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That system of de facto segregation no longer exists, but Indian Creek remains fixated on keeping certain people out. “The security is very different than how it used to be,” says Gerardo Vildostegui, who grew up in the neighboring town of Surfside, a middle-class community that shares a two-lane bridge with Indian Creek. A member of Surfside’s town council, Vildostegui recalls a time in the early ’90s when he could bring his college friends to Indian Creek’s gate and get permission from the police to give them a tour of the island. Now if he approaches the bridge, the cops start flashing their lights and order him to back away.
In the 1980s, the island’s police force — whose motto is “protecting and serving America’s most exclusive municipality” — was made up of 11 people. Recent town documents show they employ 19, one for every five residents. That’s compared with a national average of about 2.4 cops per 1,000 residents. If New York City had the same officer-to-citizen ratio as Indian Creek, it would employ more than 1.5 million cops. Because Indian Creek’s denizens are jet-setting billionaires with homes all over the world, there are likely many days of the year when police officers actually outnumber the island’s residents.
If New York City had the same officer-to-citizen ratio as Indian Creek, it would employ more than 1.5 million cops.
Often described as “butlers with badges,” the Indian Creek police force is unlike most of its counterparts. For starters, it’s nonunion. The town government quashed a union drive in the 1980s, firing a lead organizer accused of taking gasoline from a town tank. And rather than responding to calls from citizens in need, the police spend an estimated 97% of their time on security work, like patrolling the island’s perimeter in three high-speed police boats and manning the access command center by the bridge. The force’s recruitment materials say officers have “extremely high levels of training in areas such as weapons, defensive tactics, and tactical operations” and are trained to use fully automatic firearms. All told, the town spent $4.1 million — a whopping 74% of its budget — on public safety in fiscal year 2023.
In 2011, the town installed new cameras by the entrance gate that allow police to simultaneously view a visitor’s face, pull up their driver’s license, and read their license plate. Indian Creek also narrowed the gate’s opening to create what it called “a greater sense of exclusivity.” In 2012 the town replaced the tinted bullet-resistant glass in the access command center, and in 2013 it added a fence to keep pedestrians out. Such investments are generally lauded by residents, who often push the town council for more stringent security measures. “Safety is our No. 1,” Irma Braman, Norman’s wife, said at one meeting. “It should be everyone’s No. 1.”
Whatever crimes the island’s residents may be committing, they aren’t doing it on the island. Many years, not a single offense is reported to the Indian Creek police. Instead, the cops have their hands full fending off the curious boaters who try to land on the beach near the golf course. “The police are being run ragged right now,” Mayor . In April, America’s 806 billionaires boasted a net worth of $5.8 trillion, greater than the annual GDPs of Japan, Germany, and India — and more wealth than the bottom half of America. Miami is frequently said to be the US city with the most extreme income inequality.
The growing wealth gap has given rise to the security-industrial complex, a burgeoning field aimed at assuaging the anxieties of the superwealthy. Multiple billionaire-security professionals I spoke with described an increased interest in security among their ultra-high-net-worth clients. Some are shelling out millions on highly trained bodyguards or deploying high-tech surveillance drones. Elon Musk travels with up to 20 bodyguards at a time. Others are building bunkers to wait out the apocalypse. In Indian Creek, if you somehow evaded the islandwide surveillance dragnet that Bezos and his neighbors have amassed through public funding, you’d still have to contend with the formidable private dragnets guarding their individual mansions.
Walled-off communities, by their very nature, lead to ever higher walls.
Security “has become a really big concern for billionaires now, because there’s never been more talk about the divide between the haves and the have-nots,” says Brian Daniel, who operates the Celebrity Personal Assistant Network, a company that connects billionaires to security staff. “It gets people worked up.” Never mind that poor people are statistically far more likely to be the victims of crime than those who can afford supermansions on private islands. Being rich means you can afford to be safe instead of sorry.
“Trapped,” a book coauthored by Low, the CUNY researcher, describes a growing movement to build communities that are “privatized, fortified, unequal.” By 2015, more than 11 million Americans had retreated to these “secured communities,” compared with 7 million a decade earlier. But rather than making residents feel safer, Low says, the intense focus on security and privacy only serves to cut them off from the public and stoke their anxieties about outsiders. Walled-off communities, by their very nature, lead to ever higher walls.
“Indian Creek is a great extreme example of trying to pull out completely from having anything to do with the rest of the world,” Low says. “The more you enclose yourself, the more you’re reminding yourself of a sense of risk.”
At a council meeting in 2022, not long after the installation of the perimeter-security system, Indian Creek residents were once again discussing the need to ramp up their security. This time, they worried the threat might be coming from inside the mansions. The police chief, John Bernardo, proposed a measure that would require any worker entering the island to submit to a criminal background check. Despite pushback from some residents who were concerned that the policy would make hiring more difficult, the council came down largely in support of the idea.
For Mayor Klepach, the background checks were just a starting point. More wealth leads to more workers — and every worker is a potential threat.”Especially when you have so many houses going up and a caravan of employees coming in and out of here,” the mayor said, “we could do so much more.”
Guthrie Scrimgeour is an investigative journalist based in Washington, DC, covering wealth and power.