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.” 

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. 

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.”  

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. 

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.”  

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."