still own a tiny piece of Florida, but with little benefit. For the past 25 years, the property has been controlled by a group of hunters and others intent on keeping it the way it always has been: a gated enclave with absolutely no government and few rules.

"I don't know any place like it where you got this kind of freedom," said Becky Surls, 62, a retired school bus driver from Okeechobee who has owned land inside River Ranch since 1984. She transported her grandmother's cabin and rebuilt it about 4 miles inside the heart of the property. "And so far, we still got that freedom."

But the hunters' control is under attack. River Ranch Acres is in the path of a state environmental conservation plan. Polk County recently launched an investigation into unpermitted building on the property. And a new lawsuit may be looming that seeks to remove gates and open it to other land owners.

The property offers a window into a world where planning, building, health and zoning officials have no control, where one group of landowners has full use of land that belongs to hundreds of thousands of others and government can do little to change it.

Though there are other examples of small groups of hunters or cattlemen using large undeveloped tracts belonging to absentee owners in Florida, none seems as blatant as River Ranch Acres. It was even the subject of a 2004 book called Redneck Riviera, Armadillos, Outlaws and the Demise of an American Dream by the son of one landowner.

For decades, out-of-town landowners have complained of being turned away by guards with guns at River Ranch. The hunters charge their members a $60 annual fee to get in and have haphazardly created a minicity inside gates once erected to hold in cattle.

Large A-frame homes that poke above the overgrowth sit just down the road from tiny plywood shacks. Extension cords drape like clotheslines from one structure to another, providing power from generators. Piles of abandoned trailers, old couches and dead cars are scattered alongside dirt roads thick with sand that eventually become impassable without a four-wheel drive.

Doubledecker swamp buggies - truck frames with extended steering wheels so the driver and passengers can ride high above the ground - pass by with camouflage-clad men who tote rifles and gaze suspiciously at outsiders.

"This is the most outrageous thing, that in the year 2005, a county would permit a group of individuals to expropriate lands and to use them for all these illegal purposes ... and permit it to be that way for 20 years without anyone stopping it," said Richard Bennett, a Coral Gables lawyer who represented a landowner seeking access to River Ranch.

The hunters, however, say they are owners, too, and they have the right to use the land. They deny they turn away other landowners at the gates.

"We're not the bad guys," said Vic Lovallo, who manned the gate at River Ranch one day earlier this year but did not carry a gun. "Whatever, you want to call us ... we're average American people who come here to have a good time."

* * *

Wasyll Gina first saw the full-page ad in th e New Haven Register in Connecticut during the late 1960s or early 1970s.

"Buy Land in Florida," the headline almost screamed. The bank auditor, in his 40s, had thought about buying a place to retire so he went to a New Haven restaurant to hear the pitch.

"Not only did they say they were going to build condos, but they also said that Disney World was going to extend to that area and they were going to make a Disneyland water park in there," said Gina, now 85, who paid $3,000 for his lot and has paid taxes (now $10.48 per lot) on it for more than 30 years. "We northerners fell for it hook, line and sinker."

Gulf American Corp., a company started by two men who had made money selling hair conditioner to bald men, developed both Cape Coral near Fort Myers and Golden Gate Estates near Naples. In River Ranch, Leonard and Jack Rosen's third development, they decided to sell the dream but not the actual development. The property was subdivided, but there were no plans for roads or utility lines.

The company pleaded guilty in 1967 to five counts of fraud and misleading practices before the now-defunct Florida Land Sales Board over their land deals. They were fined $5,000 and barred from selling land for 30 days.

By 1971, the company had become GAC Properties Inc., but it was still using high-pressure tactics.

When a St. Petersburg Times reporter went to River Ranch Acres to hear the pitch in 1971, she was given a tour of the property with its western-style saloon and cafe, a large motel, swimming pool, lodge, airstrip and skeet and trap range. But she was never given a copy of the property report that would have told her it was only supposed to be for hiking, camping and picnics.

GAC went bankrupt in 1976 and Avatar Holdings became its successor.

Soon after, hunters who were landowners formed the River Ranch Property Owners Association. The club took control of the property, and soon after that, out-of-town landowners who came to see their property started complaining of being turned away at the gate.

* * *

Hershel Smith, a retired diesel mechanic from North Carolina, is one of those property owners. For 37 years, he has owned a couple of acres in the middle of River Ranch Acres.

But he has never seen his land.

He has tried. Four times, he has driven to River Ranch, the last in 2000. Four times, he has been prevented from entering, either by armed guards or a barbed-wire fence.

"I think it's pretty bad, kind of like a Communist to me, to tell you what you can and can't do," says Smith, 64. "It's kind of like the Wild West."

A decade ago, the tangled land dispute grew tenser. Various property owners, among them GAC's successor, Avatar, which owned 1,667 lots, tried to get access to the land to either build roads, cut timber or remove fill dirt. They were stopped by Polk County sheriff's deputies, some of them River Ranch landowners themselves, who announced they would arrest anyone who cut the property's fence.

The state recognized that the property owners had a right to access their land, but they encouraged all of the parties to back down to stop violence.

"I got so frustrated and mad because I really couldn't do anything about it," said Tommie Ferrell, 71, a retired state investigator for the Florida Land Sales Board who wrote a 1995 report on River Ranch. "It bothers me even to think about it today. ... What they were doing was not legal, but simply because landowners couldn't identify their property, they couldn't actually say someone was on their property."

Of all of the property owners, C.R. Powell, a retired New Smyrna Beach radio equipment installer for AT&T, has been the most vocal. He has been battling the hunt club since its inception in 1982.

Powell formed a rival property owners' group, the River Ranch Land Owners Association, which he says has some 4,600 dues-paying absentee landowners today. He filed his first lawsuit against the hunters in 1986. He said he has received death threats and his most recent lawsuit lasted 10 years and cost about $300,000.

Its result: Just one of the dozens of easements into the property was opened up. But he has been back to court over and over because the easement, which is close to his property, is continually faced with roadblocks: a wrecker without wheels, thousands of nails and broken glass, a padlocked gate with glue in the lock.

"Even the surveyors are frightened by those people," said Powell, 64. "These guys have got tobacco dripping off their chin, a gun on their hip and a bulldog in the back of their buggy. As bad as you think it could be, that's what it is."

Dennis Covington, an author from Birmingham, Ala., tried to claim two of the lots in 1997. It had been his only inheritance from his father.

Covington set up a small cabin on his land, which wasn't in the hunt club's designated camping ground but in the hunting area. Before long, his life was also threatened, his cabin shot up and his Jeep set ablaze, according to his book.

Soon after he arrived, he abandoned the dream and went back home to his family.

* * *

Inside the hunt club's gate house one day in January, Vic Lovallo of Lakeland was seated at a window with a ledger book in front of him. American flag suspenders held up his jeans, and River Ranch paraphernalia - T-shirts, halter tops, caps, visors, bandanas and coolies for sale - hung on the wall behind him.

At the time, he was the hunt club's treasurer, a job he took very seriously. A retired general contractor and volunteer firefighter from New Jersey, Lovallo presented a picture of the club growing stronger not with hunters, but with ATV riders and others needing a place for family recreation.

He said the club had about 4,000 to 5,000 members, who pay $60 a year. But Lovallo declined to say anything about the hunt club's budget.

Next to a gated yard with dozens of swamp buggies, he showed some of the club's spoils: a tractor, a backhoe and an old military surplus fire truck that has become necessary because fires keep raging through the club's camps.

Lovallo and other hunt club members say no one actually lives at River Ranch Acres full time; the camps are for temporary use and most people come on the weekends.

But others say there are plenty of full-time residents, many living in full-fledged homes with hot and cold running water.

"There's more illegal building out there than Carter's got pills," said Bill Read Jr., 81, a surveyor who subdivided River Ranch Acres for Gulf American beginning in 1964 and continues to survey the land for owners today. "Some live there full time. There's mansions out there."

In the past, Polk County officials have said it was too difficult to manage the unpermitted structures.

Lovallo, 66, said many of the structures are old and the hunt association now requires only trailers on wheels.

But recently, Polk County hired a new code enforcement director, Bob Gasper , who has decided to do something about the unpermitted structures at River Ranch.

"You can't not deal with it just because it's a difficult issue," Gasper said.

At the same time, the Nature Conservancy is buying its first River Ranch lots for a state conservation plan. Almost the entire River Ranch Acres subdivision is in the path of the plan, but, for now, the state is only after 3,600 acres in River Ranch north of State Road 60, said Keith Fountain, director of protection for the Nature Conservancy.

But the hunt club isn't taking any chances. It has been pooling its resources, buying up lots. Hunt club members own 5,500 acres, said Pete Edwards, its recently elected president. Its association owns about 300 acres, including 121 acres it recently purchased for $750 an acre.

"There's so many of us, I don't think they're going to mess with us," said Orval Surls, 75, on the side of the dirt road inside River Ranch Acres one day.

* * *

Powell said he was not done fighting for access to the land and planned to file another lawsuit soon. He has had five of the two dozen or so easements into the property surveyed at a cost of $25,000. Next he will seek to get the gates removed from in front of those easements.

River Ranch Acres lots are appraised at $630 in the Polk property appraiser's office. But recently the lots have started to pop up for sale on eBay with promises that buyers can build, dig wells and have the free use of 50,000 acres. Nine lots were on sale there one day recently.

"Some of these lots have sold for more than $10,000," one ad said.

With two hours and 17 minutes left, seven bidders had pushed the price of one piece of property to $4,000.

--Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report. Leonora LaPeter can be reached at lapeter@sptimes.com or 727-893-8640.

[Last modified June 5, 2005, 02:15:25]