Busting Gamblers, Saving Souls

At a month shy of 96 years old, Eric Weldon is still long and lanky. In 1953, Weldon was the long arm of the law in Everglades City, busting moonshiners and housing them in the jail, located just down the hall from his and his young wife’s apartment. And when Weldon wasn’t enforcing the law, he was in the business of saving souls, eventually transitioning from a jailhouse to a parsonage, where he served the Lord as a pastor for many years.

"I came down as a rookie trooper,” Weldon recalled from his home in Everglades City. "This was my first assignment. The lieutenant brought me in, and he said, ‘We'll get you out of here in a year or so.' And I'm thinking, ‘Man, I hope not.’"

Weldon took an immediate liking to the Everglades.

"Oh, I loved it,” said Weldon, who was born in 1929 and grew up in the Riverview area of Tampa. “Everglades was a thriving little city. The county courthouse was here. There where the park is, was a shopping mall. A little restaurant there. Had another little service station down right next to where the museum is now.”

There was something else that made Weldon fond of the area.

"I'd only been here a couple of months or so,” Weldon recalls. "I didn't know anybody. Juanita was a Deep Lake girl. Her father had me out to the house to eat one time. So, I went. It was a beautiful day. It was the last day of December. A beautiful day for the beach. I wanted to go to the beach. Finally I said, ‘Golly, I don't know anybody.” I don’t want to go by myself.' Oh, yeah. Clyde's got a daughter. She'd been in nursing training, and then she'd come back home. I called her. Golly, I thought it would take an act of Congress to get her to answer me and say yes or no. But finally she said, ‘Yeah, I'll go.' So, we went to Marco Island."

Marco Beach in 1953 was still a pioneer frontier.

"Big, long, open beach,” Weldon said, "no houses, no nothing down there. And you can't drive on up to the beach. We drove as far as we could and then the sand got too deep. We had to walk through the Palmettos and sand spurs to get to the beach. Just the two of us on this long, beautiful beach all afternoon. And we did our thing, and we're just lined up on the blanket there. And I thought, 'I'm going to kiss this girl.' I rolled over to her like that. She didn't resist. She didn't kiss me back either. Lay there like a log, you know. And I said, 'oh well.' So I rolled back another hour or so, and we left there. And I thought, ‘Well, I don't care that much about her anyhow. And I knew she didn't care that much about me. So that's it.' Six months later, we were married. She'd been going with this old boy for a year or more. And that was the end of that. We had 63 years together.

After several years as a state highway patrolman, Weldon became a Collier County deputy. He is perhaps one of the few to work for three county sheriffs: Roy Atkins, Doug Hendry, and Aubrey Rogers. Weldon jumped at the chance to join Hendry in 1959.

"I came down in 1953,” he said, "Doug became sheriff in 1959. I liked him. They say it's a razor-thin edge between a good crook and a good cop. I'm glad Doug went to be a cop. Doug was sharp. He was a good politician till he got sick. He just knew anything that I needed to know down here. And he asked me to become a local deputy for him. I had five and a half years in the highway patrol. Wasn't making any money. You know, the bills. And they'd just about doubled my income to quit and go to work for Doug. We moved into the apartment at the jail."

It was the second time Weldon lived next to the jail with his young wife.

"When I was a highway patrolman, I lived in the old jail over in the circle. A little two-story place. So, I'm well acquainted with jails. We had our apartment on the other end, and then there was a series of offices, and then the jail was on this end." He said his wife didn’t mind living down the hall from criminals.

“It was all right with her, you know?” he said. "We used her a couple of times. We'd bring a woman in that had to be strip-searched."

Weldon said they usually had someone in lockup.

"I think we had people there a year or more,” he said. "You know, we had a regular crew that was working out of there. We sent them out to work every day."

It was the main jail for the entire county at a time when the population of Collier County was 6,488. Weldon said the entire county was patrolled by a small police force at the time.

“After I'd been there a while,” Weldon said, “Bill McCrea became a deputy. When I was working day shift, he worked the evening shift. I think we had one deputy in Naples, Stormy Shark. All he did was serve papers and that kind of thing. There was nothing in Naples hardly. They had a small police force of three or four part-timers."

A typical day for Weldon was keeping tabs on moonshiners and gamblers. He recalls a time when they nabbed some gamblers heading to Miami.

“You knew who was going to Miami on a Saturday morning,” he said. “We just stopped the sucker and we begin to take it apart the car until we found all the little tickets and everything. It was under the rear armrest. Just finally took that out. Bill McCrea started at the front bumper, and I started at the rear, and we went through it till we found it. That was a gambling ring.”

Catching moonshiners was another challenge altogether.

“We tried to put a stop to gambling,” Weldon said. “That was a big thing then. And a lot of moonshine going on. We got our big still just north of Deep Lake. We laid in on that two days and nights. We received information. There was a house up on State Road 29 north of Deep Lake. There was a black guy who lived there. And he had the railroad tracks and the trains coming in and out. This guy from Homestead owned the still. He had a black guy working for him that he'd bring over. And they would drive across the canal into the driveway of this black guy that lived down here. They would walk through the swamp to where they had the moonshine stills set up. So, we went around and we'd come in the other side, and we left a guy out on the railroad tracks. And there's a bunch of guava bushes all along there. We spent two days and nights in that swamp, in the rain. In the morning, we had to go out on the railroad track in the bushes. And the black guy that lived there came out, and he's walking his dog up the railroad track. And of course, the dog found the deputy. So, the deputy called us and said, 'Doug, you better come out here.' So, Doug went out and talked to him and said, ‘Now you can either go along with this or you can go to jail.' The guy went along with it.”

With the moonshiners, the deputies and sheriff had to play the waiting game.

"So, they come in,” Weldon said, "and we surrounded the moonshine still and the bushes. And this guy comes in, and you wait for him to make some movement to show that he owns the still. So, they walked in. They just stood there and looked all around. Then, when they removed the top off one of the drums and filled the mash to see if it's ready to run, we knew it would have to run that day. We developed that much. And when he moved that stuff off and fell to the mash, that's what we needed to be able to say it was his. So, there was no shooting. There's no need to shoot on this thing. Well, we jumped up, and the black guy with him just went right through the bushes. Gone into the small open area. And this deputy is right behind him, shooting in the air. And the guy fell. But he had stumbled and fell. He said, ‘Don't shoot me!'"

Poaching was another big business back then, but the deputies didn’t get involved with that, even though they knew the players.

“There was quite a lot of stuff out there,” Weldon said. "Doug says, ‘Don't fool with game cases. Leave them to the game wardens.' And that was good.”

Gator poaching was big in those days.

“We just ignored that,” Weldon said. "We knew who it was. If you lived here, you knew who it was.”

One notorious poacher was Totch Brown. Weldon knew him well.

 "Oh, Totch and I were buddies,” Weldon said. "He never gave me any trouble. No, no, no.”

While Brown was known to operate outside the law, it was of no concern to Weldon since Brown’s transgressions at the time involved game, not gambling or moonshine.

"We just let that go,” Weldon said. “Totch was easygoing, you know. He knew what he was doing. He knew we knew what he was doing. And he knew we were not going to touch him. So, he did his thing. We did ours."

Weldon said Totch Brown had a brother Peg who didn’t have much to say.

"Peg didn't talk,” Weldon said, "and I was on the end of the dock down there one day at the end of the street, and here he is working on the boat. So, I just went down and sat down on the dock and started talking to him. And that's what happened. I talked to him over 10, 15, 20 minutes or something, and I got up and I said, ‘Well, I'll see you, Peg.' And he looked up at me, and he actually almost cracked a smile. So yeah, we didn't have anything to do with those guys. We would have during the drug smuggling days, but I'm glad I wasn't here during that time."

Weldon left Everglades City prior to the infamous Operation Everglades in the 1980s. He’s familiar with the history, however. He received a call when he was a border patrol agent.

“I had a guy call me from here,” Weldon said. "He said, 'I need to talk to a DEA agent.' So, we set up a meeting for him, and the morning he was to meet over in Miami, he called me and said, 'Eric, I can't squeal on my guys. I can't do it.' He said, 'I got three sons, and, you know, I don't want them to go to jail.' So, I had to call the DEA agent. A week later, he called again and said, 'I'm going to need to talk to this guy. My son's going to wind up in jail if I don’t.' So, we set up a meeting again the next morning. When he called, he said, 'I can't do it.’ And his sons wound up in jail."

It wasn’t long afterwards that Operation Everglades, the investigation which targeted drug trafficking in Collier County, leading to the arrest of 28 people and the seizure of more than half of Everglades City’s fishing boats, was launched by Sheriff Aubrey Rogers. Rogers paid a visit to Weldon when he was a border patrol agent in New Orleans.

"Well, (Operation Everglades) was going on at that time,” Weldon said. "I think he was coming out to New Orleans from some kind of big sheriff's convention deal, and he came out to the house and we talked. He said, ‘You know who's doing what.’  I said,  'You know, I can tell you who's doing it.' He said, 'Eric, I know they'd say, hands off. It's up to us.' They wanted to catch the big guys. Well, guess how that went. They got a bunch of mules and that was it. Not the big, big guys, no.”

Weldon served a total of nine years with the highway patrol, then three and a half years as a Collier County deputy. He then spent 20 years as a border patrol agent in Miami, New Orleans, Texas, and California. But all the while, he served as a pastor. 

"I liked the border patrol,” he said. “There's some things that I would do different, but it was good. On the border you watch crossing points. Places that are easier for them to come across. Like through a fence in California or through the mountains, or they’d try to get around into the edge of the ocean and come around the fence we had extended out in the ocean. I was a pilot and for a while, we had a special intercept crew intercepting planes that came in. The radar would pick them up as they came in. If they didn't come in for a landing somewhere, they would call us. They would call us, and we would take off to intercept them. We would just follow them up the coast till they landed and see what they had, why they didn't stop.”

Eventually, the Lord called Weldon to return to Everglades City.

“When the Lord tells you to be a preacher,” Weldon said, "you best make up your mind. And I promised him that I would do it. If he opened the door, I'd walk in. And I had already been the pastor here two years before I went into the border patrol. When the Lord opens the door for you, you better do what he tells you to do. And he's taken good care of me all through the years. He kept me from being shot out on the border. God took care of me. And he's still taking care of me today."