Catching The Codfather

NARRATION: We're back in the office of Carlos Seafood -- the Scarface posters, the model boats, the big rock on the desk -- at the moment that Carlos Rafael will regret for the rest of his life, when he reached into the bottom drawer of that desk and pulled out the secret set of books.

Carlos Rafael: I don't know you too well…if I could go out and just spill the beans.

NARRATION: The books that were labeled simply: "cash".

IRS Undercover: There he is. See?

NARRATION: His guests, of course, were undercover IRS agents. And as they eyed the books, those agents could see rows and rows of digits, adding up to more than half a million dollars in unreported income in just the last six months. But for case agent Ron Mullett, those numbers didn't mean anything yet.

Ron Mullett: He's up to something, but we can't tell what it is.

NARRATION: And even when Mullett brought this information back to his contacts at the Coast Guard, they stuck with their original theory.

Ron Mullett: It's drugs, dude.

Ian Coss: they still thought it was drugs.

Ron Mullett: It's a drug case. Yeah, yeah. They, they were convinced that that's what it was. But they had nothing to back it up. And I'm not gonna, I wasn't gonna buy that just on word.

Ian Coss: So where do things stand at the end of that first meeting? What's your process from there?

Ron Mullett: So we set up to have another meeting with him within like two weeks. And this time can you bring your financial statements, your tax returns? We just have to know that we're gonna get a return on investment in a reasonable period of time.

MUSIC: Enter

Ron Mullett: In the meantime, I got the, uh, recordings downloaded and then just listened to it and started transcribing and I was just all day – I’d take it home at night. My kids are running around in circles in the living room listening to “All the Single Ladies,” and I've got the headphones on trying to type.

Carlos Rafael: I don't know if it’s greed or if it’s ambition, this is from the heart.

Ron Mullett: So I, I listened to two hours for probably twenty hours

Carlos Rafael: I don’t know if it’s greed or if it’s ambition…

Ron Mullett: Replaying, replaying it and getting this as, as near a perfect transcription as I could

Carlos Rafael: I always had the ambition to get fucking control of the whole fucking thing.

Ron Mullett: At the same time, I am digging through what tax information I have, because he's given me the predicate to do that, saying that the IRS doesn't know. So now I'm digging through his tax records and trying to find soft spots for him, I guess, that would open him up to deeper conversations that could then bring even more out of him.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: Two weeks after that first meeting, Carlos and the buyers met once again in his office.

IRS Undercover: We don't want any surprises, that's why we're asking this stuff. A joke’s a joke, but…We don’t want somebody telling us, well this is how we used to do it, or this is what Carlos used to do, and we're like, whatcha talking about?

NARRATION: In this meeting, the agents were much more direct. If they were going to buy the business, and continue the business, they needed to understand the business.

IRS Undercover: Yeah, that's the problem.

NARRATION: So Carlos explained it to them.

Carlos Rafael: They bid at thirty, forty thousand or more. How much fish do you got? They go, I got twenty five thousand, thirty thousand. They don’t give a fuck.

NARRATION: The problem with Carlos Rafael, and this was my experience with him too,  is that once he starts talking about fish, he talks very fast and automatically switches into his own language. It's a weird mix of technical jargon, lots of numbers, and his own personal euphemisms, plus, of course, a lot of profanity.

Carlos Rafael: And make the fucking species disappear, I call 'em something else. You know, some and a quarter, I got plenty of it.

NARRATION: The agents slash buyers are clearly confused, they are not just playing dumb.

IRS Undercover: So when we bring it in, though, you're saying we can just switch the number on how much we actually

NARRATION: But even as they keep asking Carlos to clarify, the scheme always just spills out in this jumble of code words. There are references to jingles, to a dance. Something about making fish disappear, and even more confounding: painting them.

Ian Coss: What did you think he meant by painting the fish?

Ron Mullett: No idea. I had no idea.

NARRATION: Once again, Ron Mullett was listening nearby as the meeting came to a close, trying to make sense of what had just happened.

MUSIC: Enter

Ron Mullett: I really didn't. And, and it wasn't like a, a focused discussion. They were walking outta the office to go somewhere else and he stopped next to his sales rep's office, reached inside, pulled up a piece of paper and said, you see this right here? This is the fish we paint.

Carlos Rafael: The more rules they put up my ass, I'll keep painting the son of a bitch different colors.

Ron Mullett: “I can paint these fish any color I want them to. No one knows.” And I'm like, what does that even mean? I don't even know.

NARRATION:  But this time, instead of bringing the tapes to the Coast Guard, who were still stuck on their drug theory, Mullett brought the tapes to NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration -- the people who actually understand the rules of fishing.

Ron Mullett: They listened to the recordings, and they right away had it figured out.

MUSIC: Theme

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

To understand Carlos' scheme, you have to understand how the fishing industry is set up, how the regulations around it are set up, and how Carlos Seafood in particular was set up. Now that we've done all that, it's time to talk fish fraud, and also, fish science – because the two are deeply connected. In fact, some would say the science itself is the true fraud.

This is Part 5: Painting Fish.

MUSIC: Out

BREAK

NARRATION: Linda Despres grew up on the coast of Maine, watching Jacques Cousteau on TV, and spending the summers fishing tuna with her dad. She learned to scuba dive when she was eighteen, and in her high school yearbook declared that she would one day be an oceanographer.

So over the summer in college, she took a volunteer job at a research institute nearby: sorting through plankton, looking for shrimp larvae. Pretty tedious work, but her foot was in the door.

Linda Despres: And one day I was asked if I wanted to go out on the boat and actually collect the samples.

NARRATION: This would be an overnight trip, so Despres packed her things and went down to the dock. But just as she was about to board, she was informed: you can't go.

Linda Despres: As I was told, “what would the wives think of a girl staying on a boat overnight?”

NARRATION: This was in the 1970s, by the way. The crew on the research boat was all men.

Linda Despres: And God bless the captain who said, uh, “we'll get you out there.” So instead of leaving at eight o'clock at night, we left at one minute past midnight. And so I was technically not on an overnight cruise, and because I had that experience of going to see collecting samples, sorting fish, just for that one day cruise, that gave me a leg up.

NARRATION: A few years later when Despres applied for her first proper research job with NOAA, the form asked if she had experience doing sample collection at sea. And she could honestly say: yes I do.

Linda Despres: I didn't say it was for one day, I just had experience. I didn't lie.

NARRATION: By the time Despres retired decades later, she had logged a total of one-thousand-five-hundred-and-sixty days at sea.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: In the last episode, I introduced this idea of a catch share system, in which fishermen buy and sell shares of the total catch for any given species. Well that whole system, remember, revolved around a number: the total allowable catch.  As one fisherman told me: that number's a hard number, no ifs ands or buts. And that number was determined by, among other people, Linda Despres.

As you can imagine, counting how many fish are in the ocean is extremely difficult. It's not like counting trees, or even counting deer or birds. It's much harder.

Linda Despres: It's blind. You have no idea what's down there,

NARRATION: For scallops and lobsters, at least they stay mostly in one place, but fish like cod are always on the move -- they can travel hundreds of miles in a single year.

I think we forget this sometimes because we talk about fishing as an industry, but fishermen are hunters; they stalk their prey in the wild. To survive, they have to be experts at knowing where the fish are going, where they’re concentrated. For the scientists like Despres, the goal is very different.

Linda Despres: We're not devouring it. We're just tasting it.

NARRATION: Scientists want to survey the health of the whole population. So instead of looking for fish, they just fish randomly. Beginning in the 1960s, NOAA scientists literally divided the ocean into quadrants. Every spring and fall, their computer would spit out a series of locations -- what one fisherman I met likes to call, “the lottery numbers” -- and that's where the NOAA boat would go.

Linda Despres: Random spots. Sometimes it was where the fishermen were, sometimes it wasn't.

NARRATION: They would drop a fine mesh net in the water just like a fishing boat would, tow it for exactly thirty minutes, and see what came up -- what's called a "survey trawl."

Linda Despres: We brought up anchors, we brought up the kitchen sink, we brought up tires.

NARRATION: Despres has colleagues who have found fossils, unexploded bombs, even human remains. And of course, an incredible array of fish most diners have never heard of: balloonfish, cowfish, boarfish, dogfish -- even the occasional barndoor skate...

Linda Despres: six feet, eight feet long…I mean, they were huge skates.

NARRATION: All mixed in with the stuff we do know: the haddock and cod and flounder. The idea was to capture a random sample of the ocean to get a sense of how many fish of each species are actually out there. All that data would then be crunched and combined with other information to determine the numbers that fishermen lived and died by: the total allowable catch.

MUSIC: Out

Tony Alvernaz: Now, this is my opinion: your data sucks.

NARRATION: This is fisherman Tony Alvernaz, out of New Bedford. He holds the pretty common view among fishermen that the NOAA trawl surveys are deeply flawed, but unlike most fishermen, he's actually worked on those surveys. Back in the nineties, when the New England Council started closing parts of Georges Bank and limiting days at sea, Alvernaz took a steady job with NOAA on their research boat, the Albatross.

Tony Alvernaz: I didn't even, I didn't realize that was the ship that determined what, what fish was out there. So I thought, you know, hey, get paid by the hour, benefits, whatnot. Let's, I can't beat 'em. I'm gonna join 'em.

Linda Despres: Tony was one of our fishermen.

NARRATION: Linda and Tony actually worked together on a number of these trawl surveys. She was there as chief scientist, he was there to handle the actual fishing gear.

Tony Alvernaz: Oh yeah. I knew Linda well.

Linda Despres: We had a Big Tony and we had a Little Tony on at the same time.

Ian Coss: Was he Big Tony or Little Tony?

Linda Despres: He was big. He was Big Tony.

Tony Alvernaz: You know, good person, but she’d defend, defend their method, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. I knew Linda very well.

Linda Despres: And he had opinions

NARRATION: Alvernaz used to scrutinize all the net gear on the Albatross, because once he realized what the boat was for, he knew that net helped set regulations for the entire industry. The more the Albatross caught, the more his fellow fishermen would be allowed to catch. As Alvernaz puts it: that net would make scripture. And he found the net...lacking.

Tony Alvernaz: This is a true story.

NARRATION: Once when the Albatross was in port, Alvernaz noticed something really off with the net, so he called over one of the NOAA staff people named Tom.

Tony Alvernaz: Uh oh. “What is it, Tony?” I was like, well, Tom, I'd like to, I'd like you to explain something to me. “Oh, okay. Gimme a few minutes.” I would stretch the net out so that he'd basically trip over the problem.

NARRATION: They spent a minute looking at the net together -- the net that made scripture.

Tony Alvernaz: So finally I says, look, look at the rollers, Tom.

NARRATION: This net was designed to hug the ocean floor, where species like cod and flounder -- the so-called 'groundfish' -- could be caught.

Tony Alvernaz: It's ground fish, it's on the ground.

NARRATION: And to do that, the net had a set of rollers on the bottom edge, like heavy rubber wheels to keep the net weighed down.

Tony Alvernaz: Solid, that's the way this should be. You want that net on the bottom, heavy. You want weight. These things, they could practically float. You know? And I, and I, so I just say, Tom, you're, you know, you're broad side on a current, right? What's gonna happen to that net? You know, it's gonna collapse. It's gonna, you know.

Ian Coss: And would you ultimately fix those issues with the nets, with the rollers or the doors?

Tony Alvernaz: Oh absolutely. Oh yeah. No, absolutely, absolutely. As I got, I, I kept it standard as best as I could. Yes, most definitely. 'Cause I, I have friends. I, I know what it's like to make a living. I wanted to make sure those nets fished proper – as proper as they could. Yes.

Linda Despres: He was always suggesting new ways of making the net better, fish better, or work better

Ian Coss: to catch more fish.

Linda Despres: To catch more fish. And it's like, we can't do that, Tony.

NARRATION: Part of the disconnect here is that the Albatross was not supposed to be the best fishing boat possible. The goal was to be the most consistent fishing boat possible. NOAA started doing its trawl surveys in 1963, and so to keep that data comparable over the decades they continued to use the same net design on the same boat with the same method. Eventually it became completely outdated; by the nineties, when Tony and Linda first served together, you couldn't even buy that style of net anymore. But if it was flawed in 1963, then to keep the data consistent, it should still be the same kind of flawed in 1993, or 2003.

Tony Alvernaz: Anytime I questioned the integrity of the nets and blah, blah, blah, I was wrong.

NARRATION: For the fishermen on board, who knew how much more fish they could be catching, and whose friends depended on this data, it was all hard to swallow.

Tony Alvernaz: This is a joke.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: The trawl survey has always been controversial, and there are many stories out there like the ones Tony Alvernaz shared. Just search for "Trawlgate" and you'll see what I mean.

But in 2010, the trawl survey took on a whole new meaning, whole new stakes. Remember, the old system of regulations was based on soft measures like limiting when and where fishermen could fish. The new catch share system was based on a hard limit -- a number. This is how much fish you can catch.

And almost as soon as the system was introduced, those numbers started to swing.

MUSIC: Out

Ian Coss: Do you remember getting the stock assessment and seeing the change?

Tom Nies: Oh yeah.

NARRATION: Tom Nies, who we met in the last episode, was on the staff of the New England Fishery Management Council. He helped develop the whole catch share system, and so as soon as that system went into effect he was watching the data very closely to see how much quota they would have to divvy up. And it just so happened that when catch shares first rolled out, the most recent fish counting data were showing there was a lot of fish out there.

Tom Nies: I, I mean, the 2008 assessment for Gulf of Maine cod was very optimistic. Things were looking really good. Uh, 2010, the fishery was doing well.

NARRATION: So the total catch limits that first year were set pretty high.

Tom Nies: You know, bluntly, we set the quota too high, they caught it, uh, I think it was 2011 when we did a stock assessment for Gulf of Maine cod that said, guess what? It really isn't that good.

NARRATION: This new data was a little hard to make sense of, because just around this time when the cod numbers started to swing, two unrelated things were happening at once. The first is that the waters off New England got warmer very fast -- truly a spike in temperature unlike anything we had ever seen in records going back more than a century. The second is that NOAA chose this same moment to overhaul its entire survey method. So after decades of using the same boat with the same net with the same tow time -- like a sacred ritual of fish counting -- suddenly all that changed. The Albatross was finally retired, and a newer, bigger boat took its place.

Tony Alvernaz: You build this monstrous ship and they're gonna tow this big net and you know, all. I'm like, oh shit. Fuck.

NARRATION: For the already skeptical fisherman like Tony Alvernaz the whole thing didn’t smell right, because the new data from the new boat with the new net had to be somehow adjusted to match the old data from the old net on the old boat -- so that you could compare them apples to apples...

Tony Alvernaz: They have a formula. What would've the Albatross caught?

NARRATION: And again, just as the scientists are trying to make this adjustment, the entire ocean environment is also experiencing a historic change. So yeah, the timing of this new boat was very bad. One NOAA scientist told me: it’s like changing the prescription on your glasses while the world keeps moving around you. It's hard to know if what you're seeing is real. Were the fish really declining that fast? Or was it just the boat?

Tony Alvernaz: Oh, let's do our little modeling, our little whatever, magic numbers and voila. Can you imagine that, basing science on that?

NARRATION: The scientist told me: “it was a perfect storm for mistrust.”

Tony Alvernaz: So to this day, I've got no respect for that trawl survey. Especially today with that monstrosity.

NARRATION: Now in fairness to the scientists, there is an elaborate methodology for these stock assessments. They don't just dip a net in the water and say that's how many fish are out there. They are looking at historical data, they're looking at what fishermen are catching, there are a lot of inputs. And they are coming up with a range of possible scenarios.

At the end of the day though, the catch share system could not deal in nuance or complexity or uncertainty. The system required a number every year. A hard number that could be sliced, diced and swapped among the fishermen of New England.

MUSIC: Enter

ARCHIVAL: As Gloucester's best known industry struggles, the mood in the city is bleak

NARRATION:  So just as fishermen were getting used to this whole catch share system, the New England Council slashed the all important cod quota -- which historically was the big money fish for the region. And of course, when the total cod quota gets smaller, every fisherman's individual slice of the catch gets smaller too.

ARCHIVAL: But declining fish stocks and new federal quotas have dramatically changed the industry.

Tom Nies: We did another stock assessment I believe in 2012 because everyone was so shocked at the 2011 one. That didn’t come out any better.

NARRATION: Year after year the assessment numbers for cod kept going down, and so year after year, the quota for cod went down too.

ARCHIVAL: And now fishermen have little choice but to observe the new limits.

Tom Nies: That was devastating.

NARRATION: That is, it was devastating for everyone but Carlos Rafael.

Ian Coss: Did you captain for Carlos?

Paul Valente: I did.

NARRATION: Paul Valente worked on several of Carlos' boats -- both scallopers and draggers -- in those years when, as Carlos likes to say: “all this shit started.”

MUSIC: Out

Ian Coss: Would you mind telling me about what he was like to work with?

Paul Valente: Here we go. Uh, people have a bad, bad persona about him, but he was actually a very fair and honest man. To his crews. To his crews. And if you were one of the boats that really drove and did what you're supposed to do, he paid you really well. He took good care of you.

NARRATION: Valente remembers that when he was out on groundfish trips he'd constantly be on the phone with Carlos back at the dock, checking fish prices, making sure he was chasing the right species.

Paul Valente: I would be the one calling him all the time. Hey Carlos, I found this or I found that. What do you think? And he would be like, “Yeah, keep getting it. Price is good.” Or, “Get that fucking boat back to the dock. You already got a trip, let's go.”

NARRATION: One thing they never talked about though was fish quota. As Valente describes it, quota for Carlos was a non-issue.

Paul Valente: He just always says “catch whatever you catch.” I goes, I have a quota for everything. “Don't stop catching fish because of quota.” That's what he used to tell us.

Ian Coss: Really? So he just said, like, I have so many boats. I have so much quota. Catch whatever you can catch.

MUSIC: Transition

Paul Valente: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now was that manipulated later on? Beforehand? I don't know. What he did behind the scenes, I don't know.

NARRATION: Remember that the total quota for each species was based on what the science data said about that species. Now it just so happened that in those same years when the cod quota was extremely low, the quota for haddock was pretty generous. And because Carlos controlled twenty-five percent of all quota for all groundfish species in all of New England, he had a lot of haddock quota. And he had a special way to use it.

Ian Coss: When did you first realize that?

Carlos Rafael: In 2010 when that bullshit come in, because I never had to do any other shit. But after 2010, when they came with the rules and regulations and all that bullshit, says I got to do what I got to do. I'm gonna survive.

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

Carlos Rafael: That was very complicated. You had to do some serious maneuvers.

MUSIC: [Auction house sounds]

NARRATION: According to Carlos, the maneuvers started here: at the dock of the New Bedford auction house.

So if we think back to the fishermen's strike, one of the outcomes was that the fish buyers abandoned the city-run auction, and set up their own private auction. Well the fish auction has remained privately-run ever since, in various forms and in various hands. But for many years now, the auction has been run by two brothers: Richie and Ray Canastra.  They came up in the same era as Carlos, in the same city, and like him, built a very successful business.  In Portuguese, Canastra means fish basket.

I want to state clearly that the Canastras were not prosecuted along with Carlos and that they deny any knowledge of his scheme. But there is no doubt that the so-called “painted fish” passed through their building.

MUSIC: Enter

Ian Coss:  Can you walk me through how the arrangement with the auction house worked?

Carlos Rafael: You called in and you got so much fish, they would give you a time to get in and unload.

NARRATION: The auction house is a big gray box built right at the harbor's edge. One side is lined with loading docks for trucks. The other side has an opening the size of a garage door facing the water. Standing on the inside, it looks like a door to nowhere, all you see is water and sky. This is the portal between the worlds of land and sea, and almost every fish sold in New Bedford passes through it.

Once a boat arrives, the fishing crew are free to go. They've probably been out for days, maybe only sleeping a few hours at a time. So at this point, the shoreside team takes over. The 'lumpers' as they are known, go down into the hold of the boat and start filling baskets with fish, shoveling them out of the ice with long pitchforks.

As each basket fills up, the team on the dock will lower a rope with a hook on it so that the team on the boat can swing the basket across to land. They pass the rope back and forth like this for hours. It's really very elegant, but also gives you an appreciation for why this entire industry is so dangerous. Everything is moving, everything is heavy, everything is under high tension.

Each time a basket swings over from the boat, someone is waiting up on the dock to catch it and dump the fish into a chute. The fish flow into a big tank of water and then up a conveyor belt to get sorted, weighed and packed into crates.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: Because Carlos Rafael was both a boat owner and a fish dealer, he could then choose whether to send his catches to the auction floor like everyone else, or send them directly to his own facility. If the catch was going to auction, the fish would all be weighed, the species would be identified, and all that information would be reported to the government by the auction. But if it went straight to Carlos, technically, the exact weights and species did not need to be reported.

Carlos says for these loads, he made sure to pay the auction house in cash for unloading the fish. And to be safe, as the truck drove around the block from the auction house to Carlos Seafood, Carlos would have a lookout making sure there were no regulators or environmental police who might inspect the load.

Carlos Rafael:  If we got a call, then we put everything away. Everything was stashed. They could never see it.

NARRATION: But assuming the truck arrived at Carlos Seafood without incident, Carlos – as the fish buyer – would prepare his own report to submit to NOAA. The total weights would all be accurate, but the species would not.

Carlos Rafael:  Goodnight Irene, it would disappear.

NARRATION: On paper at least, a codfish or a flounder, could become a haddock. The fish had been painted.

Carlos Rafael:  They would never track that down.

Carlos Rafael: If they’re not around, I call 'em fucking pollock, or I call ‘em haddock, or I call ‘em any mother fucking thing under the sun.

NARRATION: Later, when Carlos was under investigation, he explained to the agents his process for deciding what color to paint his fish. In the catch share system, fish quota is a market like any other, its price is governed by supply and demand. So for the fish with very limited quota, like cod or dabs or gray sole -- the quota itself is expensive.

Carlos Rafael: The quota for gray sole is about a buck forty a pound.

NARRATION: Sometimes, the quota for a given fish would cost more than the value of the fish itself. Let me say that again: in order to buy the right to catch the fish, you have to pay more than what the fish is worth.

Carlos Rafael: That's why ninety percent of them are not making it.

NARRATION: So when his boats came back with cod or gray sole or dabs -- those fish with very limited quota -- Carlos could paint them into pollock or haddock, fish he had a lot of quota for. Plus, if he ever needed more quota, it was cheap to buy.

Carlos Rafael: So I had to go out and buy quota. So last night they fucking, I had, I call ‘em haddock. Haddock is one cent a pound.

IRS Undercover: So for us to be able to do that, we have to have both sides though. We have to have the processing plant and uh

Carlos Rafael: Yeah that's how you'll protect your investment. Otherwise,

IRS Undercover: then we can call it whatever the heck we want to call it.

NARRATION: The key to the whole operation was vertical integration. Or as Carlos put it to me:

Carlos Rafael: It came from the ocean, direct to me.

NARRATION: Because as a safeguard against exactly this kind of fraud, boat owners and fish buyers were each required to submit their own report on each load of fish. But again, because Carlos was both the boat owner and the fish buyer, he could control that entire chain of paperwork. So if regulators ever checked the boat reports against the dealer reports, everything would match, Carlos made sure they matched.

Carlos Rafael: From the boat to me to the wholesaler. So it was only one guy in the middle, nobody else put their fingers on the cake.

NARRATION: In Carlos' telling -- which as usual makes Carlos look good -- the fish painting scheme was just a way to help his boats hold on.

Carlos Rafael: To keep ‘em going, because of all this bullshit with sectors and quotas and all that.

NARRATION: Like he told me back at the beginning.

Carlos Rafael: It was not for the money.

NARRATION: It was not for the money. Carlos has maintained that ever since his arrest.

Carlos Rafael: Because I had tons of money. I didn't need any more money. But I wanted to protect the people around me because a lot of them worked for me for thirty years. They were loyal to me. So you pay back with loyalty. That's the only way to pay back.

NARRATION: Carlos says that in many of those same years he was painting fish, his dragger fleet still lost money. That he would subsidize them with profits from his scallopers, just to keep the boats working and his people employed -- the people who, like him, had bought houses and pick-up trucks, who had put their kids in college, who were chasing the same American Dream Carlos had chased through those very same boats. He was not ready to give up on them now.

Carlos Rafael: Because I build my wealth from there. I mean, for somebody to start with five-thousand dollars and twenty-cents, and you build a company to that size – it was through those boats too. And my accountant would say, “You're crazy.” This industry will come back, I would tell her.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: But if Carlos truly did think the trouble would pass and business could go back to normal, he was very wrong. Soon enough he would need his painting scheme more than ever. Because in 2012, a new federal bureaucrat took charge in New England. It was someone prepared to make hard choices, unpopular choices. And it was someone Carlos Rafael knew very very well.

Ian Coss:  What did you think when Bullard became the regional administrator?

Carlos Rafael: I know that everything was going to shit. The minute he became, I knew that everything would go to shit.

MUSIC: Out

BREAK

Tour Guide: So now we're in, uh, Memorial Hall. For many years, this room is with a collection of Massachusetts state flags from the Civil War, both World Wars, the Vietnam War, and the Korean War.

NARRATION: I’ve talked a lot this episode about codfish in particular, and there’s a lot more of that to come, so I think it’s time we took a tour of the Massachusetts State House.

Tour Guide: Up there you see the first battle of Lexington and Concord

NARRATION: Sidebar: I love this tour. The State House is filled with all kinds of neat artifacts and artwork. It’s basically a big gallery with a lot of politicians wandering around. And if you've ever been on this tour, you know exactly where I'm going...

Tour Guide: So now we're in the House Chamber.

NARRATION: To the House Chamber, where you can behold the most distinctive artifact of all: “the Sacred Cod”

Tour Guide: Up there you see the Sacred Codfish that was presented to the legislature as a good luck charm in 1784 and has served as one ever since. In 1933, that fish was cod napped as a prank. Nobody knows who did it, but everybody suspects it was probably Harvard students. A little while later it was mailed back. Any questions before we move on?

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: The Sacred Codfish is about five feet long, carved out of wood, and painted realistically in a mottled green that fades to white under the belly. It occupies a central and honored position in the chamber, so that if the Speaker of the House looks up from their raised desk, they look right at the Sacred Cod.

Tour Guide: Uh, 'cause in its early days, much of Massachusetts' economy was dependent on the fishing industry

NARRATION: And the reason this plain looking fish holds such a place of honor, is that the cod fish, with its mild and flaky white flesh, is baked into the politics of this state. It was part of the reason English settlers founded a colony here in the first place.

ARCHIVAL: Historian Samuel Elliot Morrison remarked that Puritan Massachusetts derived her ideals from a sacred book, her wealth and power from the Sacred Cod.

NARRATION: There's a famous story, in which the Pilgrims went to King James to seek his permission for their voyage, and the King asked for a justification: how was this colony going to make money?

ARCHIVAL: He was answered in a single word: fishing. Whereupon James replied, “so God have my soul, ‘tis an honest trade towards the Apostle's own calling.”

NARRATION: Early English settlers wrote of codfish "in abundance almost beyond believing." This cod was the basic resource that made the Massachusetts colony wealthy, that gave it the power to expand, and ultimately become independent.

ARCHIVAL: The cod was the prize catch. Other species were used, but for centuries, the cod dominated the fishery.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: Four hundred years later, cod is not abundant beyond believing, yet it is still the iconic fish of New England, and in many ways, of the United States. When it comes to cod, the issue cannot be reduced to simply a matter of commerce, or science, or food – it’s a symbol of our abundance, our God-given fortune, our very political nature.

And in 2012, the humble codfish was once again the subject of high level politics.

John Bullard: The White House under Obama was getting concerned.

NARRATION: That year our old friend John Bullard got the phone call.

John Bullard: A chief of staff at NOAA told me that what we got a memo from the White House saying, here are ten problems NOAA faces, and, you know, satellite systems were delayed and over budget, you know, various kinds of problems that NOAA had. And each problem had a, uh. ten-page paper on how to solve the problem. And then one of the ten problems was “groundfish crisis in New England.” And it didn't have a ten-page paper, it just had “hire John Bullard as the answer to that problem.”

NARRATION: This job would be the final act for John Bullard's life in public service. Remember, back in the eighties he was the mayor of New Bedford, during the fishermen's strike. And in the nineties he went down to DC to work inside the federal fishing bureaucracy. So he knew the system at many levels. In that last job, Bullard got to play good cop: delivering relief money to fishermen. The new job would be different. He would be what's called ‘the regional administrator.’ That’s basically the person here in New England who speaks for NOAA, for the Department of Commerce, for the whole administration really. And if you can't tell, that's more the bad cop.

Ian Coss: How well did you know John Bullard? How, how, how would you describe him?

Rodney Avila: He rode in my car for about two years, three years to every council meeting.

NARRATION: Rodney Avila had known Bullard for years at this point. They used to carpool together from New Bedford to the council meetings, and he had high hopes for John as regional administrator.

Rodney Avila: I like John. John's all right. But, you know, I expected a lot more outta John than he produced.

Ian Coss: You had hoped he would help protect the industry?

Rodney Avila: Yeah, ‘cause he, he, he rode in our car, he read our souls, everything that we went, he knew what we were going through. You know? It's like me going to a priest and telling the priest all of my problems. You know, this is what I'm going through. And the priest says, “I don't give a shit.” You know? I think the whole city was expecting more of John Bullard.

NARRATION: By 2012 it was clear that all the problems the catch share system was supposed to solve were not going away. The scientists continued to say the fish stocks were in trouble, and the fishermen continued to say that they were in trouble. No one was happy.

So when Bullard arrived at the regional NOAA office, he called an all-hands meeting to address the staff. There was anxiety in the room. Everyone knew Bullard was there to make changes, but no one knew exactly what those changes would look like.

John Bullard: I’d said I’d wanted us all always to be governed by not what the law is, but by: do the right thing. Do the right thing. And, and a staff member raised his hand and said, “Well, but we're a legal entity. We deal with regulations. Don't we have to pay attention to the law?” And I said, well, of course we do. But. But we have good lawyers. Figure out, first of all, what's the right thing to do. Then figure out a legal way to do it. But don't get it backwards. Don't start with what's the law. That's a cop out.

ARCHIVAL: January meeting of the New England Fishery Management Council. Uh, the current agenda is yellow in color

NARRATION: Typically the regional administrator will take a hands-off role with actual management decisions. They are there to oversee and implement policy; it’s usually the regional council that sets the policy.

But when Bullard arrived at his first council meeting in January of 2013, he immediately made his presence felt. He recalls giving a speech, and announcing to the council members: "We are headed slowly, seemingly inexorably, to oblivion."

ARCHIVAL: John, do you have any more good news for us? Mercifully, that concludes my report.

NARRATION: Everyone had seen the same numbers, everyone understood the situation; now it was time to act.

MUSIC: Enter

ARCHIVAL: Back to today, which marks, by the way, the start of the 2013 fishing season, something that fishermen usually look forward to. But new catch limits announced by the federal government have cast a dark cloud over the season

NARRATION: I know I keep playing these news clips that tell the same basic story: the regulations get tighter, fishermen say it’s the end of the world, somehow life goes on. And yeah, that same basic pattern does repeat many times, but what happened in 2013 was remarkable.

ARCHIVAL: I mean, this is a really draconian cut

NARRATION: To give one example, the quota for all cod on Georges Bank was cut by sixty-one percent. Cod in the entire Gulf of Maine was cut by seventy-seven percent. Seventy-seven percent. So if you could catch a thousand pounds before, you were catching a couple hundred pounds now.

ARCHIVAL: What's certain is that a seventy-seven percent cut will wipe out the human end of it and the, and the business end of it.

NARRATION: Bullard recalls at that same meeting when the cuts were decided, Carlos Rafael even showed up to voice his outrage: "I'm leaving here in a coffin," he said."

MUSIC: Post

ARCHIVAL: But some officials say the real disaster would be letting fishing boats just keep pulling more fish out of the sea.

We want you to raise the quotas. Well, I don't think we should. I think we really need to rebuild those stocks.

NARRATION: John Bullard was now the face of fishing regulation in the region.

ARCHIVAL: Last week, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Mo Cowen

NARRATION: Senators and Congressmen criticized him for implementing these quota cuts too quickly. The Attorney General of Massachusetts even sued his office on behalf of the fishermen. But Bullard felt like he had watched this slow motion car crash for too long. He had heard all the criticism of the science, all the emotional appeals of the fishermen, and he was determined that he would not just stand back and do nothing.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: I realize I'm making a big deal here about the cod quota, which is ultimately just one species out of about a dozen groundfish common off New England. A historic species, yes, but you've still got your haddock, pollock, dabs, flounder, hake, and so on. But the real problem here is that when you severely limit the quota for a single species, it puts the fishermen in a bind.

Tom Nies: Fish mingle, oddly enough, right?

NARRATION: Once again, this is council staffer Tom Nies.

Tom Nies: I mean, when you drop a net in the water, you don't just catch one thing, you catch groups of things. If one of those species has a very small quota, that can be a problem because when your quota for that species is caught, you can no longer go fishing again.

NARRATION: That fish with the lowest quota is called the “choke species.” And this is where the disconnect between what the scientists see and what the fishermen see becomes so crucial. Because if there truly were no cod to be caught, then the choke species would not be an issue. You wouldn't be able to catch them anyway. But in 2013, the fishermen were catching cod. Sometimes it was like they couldn't escape the cod.

Tom Nies: Cod unfortunately is one of those things that's pretty widespread and it's easy to catch and it mingles with other species. So when the cod quota goes down, it becomes very difficult to go fishing.

NARRATION: At that point you have three options: you could buy more cod quota, which is expensive -- for many fishermen, impossibly expensive -- or you could stop fishing altogether like Tom Nies said...or you could break the rules.

Now the way most fishermen would break the rules is by discarding the choke species: just throw the cod overboard and pretend it never happened. To be clear, this is not allowed, but according to several fishermen I spoke to, it was pretty common at that time.

Bill Blount: I mean, they were catching too much cod and too much dabs

NARRATION: Fisherman Bill Blount remembers hearing about these huge discards, and would sometimes discard a few fish himself when no one was looking. He was horrified by the waste.

Bill Blount: And they had to shovel it over the side. They were shoveling like a thousand pounds every tow over the side. All this good fish 'cause, 'cause the National Fisheries Service got the numbers wrong. So they screwed up.

NARRATION: When you discard fish, they don't all just swim away. At that point they've been compressed in a net, maybe for hours, dragged out of the water, dropped on the deck, tossed overboard. So what you see behind the boat is a mass of white bellies floating dead on the surface, then slowly sinking to the bottom. This was the law of unintended consequences hard at work.

And this is also why a lot of fishermen, including Bill Blount, don't blame Carlos for painting fish. It was another way out of the bind. Yes, it was fraud. Yes, it was unfair to all the fishermen who did respect the rules. But at least this way, someone got to eat all those fish.

Bill Blount: What would you do, okay? You haul back and you gonna, every tow, you shoveling a thousand pounds of dabs and cod over the side. And this stuff's worth a lot of money. Two bucks a pound for cod, shoveling two-thousand dollars of cod over every tow. It's nuts. So, so what would you do? Wouldn't you be tempted, at least?

MUSIC: Transition

Tom Nies: Then in 2014 there was the secret stock assessment. I don't know if anybody's mentioned that to you.

NARRATION: But for the jaded and beleaguered fishermen of New England, there was one more surprise still to come. For many, it felt like the deathblow: the so-called secret stock assessment.

Tom Nies: Calling it a secret is a little bit of a misnomer. It was an unplanned assessment.

NARRATION: Typically, a full assessment of a fish stock is planned and conducted over several years. But the scientists were getting new data all the time. So in 2014, with all this pressure and attention around the cod stock in particular, one scientist quietly tested what the new data would look like in their population model.

Tom Nies: When they did it, I don't think they ever intended to release it until they saw what the results were. And they said, we can't sit on this.

NARRATION: The results  showed that once again, the cod population was even lower than everyone thought.

Maggie Raymond: And then once it's done, it's like, you can't suppress it, right? So it's out there.

NARRATION: Maggie Raymond, a boat owner and advisor to the New England Council, heard about this new assessment along with everyone else -- after it was complete.

Maggie Raymond: I asked the science director, how could this happen? And he said, “I knew about it about ten minutes before you did.” And everyone was shocked.

NARRATION: Many fishermen were incredulous of this new assessment. Because again, their boats were catching cod. One man at a meeting told John Bullard: "You haven't been out there. You can't get away from the cod."

I want to stress that it’s entirely possible both things were true: that the cod population was crashing, and that the fish were also abundant in certain areas. One possible explanation for the disconnect was a theory of fish behavior: that once the cod population got low enough, the remaining fish would start to gather in clumps. Bullard believed that the fishermen were finding those clumps. That's why the cod seemed abundant. And if they caught those clumps, it could be game over -- a total collapse of the stock.

John Bullard: My feeling was always, we have to not think about today, we have to think about tomorrow. This fishery’s been there four-hundred years, is it gonna be there another four-hundred years? Is it gonna be there another twenty-five years? And if so, how are we going to make that pass.

NARRATION: Bullard believed this situation called for more than just another quota cut, and many on the council agreed that some kind of emergency action was necessary. The question was: what?

John Bullard: There was a series of meetings where the New England Council had this unbelievable number of, you know, someone would put forth an answer and it would be a tie vote, and then there'd be another person put forth an answer and it was a tie vote.

NARRATION: Bullard got increasingly frustrated with the lack of action: more than a dozen motions, a dozen votes, but no clear plan of action. Like I said before, the administrator does not typically step in and just make regulation on their own, but this was getting ridiculous.

John Bullard: One tie vote after another, after another, after another made it damn clear that the New England Council wasn't gonna act.

David Goethel: As I remember, he threatened the council, “you vote for an emergency action, or I'm gonna do it anyway.”

NARRATION: David Goethel, the small dayboat fisherman was at this meeting too.

David Goethel: And they, they didn't, they wouldn't vote for it. Nobody had proven to anybody that it was warranted.

Maggie Raymond: The council said, “Uhuh, we're not doing this. You do it.”

John Bullard: Somebody's gotta do it. The only person left is me.

NARRATION: To zoom out for one second, Bullard's dilemma takes us back to one of the founding principles of fishery regulation in the Magnuson Act. Part of the idea was that power would be distributed to these regional councils, pushed down to the local level -- that fishermen would be involved, that it wouldn't just be federal bureaucrats deciding their fate.

Bullard believed in that system, but he also believed he had to do what was right to protect the fishery. That's what he had told his staff: first figure out the right thing to do, then figure out how to make it legal.

John Bullard: I have to take an emergency action because something has to happen.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: Maggie Raymond told me that every week she used to read the federal register -- the full list of all new government regulations and executive actions -- just to keep an eye on what was happening. When she saw what Bullard and his staff had done, she was shocked.

Maggie Raymond: It's like, what are you thinking?

MUSIC: Post

NARRATION: This time it was more than a quota cut. It was a full moratorium on all cod inside an area the size of the state of Maine. Bullard was acting alone here, without the council's approval, and he told the press: "We're trying to absolutely shut down fishing where there are concentrations of cod, so there will be zero cod caught."

MUSIC: Out

ARCHIVAL: Okay. Good afternoon everyone. Um, welcome to Newport for a three and a half day council meeting with a whole lot of groundfish on the agenda.

NARRATION: Just after the emergency action was announced, the full council gathered for its last meeting of the year.

ARCHIVAL: Thank you for your hospitality

NARRATION: These council meetings rotate around the region, and this one was at one of their swankier locales: the Marriott Hotel in Newport, Rhode Island. It's all brick, right on the water, surrounded by docks. But the Council was not there to eye the pretty sailboats. They had serious business.

ARCHIVAL: First is related to our management action timelines

NARRATION: This was mid-November, just a couple weeks before Thanksgiving, and David Goethel told me he had been saving his cod quota all year for this moment, when the cooler water brought the fish down from farther north to places he could reach in his dayboat. Suddenly that patience was being punished; the quota he had been saving, was now useless.

David Goethel: And so I was hot under the collar. And obviously everybody there was already hot under the collar.

NARRATION: Goethel had spent the last few days studying that unplanned stock assessment, trying to get through five-hundred pages of math in between tows on his boat. And from what he could see, there were some assumptions baked into the numbers that didn't feel quite right -- stuff about fish mortality, spawning rates.

David Goethel: And I know these are kind of technical terms, but small issues, with every one of 'em cumulatively, they turn into a big math error at the end.

Ian Coss: Did you confront John Bullard at that time?

David Goethel: I don't say confront is the right word. We had heated discussions.

ARCHIVAL: I want to state unequivocally that the last two card assessments have drastically underestimated the spawning stock biomass of Gulf of Maine cod.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: The heated discussions went on for almost two hours that day, and then into the next day.

ARCHIVAL: There's fish coming in all different sizes, talking from baby codfish to large cod. Take a look at our numbers.

We're accountable for what we do. And what we do is follow your rules. Mr. Bullard, where is your accountability?

NARRATION: Mostly, Bullard sat silent at the front table, looking down over the top of his glasses at his critics as they came up one by one to the public microphone, close enough to feel their spit.

ARCHIVAL: How many of you people have taken a pay reduction like we have?

You folks ought to know that this is the end of it for us.

It's bullshit. 'Cause you guys are wrong and you know you're wrong. And no one up here has the balls to admit it. You're gonna hang a bunch of people and you're all putting your heads down 'cause you know I'm right.

MUSIC: Transition

ARCHIVAL: John, John Bullard.

NARRATION: Eventually, Bullard did respond.

ARCHIVAL: So, uh, several people have, uh

NARRATION: He began by talking about accountability.

ARCHIVAL: accountability

NARRATION: And it's obvious that Bullard was bothered by the suggestion that he is some kind of disconnected bureaucrat, unfeeling, uncaring. By this time, Bullard had been in public life for three decades. He'd faced voters, he'd faced hearings. He'd been sued and mocked -- called an “unfrozen neanderthal.”

ARCHIVAL: On the radio no less. And, uh, I see you there. Our motives are questioned, but I think we are accountable as we sit up here.

NARRATION: And he ended his statement with a plea to find a new, shared path out of this crisis.

ARCHIVAL: To build, uh, bridges between, uh, science and, fishermen. Because, uh, you can have the best science in the world and if there isn't an understanding of that, it, it just simply doesn't matter.

MUSIC: Out

BREAK

NARRATION: The whole purpose of regulation, the reason we started making law this way in the first place, was to put the law in the hands of experts -- the people who know best. To get the politics out of it. And the idea of catch shares is exactly that: remove the politics, remove the discretion -- whatever the data says, that's what the rule is. But sometimes it feels like the more pressure we put on science to be the policy, the more the science itself becomes political. And I don't think that's just true of fishing. You can see it in public health, you can see it in climate, you can see it in any number of issues where science and expertise take a beating. Because when it's an issue people care about, then the regulation around it -- no matter how technical or scientific it is -- cannot live outside the world of politics. It's political like everything else.

Linda Despres, the marine biologist from earlier, retired in 2013, just as her data and her colleagues' data was being tugged and torn at from all sides. Once our interview was over, she told me that after forty years of doing this work, she really thought things would get better, that we'd reach some kind of common understanding about how many fish are in the sea. And yet, to this day the same debates rage on.

Linda Despres: It's like, what is that chasm? How can we bridge that chasm by talk? Because there's a resource out there that is not unlimited and we're trying to save it for future generations. And it was, it was sometimes you have a, a boat payment now and you've got insurance to pay and you got ice and gases going up. And I understood, I could understand their reasoning, but we wanted to keep it for future generations too. So how can we have some pain now so that their kids have a resource. Because again, they don't own the resource. That's, that's that terrible tragedy of, of the commons, that no one owns it. But everybody, everybody that's a fisherman wants it.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: A few months after the cod moratorium went into effect, Carlos Rafael – the Codfather himself – reached the conclusion that he was ready to cash out. He was done with the business that had defined his life. On January fourth, 2015, a notice went out in the local paper: Carlos Seafood was for sale. The problem was that his business now depended on an elaborate fraud. And the longer that fraud went on, the more suspicious the regulators became.

John Bullard: Nobody had any doubt about Carlos being a crook. No one was suspicious. Everyone knew. Absolutely. Let me put my home mortgage on the table. He's a crook. It is just, can we catch him?

NARRATION: That's in our final episode.

Carlos Rafael:  They wanted to strip me out of everything, it didn't work that way. At the end of the day, this asshole won.

MUSIC: Closing song

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, produced by Joanie Tobin and Anny Guerzon.   

There is a terrific film about the cod moratorium that I highly recommend if you want to go deeper on that topic. It’s called “Sacred Cod.” I want to recognize GBH reporters Emily Rooney and Adam Reiley who we heard throughout this episode, and also in the last episode. Thanks also to Bill Karp, the former Science Director for NOAA in the northeast, who I spoke to but who you do not hear. And of course to my fantastic statehouse tour guide: Eli Arsdell. Any questions before we move on?

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.