Catching The Codfather

NARRATION: Bill Blount is the image of an 'old salt.' Tall, white beard, weathered face, full of stories, but also possessed of that Yankee stoicism that makes you wonder if these stories are even more terrifying than they sound.

Bill Blount: It was in Hurricane Bob

NARRATION: This story is from the summer of 1991.

Bill Blount: and, um, I had – It was a little slow coming home. And I saw the wind switch. It switched too early. The minute I saw that, I said, oops, this thing's coming really fast.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: As soon as the wind switched that day, Blount started steaming west towards the tip of Nantucket, away from the incoming hurricane. He didn't know if he could make it back to New Bedford in time, but he had another idea.

Nantucket Island is a big crescent, with the rounded side facing out to sea. So if Blount could get around the backside he could wait out the hurricane there, then bring the fish to auction as soon as the storm passed. It was a little risky , but the payoff would be great since the rest of the fleet would be stuck in harbor. He'd have the only fish in town.

So Blount rounded the North Point of Nantucket, into the lee side. The wind was gusting well over a hundred miles an hour, but here at least, there was some shelter.

Bill Blount: I got as close to the beach as I dare get,

NARRATION: He hugged the coast, pointed his bow into the wind and did his best to hold position.

Bill Blount: The front, front windows were just white. You couldn't see out them, you couldn't see anything, and it was hot. A hurricane is hot and like you could see the water accelerating right into the sky.

NARRATION: Occasionally Blount would throw open the door at the back of the pilot house just to let out the humid air, but mostly he was enclosed, surrounded by white wind and water, blinded to the outside world and just relying on his radio navigation unit to keep from running aground.

And in this particular situation, a good stoic front was important, because Blount also had his twelve year old son, Luther, on board with him.  Luther later told his mother: I wasn't scared, because dad wasn't scared.

MUSIC: Fade

NARRATION: So father and son rode out the storm together. And three days later, they made their way back to New Bedford to sell the catch and pick up the check from the fish dealer.

Bill Blount: Everything was tremendous money 'cause it was – there was nothing behind us. So this was all the fish gonna be in New England for the next week. And I looked at my check and I wasn't – I said, where's the sand dabs?

NARRATION: The check in his hand was short. In fact, one of the fish species -- the sand dabs -- was missing entirely from the payment. The man writing the check was Carlos Rafael.

Bill Blount: I said, where are the sand dabs? He said, “send up for your son.” I said, okay. So I sent my son: go up and see Carlos. So we went up and saw Carlos. And Carlos cut him a check for the sand dabs.

NARRATION: It turned out Carlos had saved the last piece of the payment for Luther, and he handed the kid his own check for five hundred dollars.

Bill Blount: ‘Cause he was with me on the trip and went through the storm and everything, you know. So, I mean, that's, that's Carlos, you know. When you first met him, you'd run over, you'd say, oh, this guy's a mafioso, you know? In the way he talks and everything. But actually, if you get to know him, I mean, he's, he's a really nice guy.

NARRATION: I gotta say, when I first met Bill Blount, I thought: this is the last person in New Bedford I expect to rise in defense of Carlos Rafael. I mean the old salt made his career working a single fishing boat named for his wife; he says grace before dinner; I never heard him swear once. And here he is singing the praises of a man who models himself on the movie Scarface.

Bill Blount: If I was struggling, he's the one that would say, “I'll give you another ten cents on your fish. You should be able to make it then, right, Bill?” Yep. “Okay.” I seen him do that.

Ian Coss: He did that for you?

Bill Blount: Yeah. A lot of fish dealers had no heart. They're ruthless, but Carlos wasn't like that, he had a heart.

MUSIC: Theme

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

Carlos Rafael is a hard man to pin down. In some stories I heard, he comes across as a simple crook, a swindler, someone you can never turn your back on. In others, he’s more like a benevolent overlord of the docks, even a pillar of the community. And these two versions of Carlos would collide dramatically in the early 2000s. Because just when it looked like the Codfather had reached the peak of his power, the whole game of fishing changed, revealing the true extent of Carlos' ambition. Or some would say, his greed.

This is Part Four: Mosquitos on the Balls of an Elephant.

MUSIC: Out

BREAK

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: It's hard to say when the public image of Carlos Rafael started to shift – when the reverence and charm started to fade. But back in the 1990s, he still had some shine to him. When ABC News came to town for a piece about the closures on Georges Bank, Rafael was presented as a kind of spokesperson for the industry, a plucky entrepreneur doing his best with his back against the wall.

ARCHIVAL: Carlos Raphael, who owns the biggest fish processing plant in town….

NARRATION: Carlos is shown in a bright blue jacket, in his pristine filet plant, doing business on a giant mobile phone, and speaking really as a voice of reason:

ARCHIVAL: They could have solved the problem if they would've acted in time. The irony is even the government now agrees, Carlos Rafael is right.

NARRATION: In addition to being called "The Codfather," people also called him the "Waterfront Wizard," the "Oracle of the Ocean." He employed hundreds of people. He supported the local Portuguese clubs. Every year he would show off his famous fish cutting skills at the local waterfront festival, holding court with his white glove, yellow smock, and pile of glistening flounders. The man was a fixture, a local character.

But with Carlos, there was always more going on. And by that I mean: he was also getting into trouble with the law, repeatedly.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: I told you in the last episode about the price fixing case, but that wasn’t even Carlos’ first legal trouble. Back in the 1980s, he was convicted of tax evasion and spent four months in jail. That time, he simply ran his business from inside.

Carlos Rafael: It wasn’t easy, but we kept it going.

NARRATION: Then in the 1990s, federal investigators came knocking again, that time with the price fixing case. Carlos was able to beat that one back.

Carlos Rafael: That was it. And I told the truth.

NARRATION: And it's hard to say if that brush with the law left Carlos more cautious or more emboldened. But it did not teach him to tow the line.

John Bullard: Nobody had any doubt about Carlos being a crook.

MUSIC: Post

NARRATION: One of the stories that everyone tells -- including John Bullard here -- is about the time Carlos got up in a fishery management meeting and declared to the regulators themselves: "I'm a pirate. It's your job to catch me."

John Bullard: As he said, “I'm a crook. You're – it's your job to catch me.”

NARRATION: And they did, repeatedly.

In 1999, Carlos was investigated again, this time for lying on a permit application for squid. He pled guilty in that case. Then in 2003, he was sued by the EPA for dumping a derelict fishing boat in a federal clean-up site. Carlos was fined for interfering in a Coast Guard inspection, for submitting false catch reports, for fishing in closed areas, and once, had a nearly nine-hundred pound tuna confiscated from one of his boats. The tuna had been caught illegally.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: Yet none of it really seemed to hold him up. Carlos had his gorilla of an attorney, plus all the money and spite he needed to fight off any legal challenge. He seemed unstoppable, like no amount of legal trouble could slow down his growing empire.

Carlos Rafael: So, things start to shaping up. That was one of the vessels there, that, this mini vessel.

NARRATION: In his office, along with the Scarface posters, and the rock that a picketing fisherman once threw at his car window, Carlos also keeps a miniature model of one of his prized boats.

Carlos Rafael: I bought that vessel at auction for $365,000.

NARRATION: Carlos was a master at what stock investors would call "buying the dip." Even when catches were down or regulations were tight, he was big enough that he could still afford to buy boats -- fishing boats and some scallop boats too. If his timing was good, a vessel that cost a million dollars to build, he might get for a few hundred thousand.

Carlos Rafael: I bought three vessels for $615,000. Things were so bad that everybody said I was a nut case when I bought the vessel. I say, shit, so how bad can things be?

NARRATION: Then when the fishing picked back up, he'd be ready to make a profit.

Carlos Rafael: So I paid for the boats in one year's fishing.

NARRATION: Like he always says: a crisis, that is the best time to make money.

By the early 2000s, Carlos owned or co-owned fifteen boats, plus his own processing and distribution plant. Many of those boats had names from Greek mythology: the Athena, the Poseidon, the Hera, the Apollo. They all had the same shade of sea green paint, and the letters "CR" on the bow.  Everyone knew Carlos had a long rap sheet, but he was also the biggest game in town, at least when it came to groundfish. He was someone you had to deal with.

And that was before the big change -- the one that set his most elaborate scheme in motion, the one that lifted Carlos to new heights and ultimately brought the entire empire crashing down.

MUSIC: Transition

NARRATION: I want to set up this change, and why it was such a big deal, with the story of a fishing trip in 2004.

Tony Alvernaz: This was the Christmas trip. I don't know, four or five days before Christmas.

NARRATION: That December, Tony Alvernaz was the captain on a scallop boat. They were far from shore in bad weather, along with another boat called The Northern Edge.

Tony Alvernaz: It's getting rough and I was like, I says, Paul, I'll handle the gear. Secured the dredges. Turned around and went – just headed fair wind so I can eat in calm weather – in better weather, you know? Paul comes up, he's like, “Hey, where'd the Northern Edge go?”

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: The thing to know about this fishing trip, is that given the choice, neither boat would be out this far in this weather, the week before Christmas. But because of the regulations we talked about in the last episode, these fishermen didn't feel like they had a choice. Remember, after Amendment Five, boats got a set number of days every year to go out and fish, and they were only allowed to fish in certain areas. This area these boats were in had been closed entirely for a while, part of that effort to prevent overfishing. And so when these scallop boats were granted permission for a single trip to this area at a specific time, they weren't going to miss it - no matter the weather, no matter the danger. It was a chance to bring home a big catch, to put real money in the bank.

But now the rough weather had really picked up, and no one could see the Northern Edge.

Tony Alvernaz: Should have been off the stern.

NARRATION: So Alvernaz got on the radio and tried channel sixty-eight, which he and the Northern Edge captain used to communicate.

Tony Alvernaz: Nothing. Got on sixteen. Hey, uh, Northern Edge? Nothing. It's like, I don't know, you ever get that feeling where your brain’s spinning – something's, something's wrong.

NARRATION: That's when Alvernaz called the Coast Guard.

MUSIC: Out

ARCHIVAL: [Inaudible] from Coast Guard

Tony Alvernaz: So I get on sixteen again. I says, hey, I think something's wrong with the Northern Edge

ARCHIVAL: [Inaudible] from Coast Guard

Tony Alvernaz: So then Paul, all of a sudden, he says, “Hey look,” you know, well “fire!” And sure enough, off the stern, I don't know, a mile or so, was just a big glow right off the water. I was like, holy fuck.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: He knew the Coast Guard would never respond in time, so Alvernaz spun the boat around and headed towards that distant glow. The waves were now fifteen feet high, the wind was whipping spray off the water, and he couldn't be sure what he was looking at.

Tony Alvernaz: What it was, was the flares.

NARRATION: As he got closer, Alvernaz realized the boat itself was gone. It had taken a couple waves across the deck and quickly capsized. But a single crewman was rolling in the waves. He was barefoot, shirtless, clinging to a rubber lifeboat, with a flare.

Tony Alvernaz: So I know now I gotta go into the wind, put him underneath alongside of me, and then I gotta turn around broadside and let the wind hopefully push me on top of him and grab him.

NARRATION: Alvernaz had to execute this whole maneuver in a one-hundred-and-ten-foot boat in fifteen-foot seas. The first pass failed, so Alvernaz came around again.

Tony Alvernaz: Got the boat back in position, got him just off my port bow and the sea comes and basically throws him out of the raft.

MUSIC: Out

Tony Alvernaz: Paul looks at me, he's like, I could lip read, if you will. He's, he got thrown out. He got thrown. I'm like, fuck this guy's dead. This guy's dead. There's, what the, what the fuck do I do now? And then all of a sudden he's like, “He's back in. He's back in.” I'm like, fuck, I'm trying to, so this boat is a twin screw.

NARRATION: Twin screw, meaning two independent propellers, meaning more maneuverable.

Tony Alvernaz: I was treating it as a single screw. So, uh, finally, I just, you know, hard forward on one end, hard over, seen Paul walking along the side looking down off the bar. I'm like, shit, now I'm gonna run this fucking guy over. And I jammed the engines in reverse and then put it in idle and, The Good Lord, he was – he put him on the – on the lee side, and he used the dredge that was hanging over the side as a ladder.

NARRATION: Alvernaz remembers the young man coming over the edge and then walking across the deck half naked, cutting up his bare feet on the scallop shells. When they got him inside, he was red as a cooked lobster, barely able to talk. From the crew of six, he was the only survivor.

Ian Coss: Did you find any other sign of the Northern Edge?

Tony Alvernaz: No. No. No sign at all.

NARRATION: The sinking of the Northern Edge, just one week before Christmas, was devastating in New Bedford – and the deadliest single fishing disaster in the whole region since the famous Perfect Storm of 1991. Afterwards, the Boston Globe asked Carlos Rafael for his comment on the sinking; he was blunt, as usual: "It's their fault." "They" being the federal regulators, the people who had granted those boats a one-time opportunity to fish in this area. A chance they could either use or lose.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: And the sinking became one of many many events that shifted the conversation around fishing regulation. It’s important to note that the Northern Edge was a scallop boat, and they've always had different rules than groundfish boats. But the sinking highlighted the flaws of the larger system -- how it forced boats to fish at certain times, in certain places, in certain ways. It's like, imagine if you wanted to regulate air pollution, but you did it by telling people they could only drive on certain days of the year and on certain roads. It was a roundabout way to achieve a simple goal. To the extent that it worked, it worked by making the fishermen less efficient, and sometimes less safe.

So all around the region there were fishermen who believed something had to change. When the change came, Carlos would be ready for it, and all of New England would find out just how ambitious he truly was.

MUSIC: Out

Ian Coss: When did you first join the management council?

David Goethel: Uh, I was nominated a few times, but I was actually appointed in 2004.

NARRATION: The same year the Northern Edge sank, David Goethel joined the New England Fishery Management Council -- the group that sets the rules for fishing in the region.

David Goethel: And I used to say, when I went to these meetings, if you're not at the table, you're on the menu. So if you're not there to represent yourself, you are gonna get carved up and you are the one who's gonna pay the price.

NARRATION: Fishing regulation is a little different than most kinds of business or environmental regulation, in that the rules actually vary region by region. This was part of the original vision of the Magnuson Act.

John Bullard: So you have a northeast region, you have a southeast region, you have a Gulf of Mexico, Alaska, Western Pacific, so on. 'Cause every region is different.

NARRATION: Again, John Bullard

John Bullard: And this was revolutionary. I mean, a lot of environmental legislation was top down, all wisdom resides in Washington, and there's a single standard that everyone has to meet in clean air and in clean water.

NARRATION: Under Magnuson, there are standards – like preventing overfishing – but each region can decide for itself how they meet the standard. So that is what David Goethel became part of in 2004: the regional council for New England.

He was on the council when this big change I’ve been talking about took place. And I want to explain that change through his eyes, because Goethel represented a very particular perspective on that council. Goethel is based out of New Hampshire, which has smaller ports with fewer boats than its neighbors, Maine and Massachusetts, and he was appointed to the council by his governor in part to be a voice for the little guys. Instead of operating a big fleet of boats that traveled far off shore to hunt fish, Goethel ran what's called an "inshore boat," doing short trips just off the coast of New Hampshire; he's like the equivalent of a small family farm.

David Goethel: I'm not an LLC, I'm not anything. I'm just me, myself, and I, you know, my return is to feed my family. That's it.

NARRATION: So he joined the council in 2004, and pretty soon there were signs that something big was coming their way. It started when a pair of environmental foundations sponsored a trip to New Zealand for the council members. The goal was to show New England fishermen a whole different system -- a different paradigm really -- for managing the ocean.

David Goethel: I knew it was a very different management style, but the proponents seemed to vastly outnumber the detractors.

NARRATION: Goethel was curious to see how this system worked in practice. So he went.

David Goethel: It was a very interesting trip.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: Remember that up to this point, the New England Council had used a hodge podge of measures to limit how much fishermen caught. They limited how many days they could fish, where they could fish, what kind of gear they could use.

In New Zealand, the government had taken a very different approach.

The system was: at the beginning of the year, they decided the total amount of fish that would be caught -- literally a specific number of tons for each species -- then they let the fishermen decide when, where and how to go out and catch it. So no limitations on how many days people fished, just a limit on the total catch. The key to this kind of system is that the individual fishermen are each assigned a share of that total catch -- their personal slice -- which they are then allowed to buy, sell and lease between them. It's called "catch shares."

David Goethel: So they were turning fishing into a commodity.

MUSIC: Out 

Ian Coss: I wanted to ask you about the trip in New Zealand? Anything that stands out in your mind?

Rodney Avila: Just that they drove on the wrong side of the road. We tried to rent a car. We almost got ourselves killed.

NARRATION: Also on that trip: fellow fisherman and council member, Rodney Avila, from New Bedford.

Rodney Avila: It wasn't bad till we go into a, a roundabout, and I'd always pull to the right. I don't know why, it was instinct.

NARRATION: So Avila and Goethel were in New Zealand together to see this "catch share" system in practice, and get a glimpse of a possible future for their own industry in New England. The groups funding the trip, which I should add were big supporters of catch shares, had set them up to meet with some local fishing companies.

Rodney Avila: We're gonna show you the people who you have to talk to.

David Goethel: And everywhere we went, they'd send along a guy who was like the tour guide

Rodney Avila: Anywhere we went, we went with them

David Goethel: who wanted you to see how great everything was. And, I mean, nobody'd say anything bad on the record, but strange things started happening.

MUSIC: Transition

Rodney Avila: We ran into a couple of fishermen at the local bars, and as soon as they, they recognized us, they came over: “Hey, this is the real story, guys.”

David Goethel: You go in, in the men's room and some guy would follow you in and while you were, you know, standing there, he'd start spouting off as soon as he was sure there was nobody in the stalls about what he thought was really going on.

Rodney Avila: And it was a total different story.

NARRATION: These fishermen did not talk about the wonders of this new management system. They talked about being shut out and exploited by it.

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NARRATION: So far, these were just scattered stories from strangers. But when Goethel and Avila tried to get more concrete information down at the waterfront, they kept hitting a wall.

David Goethel: Couldn't confirm it 'cause nobody talked to us.

Rodney Avila: These guys would clam right up. Just not say anything.

NARRATION: So one time, when they were touring a fishing boat, the two of them hatched a plan.

David Goethel: So the man I was with was, was quite large. He's a big guy, big Portuguese man.

NARRATION: The big Portuguese man is Rodney Avila.

David Goethel: He says, I'll detain -- we call him “the minder” by then, “the KGB minder” – I'll detain the minder. You go talk to the crew. And he just basically backed the guy into the corner of the rail of the scallop boat, he went, went out, the guy couldn't get by him. He's going like this. He's all nervous trying to see what was going on. He's trying to look around him. And I called the crewman aside and he, I said, he said, what? What's going on here?

NARRATION: Goethel says that in private the crewman confirmed what they had already begun to suspect: a few large companies had bought up most of the fish quota and now controlled the industry.

David Goethel: He said, “the people who own these companies,” he said, “they're building a race in America's Cup yachts. And we don't get paid a living wage.” And that pretty much told me everything I needed to know.

NARRATION: As David Goethel looked around the docks, he didn't see a lot of small boat operators like himself. The ones they did find were hanging on by their fingernails. Mostly, fishermen had to work for the big companies, since that's who owned the fish quota -- they literally owned the fish in the ocean that had yet to be caught.

David Goethel: And we got an earful, but people were scared. These companies had enormous power. Fishermen and crew were called human capital and they worked whatever hours, whenever the company wanted them to work. And if they complained or tried to unionize or did anything to better their conditions, they'd be fired and replaced with more human capital. It was stark.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: It didn't help that there was a lot of corporate money backing this trend toward catch shares.  For Goethel, the whole system looked like a money grab that would turn fishermen into helpless pawns.

David Goethel: And we came back, at least the two of us came back, with a very jaded view of what we were entering into.

Rodney Avila: I could explain it like this. You lead the cattle into a slaughter. They was leading us into where they wanted us to go

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BREAK

NARRATION: I’m hoping that some of you out there remember the classic School House Rock Song “How a Bill Becomes a Law.”

ARCHIVAL: I am just a bill. Yes, I'm only a bill and I'm sitting here on Capitol Hill.

NARRATION: It captures, I would say, the emotional journey of how an idea becomes an actual law -- how it has to wind its way through committees, through both chambers of congress, and all the procedural hurdles along the way.

ARCHIVAL: If they vote yes, what happens? Then I go to the Senate and the whole thing starts all over again. Oh no. Oh yes.

NARRATION: Well there ought to be a companion song called "How a law becomes a regulation." Something like: "I'm just a law, yes I'm only a law, but you know I'm not specific at all"...

Because really, if you get down into the actual nitty gritty rules that govern day to day life in this country, they are not written by congresspeople. They are written by bureaucrats in what is sometimes called "the administrative state," or even more ominously: "the fourth branch of government.”

I'm not going to further attempt to put this whole process into song, but I will attempt to break it down with the help of Susan Dudley, who is a professor of public administration at George Washington University.

Susan Dudley: Our constitution conceives of three different branches of government

NARRATION: And yes, we're starting with the very very basics.

Susan Dudley: And it was the legislative branch that was responsible for writing all laws. That's the language of the Constitution. And so early in our government, the idea that Congress could hand over or delegate that authority to the executive branch was unheard of.

NARRATION: When the country started there was no EPA, no FCC, no FAA. If congress wanted to make a law about road construction, or banking, they had to roll up their sleeves and write the exact rule they wanted, word for word.

Ian Coss: So what changed? Why did the country then decide that we needed these other agencies?

Susan Dudley: As the country got larger and issues became more complex, members of Congress felt it was less able to write the details of these laws. And so they thought it would be important to have expert agencies.

NARRATION: In effect, Congress wanted to delegate some of its power to the agencies. We give you the general idea, and you get into the weeds on exactly how to make it happen. The whole issue came to a head during the New Deal, when Congress was setting up a whole bunch of new agencies: the SEC, the FDIC, the NLRB, the WPA, so on. And that huge delegation of power sparked a debate...

Susan Dudley: Raging debate between scholars and legal theorists about whether this was constitutional, this delegation of authority to essentially set laws.

Ian Coss: And how is that debate ultimately settled?

Susan Dudley: A compromise was reached, and that was with the passage of the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 and that is probably the most significant law affecting the “administrative” state today.

NARRATION: The Administrative Procedure Act clarified that yes, Congress can delegate authority to agencies, and yes those agencies can then write regulations that carry the force of law. But, as a compromise to the skeptics, the agencies are not free to just make whatever rules they want.

Susan Dudley: They can write binding laws as long as, a) they do it within the authority that was delegated to them by Congress, and b) they follow certain procedures.

NARRATION: And this gives rise to some language that might be familiar, like "notice of proposed rule making," and "public comment period." Those are the hoops laid out in 1946 that every agency has to jump through in order to issue a new rule – it’s how a law, passed by Congress, becomes a regulation. And when it comes to our story, the people scrambling through those hoops are the members of the New England Fishery Management Council.

Ian Coss: So what'd you bring there for, uh, for reading material?

Maggie Raymond: Oh, I brought my copy of the Magnuson Stevens Act just in case I need to look up anything.

NARRATION: Maggie Raymond is a former boat owner in Maine, who for many years also advised the New England Council.

The copy of the Magnuson Act she's holding is from 2007. That's important because Magnuson, just like the Farm Bill and a lot of other legislation, gets reauthorized periodically. And the 2007 bill had some language tucked into it that would change American fishing forever.

MUSIC: Enter

Ian Coss: And that's on – what page are we on here?

Maggie Raymond: Seventy six. This is section 109-479.

NARRATION: From the very beginning, Magnuson had provided some general guidelines for fishery management, like preventing overfishing. But in 2007, the guidelines changed.

Maggie Raymond: Okay. Establish a mechanism for specifying annual catch limits

NARRATION:  As of that year, all fisheries in the country were required to implement an annual catch limit. That meant all new regulations would have to look something like the system in New Zealand, where fishermen received individual shares of the total catch. A lot of US fisheries had already switched to that model -- including, for example, the Alaskan king crab boats you see on the show Deadliest Catch. Now New England would have to make that switch too, and they had a deadline of two years.

John Pappalardo: And it meant that we needed to move quickly

NARRATION: John Pappalardo was the chair of the New England Council, which would have to turn this new law into actual regulation.

John Pappalardo: And perhaps not have the luxury of enough time to fully vet a lot of the things that we ended up doing.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: The big challenge in switching to a catch share system, is that you have to decide who gets how much quota as a starting point. It's like dealing out the cards at the beginning of a game; the cards have to start somewhere before all the wheeling and dealing can begin. And you've got thousands of fishermen, from small boat operators like David Goethel all the way up to fleet owners like Carlos Rafael, all of whom expect a piece of this new market.

So the council started working out a system for deciding how the cards would be dealt out, based on who owned what permits and how much fish they had landed in the past few years. But like any system, it could be gamed.

Maggie Raymond: I mean at the time, you know, you had a one big owner who had twenty-five, thirty vessels

NARRATION: Again, Maggie Raymond.

Maggie Raymond: and there was concern about consolidation of too much quota into, into too few hands.

Ian Coss: Who was that biggest boat owner at the time?

Maggie Raymond: Carlos Rafael

NARRATION: Carlos had been buying up boats and permits for decades at this point, so he was already the biggest player in the region. But once he saw what was about to happen with the catch share system, he went into overdrive. According to an interview he gave later, Carlos Seafood spent ten million dollars buying up boats in the years leading up to the new system. The goal was to make sure that when the shares were dealt out, Carlos received as much quota as possible.

David Goethel: He's exhibit A of why managing fisheries based on economics is a bad idea. He was out to maximize the money for Carlos

NARRATION: This again is David Goethel, the day boat owner who went on that trip to New Zealand.

David Goethel: and my response was, since when is greed good?

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: Early on, as the council was developing the catch share plan, it had included what was called an "accumulation cap," basically something to say that any one person can only own so much of the fish quota. But adding even a small provision like that requires public notice and comment and review -- that whole process of how a law becomes regulation. In other words, it takes time, something the New England Council did not have.

So the accumulation cap was scrapped -- one of several choices that in hindsight, had real consequences.

MUSIC: Transition

John Pappalardo: If I were to do it all over again, I would've said, we're gonna get it done when it, when it's ready. But I felt like, oh man, I gotta get this done.

ARCHIVAL: Afternoon everybody. If you could take your seats.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: In June of 2009, John Pappalardo called the New England Fishery Management Council to order, at one of their usual haunts: the Portland, Maine Holiday Inn. Also there was council staffer Tom Nies.

Tom Nies: at the Holiday Inn By the Bay, if you've ever been there.

Ian Coss: No. Can you describe it?

Tom Nies: No, not politely.

ARCHIVAL: this may have, this

NARRATION: The council members were seated at a series of tables arranged in a horseshoe shape. They had name plates, bottles of water, microphones, and before them, a packed audience.

Because this was the last chance to make any changes to the new catch share plan, a generational shift known as Amendment Sixteen.

ARCHIVAL: Ground Fish Amendment Sixteen, how to handle public comment and still get through all of the decisions we have to make.

NARRATION: Just a few weeks earlier, permit holders had been notified how much of the total quota they would receive as their starting share. The cards had been dealt. So now for the first time, fishermen across the region could start to glimpse their future. Some were lining up in opposition; some were lining up in support.

Ian Coss: Was Carlos one of the people who wanted catch shares?

Rodney Avila: Yeah.

NARRATION: Again, Rodney Avila, who was on the council for this vote.

Ian Coss: Because he knew it would be good for him?

Rodney Avila: I mean, Carlos doesn't do anything that's not good for him.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: Under Amendment Sixteen, Carlos Rafael would get the biggest share of quota -- almost ten percent of all the groundfish in all of New England. And of course, there was no limit on how much more quota he could accumulate.

ARCHIVAL: it's just gonna drive the industry into consolidation to large operating units

NARRATION: A number of speakers rose to share this concern

ARCHIVAL: excessive consolidation that would eliminate the day boat fishery

NARRATION: Including David Goethel, who was up front, at the council table.

ARCHIVAL: Right now I see, uh, consolidation happening the minute you go to any of these systems, because once the process is unleashed, you won't be able to stop it.

NARRATION: As far as I can tell, Carlos Rafael is never mentioned by name, but one commenter says that under this system: "every damn groundfish boat in New England will wind up in the city of New Bedford."

ARCHIVAL: There are gonna be miles and miles of coastlines and communities that never will have access to fishing again.

MUSIC: Post

NARRATION: Another concern that comes up again and again is that the region was just not ready for this change, especially when it came to enforcement. Would the government really be able to keep track of what every boat was catching? That they were actually staying within their slice of the quota?

ARCHIVAL: Without that enforcement, I think, uh, there'd be nothing but problems

NARRATION: The lack of an accumulation cap, and the lack of enforcement, would ultimately prove to be a dangerous combination. But after four days cooped up at the Portland Holiday Inn, and  two years of bureaucratic process, the Council had truly run out of time. The deadline had arrived. They had to pass something.

ARCHIVAL: Okay, we're gonna break for lunch here. Be back at one thirty.

MUSIC: Out

Ian Coss: Can you take me to the day of the vote?

David Goethel: Yeah, it was hot. The room was overcrowded and overheated. People spoke passionately.

NARRATION: Again, David Goethel

David Goethel: People got tired. Once they get tired, they tend to get more irritable. The public started to become deeply disillusioned that, you know, the fix was in, that they'd wasted their time coming, you know, voices were raised. It, it wasn't a pleasant day.

NARRATION: When you are dividing up a common resource into private property, there is no way to do that without benefiting some people and hurting others. So the feelings were strong on all sides.

Rodney Avila: when that vote was coming up. You got pressure from the environmentalists. You had pressure from other fishermen that wanted catch shares.

NARRATION: This vote cut right to everyone's bottom line.

Ian Coss: And do you remember anything about the final vote?

ARCHIVAL: I would like to make one final motion. That we submit the amendment sixteen document to the service

David Goethel: The final vote was the vote for submission.

ARCHIVAL: Please answer yes, no, or abstain.

Frank Blount? Yes. Rep Cunningham? Yes. David Pierce? Yes. Jim Fair? Yes. David Goethel? No. Mike uh, Sally McGee? Yes.

NARRATION: In the final roll call, Rodney Avila, despite all his reservations, voted yes. The lone no vote was David Goethel.

David Goethel: I was the one.

ARCHIVAL: Motion carries fourteen to one with one abstention.

David Goethel: You know, this is just gonna unleash greed, which is the basest human emotion on the planet. And, and I do not to this day understand how greed is gonna manage a fishery sustainably.

MUSIC: Enter

David Goethel: And right from the get go we had problems.

ARCHIVAL: This month, US fisheries officials implemented more new rules. They say, will finally bring local fishing grounds back to full sustainability.

NARRATION: Once the new system went into effect, every permit holder had a certain amount of quota attached to their permit -- a percentage of the total allowable catch.

ARCHIVAL: With the quota they give my boat, my season will be over in about two months.

NARRATION: But for some smaller boats, their quota for certain species could be so small, it didn't really make sense to go out and try and catch it.

ARCHIVAL: making it hard for small fishermen to stay in business

NARRATION: And of course, that little slice of quota could be bought and sold -- it had real value. So for Carlos, those little guys were now ripe for the picking.

MUSIC: Out

Carlos Rafael: Everything that's taking place today was predicted way back then when this shit started.

NARRATION: This is Carlos recalling that moment to the undercover IRS agents.

Carlos Rafael: I told 'em what was gonna happen. I told 'em, I says, you're going put all the little guys out of business. The small guy can never get into this business.

Undercover 1: So, well, what's the, what's going on? I mean

Carlos Rafael: What's going on? The strong will get stronger and the weak will disappear

MUSIC: Enter

Tom Nies: Remember, there was no accumulation limit, so he could acquire as many permits as he wanted

NARRATION: Again, council staffer Tom Nies.

Tom Nies: and he did

MUSIC: Post

NARRATION: Like I said before, Carlos started out with about ten percent of the total catch quota; within a few years he had twenty five percent. That means he owned twenty five percent of all the groundfish caught between the Long Island Sound and the northern tip of Maine.

David Goethel: By then I think he'd pretty much bought up everything you could buy.

Tom Nies: And he was unabashed about, uh, saying he was gonna squash all the mosquitoes, you know, he was gonna run things.

NARRATION: I believe this is when the public narrative of the Codfather fully turns, from a colorful character, to something more sinister, exploitative even. Carlos himself used to call the little fishermen -- the guys like David Goethel -- quote "mosquitos on the balls of an elephant". Carlos, of course, was the elephant.

MUSIC: Out

ARCHIVAL:  What the government has done so far has put me and a few other guys sittin’ pretty, because we are making money. We are making serious money.

NARRATION: The council did ultimately come back to the idea of an accumulation cap on quota. The problem was that by that time Carlos was already well beyond the initial limit that had been considered, then abandoned. So to put the cap in place now would mean forcing him to sell off his shares. Carlos was furious.

He told a reporter that these smaller fishermen who were advocating for a cap were "maggots screaming from the sidelines...they can scream all they want. Nobody can save them."

ARCHIVAL:  Now they wanna go to give you a quota limit to what every person can own

NARRATION:  According to David Goethel, Carlos rarely came to fishery meetings himself, but when the new ownership cap was being considered, he started showing up more.

ARCHIVAL:  but I don't think it's gonna be the case because I will fight this to the dead. If somebody tries to take what I worked for forty years, I'll lose it all. But I will prove a point.

David Goethel: I'll sue you guys back to the Stone Age and, and he, he, he meant it, I mean he, he wasn't shy about, dropping a good chunk of money on a lawyer. And so they, they backed off. The council had to write rules that grandfathered him in.

NARRATION: The new accumulation limit was ultimately set just above what Carlos already controlled.

David Goethel: and that was strictly for Carlos, nobody else came even close.

Carlos Rafael: You know, you get the newspapers, sometimes they come up with that bullshit that pisses the living shit out of me. They come up and they say, “Oh, he took advantage of some of these people will go and broke when these quotas come in.” That was not so.

NARRATION: Carlos rejects the narrative that he somehow took advantage of the smaller owners who sold him their boats and quota.

Carlos Rafael: A lot of the people that I bought their boats, they would come and they would tell me, “Do you want to buy my boat? Because I'm having trouble. I might lose the boat. I might lose my house.” I says, look, how much do you want for the boat? The guy would say, “I want three hundred thousand. And I would do the math. I say, “a little too steep, but I will give you two-hundred-and-seventy thousand.” I says, “but I'm going to do a much better deal to you. You go and see if you can get three hundred thousand. If anybody gives you the three hundred thousand, sell the damn thing. If they, nobody wants the boat for three hundred thousand, you come back to me, my offer’s still two seventy. I’m not gonna try to beat you up because nobody wanted to give you the three hundred thousand.” And this is – every deal I did was like that. I love to make money, but I also have a conscience.

NARRATION: It’s a little hard for me to reconcile sometimes the Carlos I hear in this interview with the other version of Carlos I’ve heard – the one on the undercover IRS tapes.

Carlos Rafael: The amount of fish he has is not profitable for him to go fish.

NARRATION: Where he is much less charitable towards those little fishermen he was buying out.

Carlos Rafael: he doesn't have the money to buy fucking quotas. So he's fucked either way. He's hanging by shoe strings. So this is a matter of fucking time for me to pick the rest of these fuckers and just get him all out of the picture.

NARRATION: And he's a little hard to understand in this last part, but Carlos says: "I don't know if it's greed or if it's ambition, but I always had the ambition to get fucking control of the whole fucking thing.”

Carlos Rafael: I don't know if it's greed or if it’s ambition, this is from the heart. I always had the ambition to get fucking control of the whole fucking thing.

NARRATION: The easy explanation is that the man I talked to is just a farce, and the real Carlos is what you hear on those undercover tapes. But I don’t think that’s quite right. I think both versions of Carlos are performances to some degree. On the tapes you hear Carlos playing the tough guy for what he believes are a pair of Russian mobsters. I know he's playing up the crime lord drama because there are some numbers in there we can actually check. For example, he told the agents he was facing twenty years in jail for price fixing. He was facing three years. I should also add that I don't have the full audio of those recordings; I have what the US Attorney's Office chose to enter into the public record, so no question those tapes are cherry picked to present Carlos at his most malicious moments, his most obnoxiously overconfident. In our interview, on the other hand, you hear Carlos playing the nice guy, trying to correct what he sees as an unfair portrayal in the media.

Carlos Rafael: the papers twist things the way they wanted to make me look like a scumbag. And then they keep calling my house. “Do you wanna sign up to get a newspaper?” I says, after you worked me over the way you guys did, you never wanted the truth, you went with everything else, but you never asked me anything. You just write up the bullshit that the government tells you. Says, don't call my ass no more.

NARRATION: When Carlos was eventually sentenced for his crimes, all these quotes I've referenced came back to haunt him: the "mosquitos," the "maggots," the little guy "hanging by his shoe strings." They were used as proof of his vicious contempt. But they can also be read almost as pity. When catch shares came to New England, those little guys were screwed; they were sidelined; they were hanging by their shoestrings. According to Carlos, when the fishing was bad and people were looking for a way out, he was often the only option -- the only one crazy enough to keep buying fishing boats with everything that was going on.

Carlos Rafael: They wouldn't go anyplace else because there was no money. People had no money, because of all this bullshit with sectors and quotas and all that. And my accountant would say, you're crazy.

NARRATION: I think maybe the most honest moment I hear in all these recordings is the one where Carlos questions his own motives: "I don't know if it's greed or if it’s ambition," he says. Greed or ambition? I thought it was telling that when the federal prosecutor quoted that recording in their sentencing document, they omitted that rare moment of self-reflection. It's reduced to an ellipse -- dot dot dot -- followed by the more eye-catching last line: "I always had the ambition to get fucking control of the whole fucking thing."

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: The rapid consolidation of boats and permits into Carlos Rafael's hands was a warning sign, but from a fishery management standpoint it wasn't necessarily a bad thing. There were, after, all too many boats, too many permit holders, and not enough fish. Consolidation was, to some extent, the goal. The system was doing what it was designed to do.

Maggie Raymond: I think things were going pretty well in general, until, you know, Rafael showed everybody that he, he knew how to break the system.

NARRATION: But it turned out that Carlos' rapid growth had also opened a door for an entirely new kind of fraud, unlike anything he had attempted before. It would become, by one account, the most significant case of admitted illegal fishing behavior in US domestic fishing history.

Ian Coss: What did that mean on a day to day basis?

Carlos Rafael: That was very complicated.

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. If you want to hear more stories like this one 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, produced by Joanie Tobin and Anny Guerzon.   

Thank you to New Bedford Cable Access and the New England Fishery Management Council for generously sharing their archival material for this episode. I also want to give a special thanks to Tom Nies, who was incredibly generous with his time and shared a lot of information to help me understand the inner workings of the Council. 

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.