Shell Games

by Craig Welch

  When it came to training divers, Dennis Lucia was an obvious choice. He had worked below the waves since the 1970s, removing batteries and hazardous material from the Gulf of Alaska for the Coast Guard. He worked the Prince William Sound cleanup when the Exxon Valdez dumped eleven million gallons of crude in 1989. By the early 1990s, would-be clammers jammed his answering machine, offering bonuses if he moved them ahead in line or would squeeze months of training into a weekend. By the time Lucia heard from Doug Tobin, he already had scheduled a class for Squaxin Island Indians. He asked tribal leaders if he could add the brothers. The tribe said no. The Tobin boys, he was told, did not always play well with others.

  Lucia, unperturbed, agreed to give the brothers a special class. They met at John’s house across the spit. The Tobin meticulousness was everywhere in the home: the grass trimmed and edged, the outbuildings freshly painted and scrubbed. In a spotless kitchen, Lucia went over written material—pressure equalization, nitrogen narcosis. John asked questions. Doug barely paid attention. Still, when Lucia started grilling the brothers, Doug recalled the essence of every lesson.

  They rocketed off on a sunny morning, puttering into the sheltered waters of an isolated shark-fin-shaped bay. John dived first and struggled to orient himself. When his turn came, Doug took obvious pleasure in being underwater. Geoduck fishing requires patience and a supple grasp of body mechanics, the kind that astronauts need when grappling with lug nuts. Fishermen wrestle constantly for leverage as they drag hundreds of feet of heavy line in a nearly weightless environment. When currents grow swift, the divers strain to stay put, jamming their spray nozzles, their stingers, in the ground for balance like mountaineers leaning on ice axes. Inattentive divers get tangled in their lines or wrapped into balls around boat anchors. Some complain of being lifted off the bottom by tidal forces that feel like hurricanes.

  That environment can kill, and often has. In 1988 a seafood diver’s weight belt came undone below, sending him so quickly to the surface that he fell unconscious, rolled onto his face, and drowned. The next year, a diver surfaced with no mask, one fin, and blood rushing from his ears, nose, and mouth. He died within minutes. Another diver’s weight belt and water line cinched around his air hose, suffocating him as effectively as a noose. Whales crash against geoduck boats and pin divers on the bottom. A gray whale once nosed through the silt and actually struck geoduck diver Mark Mikkelsen. Earlier in the day he had seen the whale grinding its nose in the mud and gyrating and twisting its body. Perhaps attracted to the vibration of water through Mikkelsen’s hose, the whale later plopped down on Mikkelsen’s lines, trapping him in place. A few seconds later, the creature lost interest. Thinking it was gone, Mikkelsen resumed digging. Then the whale smacked his back, flattening him as if he’d been slammed by a two-by-four. After righting himself Mikkelsen watched the barnacled snout nose back toward him through the silt. He could have reached out and swatted it. The whale hovered momentarily and was gone.

  Doug did not seem unnerved by the dangers. Instead he focused on the world opening before him. Geoduck divers saw sights few others did: rare territorial sixgill sharks, some reaching sixteen feet, and great Pacific octopuses with flaming red bodies. Divers came whisker-to-whisker with barking thousand-pound Steller’s sea lions, which could appear, in confrontation, like underwater grizzlies. While geoduck fishermen worked, spiny dogfish, small sharks with mildly toxic dorsal fins, swarmed their mesh bags of geoducks like packs of hungry Rottweilers, the fierce nippers bumping divers in the rear.

  After their training, Doug and John Tobin motored their boats in and out of coves while they gnawed on cigars, muscles rippling under their tank tops. A fishing buddy helped set up John’s boat while Doug found his own partner and tried to gain a competitive edge. He planned to get a seafood broker’s license and buy from Indian divers. He suspected they would offer him discounts if he paid in cash.

  Almost immediately, Doug said, he saw corruption. Everywhere he looked someone ran a scam. Scuba shops sold divers ancient weight belts, cheap dive computers, and tattered dry suits. “Everybody blew smoke up our asses,” Doug later said. “It started with the dive shops. They’d have you getting into this big old huge bullshit suit that made you look like Winnie-the-Pooh. Nobody bothered saying, ‘If you want a real suit, get ready to drop three thousand dollars for crushed neoprene titanium with Kevlar knees and lugger boots.’ We weren’t talking about weekend-warrior diver bullshit. We were talking about commercial harvest!”

  Doug settled on gear and focused on finding clams. Sophisticated buyers and connoisseurs choose clams based on presentation. Parts of the Sound grow clams with gnarled, dirty siphons, which divers dismiss as “footballs” or “hand grenades.” They fetch less money than perfect clams with gleaming ivory necks. But one can’t judge a geoduck’s quality until pulling it from the muck, and divers can’t legally throw back unburied clams. Freed from their burrows, geoducks can’t rebury themselves and are immediately devoured by crabs and flounder. To make sure divers don’t take only the choicest clams and leave the lower-quality mollusks to die wasted in the mud, laws require them to keep every one they dig.

  A diver’s best hope is to fish an area populated by an abundance of high-quality clams. That isn’t easy. Millions upon millions of clams are off-limits, either because beds are polluted or to allow already-fished geoduck tracts to recover, or simply because the area is too ecologically sensitive. Within open fishing grounds divers jockey for position, often arguing over who gets to work the best beds. The disputes lead to arguments and fistfights and conflicts among boat captains. One crew even tried to bean rivals by chipping golf balls off their boat’s deck.

  It didn’t take long to see how things worked. Some fishermen cheated by diving illegally at night when no one watched. Others sold clams under the table. People Doug had known his whole life poached from waters he’d fished since childhood. A friend harvested twice as many clams each day as were tallied by official monitors. The rest he bagged and stashed on the bottom so they wouldn’t count against his quota. Late at night he slipped out and dived with a headlamp to retrieve them. Another man, tight with local politicians, fished for and sold so many geoducks illegally he bought a home and a sports car with the proceeds. Doug told friends that he’d heard the man’s girlfriend kept a diary of his crimes.

  Less than a year into his business, any edge Doug thought he had was gone. So many people made money illegally collecting clams that Doug’s initial business plan sounded quaint. A friend and fish broker took Doug aside and told him about acquaintances at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. He said the detectives there might be interested in what Doug saw. This broker had taken previous complaints to the cops and had found the detectives responsive. They had been willing to look into poaching allegations. The broker said Tobin should share what he’d seen with a wildlife investigator—someone like Kevin Harrington or Ed Volz.

  The fish broker also dropped Doug Tobin’s name to the detectives. The salesman suggested the Native fisherman could help them clamp down on poaching. He said Tobin was actually quite willing.

  The first thought that registered for Volz: not another informant. By the summer of 1996, Volz had gotten used to working again without Dave Ferguson. He was no longer sure he was ready to take on another snitch. Informants were like unruly teenagers. They needed handlers twenty-four hours a day. Every mole Volz had known had wanted to be his buddy. When wives or girlfriends kicked them out, they wanted to tell him their sad stories. When they couldn’t pay their bills they wanted their friend the cop to loan them money. Informants had called Volz late at night when he was with his family just because they were out and a bit bored. Plus informants always thought they knew more than the police. Now that Volz had gotten his old life back he wasn’t eager to give it up again so fast. But he and Detective Harrington agreed to talk it through.

  Volz and Harrington worked from a satellite bureau north of Seattle, a white single-story wareh
ouse tucked behind a Boston Market restaurant. Volz’s office was a cheaply carpeted windowless square at the end of a row of pushpin cubicles. In it he stuffed bookcases with case files in three-ring binders and filled a shelf with treatises like The Textbook of Fish Diseases. Volz constantly redecorated, as if to make up for the soulless architecture. He tacked strings of confiscated eagle feathers next to a hanging collection of Bowie knives or taped wanted posters for serial poachers alongside a sushi chart. A few months later it’d all come down and he’d hang photographs of trophy salmon. For a while he displayed a wall-length map of the western United States, highlighting every place a road-weary cop could find a Comfort Inn.

  Volz and Harrington huddled inside and hashed out the pros and cons of taking on Tobin. They couldn’t shake their reluctance; the detectives were deep into their investigation of geoduck trafficking and they weren’t sure they were prepared to start managing someone new, not after the handholding and scare they’d had with Ferguson. The boat explosion may not have been fatal, but it very easily could have gone another way.

  Tobin also sounded like another high-maintenance guy. Volz hadn’t technically ever met Doug—he could tell a few stories about seeing him at work—but other cops had, and Volz had checked him out. The fisherman’s big personality was well known on the water. The detectives worried Tobin might be difficult to corral. And there was a history of bad blood between Northwest tribes and wildlife officers that might make it hard for either side to maintain trust.

  On the other hand, doing nothing wasted an opportunity. Geoduck theft in Puget Sound was exploding, and Volz saw stopping it as more than just a job.

  Volz had gone from high school to the army to college and then to work, hiring on as a fish cop in 1976. Early on he patrolled marine waters at night to make sure fishermen followed the rules. Over time he came to appreciate Puget Sound’s delightful peculiarities. Early in his career, while patrolling in his thirty-two-foot bowpicker Volz had caught some commercial salmon fishermen working at night in a closed area. He ordered the boatmen to haul in their gear, and as one pulled up his net, an enormous fish tail broke the surface, snared in the webbing. Volz and the stunned fishermen could see only the narrow muscle linking the creature’s spotted back to its tail fin, the caudal peduncle, but already it stretched the length of Volz’s boat. This was no orca or blue whale, but a bafflingly large fish. Volz and the men quarreled over its identity even after a two-hundred-foot research vessel arrived to pull it free. Before the research crew could hoist the net and untangle the fish, the creature slipped its noose and plunged into the black sea.

  A week later the mystery fish washed up dead near Seattle, its tail mangled and bloody. It was a whale shark, the world’s largest fish, a docile, prehistoric-looking filter feeder. Whale sharks can reach sixty-five feet. Their mouths open wider than doorways and contain three thousand vestigial teeth. They typically reside in tropical waters around reefs off the Caribbean or South Pacific. No one could explain why it had turned up in Puget Sound.

  For Volz, the incident summoned everything magical about the Sound, the rich mystery of the place and what it once had been. For a century the Sound’s waters had provided a seafood bounty of flaky sablefish, English sole, flounder, and Pacific whiting. Fishermen snared fat chinook with nets, filled mesh cages with shrimp, and hand-jigged for squid on November nights. Perhaps the bonanza should have lasted forever, but by the mid-1990s, it was becoming clear it might not. Scientists had come to view the Sound as a living system influenced by every organism within it. But many of its creatures were in steep decline, from overdevelopment, pollution, and simply too much fishing.

  Puget Sound was undergoing an ecological transformation, and this new order made for unusual encounters. Sea lions, once bound for extinction themselves, had made a comeback after the United States banned shooting them in the 1970s. Now they hung out near a buffet line of shipping locks, chomping the last of a dying run of steelhead. Biologists desperate to break up this snack time took extreme measures to shoo away the pinnipeds. They fired metal pellets from slingshots, shot rubber-tipped arrows from crossbows, and dropped firecrackers that exploded underwater. They even piped in killer-whale sounds to make the predators feel like prey.

  Volz knew cops couldn’t save the Sound, but their job description gave them incredible power to fight one problem: illegal fishing. The detectives considered their options. The shellfish inquiry they had started two years earlier had now ballooned to unusual proportions. The tips they picked up just kept getting weirder. They heard poachers cut hull sections from their boats to hide air compressors and pretended to troll for fish while divers hunted clams below. Someone marketed stolen geoducks from a Porsche, while another guy used a pay phone outside court to arrange one last shellfish buy before jail. Thieves traded clams for Vicodin and swapped them for untaxed cigarettes. It was crazy. By their calculation dozens of poachers were on the water every week, some smuggling tens of thousands of clams. The cops suspected the value of that theft probably surpassed several hundred thousand dollars a year. Later they would realize that wasn’t even close.

  The detectives could always use better inside information, and Tobin might fill that void. He was smart and creative and drew people to him and had spent just enough time in prison that smugglers might confide in him. He didn’t drink and wasn’t known to do drugs, and he would be the rare informant not trying to avoid a jail hitch. Tobin basically had just volunteered.

  In their office that early July, Volz and Harrington found a compromise. They would take Tobin on but make him someone else’s problem. The detectives would introduce this new informant to a federal agent—but not to just any officer. They would take him to one of the nation’s best, a federal fish cop with the National Marine Fisheries Service. Special Agent Richard Severtson was an ex–Green Beret who’d served in Vietnam, a bureaucratic elbow-swinger who’d spent years working undercover. If Tobin worked for Severtson, the detectives could avoid some of the headaches. The Feds would share the information they got from Tobin so the detectives would still benefit from his insight. And an old pro would be responsible for keeping the informant in line.

  Volz and Harrington could stay focused on their own geoduck investigations, which already managed to dominate their caseloads. It had been that way for so long now that most days they didn’t give it much thought. But sometimes it struck them as entirely preposterous. Even with all of Puget Sound’s interesting sea life—the snailfishes and tube snouts and pricklebacks and nudibranchs—this odd long-nosed clam was the thing people craved. And every poacher with a face mask thought it’d make him rich.

  chapter three

  CLAM KINGS

  The geoduck was no stranger to thieves. Since its discovery by nineteenth-century explorers, the clam had proved irresistible to crooks. The mollusk was besieged by unscrupulous seamen and researchers even before scientists had settled on what to call it.

  It began with a voyage in 1838. Under orders from President Andrew Jackson, six ships sailed from Virginia bound for the Pacific Ocean. Over the next several years, the 346 sailors of the U.S. Exploring Expedition would visit the white-tipped daggers of the Andes, Antarctica’s ice deserts, and the sun-baked shores of Sydney and Honolulu. The men would gather artifacts, map coastlines, draw navigational charts, and study distant cultures. Before the ships turned toward home, the sailors would set a course for the Pacific Northwest, where scientists would collect flowering plants, coral, otter skins, shellfish, and jars of seawater and cart it all back east in the name of science.

  This was North America’s richest period of ecological discovery, and the ships carried men who would become some of the biggest names in science. Entomologist and museum owner Titian Ramsay Peale, son of famed portrait painter Charles Willson Peale, was the expedition’s chief naturalist. Geologist James Dwight Dana would trade mollusks and argue about volcanoes and coral atolls with Charles Darwin. Also on the journey was Joseph Pitty Couthouy, a con
chologist, who joined the trip after pleading with President Jackson that the hunt for valuable seashells was as important as any exploration of natural history and would pay for itself. “In conchology, particularly, it is impossible to count the rare and undescribed species which may be discovered,” Couthouy wrote to Jackson. “This is a science which is daily awakening more notice in this country; and such collections might be made [which] would by their sale more than reimburse the Government for any outlay attendant upon the appointment of a person to fill that department.” Couthouy argued that the allure of shells and shellfish already had been embraced in Europe, where great collections sold among the wealthy for staggering sums. If Jackson wouldn’t consider sending him, Couthouy wrote, “Well General, I’ll be hanged if I don’t go, if I have to go before the mast!”

  During the trip, Couthouy gathered thousands of shellfish from Rio de Janeiro to Samoa but eventually he clashed with the expedition’s obstinate captain. Charles Wilkes was brilliant and a tyrant, and some later scholars would suggest he served as a model for Melville’s Captain Ahab. He lost men to accidents, scurvy, and cannibalism; drove his sailors to the edge of madness; and would later be court-martialed for flogging and jailing crew members. Couthouy noted bitterly in his journals that Wilkes hampered his ability to collect and store new finds. Wilkes accused Couthouy of inciting a mutiny and kicked him off the expedition in Hawaii.

  By the time the Porpoise and the war sloop Vincennes headed into the waters of Puget Sound in late spring 1841, the expedition was without its shell expert. The ships anchored at the mouth of the Nisqually River, and the men fanned out to do their exploring. Some went to the water, while others headed overland toward the Cascade Mountains or the Columbia River. When the naturalists returned, they hauled hundreds of creatures back to the ships: shrimp and barnacles tagged and shoved in jars, boxes of pelts and bird skins, thousands of pressed plants, all manner of fish and many, many varieties of shellfish. From the mudflats at the mouth of the Nisqually River someone had plucked a plump and flaccid species of burrowing clam. This would become the first geoduck described by scientists—but only because it survived a rash of thefts.