Catching The Codfather

NARRATION: Let's recap the investigation into Carlos Rafael so far. In January of 2015, Carlos announced his business was for sale. In May, the IRS agents reached out pretending to be potential buyers. And in June they met, twice, to discuss the details of the business. By the end of the summer it’s clear that there's a case, that Carlos is doing something illegal involving fish. What's not so clear is where all that fish is going. And where all the money is going.

So in the fall of 2015, case agent Ron Mullett instructed his undercovers to go back to Carlos once again. This time, with a specific purpose.

Ron Mullett: This money's gotta be somewhere else. I need you to get me the show me the money moment. Like, if there's nothing else that you talk to him about, he's gotta show you the money.

NARRATION: This meeting was in a more casual setting: a seafood restaurant just up the coast from New Bedford. Carlos had been wanting to give his buyers a real taste of what they were getting, and this would be the perfect place to do that. So everyone piled into the agents' BMW 5 Series, the sport version with a V8 engine, and went for lunch. One agent told me: “I made sure to drive like a crazy Russian mobster -- you know, to keep character.”

IRS Undercover: Doing great, thank you. You guys have coffee by any chance?

NARRATION: Carlos and his guests were seated in a private room, where Carlos ordered for everyone -- seafood of course – and where he was very much in his element.

Ron Mullett: He had his own wine at the restaurant. Nobody else could buy it. They only had it for him.

Carlos Rafael: I'm a guy that I love to eat. I love good booze. I love a good cognac.

Ron Mullett: So he was having his wine

NARRATION: On the tapes, you can also hear Carlos order an espresso with Remy Martin. He does like his cognac.

Ron Mullett: And maybe that contributed a little bit, but he got loose lips.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: At this point in the investigation, the undercover agents thought they had plenty of time. The cover story was clearly holding, and there were so many players connected to the fraud still left to explore: the boats, the captains, the auctionhouse, the wholesalers; there was money laundering, tax evasion, false reporting. It could take months and months to unravel it all. But that day over lunch, the urgency of the situation changed.

Carlos Rafael: I put it over there because sometimes I buy this, I buy that.

NARRATION: The agents brought up the question of where the money goes. And Carlos mentioned that whenever he flies to Portugal, he brings some cash and deposits it in a bank there.

Ron Mullett: That's where the money is.

NARRATION: This is exactly what Mullett was looking for.

IRS Undercover: How much cash you can bring there?

Carlos Rafael: I take forty, fifty, sixty thousand every time I travel.

NARRATION: But it also raised more questions. If you fly internationally with more than ten-thousand dollars, you have to report it to US Customs. And it's not like you can easily hide fifty-thousand dollars in cash from a TSA screener. Somehow Carlos was getting it through.

Ron Mullett: That was pretty mind blowing. What kind of a person has the ability to walk through security with cash and not declare it? What do you mean? You can't do that.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: Carlos paused and got very quiet. Even after everything he had disclosed already, he seemed to sense that this was new and dangerous territory he was entering.

Ron Mullett: And he said, “I got a friend at Logan Airport that can get money through.”

Carlos Rafael: I have one of the guys in Boston, one of those fucking agents. He's my friend. I give him the money before I go through security.

IRS Undercover: Okay. And then he gives you?

Carlos Rafael: Then I go to the bathroom.

IRS Undercover: He gives you the money?

Carlos Rafael: He gives me the money.

IRS Undercover: Nice

NARRATION: In case you didn't catch that: Carlos said he had an agent inside Logan Airport in Boston who would get the cash around security, then hand it off in the bathroom inside the terminal.

Carlos Rafael: I give him the envelope to put it in his pockets. He doesn't go through security because he got one of those fucking badges. He's, he's an agent.

IRS Undercover: They don’t go through, huh? You would never

Carlos Rafael: If, if we make this deal, later, if you want to pass shit over to the other side

IRS Undercover: Absolutely

Carlos Rafael: I, I’ll be your carrier. I’ll be doing a lot of traveling.

MUSIC: Theme

NARRATION: That IRS agent you hear laughing on the tape there told me this was a turning point in the investigation. On a personal level, he had started working with the feds right after 9/11. So did Ron Mullett for that matter; a lot of people signed up in those years. And now here they were yukking it up with a fishing mogul about how he dodges airport security.

The undercover agent told me it took a lot of self-control in that moment to keep laughing, to keep playing his part. Because he now knew that as long as their investigation went on, there was a crooked agent working inside the very same airport where the 9/11 hijackers took off from.

Ron Mullett: So again, I'm still not positive where this cash is coming from but it's, it's heading outta the country, via Logan.

NARRATION: That meant they did not have time to follow every lead, and unravel every mystery: they had to close this thing down, fast.

Ron Mullett: Let's go.

MUSIC: Theme

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

The case that the IRS ultimately built was all focused on one man: Carlos Rafael. But Carlos is just that – one man – one player in a whole port that has been dealing with shrinking fish stocks and tightening regulation for half a century now. So what happens to that port – to the boats, to the fishermen, and to the fish – when the Codfather does finally fall?

This is Part Six: It's Your Job to Catch Me.

MUSIC: Out

BREAK 

Andrew Lelling: The first time I heard about Carlos Rafael was standing in the hallway of the US Attorney's office.

NARRATION: Former federal prosecutor and US Attorney, Andrew Lelling.

Andrew Lelling: There was an agent who worked for the IRS at that time named Ron Mullet, and he's standing in the hallway of the US attorney's office with a cardboard box full of tapes, trying to get someone to listen to him talk about this new case he has, which he thinks is great. And I happen to walk by.

NARRATION: This was in late 2015, just after the undercover agents met with Carlos at the restaurant. So Mullett already had the outlines of a case, and now he needed someone to prosecute it.

Andrew Lelling: And he says: “Andy, please let me tell you about this case.” And I said, sure.

NARRATION: Andrew Lelling was intrigued like anyone would be. I mean, you've heard those tapes, it's good stuff. But what really caught Lelling's attention was Carlos Rafael's unusual criminal history.

MUSIC: Enter

Andrew Lelling: The white collar offenders, usually you prosecute them once and they never do that again

NARRATION: There was of course the tax evasion case in the eighties, the price fixing case in the nineties, and the false statements case in the 2000s

Andrew Lelling: It is very, very rare to have an individual prosecuted by the federal government three times and in the same place. You never see that. Never see that. And all of his cases were related to his fishing business.

NARRATION: As Lelling studied up on the case, he also read about Carlos taunting federal prosecutors in the halls of the courthouse.

Andrew Lelling: You know, fuck you, you're an asshole, blah, blah, blah. And then walks out

NARRATION: He read about the famous fishery meeting when Carlos announced to the regulators: "I'm a pirate, it's your job to catch me." About how he had flaunted the rules. How he had mocked the smaller fishermen as mosquitos and maggots.

Andrew Lelling: It was just unbelievable. So this guy has been untouchable for thirty years.

NARRATION: And the more Lelling read, the more determined he became to get Carlos. And this time get him for good.

Ian Coss: Did you wanna make an example out of Carlos Rafael?

Andrew Lelling: A hundred percent

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: To build that kind of case, the IRS agents needed to connect all the dots, with hard evidence, from the dock in New Bedford to the offshore bank account in the Azores. And there was still a big link missing in that chain.

Ian Coss: What were you doing with a quarter million pounds of fish every day?

Carlos Rafael: Selling it.

NARRATION: Where did that mislabeled fish go?

Carlos Rafael: But, I had some deals cooked in the side of some people that they couldn't, they couldn't figure out what I did with all that fish. They couldn't just, for the life of them, they says, “where does this son of a bitch sell all this fish?”

NARRATION:  One of the keys to Carlos' business, and ultimately his fraud, was the network of customers Carlos had built up for his product. He had specialty high-end clients who would pick their fish right off the boat, he had grocery wholesalers, he had a company that supplied cruise ships -- even military contracts at one point -- truly a customer for every fish.

Carlos Rafael: I didn't have to call. Oh, what do you need? No, no, just load the trailers and let it rip.

NARRATION: So when Carlos started bringing in loads of his “painted fish” -- which, in fact, were tightly controlled species like grey sole and flounder, he knew he had just the right buyer for them. Someone who would pay well, and pay in cash.

Carlos Rafael: I gotta take this call.

IRS Undercover: Oh yeah, sure.

Carlos Rafael: Yellow. Cocksucker.

NARRATION: And it just so happened that when the IRS agents first visited Carlos Seafood, they got a whole earful about this someone, named Michael.

Carlos Rafael: Michael, that little fucking weasel, he is selling fillets to one cheese, four forty

NARRATION: On this particular day, Michael and Carlos seemed to be off on the wrong foot

Carlos Rafael: Do the math. Do the fucking math.

NARRATION: But then as the meeting went on and the secret books came out, Carlos told the agents: you know that guy I was complaining about earlier -- Michael? That's who this secret cash ledger is for. Of course, Carlos put it in his own unique style.

IRS Undercover: So is that the dollar numbers? What is that?

Carlos Rafael: Right. Dollar numbers. He send me a fucking bag full of fucking jingles.

NARRATION: The bag of jingles.

Carlos Rafael: And then I work it off. I keep billing, I keep selling them fish. I keep deducting, deducting, deducting.

NARRATION: At that time, the “bag of jingles” was just another throwaway remark -- like painting fish -- it didn't make any sense out of context. But a few months later at the end of 2015, with the agents now under pressure to close out the investigation, they wanted to find the source of the jingles. They wanted to find Michael.

MUSIC: Enter

IRS Undercover 1: Yeah. Um, the fish dealer,

NARRATION: That is the voice of the undercover agent playing the part of the lead buyer, who we’ll call Lenny. I have disguised the voice somewhat, but hopefully you can tell that the Russian accent is very much genuine.

IRS Undercover 1: So he came in the picture because we were asking what he does with the extra fish that was caught illegally

NARRATION: Towards the end of 2015, Lenny asked Rafael about this mysterious transaction of jingles, and if they could meet the man who sent it. Once again, it was the old line: “well if we're going to buy the business, we kind of need to understand it.” And eventually, Carlos agreed to share Michael's phone number.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: Michael took the agents' call and they made a plan to meet in New York City, where Michael was based. The Russian buyers could choose the restaurant.

IRS Undercover 1: Maybe it's funny or not, but we chose, uh, the place by the name Sparks.

NARRATION: That would be Sparks Steak House. The agents were looking for a place where the support team could be nearby just in case. But Sparks, as you may know, also had some history to it.

IRS Undercover 1: The, uh, head of the Gambino organized crime family has been killed there, uh, back in the days coming out of Sparks during Christmas time. So Sparks is very known restaurant in Manhattan. Very high end, very flashy restaurant. So that’s where we decided to have our lunch, okay.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: Sparks has a dimly lit dining room with a low ceiling and no windows. The walls are covered with paintings. Not decorated, mind you, covered. One picture frame right up against the next one. The group of men found a table. Michael didn't drink and hardly ate. This meeting was all business.

MUSIC: Post

NARRATION: It turned out that Michael operated out of a booth at the Fulton Fish Market in Manhattan, a place that, like Sparks, has deep mafia ties.  Michael and Carlos had known each other a long time, maybe twenty years at this point, but for most of that time they had only talked on the phone. They never actually met in person. Until one day in the early 2010s, right around the time the catch shares system began. Carlos' daughter was graduating from college in New York, so he spent the night there. And at two in the morning, on a whim, Carlos decided to go down to the fish market to meet Michael.

There, in person for the first time, Michael showed him into a back room, filled with cash.

Ian Coss:  How big was that amount of cash?

Carlos Rafael: I had a picture, but I wiped it out in case the feds would ever get my phone. Big.

NARRATION: Carlos held out both his arms to show me just how big.

Carlos Rafael: Crazy. Something I never thought I would see in my life. I said, son of a bitch.

NARRATION: And immediately the gears started turning. What Carlos realized is that Michael was paying for the fish on a thirty-day billing cycle, but then he was turning around and selling the fish for cash, right away. So in business terms, Michael got to keep the float. He was holding on to Carlos’ money.

Carlos Rafael:  And he gets to use my money. I says, Michael, from now on, I want half of what comes in. And that cash comes to papa.

NARRATION: Clearly, the two shared an affinity for cash. So they haggled back and forth and landed on a deal that worked for both of them.

IRS Undercover 1: He meets with him somewhere on the road on a truck stop

NARRATION: Again, the undercover agent, Lenny.

IRS Undercover 1: Okay. And what happened is that guy just literally throws him a bag of cash through the window and they just separate, they go their own way.

NARRATION: That duffel bag of cash was the bag of jingles. Michael would pay upfront now, hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time, then Carlos would work it off, deducting the value of each truckload of fish as he sent it to New York. So now Carlos got to benefit from that cash advance – he says he used it to pay the auction house for unloading all the fish – with of course the added bonus of saving on his taxes, and avoiding any extra scrutiny.

Michael's own clients were largely high-end restaurants. Some specific names were told to me off the record, and I will just say that if you've lived in New York and are into food, you have heard of some of these places. Those fish that you heard Carlos haggling over for a dollar thirty a pound, might well end up in an entree that costs fifty or a hundred dollars. And knowing those final dollar values would be crucial to building a case – that’s how you measured the value of the fraud.

After that lunch, Carlos called Lenny back to say: everything’s good, Michael likes you.

IRS Undercover 1:  He likes you a lot. He wants to do business with you. That's, that's, I remember the words.

NARRATION: The agents now had one more link in the chain.

MUSIC: Out

Ian Coss:   Were there ever any clues, were there moments when you got suspicious?

Carlos Rafael: Nope. Ah no, yes.

NARRATION: Around this same time, in late 2015, Carlos was back on the phone with one of the undercover agents, talking business, and happened to mention that he had just received one of his regular payments from Michael: a duffel bag with six-hundred-and-twenty-five thousand dollars. In the same call, Carlos mentioned that he was taking a trip to the Azores in November, and planned to bring some of that cash with him.  So the agents, desperate now for a breakthrough, pushed their luck a little farther. They asked: can we come with you?

Carlos Rafael: When they wanted to go to Portugal with me, I said, nah, nah, nah. My hairs were standing up on the back of my neck. I said, I don't, I don't like what's coming down.

NARRATION: This trip was for a charitable event that Carlos helped fund, called "Thanksgiving in the Azores" -- one of many acts of charity large and small that helped create his  ”rogue with a heart of gold” image around town. Every year, they would send a load of frozen turkeys and canned goods over to the islands and host a big American-style meal for people who had been deported from the US, as well as widows and orphans.

Andrew Lelling: This came up during the case. We knew that he did this.

NARRATION:  Federal prosecutor Andrew Lelling was very curious what would happen on this trip.

Ian Coss: Is he putting cash inside the cavity of the Turkey or something?

Andrew Lelling: Yes. We were, you know, these are the things you wonder, like why, why is he sending turkeys to the Azores?

NARRATION: Okay, so the turkey cash smuggling theory actually did not pan out. The turkeys were just turkeys. But this event did crack open the last mystery of the case, because it was put on, in part, by members of the local Sheriff's Department in New Bedford. And that was the inside connection. According to Carlos, it was the Sheriff's Department staff who got the money past airport security.

But now Carlos was getting suspicious – he did not want his curious buyers tagging along.

Andrew Lelling: And so we set up surveillance at Logan Airport

NARRATION: Instead, the agents would have to observe the cash smuggling more discretely.

Andrew Lelling: Obviously, there are cameras everywhere anyway, but extremely complex to do that kind of operation at Logan Airport. And some of the individuals involved are themselves trained law enforcement personnel. So that was very delicate.

NARRATION: The operation took place at night, around 9pm. Carlos was traveling along with a group of people, including an officer from the Sheriff's Department. Carlos gave the officer five unmarked envelopes, which the officer brought to the men's bathroom and distributed among the group.

Meanwhile, case agent Ron Mullet was waiting just outside the security entrance, watching Carlos smoke his last cigarette, then head through the TSA screening himself at about nine thirty. The idea was to let the whole smuggling operation go off without a hitch, but then one of the TSA agents pulled Carlos aside. It turned out, Carlos had kept yet another envelope in his own briefcase – with well over ten-thousand dollars in cash – more than enough money to catch the attention of a regular TSA agent, who of course had no idea about Mullet’s operation, and no idea what they were interfering with. So Mullet watched as Carlos was led away to the customs window, thinking: that’s it, the operation is a bust. If Carlos is stopped now, before he’s even entered the airport, they won’t be able to document the full smuggling process. That’s when Mullett called the airport staff, and told them there was a change of plans, and it needed to happen quickly.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: By the time Carlos arrived at the customs window, there waiting for him was newly assigned IRS duty agent Ron Mullet, pretending to be just any old agent working an overnight shift. Mullet rubbed his eyes, looking tired, then asked Carlos a few routine questions, asked him to fill out some forms, and sent the man on his way.

The crew from the Sheriff's Department boarded without incident, and two days later, Carlos Rafael deposited a total of seventy-six thousand dollars in a Portuguese bank account.

MUSIC: Post

NARRATION:  At last, the IRS agents could see the full scope of the fraud, from the boat to the plate, to a bank account in the Azores -- and why Carlos was the only one who could pull it off. He had managed to evade checks at so many points along the chain: on the boat, at the dock, at the Fulton fish market, at airport security, so that his criminal enterprise could operate almost entirely in the open -- all mixed in with his legitimate business, and worked that way for years. Now it was time to bring it down.

MUSIC: Out

IRS Undercover 1: My undercover partner placed a phone call and he said, listen, we have to go one more time before we, uh, make an offer.

NARRATION: In January of 2016, Lenny and his undercover partner asked for one last meeting with Carlos.

IRS Undercover 1: He did say to him that my clients, they good to go. They, they wanna buy it, but we have to meet one more time, okay?

NARRATION: The goal this time was to get their hands on the physical documents at the heart of the whole fraud: the falsified reports.

IRS Undercover 1: We met with him so many times, you know, trying to drag that paperwork out of him, but never happened.

NARRATION: The meeting was at night. The fish plant was dark, everyone was gone except for Carlos and his personal bookkeeper. So they went upstairs to the same office where they had all met the very first time and Carlos had joked about how bad it would be if these guys were here with the IRS.

Undercover 1: No, we're, we're definitely interested. We have a better handle on it now.

NARRATION: Now, over six months later, it seemed like any misgivings Carlos had been holding onto, were gone. He was ready for the deal to be done.

IRS Undercover 1: So what I said to him was very simple. I said, Carlos, I like your business, willing to buy it, but just pretend to be a fucking retard. I have no fucking clue what you're doing here. I just don't have a clue. And I said, just explain to me word by word, okay? In the normal language, how the shit works. And believe it or not, he, he said, all right, just fuck it.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: Carlos' bookkeeper, who was aware of the fish painting operation, went into a side room off the office and brought out a stack of papers.

Carlos Rafael: I mean it's so much freaking shit in here. You got permits, you got IFQ, you got every goddamn thing. You got shit that I didn't even know I had.

IRS Undercover 1: He brings out this book, and we went line by line

Ron Mullett: So he showed us the dealer reports, he showed us the fishing vessel trip report. He showed us white lined paper, handwritten, he called it “the dance,” that said, hey, this haddock is actually grey sole of the medium size and it's this many pounds of this of small size. I called it all haddock on these two reports. But here's what it really is.

Carlos Rafael: I mean, everything is nice and clean. If they know what they're doing, they can figure everything out to the T.

Ron Mullett: So he walked us through, here's an example of, you know, last Thursday, fishing vessel trip report, dealer report, the dance sheet, the bill of lading, the invoice to the buyer. Here's how it started as haddock. And on the last page, the fifth page in, it's really all the grey sole.

Carlos Rafael: But it'll all work out. It usually does. We'll call ‘em haddock. We’ll call ‘em haddock. I’ll fix them.

Ron Mullett: And they said, wow, I'm not sure I get it. Can you show me again? And he pulled out another set of documents and he walked him through it again.

NARRATION: While Lenny went line by line through the documents, playing dumb, his partner -- the guy who was playing the part of the broker -- was able to step away and start taking photos around the office with a concealed camera: hard evidence that they could use to get a search warrant.

And still Lenny kept on saying:

Ron Mullett: I think we got it. One more time. And he brought out another set of documents and walked him through it.

IRS Undercover 1: We were sitting there probably from six to nine, ten o'clock at night, like four hours in that thing.

Ian Coss: Oh wow.

IRS Undercover 1: Okay. Going line by line.

Ron Mullett: Those three documents, those three transactions, those were the three primary charges that got us, as we say, in the door to do the search warrant.

IRS Undercover 1: When we came out of there, we met with the cover team, including Ron. He said, that's it. He's done. He’s done.

MUSIC: Out

Ian Coss: how did you hear that he was arrested?

Paul Valente: How did I hear it? From the fuel guy.

NARRATION: On February 26th, 2016, Paul Valente unloaded fifty thousand pounds of groundfish in New Bedford. He had heard the rumors, that his boss Carlos was in talks with some Russians about maybe selling the business. But Valente says he didn't talk about that kind of stuff with Carlos. He just talked fish.

Paul Valente: And I was waiting to find out what my settlement was and I never got an answer from him, from his phone. I found it odd. And then the fuel guy had just finished fueling me and he goes, did you see what happened to your boss? I says, no. He goes, a bunch of feds and cops and everything around his building. I was like, oh Jesus, here we go. And then I drove by and I seen him like, yep, that's why I am not getting a settlement today.

Ian Coss: And how many, I mean, was it like a line of police cars and vans and things?

Paul Valente: Yeah, I think they had more, more police presence to arrest a fish buyer than they did when they took down El Chapo. It was that bad. They had helicopters, they had, you name it.

It was like something in a mob movie.

Ian Coss: Like they were expecting him to be holed up in there with like Scarface style with a cash of guns?

Paul Valente: Yeah. It was, it was pathetic actually, to have that much police force down there. It was pathetic, yeah. All they had to do was just go in there and say: you gotta come with us. And he would've went, you know what I mean? He might cuss and yell and scream and make some noises at ‘em. Call ‘em a bunch of nice names, but he would've went and, there was no need for all that drama. No.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: Valente did get his settlement check for that trip, but what would happen beyond that was anyone's guess.

Paul Valente: You don't have security, you don’t know if you have a job tomorrow. Scared that everything's gonna be tied up and you can't feed your family. You know, all that uncertainty just comes rushing down.

NARRATION: And watching as the helicopters circled Carlos Seafood, Valente also had to wonder: who were they coming for next?

MUSIC: Out

Andrew Lelling: Every captain knows what is happening on the boat. Every captain knows that they didn't catch haddock, that the captain is lying on the relevant form.

NARRATION: Prosecutor Andrew Lelling now had an important decision to make: who else would he prosecute?

Andrew Lelling: This comes down to a philosophical question if you're a prosecutor: do you want every single scalp or do you just want the key scalps? None of this fraud occurs, but for Carlos Rafael. Of course he sucks other people into his orbit. Like these Sheriff's Deputies, like these captains, but they are secondary. And so the captains as a category, we just let them go.

NARRATION: Lelling also let the bookkeeper go, as well as another employee at Carlos Seafood who was involved in forging paperwork. Two officials at the Sheriff's office were arrested, but Michael the fish dealer was never prosecuted, and maybe most crucially, the owners of the auction house -- the Canastra brothers -- were never prosecuted.

Carlos Rafael: If you come after me, the guy that participated with me in a scam should get nailed too.

NARRATION: Carlos has always insisted to me that the Canastras were involved – that they knew the fish was being mis-labeled, that they would even tip him off whenever regulators or environmental police were snooping around the docks. And there is some evidence to back this up. A few years ago some new documents emerged as part of a civil case between Carlos and the Canastras’ business. Those documents include a sworn affidavit by the former General Manager of the auction house, who states that the Canastra brothers personally instructed him to treat Carlos’ boats differently, to facilitate his fraud. I spoke with that manager as part of my reporting; he stands by everything in the affidavit, and emphasized to me that he and his staff did record the actual weights and species of all that fish they unloaded from Carlos’ boats. The manager told me: he shredded that original paperwork. The Canastra brothers did not respond to my request for an interview, but they have always denied any involvement, and the current manager of the auction house told me that they never reported any false information to the government. So that piece remains contested.

The way Carlos sees it, he was singled out and targeted -- by NOAA, by the IRS, by John Bullard and Andrew Lelling and all the people who wanted him out of the fishery for good.

Carlos Rafael: And the auction was just as involved as I was in this deal. I've paid them over a million dollars in cash, cash, for the unloading of all that fish I used to do there. Where's the IRS? Where's NOAA? Where's all these guys? Where's the Department of Justice? These guys are a bunch of assholes, that's what they are. Because that operation could have not been done if they were not part of this scam. But somebody was tilting the scale.

NARRATION: For his part, Andrew Lelling told me that he assumed all along that the auction house knew what Carlos was doing, that they had to know. Lelling says he just couldn't prove it.

Carlos Rafael: So we'll take one criminal and we'll leave the others behind. That's the way that was set up.

NARRATION: The reason all these choices matter is that over the years since the arrest, regulators, prosecutors, and politicians alike have often described Carlos the way Lelling does: as a lone bad actor who managed to corrupt all the people around him. The one proverbial rotten apple spoiling a perfectly good bunch. And when you tell the story that way, the whole thing becomes a little easier to dismiss – it’s just Carlos being Carlos. Now I’m not trying to say the whole waterfront should have been rounded up and thrown in jail over this case, but I do think we have to see Carlos as part of a larger story and a larger culture.

One of the things that constantly surprised me in my interviews – and really what drew me into this story -- is how many people I spoke with who expressed some sympathy, or at least ambivalence for what Carlos did. That includes lifelong fishermen like Bill Blount and Rodney Avila, civil servants like Maria Tomasia, as well as academics, journalists, even some NOAA officials I've talked to. The point is this: Carlos may be a pirate at heart who would break the law in anything he did, but he could never have pulled it off for so long if there weren't a lot of other people in this port who also thought the system was broken.

Taking Carlos down did nothing to change that.

Carlos Rafael:  They think they solved the problem. They haven't solved shit.

NARRATION: And in the ten years since his arrest, there have been other documented cases of illegal fishing out of New Bedford, including some loads that passed through the very same auction house. If you ask Carlos, there’s a lot more of that going on that the government doesn’t know about.

Carlos Rafael:  Because fishermen are a lot smarter than they are. And now they know what they gotta do not to get nailed. So they'll never stop the bullshit that goes on in the fishing industry. Not in a million years.

NARRATION: John Bullard and I talked about this question for a while: of whether the Codfather case can be reduced to the sins of one man, or if it's a sign of something much deeper.

John Bullard: I think the fact we're talking about it right now, uh, is, uh, unfortunate.

NARRATION:  And you won't be surprised to hear that as the mayor of New Bedford and then the top local regulator for NOAA, Bullard has formed a very strong opinion of Carlos.

John Bullard: Because in my mind, uh, Carlos, is a crook more than he is a fisherman. And as someone who has spent his whole life trying to make the city of New Bedford a better place, I take it personally when someone like that defames our city.

Ian Coss: Yeah. I do, um, I find myself drawn back to the story of Carlos, even though in some ways he is an outlier, there is this way in which he also represents all of the regulatory changes that came in the last half century. Like, without Magnuson and all the economic incentives to build boats, Carlos never buys his first boat. Without catch shares, he may have never consolidated so much control over so much of the catch. And so in this weird way, he does feel like a product.

John Bullard: I don't buy that at all. I don't buy that at all. I mean, there are thousands of people in New Bedford in the fishing industry, uh, from crew to boat owners, to processors to electricians. There are thousands of people who earn their living in the fishing industry. They all went through the strike. They all went through Magnuson, they all went through catch shares. All of them went through everything Carlos went through. They didn't all turn into crooks. Only Carlos turned into the biggest crook in America. Just Carlos. He is not a product of catch shares. He is not a product of Magnuson Act. He is a product of his own moral depravity.

Ian Coss: Will you be disappointed if this podcast comes out and it – the story of Carlos Rafael – is a, you know, a big part of it?

John Bullard: I mean, if someone wants to do a story on Carlos, more power to him. But if someone wants to do a story on the fishing industry in New Bedford and they spend more than thirty seconds on Carlos, then they don't understand the fishing industry and they're telling a story that is torqued way in the wrong direction. There's too many heroes. There are too many good people. And anything that gives Carlos attention and takes it away from people like that, is uh, someone who's grasping at a shiny object and is not seeing the real fishing industry in New Bedford. New Bedford is the number one seaport for the last twenty years, I hope, for the next hundred-and-twenty years, because of people not named Carlos.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: In March of 2017, Carlos Rafael pled guilty to conspiracy, tax evasion, bulk cash smuggling, false labeling, and falsifying records. Andrew Lelling told me he was surprised the swashbuckling Codfather didn't go to trial. He was expecting a fight, expecting to get cursed out in the hallway. But Lelling got a very different Carlos.

The day of his sentencing, Carlos arrived at the Boston courthouse in a loose fitting dark suit; his lawyer told him to keep his mouth shut, and he did.

Andrew Lelling: He knew that the consequences were going to be dire. It, it was the more muted Carlos Rafael.

NARRATION: John Bullard, who was still the regional administrator for NOAA, was there for the sentencing as well.

John Bullard: Because this was a guy who said, I'm a crook. You come and catch me. And Andrew Lelling had caught him. I wanted to see that.

NARRATION: Lelling delivered a twenty-seven page sentencing memorandum, urging the judge to give Carlos the maximum possible sentence based on the quantity and value of the misreported fish.

He was supported in the hearing by some folks you might remember: the Conservation Law Foundation -- that was the environmental group that had pushed the government to tighten its fishing rules decades before. They submitted their own statement, claiming: "This is by far the most significant case of admitted illegal fishing behavior in U.S. domestic fishing history."

Andrew Lelling: A lot of fishermen showed up.

NARRATION: And of course, there were fishermen there too.

Andrew Lelling: A lot of local fishermen from New Bedford were in the gallery

NARRATION: A group of forty or so came from New Bedford to show their support. Paul Valente was among them.

Paul Valente: Yeah, mostly the younger generation fishermen. So the judge could see that it was gonna hurt a bunch of young guys.

NARRATION: Then there were other fishermen, the fishermen who came to show their anger, to watch Carlos fall. Some of them had submitted their own victim impact statements, detailing how Carlos' actions had unfairly hurt his competitors, damaged their fish stocks, and undermined the entire system they lived by. One said that Carlos Rafael was "the worst thing to ever happen to New Bedford."

Andrew Lelling: And what really struck me is I chatted with some of them beforehand and more than one of them said to me, they didn't believe this would actually happen. That he would ever actually go to jail. And they had to come see it themselves.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: Carlos' lawyer delivered a statement on his client's behalf. He told the same story I have told in this series, about an immigrant who starts from nothing, who builds an empire and then does what he has to to protect that empire.

Paul Valente: I remember his lawyers explaining to the judge that, uh, he was doing it to help the commercial fishermen, to help the industry, you know, keep the boats working.

NARRATION: The statement read: " This is the stupidest thing I ever did. I didn’t do it to hurt anybody. I did it so my people could keep their paychecks."

Paul Valente: And then when the judge gave a sentence, the judge said that it was full of shit.

NARRATION: When the judge finally addressed Carlos from the bench, his voice was sharp. "This was not stupid," the judge said, "This was a corrupt course of action from start to finish. It’s a course of action... designed to benefit you, to line your pockets. That’s what it is and why the court has sentenced you as it has." The judge gave Carlos forty-six months -- almost four years -- in federal prison. Four years may not sound like a lot as sentences go, but for a sixty-five year old man who had only committed non-violent crimes, it was harsh. It was a message.

MUSIC: Transition

NARRATION: But the criminal sentence did not settle the most important question for the port of New Bedford: what would happen to the Codfather's business -- to all the boats, the permits, the quota Carlos had amassed?

John Bullard: You know, our number one goal is to get him and his family out of the fishery.

NARRATION: And in an interesting twist, this decision would not be up to the judge, it would be up to the regulators themselves -- up to NOAA and of course up to John Bullard to decide the future of perhaps the greatest fishing empire his hometown had ever known.

Carlos Rafael: But if they feel good because they knocked me out, I'm good, I'm very good. Because they wanted to strip me out of everything, it didn't work that way. At the end of the day, this asshole won.

MUSIC: Out

BREAK 

NARRATION: In 2017, when Carlos was sentenced, John Bullard was hoping that as part of that sentence, the judge would also force Carlos to forfeit his boats, or at least forfeit a significant number of them. But the judge disagreed.

John Bullard: You know, this is not a violent crime. No one's murdered here. You can't take twelve of his boats.

NARRATION: Here in the United States of America, we take our private property very seriously. So even as the judge sent Carlos to jail and imposed a heavy fine, he would not take the man's fleet. In the end, the state took just four boats out of dozens.

John Bullard: And everyone in the fishing industry was apoplectic that that was such a small slap on the wrist.

Maggie Raymond: We advocated strongly for him to lose everything.

NARRATION: Meanwhile, you had boat owners like Maggie Raymond up the coast in Maine and elsewhere who were telling Bullard: look, forget about the boats, you need to hit Carlos where it really hurts. Take away Carlos' permits -- his precious quota.

Maggie Raymond: And that's what we wanted done. Take his permits away, don't let him sell them.

NARRATION: Because a fishing permit is like a taxi medallion, or a liquor license; it's the true asset of the business. And the idea was that if NOAA simply dissolved those permits entirely, the fish quota attached to them could then be redistributed to fishermen all over the region -- the fishermen who had been following the rules.

Maggie Raymond: It would've been a message to the people who are compliant. You know, now you get a bigger piece of the fishery.

NARRATION: And to be clear, the question of the permits was not up to a judge; this was now up to NOAA.

So two months after the sentencing hearing, Bullard directed his agency to freeze the permits on about sixty boats that Carlos either owned outright, or had some control over. Crewmen went on unemployment, business at the ice plant slowed way down, and everywhere you looked there were the sea green boats with "CR" on the bow, tied up at the docks.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: That winter  the port was eerily quiet, waiting in limbo for a final decision on the permits.

But things were not quiet for John Bullard; he was being lobbied, aggressively. He remembers going to meet with Susan Collins, the Senator from Maine, and before he could even say good morning, she asked: "What's happening with Carlos?" The feelings on this were that strong.

Maggie Raymond: Rip the permits up, let 'em keep the boats. The boats are useless without the permits. Who cares about the boats, right?

NARRATION: The thing is: there were people lobbying on the other side who did care about those boats. It was the crewmen who worked on them. It was the ice plant and net maker that supplied them. The auction house that unloaded them and the trucking companies that shipped their product. All those people wanted to keep the boats working, and keep them in New Bedford. To do that, you had to keep the boats and permits together.

Maggie Raymond: The richest fishing port in the nation. More money there than any other port in the entire nation, so a lot of pressure from different people, from the mayor of New Bedford, Elizabeth Warren.

NARRATION: Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to NOAA officials urging them to keep the permits in the port of New Bedford. The governor weighed in as well, so did the mayor. And Bullard of course was sympathetic. This was his hometown after all. He had been the mayor once. He had fought to protect those same jobs once.

As Bullard recalls, there was no perfect solution that pleased everyone, but there was a simple -- if a little unsavory -- option for getting Carlos out of the fishing business for good.

Maggie Raymond: They let him sell everything and make millions of dollars.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: NOAA barred Carlos from the commercial fishing industry for life, and gave him two years to sell his boats, permits, processing facility -- the whole enchilada as Carlos would say.

Maggie Raymond: And why? I'll never forgive them for that.

NARRATION: Maggie Raymond was stunned.

Maggie Raymond: Because it's a privilege, right? It's a privilege to fish. It's a public resource, so they, they did not do what should have been done.

Ian Coss: How much influence do you think John Bullard had on that decision?

Maggie Raymond: Oh, a lot. I'm sure he had a lot to do, you know, to do with that.

NARRATION: The way Maggie Raymond sees it, Bullard had a choice. He could protect his home town or he could punish Carlos Rafael. He could not do both. And he chose to protect his home town.

In a statement Bullard said: "I know there were people who wanted him to have more punishment ... I certainly heard from a lot of them, but the main thing is that he’s never going to be a part of [the fishing industry] again and that his boats will continue to fish and create jobs, but this time they’ll do it following the law."

Carlos Rafael: Actually, at the end of the day, they did me a favor.

NARRATION: Carlos himself was just fine with this arrangement. After all, he had been trying to sell his business all along.

Carlos Rafael: All the charade they did on the radio and the newspapers and all that, all they did is advertise me for the sale of my vessels. I didn't have to pay for no advertisement.

NARRATION: And this time he didn't just get an offer from some phony Russian gangsters. Big money came calling, corporate money. From his jail cell in Fort Devens, Carlos negotiated a series of deals for the boats and permits, netting a total of about one-hundred million dollars in cash -- so not quite what he had been asking originally, but also not bad for a man who had just pled guilty to twenty-seven counts of federal financial crimes.

Carlos Rafael: And I walk away with over a hundred million dollars. So I think I got a lot more juice out of this deal than all those assholes that investigated me will ever dream to see in a lifetime. All of them. They're left to work until the day they die. ‘Cause they're never going to be able just to sit back and enjoy the fruits of my work.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: When I first heard about the case of Carlos Rafael, it sounded like an intriguing but kind of small story. I looked into it; I interviewed Carlos, and then I put it aside. For all the big talk, this is not the fraud of the century. In dollar terms, it's nothing next to Theranos, or FTX, or Bernie Madoff, because fishing in the United States is just not a huge industry. Most of our seafood is imported at this point; in a lot of coastal towns it feels like the fishing boats are mostly there as a nice backdrop. So yeah, the Codfather was a colorful character in a colorful world that has nothing to do with most people's daily lives. That was the conclusion I came to.

MUSIC: Out

ARCHIVAL: We'll hear argument next in case twenty-two-four-five-one. Loper Bright Enterprises versus Raimondo. Mr. Clement.

NARRATION: Then in 2024, something happened that changed my mind.

ARCHIVAL: Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court.

NARRATION: This is where our story leaves the port of New Bedford and lands in the Supreme Court of the United States. Maybe you heard about this case a couple years ago involving a legal principle known by the shorthand “Chevron.”

ARCHIVAL: This case well illustrates the real world cost of Chevron

NARRATION: Simply put, the so-called Chevron Doctrine has to do with how federal agencies like NOAA turn the vague laws of Congress into the specific regulations we all live with, and just how much latitude those agencies have. Now, this case could have been brought by anyone who feels they have been unduly regulated. It could have been a banker, a truck driver, a farmer, a small restaurant owner. Truly, all of us lead regulated lives. But this case was not brought by any of those people and it was not brought by Chevron itself. It was brought by a group of fishermen.

ARCHIVAL: Commercial fishing is hard. Space on board vehicle vessels is tight, and margins are tighter still.

MUSIC: Transition

NARRATION: The Chevron Doctrine dates back to a case from the 1980s. Back then, it did involve the oil company, who was challenging what they thought was an unreasonable regulation. And at the time it was kind of ambiguous whether the regulation fit within the lines of the law, or not.

Susan Dudley: And the courts said, look.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: Susan Dudley, professor of administrative law.

Susan Dudley: Agencies have expertise in what the law provides. We're going to defer to the agency's expertise on whether the law allows them to do this.

NARRATION: That was the gist of the Chevron ruling: leave it to the experts. So from then on, if there was ever a technical question about what an agency could or couldn't do, the courts deferred to the agency -- meaning, to the regulator.

Susan Dudley: And so the goal of Chevron was to say: judges, stick to your lane and we're going to give agencies this lane.

NARRATION: If we take one step back, or maybe two steps back from this narrow legal question, it's really a political question that our democracy has been trying to settle since the founding – the question of who fills in the details. Like Dudley explained a couple episodes ago, the country is too big and complicated for Congress to truly write all the laws of the land. So who should actually decide what safety features your car has to have,  or what words you are allowed to say on television, or where exactly you can drill for oil, or how many fish you can catch. This is the messy, nuanced and often unpopular work of governing that we keep passing around and around between the branches of government. Chevron seemed to end that game of hot potato, for a time.

Ian Coss: How important is that legal precedent?

Susan Dudley: There are some people, and I'm not an attorney, who think that Chevron contributed greatly to the increase in the administrative state in the number of regulations that agencies issue and the, the breadth of the authority that agencies have found.

NARRATION: As Dudley describes it, after the original Chevron case, for decades agencies kept expanding their reach, and finding new ways to interpret the law that gave them more power.

ARCHIVAL: There is no justification for giving the tie to the government or conjuring agency authority from silence.

NARRATION: Then along came this case in 2024, brought by a group of fishermen working under the same regulations as all the fishermen you have heard in this series.

ARCHIVAL: Congress recognized as much

NARRATION: Listening to the oral arguments, I immediately thought of all Carlos' ranting about the government, the enforcers, the overreach, the endless infractions and fines.

ARCHIVAL: But the agency here showed no such restraint

NARRATION: Because here was that same rant, but sharpened, cleaned up, and directed -- turned into a weapon to slash away at the powers of the administrative state.

ARCHIVAL: Welcome the court's questions

NARRATION: And the high court said, you know what...

MUSIC: Enter

ARCHIVAL: I have the opinion of the court in case twenty-two-four-fifty-one

NARRATION: This has all gone too far; the Chevron Doctrine has gone too far.

ARCHIVAL: The time has come to leave it behind. Chevron is overruled.

MUSIC: Post

NARRATION: That means agencies like NOAA and EPA will no longer enjoy the wide deference they had in the past, to interpret the law and write the rules of life.  So we have now entered a new era of regulation, but exactly what that new era will look like, that's still hard to say.

MUSIC: Out

AMBIENT: A little right. A little bit. About two feet, or a foot.

NARRATION: Most of the fishermen I talked to for this series have given up the hunt for fish. They've retired, or they've taken a job on land. Or maybe they've moved on to working scallop boats, which today are the big money maker in New Bedford.

The one person you heard from who still chases groundfish is Paul Valente, the guy who used to captain for Carlos. The day I first met him, he was just back from an eight-day trip to Georges Bank.

Ian Coss: So how many hours of sleep did you get the last eight days?

Paul Valente: I got about two hours in twenty-four hours.

NARRATION: Valente didn't follow the Chevron case all that closely. He spends over two-hundred-and-fifty days a year out at sea, so he has more immediate concerns than a Supreme Court ruling that will take years to filter down into actual day to day regulations. Boats still have to get permits and quota at the start of every season. They still have to use the right gear and avoid the closed areas. They still have to submit to all kinds of monitoring and reporting. For now, none of that has changed.

The reason this case changed my mind is that it reminded me what's truly at stake in this story, something that can't be measured in dollars and cents. Because if commercial fishing were just about money, everything would be so much easier. The government could decide how many fish can be caught, and a big company could send out a big boat and catch them all. It would be easy to monitor, easy to enforce, with no haggling over tiny slices of quota, no meetings in hotel conference rooms with people spitting in each others’ faces. None of that.

The problem is that there is so much more at stake: it's the culture, the history, the community, the tradition. That is what makes fishermen so hard to regulate, and ultimately, I believe that is why they wound up before the Supreme Court.

NARRATION: That day when Valente got in, his wife and son and grandson all came to meet him at the auction house -- the portal between land and sea. They brought coffee and a box of donuts for the crew, then everyone huddled around to watch the fish flop down the conveyor belt, like a little family gathering.

Paul Valente: You wanna be a fisherman when you grow up? Yeah.

NARRATION: Valente's father took him out fishing when he was eight years old. He took his own son out when he was eight years old.

Paul Valente: What, what does the green buoy mean? More water. More water. What about the red buoy? No water.

NARRATION: That's Valente's grandson you hear there. He's only four, and it sounds like he'll be ready if and when the time comes.

Paul Valente: Where's the bow? Where’s the stern? There you go. He knows more than some, some guys I got on deck.

NARRATION: But I asked Valente later if he thought his grandson would actually be a commercial fisherman like him, and continue the family tradition that went all the way back to the old country. He told me, the way the business is today, "I'd rather have him do something else." Valente sounded defeated as he said it, and having just heard him quiz the kid about buoy colors and boat parts, made it that much worse.

If you are someone who believes in expertise, who believes in science, who believes in procedure and rules and regulation as a force to make the world more just, then you should also look long and close at the friction points where these things actually touch people's lives. Because in the places like New Bedford where regulation rubs hard, the friction is hot and the feelings are raw.

Many fishermen I met cheered the fall of the Chevron Doctrine as a symbolic blow against the state, just as many fishermen once cheered the lawless defiance of Carlos Rafael. Those feelings emerge from a similar place. Yes, Carlos may have been greedy, he may have been crass, he may have even been cruel. But when our backs were against the wall, he did put up a fight.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: John Bullard retired from NOAA in 2018. He told me every day he was there, he felt like an old broken down horse getting to run in the Kentucky Derby. The cod stocks he worked so desperately to protect have still not returned to their historic levels, and they may never return. But Bullard has not lost faith -- in the ocean, in regulation, or in his hometown.

In 2020, Carlos Rafael was transferred to community confinement because of COVID, so he only served about two and a half years in prison. Andrew Lelling, who by that time was US Attorney for the region, personally signed off on it. One fisherman in New Bedford told me that if he could make out like Carlos did: "I would do that time standing on my hands."

The boats that Carlos once owned have by now been bought and sold a few times. First a private equity-backed company came in and grabbed a big chunk of the groundfish fleet. But less than ten years later, that company declared bankruptcy. For Carlos, it was a kind of vindication, like: now you can see why I broke the law.

And in one last strange twist, after the bankruptcy, when the boats were put up for sale again, many of them were bought by the Canastra family -- the two brothers who also own the auction house, and who Carlos insists to this day were his active partners in the entire fraud.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: For many years you could still find boats in the harbor painted in the distinctive sea green with the letters "CR" on the bow. One of the last ones was carved up for scrap metal in 2024. Another was sunk off the coast of New Jersey to make an artificial reef.

So the Codfather fleet is now gone. Carlos, however, is not.

Rodney Avila: Here goes Carlos right now…here goes Carlos Rafel in a truck right now.

NARRATION: When I was interviewing fisherman Rodney Avila, sitting in his truck in the Dunkin Donuts parking lot, Carlos drove right by us. And this was not the only time something like this happened. The guy is just...always around.

Ian Coss: It's funny, every time I come here, I see Carlos Rafael. I went

Rodney Avila: He's, he's around the docks every day. Sundays, every day, holidays. He's around the dock every day.

Ian Coss: Why? He can't fish.

Rodney Avila: He never fished before. He just don't fish with boats.

Ian Coss: So why does he hang around the docks?

Rodney Avila: I don't know. Maybe he just likes looking at fishing boats.

Ian Coss: Something about your smile tells me there's more to the story.

Rodney Avila: I, I don't know. I can't. I don't know. Carlos is not a loser. He's not a loser, I'll tell you that right now. I mean, even the government might think that they put him out of business, he is a loser. He's not a loser. You know.

Carlos Rafael: But there’s other companies, I mean, there’s a lotta guys

NARRATION: At the very end of our interview, Carlos Rafael opened up the bottom drawer of his desk once again.

Carlos Rafael: This, this guy had said in a letter he wanted to talk. He wanted to write a book. These old people they had sent

NARRATION: Where he used to keep the secret set of books, he now has a stack of envelopes from all the publishers and production companies who wanted to tell his story.

Carlos Rafael: Talk, uh, television, LLC, whatever. Forget about it. I don't want to. I don't need any more bullshit with these guys. That's it. Done. Over with.

Ian Coss: So why are you willing to talk to me?

Carlos Rafael: Because a lot of guys try to talk to me, I just didn't have the patience or the time. And they had called me too early when I came out of prison. I had so much shit to put into place. And when you call and you said you do this as a freelancer, you are on your own. I figure it's an opportunity if somebody can get something out of the deal, then you give it to one person. It just starts in his own. Not a big producer with these guys already got a lot of money and all this other bullshit. So I like to deal with a smaller guy.

NARRATION: Carlos likes to deal with a smaller guy, which in this case, is me.

I should say in full disclosure that since the time of that interview, I have become an employee, with a salary and a boss -- all the things Carlos didn't want in life. So I am not, as I record this, a freelancer. But I guess I do still like to think of myself as the little guy. I mean: don't we all want to think of ourselves that way? As the scrappy underdog, making it work with whatever we have, building something from nothing, all on our own. That is the American Dream, right? So maybe I shouldn't be surprised that Carlos, even after all he has built, all he has done in life, he still likes to see himself fighting for the little guy.

Carlos Rafael: The big guys, they are already fat, so they don't need any help.

Ian Coss: Well, whatever your motivations, I do appreciate it.

Carlos Rafael: Okay, you're very welcome. So.

Ian Coss: We can leave it there.

Carlos Rafael: Yeah.

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. As always, if you want to hear more stories like this one produced by this same fantastic 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 one person I’ve been meaning to thank all along who has been a sounding board and a resource through this whole project: the New Bedford-based reporter and writer Ben Berke. It’s not often that you come away from a documentary project like this with a new friend, but that’s exactly what happened with this one. 

I also want to shout out Genevieve Billia who is the Public Affairs Officer for IRS Criminal Investigation, and who responded to all of my many many requests over the past year. However you feel about the government or the IRS, know that Genevieve made my job so much easier.

Thank you again to the New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center, and really to everyone we interviewed, but especially to John, Carlos, Rodney, Paul, Linda and Ron who all made time for multiple interviews and phone conversations. 

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.