Crusader in the Swamps

The southwest coast of Florida, along 200 miles of shoreline from St. Petersburg to Naples, still consists largely of mangrove swamps--low-lying tangles infested with insects. But to developers, the swamps hold a promise of beachfront resorts as shiny and lucrative as those on the east coast, and a multimillion-dollar building boom has already started. Big companies like Gulf American Corp., GAC Corp. and Mackle Bros, are moving into the area, filling in the wetlands and building high-rise hotels and condominiums. The most unyielding obstacle to this juggernaut of change is a pensioner of modest means named George C. Matthews, who has successfully challenged corporations and officials up to and including President Nixon.

At 53, Matthews hardly gives the impression of a crusader. He sweats heavily, walks with a limp, talks in a backwoods drawl, and his shirt often spills out of his baggy pants. But he loves the swamps, which he explored as a child on fishing trips with his father. "All I want," he told TIME Correspondent Christopher Byron, "is for children in years to come to have the same pleasures I've had in these waters."

In addition to such soft sentiments, Matthews can cite hard ecological evidence against the building boom. The swamps not only serve as the habitat for wildlife--many of the commercial fish in the Gulf of Mexico spawn there --but the mangrove roots also stabilize the coastline, preventing erosion.

What makes Matthews so formidable is that he once went to law school (but never practiced) and has become a self-taught expert on land law. As he sees it, most of the swamps belong to either the people of Florida or the Federal Government. Matthews has carried his arguments to the courts with startling consistency and success. His strategy: "Sue the bums until they bleed."

Many of his suits are based on various state and federal laws that forbid dredging and filling operations in tidal lands without a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers. Though tides wash over almost all of the mangrove swamps, developers often neglect to get such a permit; then Matthews sues, sometimes with strange results. In 1970, for instance, the Lutgert Construction Co. started a giant beachfront development involving the dredging and filling of 1.65 million cu. yds. of tidal lands in Naples. Matthews began writing protest letters in all directions and finally got the Corps of Engineers to demand that Lutgert stop its dredging; indeed the Interior Department argued that Lutgert must restore the land to its original state. After Lutgert refused, a federal court fined it $150,000. Lutgert paid but then requested a permit to finish the job. Surprisingly, the Engineers granted the permit; not surprisingly, Matthews sued for its revocation. Meantime, the company won a permit from the county board of commissioners to lay the foundations on its disputed land. So now Matthews has sued the commissioners for dereliction of duty.

Above the tidal area, too, development projects planned along the coast face trouble from Matthews, for he argues that most of this land is in the public domain. He bases his contentions on the official surveys of the 1870s, when Government surveyors assigned to chart the lands being transferred to state control often just drew the coastal boundaries by eye rather than trudging through the swamps. The result was that they often did not see high ground lying out to seaward from the mangroves and mistakenly designated many areas as tidal land. That error, Matthews has successfully argued, legally leaves these lands in the federal domain.

Trustee. To locate these areas, Matthews himself often slogs through the swamps. Then he files claim to the high land as a tax-liable "trustee for the people" (yearly tax: 990). When a developer tries to acquire the land for building sites, he may get a nasty surprise: Matthews was there first and has a provable legal interest in defending the land. Although he talks of "personally walking the entire coastline of West Florida," Matthews usually just compares the old maps with current project lines. When they do not coincide, he first investigates and then goes to court.

Although his antagonists denounce Matthews as a "lawsuit-happy crackpot," his lonely crusade has won him admirers too. The St. Petersburg Times spoke with a certain awe of "his mind-boggling legal assaults [that] name every public official below the rank of President of the U.S." Actually, Matthews last year challenged the President too. On hearing that the Corps of Engineers planned to improve security around Nixon's Biscayne Bay house by dredging and filling in 2,000 cu. yds. of sand in nearby tidal waters, he made one of his rare forays to the east coast and threatened to sue. Others joined in opposition, and the White House dropped the project.

Matthews is not averse to publicity for his cause, but he says he wants neither help nor thanks. He lives austerely with his wife in an apartment in Naples, where she types all his legal papers. One recent day, as he headed to court to file yet another suit, he said his only immediate worry was where he could find the money to pay some court costs. The amount: $117.

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