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Act. Other farmers chose to stonewall the Bureau in court, moving into compliance a centimeter at a time. Any self-respecting lawyer could drag such a case out for years, while his client continued to receive subsidized water the whole time. Others were being granted special exemptions by the Interior solicitor’s office. No one has ever produced hard evidence, but there has been speculation that such exemptions bore a more than casual relationship to the size of a campaign contribution—and these were growers who could easily contribute $50,000 to a candidate’s coffer. Rita Singer was a lawyer in the Interior solicitor’s office through the 1960s and early 1970s, until she resigned and joined the legal staff of California’s Department of Water Resources. “We’d be working on a case for months,” Singer recalled during an interview in 1984, “and then my supervisors would send down an interpretation of the law that nullified our cause of action. Some of the subterfuges would be allowed. Others would be disallowed. There wasn’t any rhyme or reason. In most cases we never got an explanation. It was legal hairsplitting. The solicitor’s office would recognize ‘distinctions’ in cases that were identical.

“In effect, we were telling the growers, ‘Go ahead. Do whatever you want.’ When we moved for enforcement, it was always inconsistent. We never gave them a serious message that we meant business.” In public, Singer says, the growers cursed the Bureau, calling it “dictatorial” and using epithets far stronger than that. “In private, they regarded the federal government as a laughingstock.”

The Bureau knew full well that numerous violations were taking place in California. In 1964, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall ordered Commissioner Floyd Dominy to investigate the number of violations occurring within the service area of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California—presumably to use the information as a weapon to force the Met to drop its campaign of divide and delay against the Central Arizona Project. Dominy’s regional director in Boulder City, Arleigh West, hired an investigator from Phoenix named Ralph O. Baird to conduct a surreptitious hunt for violators, learning what he could through deed records and word of mouth. According to a December 30, 1964, blue-envelope memo sent to Dominy by West, “extreme caution was required”—apparently Baird thought he had some reason to fear for his safety. In three months, he managed to document ninety-nine violations of the excess-lands provision, totaling 105,229 acres. Several growers were irrigating thousands of acres with federally subsidized water wholesaled to them by the Met; the largest of them was the Irvine Ranch, which, in 1980, was the eleventh-largest landowner in California, with 28,257 acres of cropland, 82,344 acres all told, and $140 million in annual sales, according to the California Department of Corporations and Dun and Bradstreet. The list of violators has apparently been destroyed; not a trace of it could be found in Dominy’s files or Bureau records in Boulder City. But West would admit in retirement that the violations had indeed occurred, that they might still be occurring, that in his estimation it was a clear-cut illegality under Reclamation law, and that—for reasons he “wasn’t privy to”—nothing was done. “I didn’t even dare mail the list to Dominy,” he said. “I hand-carried it to him on a plane. He looked it over and put it away. He told me never to talk about it—and he said it in that tone of voice of his that meant you’d better obey—and I never saw it again. There were some pretty powerful people on that list.”

In eighty-two years, the Bureau would see the breakup of only one major illegal landholding through to the end. That was the DiGiorgio Company, and it was stripped of its excess lands only because John Kennedy’s Interior Department solicitor, Frank Barry, was relatively serious about enforcing the act. Later, when Jimmy Carter began making noises about enforcing the letter of the law again, the growers managed to lobby through (in 1982) the most