by Craig Welch
Shell Games
Rogues, Smugglers, and the Hunt for Nature’s Bounty
Craig Welch
For J & E
Contents
Map
Prologue | The Hunt
One | Snitches
Two | Larger than Life
Three | Clam Kings
Four | The Fed
Five | Metamorphosis: Life Undercover
Six | Kingpin
Seven | “It’s Just a Business Thing”
Eight | An Incredible Virus
Nine | A Sea of Abundance
Ten | Crab Men
Eleven | The Hunt, Redux
Twelve | The Whole West Coast
Epilogue
Notes on Sources
Sources
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Map
Prologue
THE HUNT
November 13, 2001
The boat didn’t look like much. Aluminum with blue trim. A row of smudged cabin windows. A thick center mast crowded with antennas and loudspeakers. Through moonlight and a light rain, Detective Ed Volz could see a curtain of black rubber cloaking half of the vessel’s deck like a tent. He couldn’t spot the orange glow of a single cigarette and suspected the crew had been ordered not to smoke.
Volz and a partner, Bill Jarmon, were crouched behind Douglas firs and madronas on a wooded bluff overlooking Washington’s Puget Sound. They peered down a sandy cliff, Volz through a spotting scope, Jarmon through binoculars, at the boat idling below. Volz heard little other than the wind and the waves. He knew a pair of aging mattresses stuffed in old cloth sleeping bags had been wrapped around an air compressor, muffling its groan. No one who passed by would suspect the crew fed oxygen through a hose to a diver below.
Volz had never been diving. But he knew what could be found in the region’s murky underwater world. In the Sound’s web of tideflats, channels, marshes, bays, and deltas, life took beguiling forms—particularly in the dimmest depths. Shovel-nosed ratfish patrolled the cobble flats alongside wolf eels with pinched faces that looked chiseled from granite. Anemones glowed in waggling fingers of lavender or in perfect white cauliflower stalks. Ochre sea stars the size of cow heads curled around rocks and mussels, gauging light through the red dots on each arm. Bubble-gum-pink corals camouflaged the porcupine shields of sea urchins.
Rockfish, perch, lingcod, squid. At one time or another, the detectives had found all of these and more in places they did not belong—in nets tied under docks to be retrieved after dark, in aquariums or coolers hidden under tarps in old pickups, on ice in the holding tanks of pirate fishing boats. Thieves hooked, netted, dug, and snatched these creatures and then sold them for food, pets, trophies, even medicine. Some took just a few plants and animals. Others hijacked sea life by the truckload. Volz couldn’t recall all the ways he’d seen people steal.
Volz made his living policing the theft of wild things. In twenty-five years with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, he’d chased elk-antler thieves and smugglers exporting bobcat and lynx to collectors. He’d caught poachers who’d hacked off eagle talons for artifact hunters. He carried handcuffs and operated with all the police powers of other lawmen. Here on the western slope of the Cascades, he and his fellow detectives specialized in undercover investigations, mostly involving the region’s billion-dollar fishing industry. They’d tracked permits and bank records and trapped Dungeness crab thieves and snared abalone poachers who pried the fist-size mollusks from rocky crevices. But they’d never pursued anyone quite like this captain.
Volz sprawled on a spongy bed of leaves on the bluff and watched fog roll in through the rain and across the black water and the boat below. He could see the faintest glow through the trees across the channel—lights from the prison on the far side of McNeil Island. This investigation kept expanding, drawing in other officers. Tonight, he and Jarmon were joined by a third detective, Charlie Pudwill, who’d made his way to the pea-gravel beach below. Pudwill stood at the water’s edge, a quarter mile north. He was closer to the action, but if the boat pulled anchor, he’d have to sprint to his truck and wind up through the woods to the road before he could give chase.
Volz was grateful for the help. It was just after midnight, and the detectives already had tailed the suspect for hours, racing across bridges by land as the boat stole south through Puget Sound. Jarmon was an excellent driver, but he could be a cowboy behind the wheel. He’d cornered the Ford Expedition so fast that Volz had pancaked both hands against the dash trying to keep his head from whipping against the window. The captain had mastered these hidden passages, but Volz and Jarmon found the nearby streets less familiar. They’d bombed in and out of subdivisions, seeking secluded spots with views of the water that were free from neighbors, lights, and dogs. New waterfront bungalows rose among the trees, and construction cones lined streets. Bulldozers had carved a corner off a plot near the road, but no one had started building on this tiny patch overlooking the surf.
Volz adjusted and readjusted his scope. Eventually he saw what could have been a harbor seal bobbing above the water’s surface. Then a black-gloved hand emerged, and someone paddled toward the boat. The diver climbed aboard the vessel empty-handed.
Volz was not expecting this. He’d spent hours discussing this very spot with the biologist on his team. Unlike much of Puget Sound, Wyckoff Shoal, just north of Drayton Passage, rarely reached deeper than forty feet. Coarse-grained sand coated the bottom, and tides swept by at two knots. Other than accordion-fanned orange sea pens and twenty-four-armed sunflower stars, little of consequence hung out above the sandy floor. The real riches were buried below. And while each creature would take a small struggle to retrieve, any discerning thief would gather as many as he could carry. Volz had expected the diver would stay underwater for hours. Then the crew would have hauled up a net carrying a load of seafood large enough to stuff a Volkswagen. Instead, the detectives watched the black shadow peel off his neoprene dry suit.
Within minutes the boat rumbled to life. Hugging the shoreline, it jetted toward Devil’s Head point, the last hook on the peninsula before the shoreline looped west and back north.
Volz and Jarmon ran toward the road, clambered into the Expedition, and shot south, trying to keep up. The boat was already out of sight. They drove through the night high above the beach, the truck’s headlights off, unable to spy the boat or raise Pudwill on the radio. They rolled the windows down and strained to hear the ship’s diesel engine growl through the mist.
The detectives had lost the captain several times before; he used top-of-the-line radar and night-vision gear and moved unpredictably, as if he knew he was being watched. They’d finally caught a break two months earlier. An informant had described crew members on the boat forging documents and illegally hauling in several million dollars’ worth of shellfish. If that was true, Volz was watching one of the country’s most profitable wildlife smuggling rings—certainly the strangest and most sophisticated the Pacific Northwest had seen in decades. The tipster told them the captain’s top shipboard rules: Dump everything if you see anyone approaching; jet away at top speed; and don’t stop unless cops thrust guns in your face.
It was good stuff, but nowhere near enough. The detectives had to catch the thieves in the act. Four times in two weeks, they’d tried tailing the boat from land. Each time, they’d followed until 4 A.M. And each time, the boat had returned to the Fox Island marina empty. No one unloaded what the tipster said the crew was hunting: the world’s largest burrowing clam, known as a geoduck (pronounced “gooey duck”), an obscene-looking giant mollusk that embodied a sea change in wildlife smuggling,
a creature with which Volz shared a long and complicated history.
Puget Sound’s geoducks had burrowed their way into the Northwest’s mythology. Now, thanks to savvy marketing and good fortune and a lust abroad for obscure delicacies, they also had aroused the palates of Asian eaters. Every day, couriers boxed geoducks with gel packs and placed them on jets. Within seventy-two hours they bobbed in restaurant tanks in Beijing or Shanghai or lay in tubs of shaved ice in Tokyo. No matter where the giant clams went they fetched fistfuls of dollars.
Geoduck, Panopea generosa
These bivalves were so valuable that they had been traded for narcotics, and that worth helped create a perfect recipe for crime. With geoduck gathering done underwater and out of sight, corrupt fishermen could take thousands more than the law allowed. Geoducks weren’t endangered—they had almost always been plentiful. But Volz knew how fast things in nature could change. Once-abundant sea creatures were declining across the globe, including the Pacific salmon once synonymous with Seattle. The seas were in trouble, thanks in part to overfishing, and Volz had watched geoducks become the region’s most lucrative prize. Now these giant clams drew poachers and smugglers and arsonists and hit men, and one audacious thief trailed by a crew of exhausted cops.
Volz and Jarmon drove on through the dark. They pulled over after a few miles, unsure where the boat had gone. They jogged across a clearing to another embankment and peered across the water. They thought they could hear the boat groan in the distance, but the cops could see nothing. A mile or two down the road, the detectives saw a dirt trail that led through the woods. They slid on foot down the slick, winding slope to the water’s edge. The rising tide chewed at the last sliver of beach, but if they worked their way to the peninsula’s tip, Volz figured they would eventually spy the boat.
The weather worsened. Rain sprayed sideways, mixing with a salty mist that erupted from the surging tide. They could barely see with their flashlights off, but they knew any light would spook the boat’s captain. Surf sopped their clothes, and the November waves slopped against the shore. Slippery driftwood as broad as car tires blocked their way.
A mile short of the point, the men stopped beneath a sand-and-clay cliff. Geologists call such cliffs feeder bluffs because their erosion nourishes shorelines with fresh sand. Centuries of tidal pounding had eaten away at the bottom of this wall, undercutting it. Continuing on would be dangerous.
And the men no longer heard the boat. Volz tried raising Pudwill on the radio but got only static. Dark water crashed against the cliff. The beach was gone. The detectives splashed through briny water and foam, which topped their ankles and squished in their shoes. The tide was still rising, and the water this time of year was usually well below fifty degrees. Falling in could lead to hypothermia, unconsciousness, or worse. The detectives had to make a decision.
For much of a decade, Volz had seen his share of mischief. He’d chased lowlifes and hustlers and wannabe gangsters, all of them hunting Puget Sound’s inelegant shellfish. Now his ego was engaged; this might be his best shot at this captain. He wanted to get close enough to see the man’s face, but the way ran beneath this unstable bank. Volz’s watch read 2 A.M., and he and his partner had been working since dawn. Volz was letting the captain mess with his judgment. The men, cold and filthy, stopped. Volz didn’t want either of them getting hurt. Reluctantly, the detectives turned and sprinted back toward their truck, clawing through thick brush and stumbling over snags. Blackberry brambles scratched and bloodied their arms and faces. There had been a time for both men when they lived for this part of the job. But now they felt the thwack of every branch.
Caked in mud, they climbed back into the Expedition and stared out the windshield, drained. Rain pounded the hood. Volz felt deflated. He had wasted a lot of time. He brought the radio to his face. Detective Pudwill answered and told Volz he’d been moving around on the beach but hadn’t seen anything suspicious in two hours. Volz filled Pudwill in on their fruitless jaunt. Volz and Jarmon would come join him for a moment. Then they’d all head home and get to bed.
Moments later the boat tore back by heading north, its running lights blazing. It shot toward shellfish-rich Wyckoff Shoal. Maybe the captain had gotten careless. Maybe he’d convinced himself he wasn’t being followed. The detectives radioed Pudwill one more time. He told them the boat was sputtering into the channel. It cut its engines and its lights as it drifted to the far side. Pudwill radioed Volz that he could see the boat’s outline through the predawn haze. It looked as if the captain was ready to drop anchor and get to work.
Jarmon put the truck in gear.
chapter one
SNITCHES
Seven years earlier, Ed Volz slumped in a car on the Olympic Peninsula and eyed a Chinese noodle shop from the shadows. It was June 17, 1994, a cool Friday evening, and summer breezes blew in off the gray-green waters of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Patience didn’t come naturally to Volz, but he could summon it when he had to or if something intrigued him, and breaking in a new snitch usually held his attention. Informants are valuable because they’re willing to betray. Tracking their movements was one way to avoid getting played.
From his seat, Volz could see the polished glass of the Port Angeles restaurant’s front door and his informant’s Jeep parked just beyond the glowing streetlights. Volz already knew how this night would go. One officer would record the scene on video from another car. Another would listen from inside the restaurant. And Detective Kevin Harrington would smoke and fidget. Harrington always fidgeted. He hated surveillance.
After ninety minutes Volz saw movement. His informant, Dave Ferguson, popped from the restaurant and jogged down the sidewalk to his maroon Cherokee. Ferguson reached into a cooler packed with dry ice on the backseat and plucked out freezer bags stuffed with shellfish guts. Abalone meat, Volz knew. The palm-size snails live inside barnacle-encrusted shells and are a popular delicacy, especially among Asian foodies. Washington’s species, the pinto abalone, had once been so common on the tideflats that residents called retreating currents “abalone tides,” but so few remained by the early 1990s that even incidental gathering of them was illegal. Volz had pulled these specimens from a government shellfish laboratory and cleaned and packaged them to look as if they’d come from nearby waters. Now he watched Ferguson stuff the Ziplocs in a brown grocery sack. The informant slipped back into the restaurant, where he resumed talking with his contact, a businessman trying to buy stolen shellfish.
The informant and his contact huddled at the bar’s end. Ferguson, stocky and balding, wore jeans and guzzled black coffee. The contact, just shy of 120 pounds and wearing a pinstriped three-piece suit, sipped red wine. He lit the informant’s cigarette and told him to stash the shellfish behind the bar. Ferguson’s abalone was just a sample. If the contact liked it he would make a regular purchase—at least once a week, he said, ideally in hundred-pound lots. He’d already explained that he would ship the seafood south and have it relabeled as legal California abalone. He’d shown Ferguson photographs and business cards from potential buyers in Vietnam, Singapore, Hong Kong, and China.
The men joked, high-fived, and talked about Asia. Ferguson had been a grunt during Vietnam; the other man had lived on a boat there in the 1970s. They refilled their drinks. The businessman brought out a map, which he and Ferguson studied. If things worked out well, he might take Ferguson to Burma. He would make introductions and show his new supplier the seafood business overseas.
Pinto abalone, Haliotis kamtschatkana
Four seats away, another wildlife detective nursed a drink. He was incognito beneath a ball cap, jeans, and a red-white-and-blue slicker but had been watching through a long mirror behind the bar, trying to keep his eavesdropping discreet. Not even Ferguson knew the man was a plant. Volz had put the detective there as backup, since this was Volz’s first time working closely with the new informant. Volz wanted to make sure Ferguson relayed events honestly. If he did, maybe next time, the guy could work al
one.
The detective at the bar continued to listen. He overheard the businessman tell Ferguson that the two of them would make great partners. “You will learn and I will learn and we will learn together,” he said. Then the contact told Ferguson he wanted something else: the big clams with the long necks. The weird ones. The geoducks.
This didn’t surprise the cops. The sheltered marine waters of the Pacific Northwest are the only place on earth where wild geoducks grow in great size and quantity. And the mollusk was riding a tidal wave of globalization. The geoduck’s escalating popularity abroad tracked the rise of a new wildlife underground—and an evolution in mankind’s ability to exploit nature. In the booming international market for fresh seafood the geoduck had become a path to quick profits. And smart smugglers always followed the money.
Elephant tusks, wild furs, alligator skins, and exotic birds. That’s what wildlife thieves used to smuggle. But by the close of the twentieth century a new reality was emerging: Almost anything in nature can become contraband. Fish eggs. Baboon noses. Decorative seed plants known as cycads, which have been around since the Jurassic period. Venus flytraps snatched illegally from backwoods bogs in the Carolinas land in stalls at open-air Dutch floral markets. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegally caught finger-size glass eels work their way from New England to Japan. Crooks ship stolen monkey blood through Memphis and banned seal oil through Louisville. Illicit fish, plants, and animals of all varieties crisscross the globe to feed black markets.