George Melissas is the king of curio. He reigns over an empire built on coral colonies, scallop shells, alligator heads, and shark jaws. He's made a small fortune on starfish dyed blue, crabs mounted to coconuts, seashell wind chimes, and other nautical tidbits sold in bulk.
His home in the secluded, luxurious Gulf Coast town of Boca Grande — where there's a $5 toll to cross the one causeway in and out of town — is easy to recognize. Down the quiet, breezy side street a few hundred yards from the beach, it's the home with a long display of maroon coral, giant clams, assorted shells, and a well-placed vintage anchor. The electric gate featuring a Greek key pattern gives way to another, waist-high stack of coral, stone, and shells that surrounds a front-yard pool. At the bottom of the porch, near the candy-apple-red Corvette, is an even larger display of coral and shells, a mermaid statue topping this one.
Tim Grollimund
Ken Nedimyer of the Coral Restoration Foundation grows coral in an underwater nursery in Key Largo.
Tim Grollimund
Divers check on corals transplanted from a nursery to the Florida Reef Tract.
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Melissas is the founder and CEO of Shell Horizons, a Clearwater-based company that claims on its website to be the "largest wholesaler of seashells and seashell products." The balding 57-year-old, who looks like a slightly taller, slightly slimmer Danny DeVito, with a thin gray mustache, says he's not sure if he's actually the largest wholesaler; it just sounds good.
A proclivity for profiting from the sea lingers in his genetic composition.
"My grandparents were in the sponge industry in Greece," he says, leaning over his kitchen counter. He's wearing striped shorts, a buttoned-down tan shirt, and a slender black coral necklace with an expensive-looking sheen. "They came here from Greece [in the early 1900s], and they came here because there was a blight on sponges in the Mediterranean at the time. It was like a red tide."
Before the advent of cheap synthetic materials, people used natural sponges harvested from the sea, and sales of them were good. The Mediterranean blight was like a mini potato famine in the sense that it drove a tight-knit ethnic community to the shores of Florida's Gulf Coast to chase sponges. Scuba gear had yet to be invented; divers wore cumbersome lead boots and metal helmets. "Both my grandfathers had the bends and died of the bends," Melissas says. "They gave their life to the sea."
This risk-taking, moneymaking, fresh-off-the-boat subculture inspired Hollywood films such as 1953's Beneath the 12-Mile Reef, featuring Robert Wagner as "Mike Petrakis," the elder, sexier half of a Greek father-son sponge-diving team in Florida. An uncle of Melissas' starred in the film.
As a kid, Melissas worked in warehouses in Tarpon Springs, baling bundles of sponges and packing them in burlap bags to be shipped around the world. "Greeks work; they don't collect welfare," he barks. "It wasn't a fun job, but it was something that was family."
He discovered that the occasional oyster shell on the side of a sponge could be plucked, cleaned, and sold for a few cents to the tourists who frequented restaurants owned by his family. By the time he was a teenager, Melissas was buying crates of curios at wholesale prices from a shop in Fort Myers. He fashioned the shells into trinkets and centerpieces to sell at a restaurant where he waited tables.
Tired of dealing with a middleman, Melissas decided at age 17 to go directly to the source. It was a risky move. He blew his life savings on a plane ticket to the Philippines, much to his father's dismay. "We're trying to get away from what your grandfathers did and the stinking packaging houses. Who's gonna buy shells?" he recalls his dad lamenting.
The wholesaler in the Philippines expected to meet a 50-year-old businessman, not a brash teenager running a shop in his parents' backyard with barely enough money to make it back to the U.S. This young-and-dumb approach struck a chord of sympathy, compelling the wholesaler to give Melissas a batch of Pacific shells and 90 days to sell what he could.
Dead sea life has treated Melissas well in the four decades since that inaugural trip. He's well-off and well-traveled and says he owns a bone-fishing club in the Bahamas and has a partnership with a factory in the Philippines.
Melissas doesn't conceal his disdain for his critics. He launches into tirades against Tony Cruz, a Filipino news correspondent who has accused Melissas of smuggling coral from the Philippines; and Anna Oposa, a Filipina activist who went before the Philippines Senate in 2011 to levy allegations that Shell Horizons had poached protected coral from the country's waters. Melissas stresses that he was never charged and that the allegations are "totally false," based on outdated, 1970s pictures of free divers dismantling a reef that were once posted on his website.
"For environmentalists, it's broccoli or nothing," he says. "The environmentalists are concerned about everything. They're weirder than Michael Jackson."
Melissas insists that there's plenty of coral left in the sea and that scientists are exaggerating news of reef decline to secure funding. "Take the square footage of all the coral in the world and it's three times the size of the United States," he says. (The World Resource Institute, meanwhile, estimates the total area covered by coral reefs is "roughly equivalent to the size of the United Kingdom.") If coral is so rare, Melissas asks, why is he paying the same price for it that he was back in the 1980s?
