by Craig Welch
The transformation came in the last third of the twentieth century, when seismic shifts in the world economy fundamentally altered the nature of global commerce. People used to make purchases through a long chain, buying from local retailers, who bought from wholesalers, who brought goods in from other states or overseas. Then Asian economies ballooned, the Soviet Empire collapsed, and trade barriers fell one after the other. Western-style capitalism washed across continents. Shipping and jet cargo service became routine, along with private package delivery from FedEx and UPS. Industry by industry, technology transformed how everything was bought and sold, increasing the odds that someone bent on selling something could stumble across a buyer somewhere in the world who wanted it. The Internet would only stir things up more, allowing buyers to purchase directly from Thailand on eBay.
All these changes opened avenues for crooks. Suddenly anything from almost anywhere could be purchased outside the law in bulk: pirated Nintendo-game cartridges, fake designer handbags, stolen AK-47s, and plants or animals. Criminal markets and organized corruption went global. Impoverished third-world countries eager for first-world dollars sent poachers to the jungles, and pirates to the seas. By the 1990s, illegal trade accounted for 10 percent of the world economy. The value of black markets as a percentage of the U.S. gross domestic product tripled from 1960 to the mid-1990s. Wildlife trafficking blossomed along with it, becoming, according to the U.S. State Department, one of the largest black markets in the world. The phenomenon would only grow more acute.
Now, every day at U.S. airports and border crossings, wildlife inspectors and customs agents witness inspired displays of duplicity. Bird smugglers stuff stolen live finches in curling irons or squeeze them into socks packed in badminton birdie tubes. Thieves hide tiny golden-throated tropical birds called Cuban grassquits in their under-pants or cram banded iguanas from Fiji Island into hollowed-out prosthetic legs. Women smuggle monkeys in their hair. Men hide primates in their pants. Traffickers ferrying bags of sea horses from Mexico cross into the country and immediately mail their booty overseas. Some mark shipping boxes BOOKS to get cheaper rates.
This trade seamlessly intertwines with conventional markets. Boutique fashion outlets from New York to Oregon peddle illegal blue coral jewelry, belts made from alligators killed by poachers, or watch straps carved from the skin of Argentine lizards. Vials of aphrodisiacs ground from deer and tiger penises and smuggled into the country by airline flight attendants sell in herbal markets in major cities. From the tuna in a favorite sushi joint to the gobies in a friend’s fish tank, stolen creatures, or goods made from them, sell regularly in shopping malls, pet stores, flower shops, and restaurants, even in supermarkets and warehouses specializing in home furnishings.
The bulk of this trade still comes in from abroad, but the thieving isn’t limited to third-world countries. Creatures by the tens of thousands are now being lifted from the forests, deserts, and waterways around America, often not far from major cities such as New York, San Francisco, Miami, Phoenix, and Seattle. Sometimes the criminals prove to be small-time hoods, no different from desperate drug abusers who swipe copper pipes from construction zones. They may take mushrooms from national parks and sell them at farmers’ markets or poach deer for meat in a down economy.
But increasingly this trade draws a craftier breed of thief, one literate enough to comprehend obscure laws and wily enough to find creative ways around them. They steal mosses and rattlesnakes and Grand Canyon butterflies, all with an eye toward international markets. These poachers and smugglers piggyback on legitimate markets. They doctor paperwork and shovel loot into shipping containers. They pack stolen goods on jets or drop them with courier services. They trade this contraband like lawful commodities. It is a nearly recession-proof business: In good times, the wealthy demand new delights; when economies tank, enforcement gets curtailed just as people look to nature to stretch their income.
The state and federal investigators who police these traffickers troll rivers, tromp beaches, and hike deserts, forests, and parks. They struggle to halt the siphoning of the country’s strangest life-forms: Pennsylvania turtles, wild ginseng from Appalachia, black bear innards from Virginia, or the seafood residing beneath the waves.
Ed Volz shows off salmon caught during a fishing trip with his father.
Kevin Harrington strums the guitar for family and friends.
For most of their careers, Ed Volz and the other Washington detectives had only thought locally. Like narcotics officers nabbing street dealers who sold cocaine through car windows, they didn’t care—and didn’t need to—about international smuggling. They mostly pinched fish thieves in restaurants and cafés. By law, wild seafood sold commercially has to come from licensed commercial fishermen. Fishermen are supposed to painstakingly record catch volumes and locations, protecting fish from overharvest and consumers from food tainted by pollution or toxins. But cheap, fresh fish caught by local anglers often found its way illegally to local bistros. The detectives camped in dusty boathouses or sprawled in the grass with binoculars, tracking anglers from the shadows. They tailed fishermen to institutions like Seattle’s Pike Place Market. They got warrants for business records and backtracked illegal sales, once uncovering a check with “for under-the-table salmon” written in the memo line. Over the years they caught several of Seattle’s finest white-linen establishments buying fish illegally. One restaurant raked in fifty thousand dollars a month reselling that illegal catch around town.
But local salmon no longer commanded such high prices. Few of the region’s fish did. By 1994, the real money, pound for pound, was often found with marine invertebrates: Dungeness crab, shrimp, crunchy pink sea scallops, pimple-backed cucumbers, spiky sea urchins, and all manner of clams and shellfish. As licensed fishermen sold to an increasingly international clientele, crooks, too, no longer hawked their wares solely to local businesses. Poachers stole by the ton and regularly sold the catch abroad. The detectives were just beginning to grasp the scale of this trafficking and were coming to see that they could use a little help.
“He knows the product you are bringing him is illegal?” Volz asked a half hour later.
“Highly illegal,” Ferguson said.
“How is he aware of that?”
“I told him,” Ferguson said.
It was a few minutes before midnight, and they sat in a dusty, spider-filled back room behind a highway-patrol impound lot a few miles from the Chinese restaurant. Ferguson groaned that he needed to get some sleep. He had plans to get out on the water in the morning. But the detectives wanted to record his version of the night’s events while details remained fresh. This was the closest law-enforcement office Volz could commandeer.
The Olympic Peninsula juts like a mitten thumb from Washington’s mainland, with the city of Port Angeles centered on the thumb tip. The city is the timber-rich peninsula’s last gateway: a direct ferry trip across the choppy strait from Victoria, a short drive from the hiking trails and rain forests and granite ridges of Olympic National Park, and a longer journey by road and boat from Seattle. Both a tourist oasis and a working waterfront, it has gift shops and restaurants, a Coast Guard station and a lumber mill. In 1994, it remained small enough that shopkeepers often knew their customers and busy enough that strangers usually went unnoticed. Volz and Harrington counted on that.
The men huddled in the poorly lit building. The buyer had been so skittish, Ferguson told them, that once they strayed beyond mere talk, he insisted that Ferguson speak in code. They agreed that from now on they would call the shellfish “bolognas”—just in case. The buyer kept telling Ferguson to keep his voice down. But he agreed to meet later and buy more stolen shellfish.
Volz was as interested in Ferguson as he was in the buyer. So far the detective had to admit he was impressed; Ferguson had pulled it off. His description matched perfectly what the cop had heard from the bar. The detectives were encouraged by the performance. Despite Volz’s skepticism, Ferguson might
prove valuable. The detectives knew they could use the assistance.
An anonymous tip had led Volz to Ferguson, a poacher who’d slipped by unnoticed for years. In March 1994, a caller alerted police to a suspicious diving boat puttering around a tranquil bay along the strait. Police watched from afar, spying on the twenty-six-foot boat until it docked in Port Angeles. The cops saw a squat, balding man with a mustache as thick and brown as a cigar hand a sack to a friend on the boat. The pair unloaded their gear and carried off the sack and a tub covered by a white cloth. Police confronted them and found 188 stolen abalone—not a huge case, but worth prosecuting.
Notified of Ferguson’s arrest, detectives Volz and Harrington headed west from Seattle the next day. They crossed Puget Sound by ferry and motored up Highway 101, which circles the rim of the Olympic Peninsula and parallels the Pacific Ocean all the way to Southern California.
The two detectives had policed small-scale fish thieves together for years, but Volz and Harrington could not have been more different. Volz had grown up in Seattle’s suburbs and liked to hunt and fish. He was a barrel-chested block with a round face and coarse dark hair that gave him the look of a shorter, friendlier Charles Bronson. He had been an animal cop since 1976, and in the fleece-chic Northwest, he concealed his .45-caliber service pistol beneath windbreakers and patterned shirts. He had studied fish biology at the University of Washington, and for a cop had a sophisticated understanding of marine life. He was serious, thorough, and rarely cut corners. But he had a lip and often squabbled with his bosses. Even the drafting of a search warrant could get him grousing about the job’s minutiae.
Kevin Harrington (standing) and Ed Volz fish while working undercover on an unlicensed charter boat in the early 1990s.
Harrington came from Michigan and considered himself a softy. He laughed often and cried openly at movies, rating them for his wife by degrees of “weepiness.” Once, working undercover alongside fish thieves on an illegal charter boat, Harrington caught some of the biggest fish of his life. In the parking lot he moved to tip one of the poachers twenty bucks until his flabbergasted partner asked: What are you doing? Harrington shrugged: Just being polite. Harrington chain-smoked, played guitar, and hated wearing his gun. His superiors eventually would dress him down because he so often left his sidearm packed away in his trunk.
The two cops irritated each other but worked as a team. Volz did not mind stakeouts but hated sifting through records. Harrington actually enjoyed forensic work; he had the patience Volz lacked and liked smoking while deciphering documents and believed that even the smartest criminals left a paper trail. When interviewing suspects, the two cops found a routine. Volz enjoyed needling hardheads. Harrington established rapport. Volz called him “the counselor” because everyone confided in him. Their tag-team style grew so instinctive that a change of expression by one could inspire the other to shift tactics. They usually found ways to get what they wanted.
Dave Ferguson surprised them both. He had told the arresting officer he would admit guilt and help wildlife cops catch the people who bought his contraband. All he asked was that they free his boating partner, who was unaware that Ferguson had been poaching. Volz and Harrington plucked Ferguson from jail and took him to a nearby office. Once assured their interest was solely in him, Ferguson answered every question without a fight.
Ferguson admitted that he regularly stole abalone, which in Puget Sound mostly live between the surface and waters thirty-five feet deep. Ferguson said he frequently covered up his poaching by scuba diving legally for sea cucumbers. His latest haul had been destined for a Chinese eatery in Port Angeles, but he also sold to a cantina in the port city of Everett, north of Seattle. Workers there kept scales inside the back door and weighed illegal products, paying cash from the till. Ferguson knew some of them resold the shellfish overseas.
Ferguson had a record, but he also had kids. His girlfriend was pregnant, and his bank account was empty. He faced criminal charges and the loss of his fishing license and livelihood. The detectives saw an opportunity. A thief desperate enough to be honest might be desperate enough to be useful. And the loyalty Ferguson had shown his friend gave Volz hope. Unlike the hard cases usually seen on television, the criminals Volz knew would sell out anyone to escape trouble. Ferguson possessed some sort of moral compass, even though he was no minor crook. He had shot at police in California, served as vice president of a prison motorcycle gang, and had faced federal charges for running guns.
Ferguson could be just what they needed. He had confessed to stealing enough abalone over the years to buy his Jeep and pay off his boat, defiantly named the Abalone Made. Biologists later calculated that Ferguson alone may have taken as much as all recreational fishermen combined had in previous years. They suspected he may have swiped twenty-five thousand abalone—nearly all that were left in the waters near Port Angeles.
And no one believed he was Puget Sound’s only major shellfish thief. The cops suspected that there might even be a shellfish kingpin, a seafood broker to whom poachers funneled their stolen loot. The detectives were on a mission to find out. After administering a polygraph, they offered Ferguson work as a paid informant. Given his reputation, Ferguson offered a unique chance to assist them. No one who knew him would suspect he’d cooperate with the police.
A month after his discussion about geoducks and “bolognas,” Ferguson returned to the Chinese restaurant, this time with an undercover female patrol officer posing as his wife-to-be. The informant’s discussions with the businessman had continued, but Ferguson and the detectives had begun shifting gears. They’d started gathering intelligence on more established smugglers and had come to realize that this contact was just a minor player. They wanted one more meeting to be sure.
The three spoke over dinner about a party the buyer was throwing for friends and discussed once again how best to ship geoducks overseas. Each time Ferguson suggested they slip out to his Jeep to get the illegal shellfish, the buyer waved him off, suddenly uncomfortable cutting deals in public. Finally the businessman offered an alternative. “We will go up to my house,” he said.
They piled into Ferguson’s Jeep and drove to a split-level home in the hills near Port Angeles. They entered through a sliding door and headed for the basement, where Ferguson and the officer handed over more seafood. When the buyer opened his freezer, Ferguson looked inside. There, still in Ziplocs, he saw the abalone he’d sold in June. The buyer hadn’t eaten or resold any of it.
Volz faced a decision. The businessman may have had international ambitions, but clearly he was still small-time. Volz could pursue minor charges against this buyer, but that would mean Ferguson would have to testify. Volz hated the thought of exposing his informant. Ferguson had been making contacts every week with fishermen and seafood brokers throughout the Northwest. He had gotten so good at digging up information that Volz saw a chance to make cases that were far more sophisticated.
Volz made a pitch that his agency should go big. If his bosses spent a few hundred dollars overhauling Ferguson’s boat, they could send him to work undercover as a geoduck fisherman. Thanks to Ferguson, Volz wrote in a report to his superiors, “the opportunity exists to have a huge impact in the illegal commercial shellfish industry.” The informant could give detectives an inside line on illicit trade in the world’s largest burrowing clam. Volz’s superiors quickly agreed. They bought equipment and paid for Ferguson to get licensed as a geoduck fisherman. Right away, the informant took work with a Canadian shellfish company. He hit the water on September 10, 1994.
The call about the fire came the next day.
Ferguson’s girlfriend screamed at Volz through the phone. There had been an explosion on the Abalone Made. Ferguson was being ferried by helicopter to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. He’d been in the wheelhouse gassing his boat at a fuel bay on the Olympic Peninsula. When he turned the ignition the flash blew out the boat’s windows and hurled Ferguson through the air. Clothes black and tattered, he sh
uffled zombielike toward the street. Firefighters would describe a charred and hobbling monster. Second-and third-degree burns covered the bottom half of his body.
Doctors found the damage confined mostly to his legs. The informant needed skin grafts and faced weeks of painful recovery. At Ferguson’s insistence, Volz and Harrington visited the burn unit. They fussed over the wounded criminal for weeks like concerned parents. He thanked them profusely, sometimes blubbering like a child. The detectives took shifts at the hospital as Ferguson underwent surgery.
Volz didn’t know what to think. Was the fire an accident or sabotage? Who knew Ferguson was a snitch? He learned through back channels that fire investigators had mixed theories. No one could dismiss the possibility that Ferguson had been targeted. Volz’s superiors had questions, too, but Volz insisted the agency use discretion. If wildlife detectives snooped around the fire, it would only raise questions that could put Ferguson in more danger.
Three weeks later, when Ferguson left the hospital with a hundred square inches of fresh skin attached to his legs, investigators didn’t know much more about what had caused the explosion. Loaded on painkillers, Ferguson walked the remains of his boat with a deputy sheriff. They found a fuel-tank vent hose lying in the bilge; it should have been clamped to a fitting in the hull that vented fuel over the side. Explosive vapors had leaked into the engine room and sparked when Ferguson turned the ignition. Had it jostled loose or been intentionally dismantled? “There is no explanation as to how the vent tube ended up unhooked,” the deputy wrote in his report. The fire’s origins would never be resolved.
Ferguson emerged from the incident grateful for the attention Volz had paid during his hospital stay and begged Volz to let him continue as an informant. He said it gave him a sense of mission. That fall and winter, Ferguson went back undercover, keeping tabs on geoduck fishermen and helping set up small buys of illegal seafood.