Catching The Codfather

Ian Coss: Can you tell me about how you did ultimately get arrested?

Carlos Rafael: This all started a few years back when I wanted to sell my business. See, my legacy, it was to grow this to a point that I would turn it over to my kids. I did it. That's it. I'm done. I wanted to give the business to my middle daughter and I told her Stephanie, I was 62 at the time. I said, “Stephanie, daddy's tired. I got enough. I'm going to give you the business. I don't want no money. At the end of the year, the profits you split with your sisters. It's yours.” So she looks at me and she says, “Do you think I want the kind of life you have?” She didn't want a company of a hundred million just for that.

Ian Coss: Can you blame her?

Carlos Rafael: Nope. No. No, because I see what I did to my family. I never got to spend time with them. I never got to go to the school plays and all this other shit. You can't buy those things back. It's over. But, if you got the American dream, it's a certain amount of sacrifice you gotta make. It doesn't come from heaven. And they say luck, luck bullshit. You have to go look for luck. Luck doesn't come to you. And my luck is work your butt off in America and you will get ahead. She said, “I don't want that kind of life. Are you crazy?” So that's why I ended up getting in a shitter because if I were to get out at 62, none of this bullshit would have happened.

NARRATION: Carlos Rafael leans back and lights a cigarette. One of many over the course of our conversation. 

MUSIC: Transition

Ian Coss: Could you talk about all the Scarface pictures?

Carlos Rafael: my daughter gave me that one. She bought that one in New York.

NARRATION: Carlos' office is covered with images from the movie Scarface. There is an actual cigar from the set, a hand-drawn sketch of Tony Montana, the cocaine kingpin, and a still from the film of Al Pacino in the big hot tub.

Carlos told me that Netflix once approached him about making a movie about his life, and asked who should play him. Carlos didn't need to think about it. It was obvious.

Carlos Rafael: I said, Scarface, he'll be the only one who could do the job the right way. Al Pacino.

NARRATION: So you can picture an older Pacino if you want, but with jowls hanging under his chin, and totally bald except for the sides of his head. That’s Carlos.

Ian Coss: And what did the producer from Netflix say?

Carlos Rafael: Nah, I asked him for, when I mentioned 20 million dollars, the guy said, forget it. Look, if something's going to get done, I want money.

NARRATION: And you'll see as we go along, there are some parallels for sure, between Carlos Rafael and Tony Montana: it's the story of an immigrant who has to make his own luck, and is willing to push that luck again and again and again. Hunger, opportunity, excess, ruin. 

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: There's a famous scene in the movie, when Montana is out to dinner and gets in a heated argument. It's at a fancy restaurant, everyone is very well dressed -- lawyers and bankers -- and they all fall silent, watching as Montana lunges across the table, spilling wine and food all over the white table cloth. But then, Montana turns and addresses the crowd directly, calls out their silent judgment of him, saying: "You need people like me...". 

ARCHIVAL: You need people like me. So you can point your fucking fingers and say, that's the bad guy.

NARRATION: Then he asks: so what does that make you? Good? You're not good. You just know how to hide, how to lie. 

ARCHIVAL: Me. I don't have that problem.

NARRATION: When he's done, Montana stumbles out, shouting over his shoulder: "say goodnight to the bad guy." 

MUSIC: Theme

NARRATION: I can hear a little of Carlos in that scene. Even after he was investigated and labeled a crook; after federal agents carted him off to jail and dismantled his empire, he keeps pointing his finger right back at the government that brought him down, saying: that right there, that is the real bad guy.

Carlos Rafael: They think they solved the problem. They haven't solved shit. Because fishermen are a lot smarter than they are.

MUSIC: Theme

NARRATION: From GBH News, this is The Big Dig. I'm Ian Coss.

Carlos Rafael is an American success story. He started from nothing, working in a neglected industry in a neglected city, and he built something real. His business was fish -- Carlos Seafood -- and by the end of his run he owned the biggest fleet of boats in the most valuable fishing port in America. So why did it all come crashing down? And why does Carlos insist to this day that he did nothing wrong?

Welcome to Season Three: Catching The Codfather. It’s a story about work, about dreams, and ultimately, about how all of us relate with our government. 

Part One: Red Lobster.

MUSIC: out

BREAK

NARRATION: Carlos Rafael grew up in the Azores, a string of islands in the Atlantic that are maybe a quarter of the way to North America if you're coming from Europe. So way out there, and small enough that you have to really zoom in on the map in order to see them at all. The Azores are part of Portugal, and in the 1960s, when Carlos was a kid, Portugal was fighting colonial wars on several fronts: in Mozambique, in Angola, in Guinea. Carlos had friends who were drafted off their tiny island and sent abroad, who died in the jungle fighting for a lost and distant cause. A pointless cause. 

His parents did not want that for their son: so they sent young Carlos to study...at a monastery. 

Carlos Rafael: That's the way they would keep me off the military, if I stayed in the monastery.

Ian Coss: I have to say, I mean, I've only known you for about an hour, but it's hard for me to picture you in a monastery.

Carlos Rafael: Oh, my friend says, what a hell of a priest you would have made. But once my sister, she told me, “dad has an American passport.”

NARRATION: Carlos’ dad had an American passport. 

This revelation is not entirely surprising in a place where lots of families move back and forth to the US. But it was news to Carlos. Infuriating news. His dad had an easy out all along, and was so comfortable in his island life, he just didn't want to take it and instead sent his son to a monastery. 

Carlos Rafael: I freaked out. I said, “Oh yeah? We're going to America.” He says, “You know you're not going to America because you're staying in the monastery. That's where they put you here.” So I did shit so they could throw me out.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: Every night the priests in training would have dinner, then go to prayer, and by 9:30 they would go up to their dormitory.

Carlos Rafael: So everybody went up to the dorm. I went to the football field and I jumped the fence and I took off.

NARRATION: Carlos didn't actually care about getting away with this little escape act. He wanted to get caught; he wanted to get punished. 

Carlos Rafael: Didn't go too far. I went for a walk until I was about a quarter of eleven. When I come back, I jump the fence and I come back out. Little I knew, the priest was upstairs waiting for me. He says, “You’re being expelled tomorrow. I'm calling your parents and we're shipping you back home.”

MUSIC: Fade out

NARRATION: Now, Carlos would find out if his gambit paid off. It looked like either way he was leaving the Azores, could be for the US, could be for Angola. Which one was up to his father. 

Carlos Rafael: So I was terrified to get home. I said, he's going to beat the living crap out of me. My father says, “I'm going to teach you a lesson, we're not going any place. He's the one, he was in the right place. He should have stood there” and all that. But, it was my mother. She, every day would be harping at him, she says, “you know what's gonna happen, if he goes, he'll probably come in a coffin.”

NARRATION: Carlos was fifteen at this point. At sixteen, he would register for the draft.

Carlos Rafael: So, after she keep battling and battling, he decided to come here.

Ian Coss: So you got out just before your 16th birthday?

Carlos Rafael: I got here in March. June would have been too late.

MUSIC: Fade in

NARRATION: Carlos boarded a TWA flight, and followed the same route across the sea that people from the Azores had taken for generations: to the small coastal city of New Bedford, Massachusetts. The flight attendant gave him a little set of plastic wings he could pin on his shirt. He was proud of those wings, proud to be starting fresh, proud to be in America, finally free. 

Carlos Rafael: When I arrived in the United States in 1968, I always said to myself, I am not going to be working for anybody else all my life. I'm going to do this for myself.

NARRATION: And it turned out that Carlos was arriving at the right time, a time of crisis actually for the industry that defined New Bedford. But as Carlos himself has told me: a crisis, now that is when you can make a lot of money. And  Carlos Rafael would do just that.

ARCHIVAL: Throughout the world, New Bedford, Massachusetts is best known as the whaling city,

NARRATION: New Bedford, as you may know, is the port that inspired Moby Dick, and where the author, Herman Mellville, set out on his own whaling voyage.

ARCHIVAL: The first whale ship, the Dartmouth, sailed out of this port,

NARRATION: But if you stepped off a boat there in the 1960s, when Carlos arrived, and wandered into the neighborhoods along County Street or Rivet Street, you'd find a very different world from the one Melville knew.

MUSIC: Enter

Maria Tomasia: That entire area was all Portuguese.

NARRATION: Maria Tomasia, like Carlos Rafael, came to New Bedford from the Azores.

MUSIC: Post

Maria Tomasia: It's like every island or every town had their own club. You know, there's the Ponta Delgada Club, there's the Faial Club, there's the Madeirense Club, there's a Fisherman Club, Central Luzo Club, Recordações Club. So everybody had their place to socialize.

NARRATION: There were two Portuguese newspapers. There was a Portuguese radio station, a dedicated Portuguese library with over three thousand titles in it. This was the capital of Portuguese North America. The Portuguese immigration here started in the Moby Dick era: the middle of the 1800s. Whaling ships out of New Bedford would stop in the Azores and Cape Verde to pick up supplies. People got on board as well, and then more people followed, and more people.

Maria Tomasia: And they saw there was a fishing industry, you lived by the water. You know, once you live by the water, it's very difficult to go any place else and not see that water.

NARRATION: By 1970, Massachusetts was home to one third of all Portuguese immigrants in the entire country, and most of those people were clustered in the coastline near New Bedford. 

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: Within the fishing industry itself, there's actually an interesting ethnic divide, historically at least. For many years, the scallop boats tended to be run by Norwegian immigrants. But the draggers – the boats that went after bottom fish like cod and flounder – they were overwhelmingly Portuguese. Eighty to ninety percent by one estimate. They will be the focus of this story, and in the 1970s, when Carlos was still new in town, those fishermen were in trouble. 

Maria Tomasia: I would be mostly as a translator

NARRATION: The man the fishermen went to for help was Maria Tomasia's boss: New Bedford Congressman, Gerry Studds. 

Maria Tomasia: they were concerned about the fact that, you know, there were other people out there

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: Other people out there…other people competing for the same cod, haddock and flounder off the coast of New England. But with bigger boats, bigger nets...

What the fishermen described was a "foreign invasion."

Maria Tomasia: That's how they would talk about it. They felt that they were taking away what was theirs.

ARCHIVAL: Okay, coming up, we've got a, uh, Russian Midwater trawler about twelve and a half miles off the coast

NARRATION: It's a little hard to imagine now, but in the 1970s, foreign fishing boats could come as close as twelve miles off the coast, and they could catch whatever they wanted. This audio is from a Coast Guard flyover just off Cape Cod. 

ARCHIVAL: Okay, this is a Bulgarian

NARRATION:  There were German boats, Russian, Spanish, Japanese, all drawn to the rich coastal waters of New England. And because they were so far from port, these ships were essentially floating factories. They filleted, froze or canned the fish right on board, working for months at a time on a massive scale.

ARCHIVAL: He's probably averaging, uh, somewhere in the neighborhood of, uh, say thirty-five to forty tons a day.

Rodney Avila: I used to see miles and miles and miles of these ships, they looked like big cruise ships.

NARRATION: Rodney Avila was a young fisherman at the time, just starting out. 

Rodney Avila: And I used to say: I’m gonna have no fish when I grow up.

MUSIC: Transition

ARCHIVAL: Modern trawling techniques are sweeping everything from the sea.

NARRATION: This foreign presence really ramped up over the 1960s, so that by the mid-seventies, if you looked at the total catch on New England's very best fishing grounds, ninety percent of it was pulled up by foreign boats. Ninety percent. And the fishermen and scientists alike could see the effects.

ARCHIVAL: Like the haddock had all already disappeared.

ARCHIVAL: The butter fishes all disappear. The fluke is all disappear

Maria Tomasia: And that's how the whole thing came into being, is that they wanted something done about it.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: That’s where Congressman Gerry Studds came in. 

ARCHIVAL: For several of the reasons that I cited in my brief remarks, I think that the time is right to ask to extend these protections.

NARRATION: Studds was always a bit of an odd fit to represent the working class Portuguese hub of New Bedford.  He was formal, clean cut, Yale educated. In pictures of him from the 1970s, he looks like he could be in the 1950s, with black horn-rimmed glasses and plain suits.

ARCHIVAL: We have some decisions to make, with some resources still available to protect

NARRATION: And on top of all that, Gerry Studds was also concealing the fact that he was gay. The suggestive term that people used for him at the time was a "confirmed bachelor," not a strong political brand in those days. But Studds was driven.

MUSIC: In

Maria Tomasia: When I first met him, he introduced himself in Portuguese.

NARRATION: So when he ran for that seat, Studds took a six-week intensive course in Portuguese, then spent another six weeks traveling around the Azores, Cape Verde and mainland Portugal.    

Maria Tomasia: [Speaks in Portuguese] You know, so that type of thing. It's, “you've gotten anything good lately?”

MUSIC: Post

NARRATION: In 1973, New Bedford sent Studds to Washington as their representative. And in that very first term he also landed a seat on the Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee, which meant he was actually in a perfect position to do something about the whole foreign invasion issue.

So that same year, Studds teamed up with congressman Don Young, from Alaska, to introduce what they liked to call “the Young Studds bill,” but was commonly known as "the 200 mile bill."

ARCHIVAL: This will probably be something like a two-hundred-mile economic zone

NARRATION: It would establish a new ocean boundary that foreign vessels could not cross: an invisible fence exactly two-hundred miles off shore. And inside that fence our richest fishing grounds would be reserved exclusively for American boats. 

ARCHIVAL: A two-hundred-mile extension of US coastal jurisdiction.

NARRATION: You would think that bill would be an easy win. I mean, who would oppose kicking out foreign fishing boats? Gerry Studds was about to find out.

ARCHIVAL: the problem as it has so often been in subsequent years was the United States Department of State

NARRATION: And it turns out the 'bad guy' in this story is the US Department of State, which makes some sense. The diplomats wanted to resolve these fishery issues diplomatically, with an international treaty. They did not want to just unilaterally draw a line in the ocean. It could impact trade, military movement, intelligence gathering. Studds was saying, it can't wait, by the time a big international treaty is ratified, the fish will be gone. That’s when Studds realized there was a deeper problem underneath it all…

ARCHIVAL: I discovered that the biggest problem that those of us who represent maritime areas have, was that nobody in Washington knew anything about it. And the best example I can think of –

MUSIC: Fade in

NARRATION: This is Studds, recalling the story in a speech a few years later, where he gave a specific example to illustrate the challenge. For years, Studds had tried to get the American Lobster designated as a "creature of the shelf," meaning it lived as the name implies, on the continental shelf and could be protected from foreign fishing boats.

ARCHIVAL: We held hearings, uh, to find out why the State Department had not designated the lobster to be a creature of the shelf, and the State Department, I kid you not, came in and testified – I can still picture them, three men. There they were all lined up in very, very fancy three piece suits to inform the House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, that the lobster was not a creature of the continental shelf because international law defined a creature of the shelf as an animal which never left the ocean floor. And the State Department had verified that when the lobster was excited, it jumped up and down and left the ocean floor.

ARCHIVAL: Now I am, I wish I could tell you I was exaggerating to make a point. But I am not. I asked the Department of State if they thought the kangaroo was a creature of the earth, and, uh, there was no response whatsoever.

MUSIC: Post

ARCH: I threatened on several occasions to put an unpegged lobster on the witness table, uh, in front of them to see if any of them had ever met one. I seriously doubt it. Uh, Washington is populated by people who think that lobsters are red. And that is the, uh, source, or at least the symbol, of a great many of the problems that we have had over the years in trying to accomplish things.

NARRATION: If you don't know: lobsters when they are alive and uncooked, are not red. They’re greenish brown. That year the bill went nowhere, and the foreign harvest of the seafloor went on.

MUSIC: Fade out

NARRATION: Carlos Rafael is in his early twenties at this point. He’s been in the country for maybe five years. And while Gerry Studds is learning the ways of Washington, Carlos is learning the trade of a fish cutter. 

Ian Coss: What does it take to cut a fish?

Carlos Rafael: What does it take? A little bit of knowledge. But you learn. As you learn, you get to it. And once you get to it, I mean, the name of the game is sharpen your knife.

NARRATION: Carlos started out working under a Cape Verdean man who showed him how to hone his blade until it was so sharp he could shave the hairs off his forearm.

Carlos Rafael: Once you got a gig of it, once you know what you're doing and you got a sharp knife, then it's like ice cream. It's easy.

NARRATION: In an eight-hour shift, each fish cutter was supposed to fill sixteen boxes, one hundred and twenty five pounds each. So, two thousand pounds of fish a day, for an average cutter.

Carlos Rafael: I won't say I was the best one in the city, but I bet you I was the fourth or the fifth best in the city as a fish cutter. I would cut twenty, twenty-two, sometimes twenty-four boxes by two, two-thirty in the afternoon. So I would go into the men's room upstairs. I would sit and smoke a cigarette and the boss would come, “get your butt to work.” I said, “I'm not going to work now. I'm having a cigarette.” “You've been here for twenty minutes.” I says, “Too bad.” “You’re fired.” So I must've got fired fifty times working for this company, but it could never fire me because I was always way over.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: As  Carlos said before, he did not come to this country to work for someone else. This was not his American dream. But it was also not a great time to strike out on his own. Even from the floor of the fish plant,  Carlos could tell the industry was in trouble.

Carlos Rafael: You know, not much fish around. And so far, we're going through a crisis way back then.

NARRATION: Catches were down, some species had virtually disappeared. And Gerry Studds knew all this too. So Studds came back around for another try, this time smarter. 

ARCHIVAL: The presence of the foreign fleets out there who were literally raping the resource. The Eastern Bloc countries, the Soviets, the Japanese

NARRATION: This time, Studds mounted a public campaign for the 200 mile bill. He held hearings. He met personally with President Ford. He teamed up with a whole fleet of fishing boats that sailed down the coast and up the Potomac to DC. And the campaign worked.

ARCHIVAL: Legislation under which The United States laid claim to a two-hundred-mile limit on its coastal waters.

NARRATION: This time the bill passed. And in 1976, fifty years ago, Gerald Ford signed what became known as the Magnuson Act, after Warren Magnuson, the Senator who co-sponsored it. 

Today, I guarantee you any fishing captain in the country will know exactly what you mean if you say the name Magnuson. One of Studd's staff members told me that years later, as the Magnuson Act became increasingly controversial, Studds would sometimes say: "Thank God they didn't name it after me."

MUSIC: out

NARRATION: Around the time the 200-mile limit went into effect, Carlos Rafael became the foreman of the fish plant, running the whole operation. It was clear that kicking out the foreign boats would be good for the local fleet, and pretty quickly he made his next move.

Carlos Rafael: I went to the owner, and I told him, I'm giving you two months to get somebody to replace me, because I'm going to do this for myself. “Oh you're never gonna make it.” I says, “That's your opinion. We will see if I make it or not.”

NARRATION: The rebellious teenager who ran away from the monastery and cherished his plastic wings, was going to follow through on his promise: to work for himself, in America.

Carlos Rafael: I went to a friend. I asked him for a five-thousand-dollar loan. I asked for ten, but at the time he says, “I don't have ten, but I got five if I can help you.” I said, “the five will have to do.” And I had twenty-seven cents left on my own.

NARRATION: That was the beginning of Carlos Seafood. 

Carlos Rafael: Just with five-thousand-dollars and twenty-seven-cents.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: And truly, Carlos' timing was very very good.

ARCHIVAL: Now with extended jurisdiction, the fishing industry is booming again.

NARRATION: Because after the 200-mile limit went into effect and the foreign fleets were gone, Congressman Studds helped use federal money to usher in a golden age for the New Bedford fleet. 

Rodney Avila: The government came down with his government guaranteed loan.

NARRATION: Again, Rodney Avila, New Bedford fisherman.

Rodney Avila: So if you could prove that you were a fisherman, they'd loan you all the money you wanted to buy a boat.

NARRATION: Interest rates at that time were quite high. If you were buying a house you might pay ten-percent, fifteen-percent interest. But if you were buying a fishing boat, it was basically free money.

Rodney Avila: I had a guy approach me to build thirty-four boats. He says, all you'll do is sit home and manage the boats. And I'll do all the rest.

Ian Coss: So it almost turned fishing boats into like an investment asset.

Rodney Avila: Corporations. Exactly. Accountants bought boats, lawyers bought boats, I know a dentist that owned boats. I know a used car salesman that owned a boat and the catching was good because there was a lot of fish around.

NARRATION:  Remember, ninety percent of the fishing pressure had just been removed in some areas, so at this point, overfishing was not really a concern. How could our dinky little fleet even approach the damage that those floating factories had done?

MUSIC: Out

Ian Coss: So you took that five-thousand-dollars and twenty-seven-cents. What did you buy? What did you set up?

Carlos Rafael: I would buy fish at night from the fishing vessels, lobsters, monkfish, scallops

NARRATION: At first, Carlos was just a small-time dealer, a middleman scouting for side deals around the docks.

Carlos Rafael: I would buy during the night, I go sell it in the next day, get the check, go cash the check, and go pay the fisherman.

NARRATION: But in those days, if you were making money in fishing you'd be stupid to not put that money into a boat. So that's what  Carlos did; he bought two boats in fact. And I should clarify,  Carlos did not captain those boats; he never captained his boats. In fact, Carlos told me he went out to sea just once right around this time. 

Carlos Rafael:  And I swore I would never go again.

Ian Coss: Why?

Carlos Rafael: Because that's not fit for human beings.

NARRATION: Carlos got so sea sick on that trip, he offered to pay for all the extra fuel if the captain would just drop him off at the closest port. He literally leapt off the boat as it approached the dock. And from that point on,  Carlos Rafael was not a fisherman, he was a businessman.

Carlos Rafael: So, I think I did pretty good. But I would work twenty hours a day, eighteen-hour days. I didn't have no, no breaks.

ARCHIVAL: Vast quantities of valuable healthy protein can now be harvested by the US industry if it expands its capabilities

NARRATION: From 1976 to 1982, the New England fishing fleet doubled in size, from six-hundred boats, to twelve-hundred boats. And it wasn't just about the total number; these were bigger boats, with more powerful engines. They were made of steel instead of wood, they had new nets, new fish finding technology. 

ARCHIVAL: The skipper stays close to the cabin during the tow, watching a remarkable collection of electronic instruments

NARRATION: If you ever look at footage or pictures of fishing boats you can spot the differences right away. On the older boats the pilot house -- the enclosed area -- is way in the back, with the open deck space in the front, because the crews would haul nets on board by hand over the side. The modern boats would have a pilot house toward the front, so they can pull the nets up from the back of the boat with a hydraulic winch. 

ARCHIVAL: Finally the net comes winding back onto the overhead drum, and the fish are shaken down into the cod end.

NARRATION: It was like the leap from propeller planes to jet engines: a whole new era, a new generation of technology. 

Demand for seafood was growing very fast at that time; and so Magnuson offered a chance for the US industry to modernize, to reclaim its ocean food chain. Studds himself called Magnuson a "rebirth" for the fishing industry, and locally at least, he was a hero. 

ARCHIVAL: Please give a rousing New Bedford welcome to Congressman Gerry Studds.

NARRATION: I talked to one Congressional staffer who told me that he knew people in New Bedford who would display a picture of Studds in their home, right next to a picture of the Pope. 

Maria Tomasia: And that's what Gary Studds was for them, was their savior, because they loved him.

ARCH: This fishing industry has known times in the past when everyone thought all was lost.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: Maria Tomasia remembered that later on when Studds' sexuality was revealed as part of a Congressional probe, when he was publicly censured, and when he chose to run for office again as the first openly gay Congressman in American history. Even then, the city and the Portuguese community did not turn on him.

Maria Tomasia: As soon as they saw him, they would start yelling and applauding. And it was like, unbelievable.

NARRATION: You have to understand that for coastal communities, the Magnuson Act was like The New Deal. Because each new boat employed a crew, each crewman supported a family, and together they supported a whole waterfront economy. 

ARCHIVAL: We believe that the future of this city and the future of this fleet and the future of this industry will match in magnitude its magnificent past. Good luck to us all.

Maria Tomasia: So it was just tremendous in every way everybody was benefiting from it. and that's what the American Dream was about.

MUSIC: Post

NARRATION: Carlos Rafael and Rodney Avila were part of a whole generation who rode the Magnuson wave. To this day, you can walk along the harbor in New Bedford and see the boats they built. From 1978, 1979, 1980, the boom times. But for the fishing industry, Magnuson was always a Faustian bargain. They asked the government to get involved in their business, to formalize what had been informal, to regulate what had been unregulated. They got their wish, but they also got more.

Rodney Avila: And my uncle,

NARRATION: Again, Rodney Avila. 

Rodney Avila: He said to me, you don't want the Magnuson Act, and I kept saying, “Why? They're gonna take my fish.” And he said to me, “There'll still be enough fish to support you. But once you let the government into your living room, it's like your mother-in-law coming to visit you. You'd never get 'em out.”

MUSIC: Out

BREAK

MUSIC: In

NARRATION: We’re going to jump forward in time, because I want you to see where all these changes are headed, why they matter, specifically to Carlos Rafael.

It’s 2015, almost forty years after Magnuson became law, forty years after New England fishermen cautiously welcomed the government into their world. Now, the boom times are over. The fishing industry is struggling. 

ARCHIVAL: a disaster is a disaster. And that's true whether we're talking about crops or whether we're talking about fish.

NARRATION: The years leading up to 2015 had been brutal for New England fishermen.

ARCHIVAL: A dramatic seventy-seven-percent cut in the cod catch.

NARRATION: The catch quotas set by the government kept getting lower and lower.

ARCHIVAL: That's gonna be a heck of a number of people out on unemployment.

NARRATION: The regulations kept getting tighter and tighter. 

ARCHIVAL: The prospects are the bleakest they've ever been.

ARCHIVAL: I'm gonna be tied up for months

ARCHIVAL: And that's the kind of draconian bureaucracy that fishermen are living with and struggling to maintain their –

NARRATION: For many fishermen, it meant the end of a career, the end of a way of life. 

ARCHIVAL: We are the most regulated fishery in the world.

NARRATION: And Carlos is tired of it all. He employs hundreds of people, manages dozens of boats, but his own daughter doesn’t want to take over what he’s built, so he decides to put his empire up for sale.

In May of that year, Carlos got a phone call from a broker, someone who helped very wealthy clients manage their money. This broker had a pair of Russian businessmen in New York who had made an awful lot of money, something involving healthcare equipment. Now they were looking for a place to invest it.  Carlos told the broker everything was up for grabs: the boats, the nets, the dredges, permits, property, a fish processing plant -- "the whole enchilada" as he put it.

Carlos Rafael: I give them the silver platter, the whole enchilada.   

NARRATION: The price was $175 million. No problem, the broker said, let's talk.

Two weeks later, the Russians drove through the chainlink gate and parked in front of the fish plant: a plain blocky building made of corrugated metal, like a big shipping container, with a sign on the side: "Carlos Seafood." The Russians drove a BMW five series, the sport version with a V8 engine. They wore Louis Vuitton shoes and Versace belts, pinky rings, Rolexes.  Carlos was in his usual outfit of jeans and a worn-out flannel, the breast pocket stuffed with slips of paper and of course, a pack of cigarettes. He did not look like a man worth $175 million.

Carlos led the men through the plant, and up a metal staircase to his office, the one filled with pictures of Scarface.

MUSIC: Enter

Carlos Rafael: This is Xavier. That's the sales man.

IRS Undercover: How’s it going? I'm Bob. [Inaudible] How are you? How are you? Good to meet you.

NARRATION: The Russian buyers, however, are not buyers. 

IRS Undercover: Those are the boat names? Yes.

NARRATION: But they are very curious about the business, and they are recording everything.

They're undercover feds.

Carlos Rafael: That motherfucker, can you believe that shit.

Ian Coss: Like I'm picturing you in a white van with headphones on.

Ron Mullett: There are white vans,

NARRATION: Ron Mullet was the case agent, with the IRS.

Ron Mullett: but I don't recall if on that particular day white vans were involved. I – I was certainly somewhere where I could respond if things went sideways in there.

MUSIC: Out

Ian Coss: So how did the IRS first get interested in Carlos Rafael?

Ron Mullett: Um, they recognized that he was growing in a time where the industry was shrinking.

MUSIC: Enter

ARCHIVAL: Most boats sit idle, confined by federal rules that limit when they can fish and –

Ron Mullett: You know, people were having a hard time meeting their loans on their boats, yet he was succeeding. And he can step right up and has an abundance of cash, to buy them out and buy their permits, most importantly.

MUSIC: Out

Ron Mullett: That led to different theories from other law enforcement that he must be involved in some other illicit illegal activity, and, and it ran the gambit. Some agencies thought he was involved in human trafficking or smuggling. Some people thought it was drugs. People thought there was public corruption. Several different agencies had had feelings that it was something, but none of them could figure out what it was.

NARRATION: The IRS, despite its reputation, does not just investigate tax fraud. As one agent put it to me: we do everything but crimes of passion. As long as there is money involved, we will take it. That's why these federal agencies wanted to brief Mullet on Carlos Rafael. There was obviously money involved, it was just, no one knew where it was coming from.

Ron Mullett: I listened to their brief. I thanked them for their time, and I left and, and, and put the briefing sheet in my drawer, expecting never to look at it again.

NARRATION: A few months later, Mullett heard from a source that Carlos was looking to cash out, and figured maybe this was his chance to get a peek inside the fish plant.  Mullett recruited a pair of undercover agents with Russian accents, then a third agent to play the broker, and sent them in to buy Carlos Seafood.

Again, none of them knew what kind of business  Carlos was really in; it could be drugs, it could be arms dealing, so they had no idea what the man was capable of. And it didn't help that the building was full of long knives used to filet fish. 

There was an uncertain moment early on, when Rafael noticed that his three guests were all wearing the exact same eighteen-karat-gold Rolex watch. But the leader of the group didn't miss a beat: those were Christmas gifts for the boys, he said. So Ron Mullet was listening intently for any signs of trouble, and also for any clues as to what Rafael’s true business was…

Carlos Rafael: So this fisheries keeps, it's like a fucking yo-yo. So

IRS Undercover: like you diversify right?

Carlos Rafael: Right.

NARRATION: The men got to talking, and  Carlos was happy to talk about his business. This was his life.

IRS Undercover: So you like scallops you said? And um, yeah,

Carlos Rafael: We got twelve of those

IRS Undercover: Twelve scallop boats, right

NARRATION: He talked about scallopers and draggers, he talked about the regulations he had to deal with: the sectors, the quotas, the permits -- stuff the IRS agents didn't really understand. 

Carlos Rafael: Yeah, that's a call. Look, I gotta take this call. “Hello?”

NARRATION: And more than anything, Carlos talked about the art of buying and selling fish, an obsession he has maintained since his days as a small-time dealer. 

Carlos Rafael: Hey, cockhead. I told you five and a quarter, I didn’t tell you five seventy five. You buy the motherfuckers, then you gotta shed a pack and then you gotta freeze the motherfuckers. Then you gotta mask them. What the fuck do you want for me?

NARRATION: But for the undercover agents, who again were pretending they wanted to buy out the whole business, there was a mystery staring them in the face – that asking price of $175 million. As big as Carlos Seafood was, that number seemed like a lot. So the agents asked for some proof that this business was really worth what Carlos said it was worth. 

Ron Mullett: And he, within probably the first ten or fifteen minutes, uh, he called his accountant.

Carlos Rafael: Why do you go to the office, get the financial statements? I take ‘em down to the docks just to let ‘em –

Ron Mullett: To send this stuff over — the financials and tax returns and stuff.

Carlos Rafael: All right [inaudible]. So, we'll take a ride. She's going to the office. She said about ten, fifteen minutes, she’ll be here.

Ron Mullett: But early on it was, there's a part of the business that she doesn't know about and we're not gonna talk about that.

IRS Undercover: about Carlos Seafoods?

Carlos Rafael: Don't ask that question.

IRS Undercover: What do you mean?

Carlos Rafael: Because she's gonna go through your la, la, la, la, la because –

IRS Undercover: Yeah.

Carlos Rafael: She don’t know nothing.

IRS Undercover: That's what we meant. We wanna talk with you separately about that.

Carlos Rafael: Okay. Because –

IRS Undercover: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what we're talking about, Carlos.

NARRATION: So the accountant is on her way over with the financials. She'll be there in ten minutes. The plan had been to take a break and go down to the docks, but now everyone understands there is a certain corner of the business, that if it comes up, the accountant will cover her ears and go la la la la la. That's what he means by that. 

So what to do?

These buyers seem serious, and they are clearly smart enough to know that the business on those official financial statements is not worth $175 million. Which means  Carlos has a decision to make, quickly. 

Carlos Rafael: They coming back and they says the numbers doesn't justify 175 million. So, stupid of me, I go in the bottom drawer

Ian Coss: of this desk that we're sitting at right now

Ron Mullett: And what he did is he opened a drawer

Carlos Rafael: And I got another set of books.

Ron Mullett: and he put it on the desk

Carlos Rafael: Right here, tell me it's not worth $175 million.

MUSIC: Enter

IRS Undercover: There you go. There he is. See? [Inaudible] Phenomenal. That’s where we want to go, the la la la before she gets here, right? Yeah.

Carlos Rafael: This is the Carlos Seafoods.

NARRATION: This set of books was labeled simply: "cash."

Carlos Rafael: This would have been another six, seven thousand dollars in my bottom line.

MUSIC: Post

NARRATION: However, the lines of numbers on the ledger did not reveal a smuggling operation, or a drug business. It was more fish, more prices, more lists of pounds and species. Because while other fishermen had been suffering and protesting under the system of regulations created by the Magnuson Act, Carlos Rafael had figured out a way to break the system entirely -- to catch whatever he wanted to catch, and get away with it for years. And this was not just about being a rebel and reeling in a few too many fish that he sold on the side. This was an operation. Carlos falsified official documents, he manipulated gaps in the enforcement system, he built up a network for selling black market fish to high end restaurants, involving a mafia associate, two corrupt cops,  duffel bags full of cash, and money hidden in offshore bank accounts -- all adding up to millions of dollars worth...of fish. The fishing was not a front, it was not a distraction; the fishing was the crime.

Carlos Rafael: You will not see it on paper

IRS Undercover: I lost you. Yeah.

Carlos Rafael: of Carlos Seafoods

NARRATION: With the tension broken and all his cards on the table, Carlos joked with these men who he had only met that day, that he's really trusting them at this point. 

Carlos Rafael: I do not know. You could be the fucking IRS, this could be a fucking cluster fuck. So I'm trusting you.

IRS Undercover: We have the same, uh, affinity for IRS as you do.

MUSIC: Fade out

Carlos Rafael: I'll regret that for the rest of my life, you son of a bitch. They would have never, never got me. But hey, it's over.

NARRATION: This is a story about one man’s choice to break the rules. But I see it as part of a much bigger story. Americans, we’ve always hated government regulation. That rebellious attitude Carlos has is not unique. It’s part of the American dream, really: that desire to be autonomous, to work for yourself, to make your own luck as Carlos put it. That culture has always been there, but the place we are in now somehow feels different. 

Today, the very idea of government regulation has become polarized, and I mean that on both sides of the political spectrum. It seems like people are instinctively for it or against it before they even know what "it" is, like as a matter of principle.  People on the left are mostly focused on the benefits of regulation – how it can be a tool for justice, for safety, preservation; people on the right seem to be mostly focused on the harms and the costs – to the point that there is talk of dismantling the regulatory state entirely, shutting down whole agencies, stripping it down to nothing. 

Surely, there is some nuance between these extremes. But the fact is most of us don’t want to look that close. It’s boring. It’s complicated. So we look away. Fishermen do not have the luxury of looking away. Nor for that matter do truck drivers, or small business owners, or nurses, farmers -- a lot of us.

​And I should be clear here that I am one of the lucky Americans who leads a pretty unregulated life. I make podcasts that go out on the internet. I don't need a permit or a license. I can say whatever I want including swears; I can make any number of episodes, anyone can listen to them, anywhere. It's a little hard for me to appreciate what it means to have your day to day work monitored by the state, to constantly bump up against rules that feel arbitrary; it's hard for me to appreciate the anger that someone like Carlos Rafael feels. But that anger is real. 

And that is why I am telling this story.

Ian Coss: The details of the operation aside, could you talk a little bit more about your motivations? Why it felt like these rules shouldn't be followed?

Carlos Rafael: It was not for the money. See, I'm the type of guy that I know the whole thing from the bottom up, because I started as unloading fishing boats. I know what it takes, what you need to raise a family, and to get ahead in life. And they forced me to do bullshit so I could keep all these people working.

Ian Coss: So you felt like you had to break the law in order to protect the people who worked for you?

Carlos Rafael: No questions asked. No questions asked. They force you to do it. They forced me to cheat.

MUSIC: Fade in

NARRATION: They forced me to cheat. When I walked out of Carlos Seafood that first day, I was skeptical of what I heard. It all felt pretty self-serving. Of course Carlos sees himself as the hero, the rogue fighting back against an overbearing state. On its own, he was easy to dismiss. 

But then again...

Maria Tomasia: I mean, we have to look at both sides of the story. Every calling has two sides.

NARRATION: As I've talked with more people who fished out of New Bedford, who worked for  Carlos, and who knew him, the image I get is not simple.

Bill Blount: When you first met him, you'd say, oh, this guy's a mafioso. But actually he had a heart.

NARRATION: In the fishing industry, Carlos Rafael remains a deeply divisive figure.

David Goethel: If he wasn't born crooked, he must have learned it before he could talk.

NARRATION: Someone who inspires jealousy, fury.

John Bullard: Only Carlos turned into the biggest crook in America. Just Carlos. He is a product of his own moral depravity.

NARRATION: And someone who despite all his crimes, all his deceptions, a lot of people continue to root for.

Ian Coss: Do you blame him for what he did? Do you think what he did is wrong?

Paul Valente: No, I don't.

Bill Blount: No, I don't.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: So who is Carlos Rafael really – a folk hero, a crook, a righteous rebel, a selfish conman? I believe in order to judge the crimes of Carlos, you also have to judge the whole system that he chose to break. 

MUSIC: Theme

NARRATION: So we're going to cover those forty years from the passage of Magnuson to the arrest of Carlos Rafael, to understand that system and the anger that grew up around it.

And here is my hope for the series. If you are one of those people who instinctively thinks government regulation is good and necessary, this story will make you question that instinct. If you are someone who thinks regulation is flawed and burdensome and unnecessary, this story will make you question that instinct. 

And if you're someone who before today thought lobsters are red, then if nothing else, you are about to learn a whole lot about where your fish comes from.

MUSIC: Post

ARCHIVAL: We've got riot gear police, uh, lined up, uh, all down the street here all the way past the gate.

NARRATION: In Part Two, what the government gives, the government can take away.

ARCHIVAL: People are being taken into custody left and right here. The last of the dealers are now out of the lot hitting the pavement pretty fast, and

NARRATION: That's next time. 

MUSIC: Closing song

NARRATION: Catching The Codfather is produced by Isabel Hibbard and myself, Ian Coss. It’s edited by Lacy Roberts. The editorial supervisor is Jenifer McKim with support from Ryan Alderman. And the Executive Producer is Devin Maverick Robins. And if you want to hear more stories like this produced by the same team, I want to make sure you know: This is the third season we have done together, and if you want to hear the rest of them, just search for “The Big Dig,” wherever you get your podcasts.

I talked to a number of Gerry Studds’ staffers for this episode, all of whom helped inform the story. They are John Sasso, Paul McCarthy, Steve Schwadron, Mike Forest, Tom McNaught and Mary Bresslaur. Susan Dudley, who you will hear later in the series, also provided valuable insights for the episode. For the archival material, we owe a thanks to the ML Baron Historic Archives, the New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center, and the Portuguese American Archives at UMass Lowell and UMass Dartmouth. And a special thank you to "Roberto and Januario [jah-new-ario] Leal [leh-ow].”

You can find a video version of this episode on YouTube featuring incredible archival footage, produced by Joanie Tobin and Anny Guerzon. The artwork is by Bill Miller. Our closing song is “Viva Viva New Bedford” by Jorge Ferreira.

The Big Dig is a production of GBH News and distributed by PRX.