Although the Honduran debt would mostly go unpaid, Zemurray had achieved a remarkable personal victory. He had outmaneuvered Knox, successfully defied the US government, poked J. P. Morgan in the eye, and ended up a much wealthier man. In engineering the “invasion,” he had covered his tracks so well that contemporary investigations into the scheme were never able to connect him to it or prove he broke any laws. But he had also intentionally overthrown a government to achieve his own financial ends.

Under the presidency of Andrew Preston, United Fruit had grown to be the largest fruit and sugar company in the world. But Zemurray’s Cuyamel Fruit had also grown and was now powerful enough to engage it in debilitating price wars. In 1930, United Fruit solved the problem by buying Cuyamel Fruit, paying Zemurray $31 million in United Fruit stock and giving him a seat on the board. But the Great Depression hit United Fruit hard; after Preston’s death in 1924, the company had become bloated, lazy, and mismanaged. Over the next few years, Zemurray watched United Fruit’s stock decline by over 90 percent, shrinking his stake to $2 million. He tried to offer the board advice, but was rudely rebuffed. At that point the board was dominated by members of the Protestant elite of Boston, many—though not all—of whom were ugly anti-Semites; they did not like the Jewish immigrant they had been forced to admit to the board as part of the Cuyamel deal. In a fateful meeting in 1933, Zemurray tried once again to persuade the board to consider his ideas for saving the company; the chairman, an effete Boston Brahmin named Daniel Gould Wing, listened to Zemurray’s heavy shtetl accent with open disdain and then, to the chuckles of other board members, said: “Unfortunately, Mr. Zemurray, I can’t understand a word you say.”

Zemurray was not a man to be ignored or insulted. He had come to that particular meeting with a weapon of mass destruction: a bagful of proxies from other United Fruit shareholders that gave him majority control of the company and the authority to act as he saw fit. He left the room, fetched the bag, came back in, and flung it on the table, saying: “You’re fired. Can you understand that, Mr. Chairman?” He turned to the board and said: “You’ve been fucking up this business long enough. I’m going to straighten it out.”

After ousting the chairman, president, and most of the board, Zemurray took over the gigantic, bumbling company, roused it from its stupor, and swiftly returned it to profitability. This dramatic move caused the New York Times to call Zemurray the “fish that swallowed the whale.”

With full control of United Fruit, Zemurray continued to play a heavy hand in Honduran politics until he retreated from business in 1954 to pursue philanthropy full time. In the latter part of his life, perhaps to make up for his earlier questionable dealings, Zemurray donated lavishly to Central American causes, schools, and philanthropic ventures; he played a significant role in the founding of Israel; he endowed a female professorship at Harvard, which led to the appointment of the first woman full professor at that university; and he financed the progressive magazine the Nation. Zemurray was a remarkably brilliant, complex, and contradictory man.*

But, colorful as their history was, it must be said: Preston, Zemurray, and the fruit companies left a dark colonialist legacy that has hung like a miasma over Honduras ever since. The fruit companies’ effect on Honduras’s development was deeply pernicious. Though Honduras did eventually emerge from under their yoke, this legacy of instability and corporate bullying lives on in political dysfunction, underdeveloped national institutions, and cozy relationships among powerful families, business interests, government, and the military. This weakness magnified the disastrous effects of Hurricane Mitch. The country fell prey to narcotraffickers. Effective antidrug policies and raids in Colombia in the 1990s pushed much of the drug trade from that country into Honduras. Traffickers turned Honduras into the premier drug-smuggling transshipment point for cocaine between South America and the United States, and Mosquitia was at the heart of it. Crude airstrips were bulldozed out of the jungle and used for nighttime crash landings of drugs flown from Venezuela—the drugs being worth far more than the plane and the occasional death of a pilot. The murder rate soared while law enforcement and the judicial system crumbled. Violent gangs gained control of swaths of major cities, engaging in extortion and protection rackets and creating no-go zones for the military and police, except when the police themselves were involved in the activities, which was not uncommon. The unremitting gang violence caused thousands of desperate Honduran families to send their children northward, often alone, in search of safety in the United States.

There was no way Elkins could get permits or mount an expedition in this environment. The country looked hopeless. He gave up on the search for the White City, apparently for good. He told me then: “I’ve had enough. I’m done. Maybe this will be one mystery I can’t solve.”

CHAPTER 8

Lasers in the jungle

After giving up on the White City, Elkins turned his attention to the second item on Steve Morgan’s list of mysteries: the Loot of Lima. He hoped, among other things, that the cutting-edge technology he had learned about in the search for the White City might also be applicable to a hunt for buried treasure. That search, into which he also drew me, would consume the next ten years of his life.

Also known as the Cocos Island treasure, the Loot of Lima was an alleged fortune in gold and gems—estimated to be worth around a billion dollars—that is believed to have been spirited out of Lima, Peru, in 1821, during the Peruvian War of Independence. The city of Lima was under siege, and the Spanish viceroy reportedly wanted to keep the city’s vast treasure out of the hands of the revolutionaries, should the city fall to the rebels.