Catching The Codfather

ARCHIVAL: Every weekday morning at dawn, the harbor here in New Bedford, Massachusetts fills with returning fishing boats as skippers bring their catch to auction.

NARRATION: For generations now, the port of New Bedford has been organized around a daily ritual -- the moment when all the key players converge, and everyone's economic fate is determined: the fish auction. 

ARCHIVAL: Ten three, two ten, four, ten thirty five, ten.

NARRATION: Back in the early 80s, the auction took place in a small city-owned building right at the dock, called the Wharfinger Building. It was so small that the fish dealers stood shoulder to shoulder, and the haze of cigarette smoke was thick enough to catch the morning light coming in the windows.

ARCHIVAL: Twenty five and, uh, thirty five.

NARRATION: At the front of the room there was a railing to hold back the crowd, and behind that a giant chalkboard divided into columns. It listed the catch from each boat, broken down by species: so many pounds of cod, so many pounds of yellowtail flounder, so many pounds of dabs, and so on. But this was not anything like the kind of auction you might expect; it was much much more confusing. Because instead of going down the list and auctioning off the species one by one, they would auction all the species at once, on all the boats at once.

Carlos Rafael: To deal in one of those auctions, you gotta be definitely good with numbers.

NARRATION: And if you want to know how Carlos Rafael really made a name for himself, how he came to dominate this port, it all started here at the auction. 

Carlos Rafael: And I have nobody to thank but my godfather. He was my teacher back home and he banged my head on a blackboard. He says, I'm gonna get this timetable through your skull. I would be pissed at that age. I'd say, “son of a bitch, I hope you die.” But today, I got nothing but to thank him. For making me that good with numbers.

MUSIC: Enter

Bill Blount: I mean, he was just like, lightning bang, bang, bang, bang.

NARRATION: Fisherman Bill Blount used to watch Carlos at the auction. 

Bill Blount: And I'd tease him once in a while. He'd get mad at me. Shut up, Billy. Shut up. But he was brilliant.

NARRATION: The fish auction began at eight am sharp, and it ended at eight twenty-two. Exactly twenty-two minutes to bid on everything you could keep track of:  the dabs, the cod, the flounder, all of it.

Carlos Rafael: I could outrun anyone on that auction. I could bet in eight, nine bolts at a time by doing the math all in my brain like a computer couldn't even do it that fast.

NARRATION: But the thing that made the auction so confusing, and made Carlos so good at it, was this final quirk in the rules: whoever put in the last high bid on any individual species from a given boat, got all the species from that boat. So even though you're bidding on the species, you're really bidding on the whole boat, via the species.

If you’re feeling lost, don’t sweat it, you don’t really need to understand how this auction works. Just know that there is some interesting strategy to it. Like if Carlos could see the guy next to him really wanted the haddock, but that same boat had a big load of cod, he could screw the guy by bidding up the cod.

Bill Blount: He'd make the cod, like huge money. He'd make the flounder small,

NARRATION: So now the competition would be forced to outbid Carlos on the cod, just to get at that haddock they really wanted. That is, unless the competition gives up, in which case Carlos would be stuck with the overpriced cod, plus the haddock, plus whatever else was on the boat. That was the game.

Bill Blount: I mean, it was really cool

NARRATION: It was fast, it was risky, it was ruthless; it was exactly the kind of business Carlos Rafael excelled at. 

Carlos Rafael: You can read his eyes. You know exactly if he's shaking, if he's not shaking, if he's gonna drop, if he's not gonna drop. When you do it in person, you can tell.

MUSIC: Out

Ian Coss: Was it a rush? To be on the auction floor?

Carlos Rafael: Oh yeah. Twenty-two minutes. That was a high to get there. You couldn't, I couldn't wait for the next day to see if I could even get better than the day before.

NARRATION: By the 1980s when Carlos came on the scene, this whole system had been in place for decades. The fish dealers bought their fish from the boat owners, the boat owners paid their captains and crews, the crews risked their lives to go out and catch the fish. Everything was in a delicate balance, held together in that little brick building owned by the city. But a shock was coming that would upend that balance forever...

MUSIC: Theme

NARRATION: From GBH News this is The Big Dig Season 3: Catching The Codfather. I'm Ian Coss.

The shock I mentioned would allow Carlos to consolidate power like never before, but it would also leave a mark on the whole port, a feeling of bitterness and mistrust that lingers there to this day – between the fishing industry, and their government. 

This is Part Two: I Hope Those People Sink.

MUSIC: Out

BREAK

Ian Coss: So I was wondering, could you, to start, tell me how long has your family been fishing in New Bedford?

Rodney Avila: Well, it started with my great-grandfather. He came over on a whale ship from the Azores and then I started my career when I was nine years old.

NARRATION: Rodney Avila is a fourth generation Portuguese-American fisherman. His grandsons fish now too, so that's six generations total, all drawn to the same sea.

Rodney Avila: Any day I had off at school, I'd go fishing with my grandfather who owned a little lobster boat outta here. So as we grew up, fishing was in our lives. That's what we did.

NARRATION: On the Fourth of July, the whole extended family would ride out to one of the islands off New Bedford and pitch tents for the weekend. The women and young kids would hang out on the beach, while the men would take one of their boats out and hunt for supper.

Rodney Avila: Swordfish, clams, quahogs, scallops. I mean, we did everything.

NARRATION: And growing up in a fishing family here, one of the rites of passage is your first trip to a place known as Georges Bank. 

MUSIC: Enter

ARCHIVAL: Georges Bank is one of the richest fishing areas in the world.

NARRATION: Georges Bank is a huge expanse of shallow water extending hundreds of miles out to sea, like an underwater peninsula invisible on the surface. From New Bedford, it takes a whole day for a fishing boat to get to the outer end of the bank, so this is not a quick trip you could make on a day off from school. Usually boats would spend at least a week fishing out there, far from shore, where the weather and currents were notoriously dangerous and unpredictable. 

ARCHIVAL: These are the wildest waters in the world. It's called the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

NARRATION: But boats have made that trip for centuries, because the shallow water and swirling currents make an incredible habitat for fish.

ARCHIVAL:  Georgia's bank is one of the few major spawning grounds for haddock and cod in the United States

NARRATION: And as soon as Rodney Avila was old enough, he made the trip there too. Avila remembers that the day he graduated high school, his mother drove him straight from the school parking lot down to the dock where a boat was waiting for him to take a seven day trip out to Georges Bank. He was a man now, and those fishing grounds were part of his family heritage, just like the Portuguese clubs and the Fourth of July cookout.

So now just imagine how the port responded, when they heard that their government wanted to give it away...to Canada. 

MUSIC: Out

Jeff Pike: I can go get a chart if you'd like.

Ian Coss: Let's do it.

Jeff Pike: Okay

NARRATION: Jeff Pike was a staff member for the Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee in the US House. He worked with Congressman Gerry Studds, the man who led the charge in kicking out the foreign fishing boats. But as Pike explained to me, that move had consequences.

Jeff Pike: So if you had the coast line, the coast line would be going up this way, right?

Ian Coss: Yep.

Jeff Pike: And you've got Nova Scotia here.

NARRATION: Two months after Gerald Ford signed the Magnuson Act -- the bill that created the 200 mile exclusive fishing zone -- Canada's Secretary of State announced that they were going to do the same thing. The problem is that if you draw a line two-hundred miles out from the coast of the US, and another line two-hundred miles out from the coast of Canada -- those two lines cross. 

Jeff Pike: And the disputed zone was, essentially here.

NARRATION: They crossed on Georges Bank.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: In 1977, delegations from the US and Canada met for a series of negotiations on how to settle the disputed zone. On the American side, the delegation was led by the State Department, the people who, as Congressman Studds put it in the last episode, thought lobsters were red. 

Harvey Mickelson: My involvement was representing the seafood processing industry from the city of New Bedford, which was major. And, being a, uh advisor to the State Department.

NARRATION: Harvey Mickelson was there for these negotiations too, and horrified by the outcome. 

The final compromise was this: the two countries would split Georges Bank, and the piece that the State Department was ready to hand over to Canada...it was the richest part of the whole bank. That meant American captains like Avila would lose access to some of their best fishing grounds -- areas they had relied on for generations. 

But there was still hope. The treaty had to be ratified by Congress. And Mickelson knew his Congressman very well; it was Gerry Studds. 

Harvey Mickelson: In fact, he called me on the phone and he said, Avi, uh, what's the story? Do you wanna accept the treaty or not? And I said, no.

NARRATION: Mickelson and the other industry reps told Studds: we want to fight. 

The thinking was that, if Congress rejected the treaty then the dispute would then go to the International Court. And Mickelson believed they had a solid case there.

Historically, it was US fishermen who had made the most trips to Georges Bank, and just looking at it on an ocean chart, it's clear that the bank is an extension of the US continental shelf. It seemed intuitive to give the whole thing to the US. 

Harvey Mickelson: And he said, okay. And that was it. He handled it.

NARRATION: The Canadian parliament ratified the treaty, but the US Congress rejected it. The fight was on.

Ian Coss: Do you remember on that phone call weighing the, like, there's a bit of a gamble here. I mean, it's sort of like choosing whether to go to trial or take a plea deal, right?

Harvey Mickelson: Anytime you walk into court, you don't know what you're gonna walk out with. We all know that.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: In 1981, the dispute went to the International Court in the Hague. For Rodney Avila, life went on as normal. Georges Bank was in legal limbo, so everyone could fish there, for now. 

Rodney Avila: Both Coast Guards used to fly over us. We used to see the Canadian Cutter, the Chebucto, that was the name of it, used to pass us all the time and they, they'd wave, we'd wave, like that.

NARRATION: But down in Washington, Jeff Pike was worried about the case. The US legal team was from the State Department, the people who had opposed creating the two-hundred-mile limit in the first place. And Pike was getting the sense that this fishing dispute was just not that team's top priority. 

Jeff Pike: Whereas Canada was putting everything they had into winning the case

NARRATION: The Canadian lawyers were all in. They were presenting videos, they had historical documents. It was a good show. 

Jeff Pike: I guess you could say we got outlawyered.

MUSIC: Transition

NARRATION: On October 12th, 1984, the ruling finally came down from the International Court in the Hague. And it was bad.

MUSIC: Out

Jeff Pike: I was in the New Bedford office and it was in the morning around nine o'clock, because as soon as I got the call from the State Department, I called Harvey, I called a number of the industry leaders. I got out the chart on Gerry's desk in New Bedford and I said, you gotta come here, we gotta talk about this.

NARRATION: On a regular map in which the ocean is just a flat, uniform wash of blue, the so-called "Hague Line" makes perfect sense.  It basically takes the mid-way point between the US coast in Massachusetts and the Canadian coast in Nova Scotia, and follows that all the way out to sea. For the New Bedford fishermen who knew what was under that expanse of water, the line was unthinkable. The court had not only split Georges Bank, but the split was even worse than the original treaty. The US had gambled, and lost. 

Jeff Pike: And, you know, and they were like shocked. It was just betrayal.

NARRATION: Now, the American boats had fourteen days to get back on their side of the new line. Then, the invisible barrier became hard. Some fishermen started calling the line “The French Fence.” 

Ian Coss: What did that loss feel like?

Rodney Avila: Well, we lost everything. We lost the best yellow tailing. We lost the best scalloping, we lost the best swordfish grounds. I, I would say we lost a good forty to fifty-percent of our revenue.

Ian Coss: Did you have an emotional connection to that place? You know, is it like a farmer losing their field?

Rodney Avila: Yeah. Uh, like I said, I started when I was nine years old, my first trip to Georges bank I was thirteen years old . I mean, I, I didn't hate a lot of people, but I wasn't happy with our government really. Only because they, I figured they just threw the fishing industry away to Canada.

NARRATION: Avila's uncle had once warned him about the government getting involved in their business - he said it was like your in-laws coming to visit. Once they came, you’d never get ‘em out. And here was the twist of the knife. The government had kicked out the foreigners, only to give up the crown jewel of their fishing grounds. 

Jeff Pike: There was a lot of anger. A lot of anger. I think, um, in hindsight now you really see how losing that has really impacted the New England industry.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: There's a phrase you hear a lot in the conversation about fishing in New England: too many boats chasing too few fish. In the 70s and early 80s, The government had encouraged fishermen to build new boats, to invest in their industry, to create jobs for their children mining this vast resource that was suddenly all theirs. Like I said before, a whole generation answered that call, including Rodney Avila and Carlos Rafael, and many others. But the promise was false, and now the whole industry built on it was about to crack.

MUSIC: Out

ARCHIVAL: From whaling to textiles to fishing, New Bedford has always put all its economic eggs in a single basket only to see each industry collapse.

NARRATION: In 1984, the year of the Hague ruling, New Bedford was the richest fishing port in the country, in terms of the total value of seafood landed there. Times were good. Then the French Fence went up. In the next year, 1985, total landings dropped by twenty percent.

John Bullard: So when you shrink the pie, when you overfish the resource, it puts everybody under strain.

NARRATION: This is John Bullard, former mayor of New Bedford.

John Bullard: And when you put everyone under strain, the pressure and the pressure cooker builds.

ARCHIVAL: the fuel costs $2,500, the ice a thousand.

NARRATION: To make matters worse, the costs of running a fishing boat -- the fuel, the insurance -- kept going up 

ARCHIVAL: to do better, they fish harder…

NARRATION: squeezing the pressure cooker even more. 

John Bullard: And at some point it's gonna blow.

Ian Coss: And it happened to blow on your watch.

John Bullard: Yeah, definitely blew on my watch.

NARRATION: John Bullard was sworn in as the mayor of New Bedford on Monday January 6th, 1986, at the high school auditorium. This was a little more than a year after the French Fence went up. 

John Bullard: So, uh, inauguration day is, you know, pomp and circumstance. It's figuring out which family bible you want to put your hand on. I chose two.

NARRATION: He chose two bibles because two of his ancestors had also been mayor of New Bedford before him. Bullard comes from a legendary local family. His ancestors had built up the whaling industry here back in the 1700s. For centuries -- literally centuries -- they had been engaged in the life of this city, and they had been known by the name "John Bullard."

Ian Coss: And how many John Bullard's are there before you?

John Bullard: Well, uh, my grandfather wrote a letter to the Harvard admissions guy saying there are thirteen John Bullard's. Eleven of 'em went to Harvard, one who didn't was fighting the Revolutionary War, and one is my grandson.

NARRATION: Our John Bullard, by the way, did become the twelfth John Bullard to attend Harvard. And now he was following through on another family tradition: becoming his city's mayor. 

As soon as he was inaugurated, Bullard knew exactly where he needed to go.

John Bullard: And I said, well, before we get to the mayor's office, Ed Craig from the police department, um, was gonna drive me there. I said, uh, Ed, could you take me down to, South Terminal?

NARRATION: …down inside the pressure cooker.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: Bullard and his twelve year old son got into the mayor's black Buick with a blue municipal license plate. The Police Sergeant descended the hill, and approached the waterfront. 

You may have an image of coastal New England as something quaint. Colorful little boats tied up at wooden piers, a lobster shack. But the New Bedford waterfront is not that. It's industrial warehouses; it's loading docks; it's concrete and steel. It's a place built to move fish. But in 1986 all of that had come to a halt. 

ARCHIVAL: Union, union, union

NARRATION: The fishermen were on strike.

MUSIC: Post

NARRATION: As the mayor's car approached the scene, Bullard could see on one side of the street there were about two hundred angry fishermen. On the other side, about a hundred police officers with riot shields and German Shepherds. The car stopped in the middle; Bullard told his son to stay put, and he stepped out to meet the crowd. 

MUSIC: Out

ARCHIVAL: In the best of times, you have one of the most difficult jobs that anyone has,

NARRATION: First, Bullard spoke to the fishermen. 

ARCHIVAL: Now, I as mayor cannot take sides between union and management. I don't think you expect me to.

“You can take sides between right and wrong”

Well,

NARRATION:  He could tell the situation was volatile. The men crowded around him, angry that Bullard wasn't taking a stronger stand on his first day in office. 

Bullard then crossed the street to speak with the police officers, and went back to the car where his son was waiting. As they pulled away, someone threw a rock in their direction. It missed, but the message was not lost. 

John Bullard: There's no such thing as being in the middle of the street.

MUSIC: Transition

NARRATION: Fishing is a kind of tricky business to unionize. A single port like New Bedford could have dozens of different boats with many different owners, each of whom hire and pay their own crews. There is no single employer to bargain with. But the fishermen of New Bedford had managed to band together nonetheless, and to win real concessions from the boat owners. 

Rodney Avila: I was a union man before I was a boat owner

NARRATION: Rodney Avila had been in that union when he was starting out, and remained a strong union supporter even after he owned his own boats. 

Rodney Avila: I kept my boats in the union because I thought it was best for the crew. 'Cause it gave them a retirement package. And it had some control over their work. On a dragger it was, uh, eight and four. You worked eight hours, you got four hours off. On a scalper it was six and six, you worked six and you got six off.

NARRATION: According to Avila, the union even limited how many pounds of fish a boat could catch per crewmember: six thousand pounds per person, per trip. The point was to protect jobs, but it also functioned as a kind of conservation measure at a time when there were very few limits on what you could catch. 

By the mid 1980s, only about a third of the boats in the port were officially union boats, but even still, the union was powerful enough that the non-union boats would mostly follow these same guidelines. 

Rodney Avila: if you didn't go by those regulations, you'd lose your crew to union boats.

Ian Coss: So as long as there was a critical mass of union boats, it kind of kept the same standards in the whole fleet?

Rodney Avila: Right. Yes. So it was better working conditions for the crew. It was better pricing for the crew 'cause the price came up and it was, uh, better for the consumer 'cause they get fresh fish. I thought it was the best. I didn't wanna see the union break up.

NARRATION: So now we can see all the main players in this particular story. There are really three of them: the boat owners, their crews who are represented by the union, and then the assorted dealers and processors who buy their fish, people like Carlos. So owners, dealers, and crew. We’re going to spend the next few minutes focusing on the conflict between the boat owners and the crews – because that’s how the strike started – but soon enough, Carlos and the dealers will be dragged into this fight too. 

MUSIC: Enter

ARCHIVAL: Boat owners and union officials haven't met since contract negotiations broke down last Thursday.

NARRATION: In the fall of 1985, back when John Bullard was still campaigning for mayor, the boat owners and the fishermen's union were meeting to negotiate a new contract. 

ARCHIVAL: There are several issues separating the two sides. The first and foremost is pay, and that's determined by the split of the catch.

NARRATION: Instead of receiving a salary or set rate, each crewmember was paid a slice of the value of the catch, which of course was determined at auction. So when the fishing was good, and prices were good, everyone benefitted. 

Under the old contract, the revenue from each trip was split so that the crew got the bigger share. 

Rodney Avila: Back then we used to get forty-two percent for the boat and fifty-eight percent of the catch went to the crew

NARRATION: A fifty-eight - forty-two split, favoring the crew.

Rodney Avila: and it was the best settlement for the crew.

NARRATION: But with rising expenses and now falling catches thanks to the French Fence, the group of owners that negotiated with the union was demanding new terms: an even fifty-fifty split of the catch. 

ARCHIVAL: What do you think of the contract they've offered you, the boat owners have offered you?

Uh, I think it's not fair. It’s not fair.

NARRATION: Commercial fishing is generally considered the most dangerous job in America, period. Rates of workplace death are forty times the national average. So even in good times that kind of pay cut the owners proposed would be a tough sell. In 1985, it was devastating. The fishermen would be getting a smaller slice of a smaller pie.

ARCHIVAL: Leave my family home, wondering what's gonna happen to my wife and the kids. To make two-hundred dollars a week. It's not, it's not worth it. It's not worth it.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: The final ingredient in the pressure cooker was the union leadership. The organization had gone through its own internal struggles that year, and the leader left standing was a controversial figure, named Joe Piva.

ARCHIVAL: Joe Piva is of Portuguese descent and he now is the business agent for the Teamsters Local in New Bedford

NARRATION: Piva was known as a bit of an agitator.  Fishermen I've met described him to me as "a badass," "a hoodlum," and a "tough character."    In pictures, Piva usually has a union jacket and a white newsboy cap pulled down over his broad face. What you can't see in the pictures is that the four letters of his last name are tattooed between the knuckles of his left hand: P I V A.

MUSIC: Transition

NARRATION: On the day after Christmas, 1985, with contract negotiations stuck, Piva's union decided to up the pressure. That's when they declared a strike. 

ARCHIVAL: It's a proud day. I must let the city know that we must let management know. We are working people. We create with our hands, we work with our hands, and all we want is a fair shake.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: Like I said before, less than half the fleet carried union crews. So if those crews simply walked off the job it would not shut down the port and force the other side to bend. Fishing could go on. However, there was another way to apply pressure on boat owners: a weak link in the whole supply chain, which is the auction. Shut down the auction, and you shut down the port. 

ARCHIVAL: It's a matter of right and wrong. Fairness, that's it.

NARRATION: So a week into the strike, on January third, six hundred union members surrounded the small brick Wharfinger Building, marching in a slow loop with picket signs against their shoulders. 

ARCHIVAL: Stay in this fight until we win

NARRATION: Two boats were waiting nearby, tied up at the pier and ready to put their fish up on the blackboard. Now in theory, the building was still open; the fish dealers could simply cross the picket line and buy fish from any boat willing to sell. But inside the building, they found that the phone lines -- which the dealers used to communicate with their own customers -- had all been cut. And the clock that counted down the twenty-two minutes, had been disabled. That day there was no auction.

MUSIC: Enter

ARCHIVAL: As the New Bedford fisherman strike gets older, it's not getting any closer to a settlement.

NARRATION: This situation went on for over a week -- the same week John Bullard was sworn in as the city's new mayor. Negotiations were stalled and the auction was closed. 

ARCHIVAL: In fact, both sides are so far apart, even the mayor of New Bedford is wondering whether anyone wants to settle.

That's a question in my mind, whether both sides are looking for a solution

NARRATION: It was January, so the union members out on the picket line lit fires in trashcans to stay warm. A local cafe provided free chicken soup and trays of baloney sandwiches.  Everyone seemed dug in, ready to wait it out.

ARCHIVAL: the mayor said his city was losing more than a million dollars a day worth of business.

NARRATION: So now, what had started as a feud between the union and the boat owners over pay, had expanded to include the fish dealers -- the people like Carlos Rafael who made their living cutting deals at the auction. Because every day the auction stayed closed meant another day of no deals, no action. Until the last week of January, when the stalemate finally broke.

Carlos Rafael: Because this still was America. You know, you ain't gonna stop my operation. You can do whatever you want. I will keep buying fish, and don’t even try to stop me.

MUSIC: Out 

NARRATION: Harvey Mickelson, the seafood industry lawyer, was at the center of what happened next, because his clients were the fish dealers, who wanted desperately to restart the auction and get back to buying fish. He recalls the decisive moment came first thing in the morning, right outside the Wharfinger Building.

Harvey Mickelson: Somebody pushed one of the buyers from behind, and there had never been anything like that before. Didn't hurt him, but he pushed him.

NARRATION: That day, Mickelson and his clients made a decision.

Harvey Mickelson: The buyers were going to take control of the auction

MUSIC: enter

NARRATION: For decades, the fish dealers like Carlos had been guests at the auction. They could come, they could bid, they could play their games, but they did not run the place. It was the union that officially ran the auction, and it was the city that owned the building. That was about to change.

Harvey Mickelson: I was able to get an office, moved all of the telephones, fourteen houses of telephones, into that place overnight

NARRATION: With those newly installed phone lines, plus of course a big blackboard, the dealers had everything they needed to run an auction.

Harvey Mickelson: without any involvement at all from the union or the city.

NARRATION: Mickelson knew this move was dangerous; it was a provocation. 

Harvey Mickelson: I mean, from everybody's perspective, I can understand that.

NARRATION: And the union would respond to that provocation.

ARCHIVAL: And I'm getting into better position here to see exactly what's going on. The dealers are out, they're out in the lot right now

MUSIC: Out

BREAK 

ARCHIVAL: [inaudible] the balance of whatever we have there on the –

NARRATION: The private fish auction opened for business on January 20th, 1986, so almost a month into the strike. The building Mickelson had found was the warehouse for a trucking company called Yellowbird Motor Lines, so people called it the Yellowbird Auction. And it had a very different feel from the old Wharfinger building. High ceilings, fluorescent lights, fresh carpeting, and a chainlink fence all around the outside.

ARCHIVAL: half it up. Nice round

NARRATION: As Harvey Mickelson himself put it to me: the fox was now taking over the chicken coop. 

John Bullard: This was one more blow to the crew,

NARRATION: Again, John Bullard, the city's new mayor.

John Bullard: so they got even angrier 'cause now they were being screwed twice. First by the boat owners, then by the dealers. And, uh, so they surrounded the building

ARCHIVAL: Union, union, union

NARRATION: Joe Piva and the mass of striking fishermen simply relocated about three quarters of a mile down the waterfront to the Yellowbird Building and set up a new picket line. But after a month on strike, the crowd was getting restless. There were reports of broken windows, and vehicles being lit on fire. Anything could happen now.

Carlos Rafael: See right here. I got a nice souvenir from that strike.

NARRATION: In his office, along with all the Scarface memorabilia, Carlos Rafael keeps a rock the size of a fist. 

Carlos Rafael: This rock was through and through the T-top of my Firebird during the strike.

Ian Coss: Where were you?

Carlos Rafael: I was going into the auction, and they had a picket line, I got my firebird, I went to the driveway, they were blocking, I won't stop, I went right through, and I saw the guy there through the rock. I went to him, I said, okay. What you did, I will not forget. And if you think you're going to scare me with a rock, it'll be the biggest mistake you ever made.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: Carlos says that some dealers didn't dare cross the union. But their loss was his gain. Carlos hired security at his warehouse around the clock. He started carrying a gun. When the tires on his trucks were slashed, he replaced them. And he kept going to the auction. Because for whoever could make it in the door there was good money to be made. 

Carlos Rafael: every time it's a crisis, that's when you make a lot of money.

ARCHIVAL: We've got riot gear police, uh, lined up, uh, all down the street here all the way past the gate. There are, uh, several police cars in an L formation.

Harvey Mickelson: I can remember leaving my car at one of the members' locations.  

NARRATION: Harvey Mickelson told me that as the standoff wore on, groups of buyers started meeting at a separate location and all loading into a delivery van, like the kind with a refrigeration unit and no windows. The van would pull into the enclosed parking lot at Yellowbird and back up to the building as close as possible. 

Harvey Mickelson: People were across the street, fishermen with wives and dogs and kids throwing rocks

NARRATION: Once the van was in place, the dealers would kick the rear doors open and sprint the final fifteen feet to the safety of the building. The way Mickelson described it sounded like the beach landing at Normandy.

ARCHIVAL: And I'm getting into better position here to see exactly what's going on. The dealers are out, they're out in the lot right now

NARRATION: But the fish dealers, remember, they thrived on cut throat action – on bluffing, backstabbing, brinkmanship -- that was all part of the business. And so they were not going to back down now.

Carlos Rafael: I come out, I says: one of you steps in front of my truck, I’m gonna shoot you. And I mean it. Don't take this as a threat. This is a promise. You block that driveway one more time, one of you is going to go down.

ARCHIVAL: More rocks flying, uh, more cars coming out. Uh, 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

MUSIC: out

Ian Coss: They cleared out of your way?

Carlos Rafael: They did. They knew I meant it. I got through, and I sold. I was making good money with the fish to the other dealers because some of them were scared of unloading the boats. I wasn't scared. This is a free country. You keep doing what you do. When you believe in a strike, you strike. You do all that. Do not interfere with my trucks.

NARRATION: Joe Piva and his union were starting to lose their grip on the port.  Non-union boats continued to fish, the private auction continued to sell, dealers like Carlos continued to profit. But the union did succeed in one thing: drawing the city government into the fray.

ARCHIVAL: You fishermen over the years have been screwed royally

NARRATION: And that allegiance between the city and union made sense. New Bedford was historically a Democratic city. The Democrats were historically the party of labor, and especially at that time, when the Reagan administration was actively breaking public unions. Bullard as the Democratic mayor always kept his distance from the contract negotiations, but it's clear to me that his sympathy was with the striking fishermen. 

ARCHIVAL: What about the strike itself? Strike What about what can you do for the fishermen?

I think that there's very little we can do.

NARRATION: And there was one thing that Bullard could do for the fishermen, one bit of leverage that he still had to at least protect the public auction.

John Bullard: There was a city ordinance that said it had to happen in public, so anyone could go down and see that take place.

NARRATION: This ordinance had been on the books for decades. It said that any fish unloaded at city piers, had to be sold at the city auction. Simple enough, but the rule had never been controversial before, so it had never really been enforced. 

John Bullard: I said, yeah, well, let's, uh, find out what's gonna happen if we do that. We need to arrest the first captain who tries to auction at Yellowbird.

ARCHIVAL: We'll enforce the ordinances against them

NARRATION: That first week the so-called 'Yellowbird auction' was open, citations quickly piled up: four against fish dealers and eight against boats. 

ARCHIVAL: To get them to act, in what we believe is –

NARRATION: Bullard was no longer in the middle of the street. He was now in the fight. 

ARCHIVAL: We'll probably find out in the next few weeks whether the ordinance is legal or not.

NARRATION: But, again, it was still unclear to everyone if these penalties would hold up in court. 

John Bullard: So I called up the judge who had sworn me in

NARRATION: On the phone, Bullard explained to the judge about the ordinance and the arrests, the question of its legality, and all that. But it turned out, no explanation was needed. 

John Bullard: Judge Jacobs said, “thanks for the call, mayor. I know that ordinance very well because I – before I was a judge, I was a city solicitor. I actually wrote that ordinance.” I said, no kidding.

NARRATION: For a moment, Bullard's heart lifted. I mean, you'd think the judge would be on the city's side if he had written the rule in question.

John Bullard: Really, you wrote the ordinance? He said, “yes, I wrote that ordinance and therefore I know it's unconstitutional, 'cause I wrote it.”

NARRATION: And with that, his heart dropped. 

John Bullard: I said, judge, you're telling me you wrote an ordinance that you know is unconstitutional? “Yes, I did. And uh, so I'm gonna throw that case out of court faster than you can just blink an eye at.”

NARRATION: The law was a hollow threat; it had always been a hollow threat. Now Bullard knew it, and if the fish dealers didn't know it too they were bound to find out pretty soon. 

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION:  The strike was now into its second full month. Boat owners and crews remained stuck, and so far the only winner was their mutual enemy, the dealers. 

ARCHIVAL: Then this weekend, the boat owners came up with a different tact. Instead of talking to the union officials, they decided to make an offer directly to the union membership.

NARRATION: So a week after the Yellowbird auction opened for business, the boat owners delivered an ultimatum: our boats are going back out to sea. You can work on our terms, or we'll find crew who will. 

The terms were basically what the owners had been demanding all along: an even split of the catch. Fifty-one percent to the crew, forty-nine percent to the owners. The union, under Joe Piva, quickly rejected the offer, but the offer wasn't really directed at him. It was at his members. 

ARCHIVAL: I mean this very sincerely. There were some vessels that got outta here and it made good press and I watched this press take me on

NARRATION: This was now the ultimate test of the union's strength and Piva knew it. Would his members hold the line?

ARCHIVAL: And I'm gonna tell you this. They watched the boats go out, but they never followed the rest of the story out. They went out with two, three men. I will remember my friends, but I'll never forget my enemies and I will never forgive 'em.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: When I talk to fishermen who were working at this time, I've found a lot of them have mixed feelings about the strike. In principle, they supported the union and what it stood for. But in this case there was some personality and ego involved that hurt the process. I'm talking specifically about Joe Piva, the union leader who once said of himself: "Some people think I walk on water and some people think I should be in the water." 

Piva promised his members a lot, maybe more than he could deliver, and  when the negotiations went poorly, he didn't shy away from antagonizing the boat owners. And then of course there was the violence and destruction of property. It's hard to judge now, and Piva would sometimes accuse the media of fixating on the violence to make a better story; he'd probably say that about this podcast. But it's clear from my research that this strike did have an aggressive edge that ultimately undermined its support. 

Ian Coss: How did you respond at the time as a boat owner?

Rodney Avila: Well, as a boat owner, I respected the strike.

NARRATION: One of those conflicted fishermen was Rodney Avila. At first, Avila kept his boat tied up and didn't ask his crew to work. He didn’t want to defy the union that he had once been part of and still believed in.

Rodney Avila: Then I had a leak in my boat and my son went down, and saw a crack. I mean, the harbor was iced up, saw a crack in one of the wells. So I called up NorthAtlantic, which was a shipyard over here, and I asked him, I says, uh, can I bring the boat over for – do you have welders? So he says, yeah, bring your boat over, and I'll get a welder right on it. So I told my son, start the engine up, I'll be right down.

MUSIC: Enter

Rodney Avila: when they heard the engine start up, one of the guy says, oh, Rodney's going fishing. They brought everybody down. Well, by the time I got to the boat, must have been at least fifty guys around, uh, my boat. And I says, I'm not going fishing. I've got a leak in the lazarette and I'm gonna weld it. And one of the guys there said, “no, he's going fishing” and then they threatened my son.

So I says, you know what? Why am I even into this? So I called up my crew without anybody knowing, and I asked them, “hey, if I take my boat to Newport, you guys ought to come to Newport and fish.”

NARRATION: That's Newport, Rhode Island, a nearby port that was not on strike. 

Rodney Avila: Everyone but one said yes. I said, that's fine. So I ended up coming down one night, starting the boat up, and my son, we took it to Newport.

MUSIC: Out

Ian Coss: As someone who had been in the union, was it hard for you to ultimately cross that picket line and go out fishing?

Rodney Avila: It was, but it wasn't the same union that I joined. It was, it was different leadership. The benefits were the same. Everything was the same. The percentages were the same, but it wasn't the same core people inside.

NARRATION: By the time Avila did come back to New Bedford, it was clear that the striking fishermen knew where he had been. 

Rodney Avila: I had to call it, I had to call four new tires. They slashed the tires, broke a mirror, kicked in the door. But, but it's all right. I mean, they did what they had to do. I did what I had to do.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: It started as a trickle of boats leaving the harbor. Then ten all at once. Then another ten. One striking fisherman told the local paper: "I hope those people sink."

MUSIC: Post

NARRATION: The strike did not formally end, but over several months the picket lines dwindled. Trash can fires stopped burning. The trays of baloney sandwiches stopped coming.  The court cases from that hollow city ordinance were all thrown out. By the spring of 1986, when the last patches of ice were gone from the harbor, you could walk the waterfront and never know that technically, it was still on strike. To this day, the city-run fish auction has never reopened, and the fishermen's union has never recovered.

Ian Coss: Do you feel like if they had held on, is there a world in which they could have won that strike?

John Bullard: I don't think so. Um, I don't think so. So the boat owners got what they wanted and, uh, the dealers got what they wanted and the crew got screwed.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: John Bullard told me that from the time he got into politics in his home town, he understood that he would have a delicate relationship with the fishing industry, that his world and theirs were not made to mix. 

John Bullard: Fishermen are anti-government because fishermen are fiercely independent. That's why they go fishing.

NARRATION: Bullard is a liberal Democrat, someone who fundamentally believes government exists to help people, and specifically those people who can't help themselves. He acted on that belief, he took a side. But in the strike, just like in the border dispute with Canada, when the government tried to help the fishermen, the government failed. It couldn’t help them.

ARCHIVAL: As you know, I've been told I do have a short statement here

NARRATION: In the summer of 1986, so a few months after the strike fizzled, President Ronald Reagan gave a press conference addressing the struggles of American farmers, who like the fishermen were facing tough economic times. And he delivered to them one of his favorite mantras: 

ARCHIVAL: I think you all know that I've always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help

NARRATION: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help. By the end of the 1980s, you can see why many fishermen would fear those words too.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION:  After the strike, there were really only two power centers left in the port: the boat owners and the fish dealers. And of course, Carlos Rafael was both. Remember, these were the years when the federal government was still offering up big incentives to build new boats. By 1986, Carlos had started to build his own fleet with the trademark “CR” on the bow. So the strike was a gift. It gave him more control over his boats, more control over the auction, more control over his entire business. Once again – and not for the last time – a crisis for the industry was an opportunity for Carlos. 

Carlos Rafael: I mean, there'd be days I’d buy a quarter of a million pounds.

NARRATION: And it was around that time that he also got a new nickname. 

Carlos Rafael: There’d be days when there would be twelve boats on the board, I’d buy ten out of the twelve.

NARRATION: One morning, when Carlos had been buying up boat after boat of cod, flounder, and all the other so-called groundfish, someone he knew walked up to him at the auction house, and declared: 

Carlos Rafael: “We're going to have to start calling him The Codfather,” because I would buy every codfish. I mean, eighty percent of the ground fish, special codfish, they arrived in New Bedford, I would buy it all. So that's how it started, right in the auction: call him The Codfather. And the stupid shit stuck.

MUSIC: Theme

NARRATION: But the strike was just the first sign of more trouble to come. It had not even attempted to address the underlying issue of falling catches and shrinking stocks -- issues that would require collective action, maybe even government action. 

All through that decade, the warnings kept coming...

ARCHIVAL: Tonight: Are the world's oceans running out of fish?

NARRATION: Until 1990, when a group of environmental lawyers took matters into their own hands. That independence the fishermen had cherished, it was over.

ARCHIVAL: It's a doomsday situation. If we keep on the way we're going

NARRATION: That's next time.

ARCHIVAL: Fish disappearing? Fish disappearing.

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. If you want to hear more stories like this, produced by the same team, just search for “The Big Dig,” wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find videos of every episode with incredible archival footage on YouTube, edited by Joanie Tobin and Anny Guerzon.   

We owe a very special thanks for this episode to the New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center for generously sharing their archival material. It is such a gift that the city has an institution to preserve that history and make it available to the public. I also want to acknowledge some of the reporters you hear in the old news features – specifically Gary Golas, Meg Vallaincourt, and Christy George; as well as Nancy Drucker. Their reporting at the time allows me to tell the story now.

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.