Shell Games

by Craig Welch

  There is no accounting for the strange relationships that develop between cops and informants. Ferguson treated Volz like a sibling. He shared petty grievances. He fretted about a friend who landed in the hospital with the bends. He complained about his girlfriend. He whined about the cost of a ruined boat propeller. He confided to Volz that the guys he knew in prison usually cheered for the cops on TV.

  Volz listened dutifully and wrote it all down. He could be brusque and combative when he thought Ferguson was out of line, but he developed a grudging respect for the informant. Not that Volz actually trusted him. He made the informant contact him daily. Ferguson had to keep meticulous notes. Not only could he not make illicit transactions without approval, but he also could make few decisions entirely on his own. Every move first had to go through his handler. Ferguson didn’t mind and kept delivering through the end of the year, offering new tidbits that led detectives deeper into the geoduck trade.

  On a wet January morning six months after his surveillance at the Chinese restaurant, Volz slumped in a vehicle once again, this time behind the darkened windows of an SUV. It was 1995, and Ferguson’s work had led Volz to a highway park and ride south of Seattle where he planned to videotape an illegal sale from a safe distance. But a red and silver Honda CRX screeched into the adjacent spot, and Volz found his suspect working two feet away.

  Volz tried not to laugh. The driver struggled to jam several fifty-five-gallon cans of stolen geoducks into a car barely large enough to pack a bag of groceries. Wet shellfish dribbled onto the backseat. Then the driver peeled out with the hatchback propped open. Other detectives fell in behind in unmarked cars.

  The man made a stop, transferring his cargo to a white van, which then hit Interstate 5 and headed south. By the time Volz caught up with the crew following the van, it was crossing multiple lanes of traffic and slipping quickly toward exits only to immediately pull back onto the highway. Volz had expected a modest sale of stolen shellfish, but this guy moved like a professional, cutting and weaving as if trying to lose a tail.

  Volz and the other fish cops followed for three hours from Washington into Oregon, fearing with each mile that they would run out of gas. When he crossed the border with stolen goods, the driver had committed a federal crime. In Portland, the men watched the driver stop and transfer his load into a midsize seafood warehouse. That suggested to Volz that they had stumbled onto a network. The detectives backed off, not sure of the scope. They already had been communicating with the Feds. This new development confirmed that they were on to something new, but figuring out exactly what might take some time.

  The detectives regrouped. Weeks later they confronted the van’s driver, who confessed that he’d bought stolen clams for years. He said he shipped them to the Oregon warehouse, where buyers then shipped them to Brooklyn. This driver told detectives he was not alone. Thousands upon thousands of illegal shellfish—maybe more—were regularly changing hands on the water, then crossing state lines and moving overseas.

  There was no telling how big this mess could get, but Ferguson wouldn’t stick around to find out. One day that winter, in 1995, a fellow fisherman accused him of being an informant and rammed his boat. Days later another fisherman accosted him. Ferguson that spring finally called Volz in a panic. Volz always knew this day would come. Anxiety from the explosion was resurfacing. Ferguson made clear that he wanted out. Volz reassured his informant, but he could tell it didn’t take. Working for the cops took time yet paid only a meager stipend, and Ferguson no longer had the same zeal. He wanted to move on and start a new life, and Volz knew he couldn’t really demand much more. Within months, Ferguson quit. He packed up and moved to Alaska. Volz would never see him again.

  Volz considered the implications for his investigation. Ferguson had been a great inside player—an outlaw with a reputation who got them close to dirty fishermen. Most of the leads they now had originated with Ferguson. The man had charm, chutzpah, and intelligence. Informants like that didn’t come along often, and Volz couldn’t imagine where he would ever find another.

  chapter two

  LARGER THAN LIFE

  Inside a restaurant on a sunny day five months later, several men packed a table and ate seafood. They were big guys and they anchored the table like sturdy pilings. Doug Tobin, as always, did much of the talking. Tobin had telephoned diving instructor Dennis Lucia asking for help becoming a commercial diver. Lucia had agreed that they should meet here, at Pearls by the Sea, in the southern Puget Sound village of Purdy.

  It was a hot August afternoon, between the lunch and dinner rush, and the manager fluttered about while they talked. He readied the pie case and milkshake machine for the coming crush of summer cabin renters. In a few hours the dinner patrons would crowd in, demanding salmon, fried prawns, steak, and crab. For the moment, though, the men had the dining room to themselves.

  Doug told Lucia that he and his brother John were Native Americans from Puget Sound’s Squaxin Island Tribe. They made their money catching fish, mostly salmon. The brothers netted chinook in August, chased coho into October, and hunted chum through early winter. Between seasons they often logged in Alaska. Doug had operated heavy equipment at gold mines and construction sites, but mostly the brothers stitched together lives from the sea, seining for perch, hauling halibut and lingcod, or digging manila clams from the beach. Now they wanted to dive for shellfish.

  The men talked and ate. The restaurant overlooked the water, and through rows of windows they could watch tides lap against Purdy Spit, a mile-long sandbar that corralled a huge brackish backwater lagoon. Gray whales, frequent visitors to Puget Sound, sometimes strayed into this lagoon and swam in circles for days before finding their way out. Lucia noticed that Tobin spoke in a circuitous stream and got lost in tangents before getting back to his point, but he usually managed to get his audience to hang with him. Three words rattled in Lucia’s head as he sized up his new client—larger than life.

  Doug Tobin had always been big, but at forty-three he was as dense and meaty as an aging pro wrestler. He kept his black and silver mane long, and it curled at times into ringlets that piled up on one another. He could have passed for Louis the XIV, if the Sun King had favored flannel shirts open to his ribs and had worn a whale-tooth necklace.

  Tobin possessed a wrestler’s showmanship, too. When he told stories he performed them with arched eyebrows, elbow squeezes, winks, and one-liners. He dismissed an ex-business partner with a wave: “No whale in the ocean has a bigger blowhole than that guy.” Emphasizing a point, he frequently cupped a hand to his ear: “What’s that you say?” He would then proceed to answer his own question. He followed the news and spoke perceptively about world affairs but had quit school early and was prone to malapropisms. He frequently exploded with off-color comic rants and introduced his stories with such fanfare that few knew which were true: “What I’m going to tell you will blow you out of this room.”

  Doug and John had been raised in logging camps around hard men. They drank coffee in grade school and slept through recess, tired from cutting trees after class. When fishing icy waters, Doug had been known to urinate on his hands for warmth. Nicks and cuts scarred his big palms after years of grabbing fish by their razor-toothed mouths. The boys had grown up fast and with exacting standards. When school shut down the week of JFK’s assassination, their father had the brothers net salmon for money. Another time, Doug’s father professed his annoyance that Doug couldn’t yet fix the car’s brakes. Doug was ten.

  Doug’s talent and ego and the demands placed on him as a kid propelled him toward a certain perfectionism. Fascinated by Native American wood carvings, Doug pared Salish masks and totem poles from cedar planks and cut intricate pieces that landed in museums and galleries. He was one of the Northwest’s best fishermen. He worked hard enough that he and a friend once slept in puddles on the floor of a cramped topless skiff during a hard rain while gathering salmon. It was a miserable night for the friend, who woke and found Doug hap
pily hauling in a full net.

  Both brothers could be intense—John spoke rarely and smiled less—but Doug was a charmer, a prankster, a benefactor, and a bully. He bought diapers for needy neighbors and Easter dresses for a struggling single-mother’s daughters, and when his neighbor’s business had a bad year, Doug quietly filled the family’s freezer. He taught people to fish, sponsored youth teams, worked with troubled tribal teens, and was quick to loan money to those in need. Yet his teasing was merciless and sometimes bordered on cruel. As a kid he talked friend Steve Sigo into getting plowed on hard liquor and then for kicks told Sigo’s father what his son had done. Another time, Doug, returning from a hunting trip, found Sigo digging clams on a beach. He fired several shots in Sigo’s direction, apparently just to watch his friend squirm. Though Sigo knew Doug wouldn’t actually shoot him, Doug was the only kid he ever ran from. As an adult Doug could be physically menacing and was sent to prison twice for violent crimes, but he was often disarmingly carefree and magnetic. He could be arrogant or self-effacing, at times in the same sentence, his broad mouth hinting at laughter, whether or not he was amused. An entourage of buddies trailed him like a prophet. A handful of friends called him Elvis.

  Listening to him in the restaurant, Lucia had to admit it: He liked Doug immediately. The man was funny and good-natured, a natural salesman and entrepreneur. Too many would-be divers approached the trade casually, but the Tobin brothers took the idea of dive training seriously, as they did anything that involved fishing. The men wanted to learn fast, but Lucia could tell they wanted to learn right. Puget Sound was in the midst of a major shellfish boom. They wanted to get trained because they thought they were missing out. And they were.

  Nearly a century and a half earlier, Washington’s first territorial governor had swindled Native tribes, giving them cash and taking land and pushing them onto reservations. He signed treaties that ensured Indians retained rights to gather fish “in common with” non-Indians—a phrase that would be fought over for nearly twelve decades. Fishing in the Pacific Northwest would become a path to riches, but whites came to control the entire industry. In 1974 a federal judge changed everything. He reaffirmed treaties that gave Puget Sound tribes rights to half the catch of fish. Less than a year before Tobin met Lucia, another judge extended the ruling to include marine invertebrates, spineless creatures like razor clams and butter clams, other shellfish and crab. Tribes had only to follow particular rules.

  The Tobin brothers saw the exploding demand for geoducks. Like others, they wanted to capitalize on the rush and join Puget Sound’s growing armada of clam divers. They were eager to squeeze into wet suits and head beneath the waves.

  After the world’s largest ocean pushes past the granite peaks and ancient conifers that line the Strait of Juan de Fuca, it plunges on toward an archipelago of nearly eight hundred small islands, formed by the tips of underwater mountains. Half of the San Juan Islands are so tiny they disappear under swollen tides. The visible ones poke through mounded and lumpy, like the rough backs of giant half-submerged crocodiles. South of these islands, the sea curls into a comma, and the blue-gray ocean becomes Puget Sound.

  The Sound stretches north to south more than one hundred miles. It swirls along crooked shorelines and around serrated peninsulas, pushes into fingery inlets and fills a long channel called Hood Canal. This creates so many miles of squiggly coastline that, if unfurled, it would stretch from British Columbia to the tip of the Baja Peninsula. Pacific seawater splashes against these shores and washes with fresh snowmelt pouring in from ten thousand creeks and rivers. That water ferries plants and insects from disparate terrains—the snowfields of an active volcano, the fertile mossy duff of rain forests, remnant bunchgrass prairies. The food and snowmelt churn with icy jets of seawater, which rise from depths of up to nine hundred feet. It’s a cocktail that nourishes one of the most ecologically productive marine systems in the world. “Nothing can exceed the beauty of these waters,” U.S. Naval Captain Charles Wilkes wrote upon entering Puget Sound for the first time in 1841. “I venture nothing in saying there is no country in the world that possesses waters equal to these.”

  The Sound is awash in the beautiful and the bizarre. Porpoises and killer whales skip across the surface. Crystal jellyfish pulsate in the depths, aglow with ethereal light. There are pink lumpsucker fish shaped like Ping Pong balls, and weird noise-making swimmers: grunting sculpins, croakers that drum and groan, and a toadfish called the plainfin midshipman, which coaxes females into depositing eggs by humming.

  Even in this world one peculiar organism stands out: Panopea generosa, the geoduck. Glistening and pale, or coarse and leathery as a bicycle tire, the geoduck’s ribbed neck, or siphon, can stretch the length of a bowling pin or recoil to a fat and wrinkled nub. The clam is immense and, to many, vile, resembling an elephant’s trunk, an aardvark’s snout, or, most obviously, the reproductive organ of a Clydesdale stud. Few who’ve seen a geoduck forget the experience.

  The geoduck is a Pacific Northwest celebrity and a lurid punch line—oversize, ugly, and still somehow charming. One boutique seafood wholesaler pitches geoducks as an erotic gift “sure to lead quickly from the dinner table to the bedroom.” A cable television show host tweaked Mae West’s famous wisecrack: “Is that a geoduck in your pocket or are you just happy sashimi?” Holding a geoduck on a visit to Seattle in the 1980s, the Today show’s Jane Pauley quipped, “God does have a sense of humor.”

  Such attention can seem excessive for a bivalve that wiles away decades buried in muck. The geoduck’s name comes from the Salish Indian phrase gweduc, meaning “dig deep,” which is what young geoducks do. A baby geoduck uses a tiny muscular foot to tunnel slowly into the seafloor. Over time, the geoduck gets bigger and burrows deeper. Eventually its shell ends up cocooned several feet down with only its neck poking through the mud and into the water. Here the clam will remain, fixed in its burrow until death.

  Geoduck, Panopea generosa

  Geoducks can grow to fourteen pounds and live more than 150 years. (The oldest geoduck lived to be 168. Another clam species, Arctica islandica, the ocean quahog, is the planet’s longest-living animal. One found off Iceland lived four hundred years.) Geoducks produce growth rings on their shells much like rings on trees, and researchers measure their width to track global climate changes. Puget Sound geoducks can so accurately reflect severe weather across the globe that a clam plucked from the Northwest can offer a fossil record of a poor monsoon season that sparked famine in India a century earlier.

  Smaller related clams exist in Argentina, Japan, and New Zealand, but Puget Sound is the geoduck capital of the world. Rows of geoduck siphons protrude in clusters from the seafloor like old-growth forests of the sea. As with Douglas fir trees or king salmon, these mollusks are a symbol of Northwest pride, an elaborate caricature of the region’s abundance. Evergreen State College in the capital city of Olympia, a progressive alternative school that eschews grades and collegiate conventions, claims the necky clam as its mascot. At basketball games, students chant, “Go, geoducks go / Through the mud and the sand, let’s go.” In a speech during the faculty’s founding retreat in 1971, botany instructor Al Wiedemann lauded the geoduck’s craning neck. “Now that’s real flexibility,” Wiedemann said to rolling giggles. “And what is Evergreen but flexible?” In Three Feet Under, documentary filmmaker and Seattle native Justin Bookey’s love letter to the clam, Wiedemann, in a sweater and horn-rimmed glasses, leans against a podium and describes how the geoduck embodies the spirit of Evergreen’s mission. “His most compelling quality is that he’s totally nonaggressive,” Wiedemann says. Hence the laid-back school’s motto: Omnia Extares, “Let it all hang out.”

  Geoducks can be dug from the mudflats during the lowest tides of the year, and in early summer one waterfront bar, The Geoduck Tavern, hosts a contest: The patron plucking the biggest clam drinks for free. But most of the Northwest’s millions of geoducks are found in deep water, and fishermen with diving gear
have legally collected them for sale as seafood since 1970. Because geoducks live so long, it’s difficult for scientists to measure the long-term impacts of fishing, so commercial geoduck diving is tightly regulated, with strict limits set on when and where divers can take clams. Laws limit divers to daylight hours so official government monitors can watch the harvest and make sure no diver takes more than the quota.

  Through the pinking gray of dawn these divers come each day in specialized boats with the cabins pushed forward to clear space for diesel generators and air compressors. With names like Gold Rush and Rawhide, the thirty-two-foot trawlers and forty-foot charter boats slice through rolling chop. The fishermen, in jeans and tattered sweats, cotton hoodies and fleece vests, anchor their boats off designated spots in fir-lined peninsulas and coves. Amid lines, hoses, and chest-high stacks of plastic milk crates, divers clip seventy-pound weights to their waists or ankles. They wear heavy boots instead of flippers, and when they slip into the wash they breathe through an umbilical hose attached to an air supply aboard the boat. The law restricts them to waters less than seventy feet deep; going deeper would increase the odds that they would need to recover in decompression chambers.

  An electronic intercom links divers to the deck, where their tinny grunting can be heard amid the hiss and pop of loudspeakers. Attentive captains can determine a diver’s well-being by listening to each breath. Down below, the divers crawl over the sand armed with a water spray gun called a “stinger.” They look for the tip of a geoduck siphon, a tiny figure eight poking through the muck like binocular lenses. Then the diver grabs this flesh and turns the water gun on the sand to clear it away. The diver frees the clam from the mud and packs the catch in a bag the size of a one-man hot-air balloon, which he sends to the boat on a line hauled by a winch. By the time the divers pop above the surf, the crews onboard are already placing the geoducks in plastic crates, which they heave on top of one another until the clams pile up like glistening stacks of hundred-dollar bills.