THE NOKOBEE WARS
33
THUS IT CAME to pass that against all odds, against all outward reason, Raphael Semmes Cody became the legal arm of one of the most rapacious land developers in South Alabama. As he walked toward his first day at work, he was in a dangerously ambiguous position, balanced on a knife edge between two opposing loyalties. A slight tip in either direction, he knew, could brand him a turncoat--a saboteur to Sunderland or a traitor to the conservationists. Either way, no one would trust him again, and his carefully constructed game plan would come apart. So he would always have to stay focused and think through his every step.
He arrived at the office building at nine o'clock sharp. He paused outside and glanced up at the large steel, squared letters announcing SUNDERLAND ASSOCIATES over the entrance. Then he wiped his hands down the sides of his new J. Press linen jacket to flatten any newly acquired wrinkles. He touched the knot of his maroon Harvard tie to be sure it was perfectly aligned with the buttoned-down tabs of his pale blue Pinpoint Oxford shirt. Satisfied that nothing of Clayville, Alabama, was in sight, he took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and walked through the revolving doors into the main lobby.
Waiting for him there was the woman who identified herself as his personal secretary.
"Well, good morning, Mr. Cody, and it's so good to see you. Everyone upstairs at Sunderland Associates is so looking forward to meeting you. My name is Sarah Beth Jackson, and I'm the one who's going to be helping you."
"Well, I'm real glad to meet you," Raff responded. "We've got a lot of important work to do together."
Sarah Beth, he thought. How perfectly Alabamian. He recalled again that it was a Southern habit to give a double first name to the second daughter.
Sarah Beth was a talker, who disliked even a brief interval of silence. "I hope you had as nice a weekend as I did," she went on as they entered the elevator. "My family and I went fishing over at Pascagoula. We caught two big wahoos. They're real delicious if you grill them fresh. Have you ever tried wahoo?"
Raff frowned and shook his head slowly as though sad that this experience had been denied him. In fact, he had a hard time even picturing a wahoo. He remembered that it was a large game fish that occasionally showed up in restaurants, and in general was considered a novelty in port towns along the Gulf like Mobile.
They reached the fourth floor and went through a door with an opaque glass window gold-labeled SUNDERLAND ASSOCIATES and into the main administrative office. A large hand-painted sign on the reception desk read WELCOME, MR. CODY.
Sarah Beth led him to his office, located at the far end of the floor. He entered, looked around, then walked over to peer out the window. The view was of tar-papered rooftops with narrow congested streets down below. He figured, correctly, that the offices at the opposite side of the floor had the view of Mobile Bay. The room was bare of books and paperwork, for the last day, he knew, even the last hour. Sarah Beth handed him a handwritten note. He was due for a luncheon meeting in three hours with Drake Sunderland and Richard Sturtevant, vice president and chief financial officer. It would be in Sunderland's suite, on the opposite side of the floor.
Members of the staff began to break away from what they were doing, mostly getting settled in with morning coffee and small talk. They came to meet the new legal counsel, singly or in small groups, and add their welcome. They chatted for a while about this or that, and all left with the mandatory parting, or something close to it: "Now, if there's anything I can do to help you, you just let me know."
He listened carefully to what each said, no matter how perfunctory. He tried hard to memorize their names and read the undertones in their words. He noticed that several spoke with a slight edge, taking overlong to explain the roles of the executive staff members and stressing their own availability to give him advice anytime he felt a need for it.
Raff could understand the implied resentment toward a twenty-five-year-old entering the firm at a level they viewed as above their own. He wanted to remind them, but could not right then, that the legal counsel was a new niche at Sunderland and outside the hierarchy, and that he was not going to be a supervisor or a director of anybody except Sarah Beth Jackson. He made a mental note of those who showed what appeared to be some degree of anxiety. It would be wise, he thought, to draw close to them and gain their trust in the future.
At the luncheon meeting Raff encountered another, more serious risk. After lunch had been served and pleasantries wound down to the point that serious talk could begin, Sturtevant came quickly to the point.
"Raff, Mr. Sunderland and I just want to clear the air on a certain matter for once and all, and keep it that way. We want to be a hundred percent sure that we don't get any conflict of interest within the firm or even the appearance of one. I'm sure you don't want that either."
"Nosir, absolutely not," Raff said. "Something like that could undermine the operation of this company and even in some cases might open us to litigation. But so I can be perfectly clear, what exactly are we talking about here?"
Raff was pretty sure he knew where Sturtevant was headed. He had arrived on dangerous ground, and more quickly than he had expected.
"Well, we know you're quite a naturalist," Sturtevant replied, steepling his hands, "and you put a lot of effort into environmental law while you were at Harvard. Now, that's all to the good. Don't get me wrong about any of this. Environmental issues are getting more and more important these days, and in the business world too, and we need your kind of expertise in what might turn out to be pretty rough waters. But we'd really like to hear your feelings about where you stand. I mean, suppose push comes to shove on some environment issue. Suppose Sunderland Associates runs into heavy opposition from some environmental group or other on one of our projects. It might even become a big media issue, with reporters interviewing you and all. How are you going to handle that?"
There it was. Sturtevant could not be plainer. Raff knew that how he answered now, right this minute, could set the tone of his relationship with Sturtevant and Sunderland, and his future effectiveness in his new job.
"Mr. Sturtevant," he said, raising and opening his hands, "I'm glad you asked me."
"Rick, call me Rick, let's not stay formal around here, Raff."
"Okay, Rick, I'm glad you asked that question. I've given this matter a lot of thought myself, believe me, and I want to reassure you and Mr. Sunderland right now to your complete satisfaction."
In fact, he had all but memorized the answer he would now make.
"I promise you there will be no conflict of interest, or any appearance of conflict of interest, on any case on which I work. Let me put this as strongly as I can. I do intend to work with environmental groups around here and promote conservation. I hope you'll approve of that. This region needs it badly. But I will also work toward solutions and so forth that are to your complete satisfaction. I think you'll find that my connections with environmental organizations will work out to the benefit of the company."
The group fell silent for the good part of a minute. Then Sturtevant said quietly, "Well, now, I think I can speak for Drake Sunderland also when I say I'm satisfied with that answer."
"Yes," Sunderland quickly added, "thank you. Now, if we're all happy, let's get organized here. If you're ready, we'll move on to the next item on the agenda."
By the end of the week, Raff was deep in legal work of the kind previously sent to independent consultants. He found to his relief that for the most part he could manage his new tasks easily. He also projected that he could do so at an overall saving for Sunderland Associates. Most of the work concerned acquisition and sale of plots in the city and suburbs, and reviews of contracts for construction on them. So far, it was all at the level of Contract Law 101 at Harvard.
After several months, when Raff felt comfortable enough with his new position, he joined the Alabama Nature Conservancy and the state organization of the Audubon Society. At the first opportunity thereafter he offered their local representatives free legal advice, and received enthusiastic responses. That was not difficult work either, nor of great importance. So far, it had not as yet yielded decisions in conflict with the commercial interests of Sunderland Associates. He seldom encountered problems in conservation that could not be settled by standard methods of negotiation.
On the side he began to study the essential players in government, business, and land management at the local and state level. He went out of his way to meet the most important among them. Raff was consciously preparing for the small fraction of future conflicts that would demand exceptional skill and effort. He was bound to honor the promise he had made to Sunderland and Sturtevant. There would be victories for the company and there would be defeats. Then, he expected, there would be a very few with major long-term consequences. The most agonizing of these was the fate of the Nokobee tract. That, Raff knew, would be the game-breaker.
In the meantime, outside of business luncheons and receptions, Raff's social life was not with his professional colleagues at Sunderland Associates. Instead, Raff used his leisure hours to quietly build a circle of friends in the environmental movement.
Raff's key contact was inevitably Bill Robbins, whose office at the Mobile News Register was only five blocks from the Sunderland Office Building. Robbins's relationship with Raff soon changed from that as mentor and adviser to close friend and partner. They made it a habit to have lunch together in the Rebel Cafe and Deli, located on Bledsoe Street halfway between their two places of work, and famous for its fried mullet, hushpuppies, and crab gumbo. Occasionally, Bill's wife, Anna Jeanne Longstreet Robbins, joined them when she could break away from her job as a manager at the downtown Sears.
Their conversations ranged widely, usually including the more savory political gossip from around the state: a governor indicted for embezzlement, a famous football coach about to be fired for a dalliance with a member of his staff, a state senator photographed leaving a Biloxi casino with a male prostitute.
But invariably, they settled on the latest events at the South Alabama conservation front. Robbins always brought along a folded map of the surviving pockets of old-growth floodplain cypress and longleaf pine. "Those little parcels are the key to everything," he said.
At their second meeting, Raff decided to disclose his full plan to save Nokobee, so the two men could discuss it at length. The confidence was exclusive. Only Robbins would know. Not even Anna Jeanne would be told, and most certainly not Cyrus Semmes. Raff was desperate to share the subject with someone else who really cared about Alabama conservation, and he needed practical advice from the knowledgeable newsman. He was familiar with the oft-quoted definition of investigative journalism: seduction followed by betrayal. But he trusted Robbins completely. They were full partners, bound together by the same goals.
After a year at Sunderland Associates with nothing decided, Raff began to suffer a growing anxiety over Nokobee. He realized that many would judge his obsession unhealthy. But he had committed too much time and energy, and invested too much of his own self-regard, to let it go. He wanted the Jepsons to move Nokobee into the market. He would put his plan into action and help to settle the issue one way or the other. He felt, he said to Robbins, like a soldier waiting for the whistle ordering him to go over the top of the trench, or, perhaps more appropriately, a prisoner in a courtroom waiting for the verdict. He wanted to be fatalistic, to know what the gods had decided, to have made the issue final, live or die, with maybe some kind of peace at the end.
"There are times," he said one day to Bill Robbins at the Rebel over boiled crayfish, gumbo, and cheese grits, "when I'm almost ready to settle for a flip of the coin. Just to stop worrying about it."
"Listen, my friend, I know how it's been eating you, believe me, but look at it this way. The longer the Jepsons hold off, the more public opinion on the Gulf Coast will turn in favor of preserving the last pieces of the longleaf ecosystem. If the Jepsons wait long enough, it might be difficult for Sunderland or any other developer to tear up Nokobee, and the more so because Nokobee is fast becoming the last really good piece surviving in South Alabama. People in Mobile and the southern tier of counties, and the next counties over in the Panhandle, might be thinking of it as their longleaf reserve."
Raff said, "You're thinking the developers might just hold off buying Nokobee and instead put their money somewhere else. In other words, save themselves a lot of trouble."
"That's right," Robbins answered. "If major players like Sunderland pull out, the asking price, or more accurately the preset baseline bid, will probably drop. And, who knows, Nokobee then might get picked up by the State of Alabama or a conservation organization like The Nature Conservancy."
"Oh, yeah. Actually, I've thought about that a lot. It could happen." Raff broke a crayfish in two and sucked out the meat, then followed it with a slug of beer. "But that could also allow some pirate group to grab it and do God knows what to it. Maybe turn it into a pig farm."
"I think that's way too pessimistic," Robbins returned. "Too much money involved. Anyway, I do think that we might have more time. I've been wanting to tell you, it looks like the Jepsons are set to keep arguing over what to do for a while yet."
"That's news to me. How do you know that?"
"I've got a couple of friends at the Atlanta Constitution with an ear on the door whenever the Jepson Trust members meet. The trust has a lot more property tied up, around here and over in Georgia. They've been arguing a lot lately over sales and development, and one of the properties they're seriously hung up over is Nokobee."
Raff asked, "Why is that, do you suppose? Some of the Jepsons want to develop it themselves? Or they want to raise the opening bid?"
"No, no. Not either. Nothing like that. It's simply that a couple of the Jepsons want to cash out now, while the others want to milk the best deal out of the tract by picking the optimum time and payout schedule. Fussing around like that could tie up the whole thing for a long time, maybe a couple more years."
"Well, damn it and be gone!" Raff reached over to another plate, lifted out a hushpuppy, chopped at it with a spoon, and mixed the pieces with cheese grits. "I ask you, why didn't God," he said, chewing, "make me the son of a billionaire so I could just buy the whole thing with pocket change and be done with it?"
"Bottom line," Bill Robbins said, brushing oyster cracker crumbs off his lap, "we just wait."