by Craig Welch
Banquet foods are chosen for sensory uniqueness, an unusual texture, taste, smell, or appearance. Sluglike sea cucumbers are soaked and boiled. Shark fin is dried and shredded in soup. Abalone and fish bladders are soaked in vinegar and deep fried. Each offers a memorable feel when sliding across the tongue. They don’t look or taste quite like anything else. Tchao spent many mornings in Vancouver walking the fishing docks, hoping to find a way to make a living with his real love: seafood. After noticing Hodgson’s success, the British Columbia government had opened a small fishing industry for its own geoducks in 1976. When Tchao finally stumbled across his first elephant-trunk clam, he saw in the geoduck something reminiscent of banquet food. Everything about this creature was unique—the briny smell, the fresh tang, the crunchy flesh, and the unusual proportions. The geoduck seemed extraordinarily Chinese. Tchao toured Vancouver’s Asian restaurants, offering up this new ingredient. The chefs were taken by the clams and began slicing them for a type of fondue known as hot pot.
Tchao wasn’t alone in seeing the potential. Geoduck samples already were being sent to a high-end Hong Kong restaurant, where the creatures bobbed in cold water in a well-lit aquarium. The restaurant served meals that could run several hundred dollars. The high prices lent the clam an air of exclusivity that impressed wealthy Hong Kong businessmen. By 1984, Claude Tchao started shipping to Asia himself.
The geoduck arrived as Hong Kong and southern China were experiencing transformation. Between 1983 and 1993, the percentage of Hong Kong’s restaurants dedicated to seafood would double. And Hong Kong sat directly across the water from one of the first areas in China to boom in the wake of economic reforms. Guangdong Province was home to new factories supplying the West: garment shops, robotics plants, helicopter manufacturers, and battery makers. The number of toy factories would balloon from a dozen in 1979 to more than a thousand just eight years later. The province’s capital was a colorful center of Cantonese cuisine where diners liked to handpick their meals from bins and cages of live animals. Traditionally, only the elite could afford China’s most striking foods, but soon wealth would spread, lower classes would indulge, and many trendy food fashions would arrive via Hong Kong, where geoducks in restaurant tanks already drew admiring glances.
With Seattle three hours by car from Vancouver, it was only a matter of time before Washington divers and seafood brokers found this market, too. Japanese restaurants already diced geoduck for sashimi and baked it in mushroom casseroles. Chefs in Hong Kong served geoduck with cucumber and orange, sautéed the clams with black pepper and scallions, or dropped thin slices into a wok with broccoli for a stir-fry. Groceries in South Korea sold geoduck steaks. Soon residents of several major Chinese cities would warm themselves with brothy geoduck chowder. By the late 1980s, China’s explosion as a consumer power was just around the corner. The geoduck’s future fairly shimmered. If only China’s richest one percent ate geoducks, fishermen would eventually have more customers than they had clams. Hodgson’s path to true riches lay before him.
But geoduck fishing remained tightly controlled, and Hodgson already had more orders than he could fill. So Hodgson had been finding creative ways around the rules. He kept tighter tabs on regulators than they kept on him. He ordered divers to bring up “product” by any means necessary and paid workers to man a sixty-thousand-dollar radio surveillance system. A friendly air traffic controller warned divers about “unannounced” airplane inspections by regulators of closed areas of Puget Sound. One of Hodgson’s employees paid area residents five dollars an hour to tail state government employees who were checking to see if divers surpassed quotas. When divers were ticketed for taking too many clams, Hodgson hired them the best attorneys. Once, Hodgson and his divers told a fussy regulator that they were watching him and would find a way to get him off their backs. The regulator went home and scratched his name off his mailbox.
In June 1987, a band of protesters marched outside the United Nations in New York carrying a photograph of their bespectacled leader: biologist Richard “Dick” Long. The marchers said Long had told them that fishermen were illegally overharvesting geoducks in the Northwest to supply ravenous Asian markets. Long’s “Save the Geoduck” committee called for a clam-fishing ban and promised a summer of escalating civil disobedience until demands were met. Days later, Dick Long revealed himself as guerrilla prankster Joey Skaggs, a performance artist who made a career skewering the media. He knew nothing about clam fishing or geoducks and had caught his first glimpse of the strange mollusk only months earlier, on April Fools’ Day. Skaggs had made up everything to try a con with a phallic prop. He duped United Press International, which sent a story over the wire. A New York television station and a few radio broadcasters were also taken in, as was U.S. News & World Report, Germany’s Der Spiegel, and a handful of Japanese newspapers.
Joey Skaggs, in costume as biologist Richard “Dick” Long, holds a geoduck on the docks in Seattle.
Skaggs was giddy. “I feel so guilty,” the lifelong trickster told the New York Post’s Page Six. “I swear I’ll never do it again.” Months later, the performance artist would marvel at his unwitting prescience. His joke had brushed closer to the truth than he knew.
Rumors about Hodgson overfishing had long since worked their way to authorities. In 1979, the Washington State Patrol had secretly investigated reports that Hodgson kept cops on the payroll. The FBI, the IRS, and a federal grand jury investigated corruption and tax evasion allegations in the early 1980s but brought no charges. No one on the planet understood the geoduck industry like Hodgson. He told one friend that as an auditor he could hide financial transactions in ways no one could unearth. “They’ll never catch me,” Hodgson said.
But the clam king’s downfall had been set in motion before Skaggs’s skit. Six months earlier, on January 4, 1987, a light-hued boat with a faded cabin, the Bandito, knocked gently against the waves in Dumas Bay south of Seattle. Dumas Bay had been off-limits to clam fishing because a sewage outfall drained wastewater there from a nearby treatment plant. From a living room window, a family noticed a fishing pole on the boat bouncing around ignored in its holder while two men—one in diving gear, one in street clothes—scurried about the deck. What kind of angler ignores a fish on the line? The family called wildlife agents. A patrol boat stopped the Bandito and found a few hundred pounds of stolen clams in garbage cans in the hold. The case would have ended with a citation for fishing in closed waters if someone had not noticed that the fishermen were Hodgson executives—one was the plant manager at Washington King Clam.
Prosecutors shuttled the case to Seattle fraud prosecutor Marilyn Brenneman. The daughter of a mechanic understood workers who took physical risks for pay. She had taken on securities crimes and homicides, and actually liked complexity. She empathized with divers locked out by Hodgson’s monopoly. She and the lead investigator, wildlife cop Kevin Harrington, trekked to biology labs, studied up on shellfish ecology, interviewed divers, and scoured Hodgson’s banking and shipping records. Brenneman decided to treat Hodgson like an organized-crime boss. Although aimed at drug runners and money launderers, the state’s criminal-profiteering laws were modeled after federal racketeering statutes and could be used to stop other criminal operations, seize profits, and force crooks to forfeit property. The case that investigators put together over the next twenty months came to be known as “Clam Scam.” At the time it was the largest white-collar fraud case in Northwest history.
They learned that Hodgson had ordered divers to falsify records and that he distributed a government map of Puget Sound clam beds called “the poacher’s handbook.” He was able to drive out competitors because he overpaid for harvest leases, then propped up his bottom line by stealing clams by the tens of thousands. He paid bonuses to thieves and threatened other fishermen. When a diver tried to unionize, someone firebombed his boat. Harrington and Brenneman estimated that Hodgson had overseen the theft of $1 million in clams.
After years of being bu
llied, divers were quick to squeal. One had kept a record of crimes he’d committed on Hodgson’s orders. When the documents were subpoenaed, Hodgson urged the man to burn them, but he refused. In 1988, prosecutors charged nine people and three businesses. The government had 180 potential witnesses and 70,000 documents. Several defendants ultimately pleaded guilty. Kevin Harrington was confronted by one defendant, and the detective never forgot the flustered man’s words. “You shuffle around like you don’t have much going on upstairs,” Harrington recalled him saying. “But you’re just like that Columbo guy on TV—always thinking.” Harrington would savor the comment for years.
Hodgson insisted on fighting his case in court. The pivotal moment in his trial came when a retired diver took the stand. In a pressed pink shirt, the diver described for jurors the scariest night of his life. The Pacific Northwest is particularly susceptible to natural disasters. Wild-fires. Floods. Earthquakes. Volcanic eruptions. Some on the jury still recalled the famous windstorm in February 1979 when winds raged so fiercely they sheared off sections of a bridge across Hood Canal. Gusts topped one hundred miles an hour. Politely and methodically the diver told the court that Hodgson had ordered him to get clams that night. When the diver protested that the seas were too perilous, Hodgson threatened to have his job. Halfway through the evening, the terrified fisherman had radioed Hodgson that he couldn’t go on. Hodgson said he’d better not leave the water without a boatload of clams.
Hodgson’s lawyers stopped the trial. Hodgson pleaded guilty to trafficking, profiteering, and leading organized crime. He was sentenced to two years in prison and fined three hundred thousand dollars. Prosecutors shuttered Washington King Clam. The judge banned Hodgson for life from Washington’s fishing industry.
Before Hodgson was sentenced, prankster Joey Skaggs wrote a letter to a Washington State senator: “I had perpetrated the geoduck hoax having totally fabricated it in my mind, not imagining that it could or would be true. I don’t know if all the hoopla the hoax stirred up rattled the cages of the geoduck commercial harvesters…but I’d sure like to think so. I can’t tell you how amused I am that life imitates art.”
After “Clam Scam,” the state reorganized geoduck fishing and strengthened oversight. Regulators bragged that these improvements transformed the geoduck industry into one of the most heavily controlled fisheries in the world. They insisted problems had been linked to one greedy businessman’s monopoly. With Hodgson gone, geoduck crime would be a thing of the past.
chapter four
THE FED
Kevin Harrington shot south from Seattle toward one of the Pacific Northwest’s worst eyesores: the frontage road that parallels Interstate 5 north of Tacoma. On July 11, 1996, Harrington was finally headed down to meet Doug Tobin and introduce him to federal agents. Harrington despised driving in western Washington, and this stretch always confirmed his opinion. Every time he traveled it he got stuck behind a stop-and-go centipede of brake lights and tried to ignore the barrage of billboards, hot tub showrooms, furniture barns, fast-food joints, and chain motels. It all obscured the area’s remarkable natural beauty: Puget Sound lay just to the west, and Mount Rainier loomed in the east, its 14,411-foot summit floating above an ever-present raft of low-lying haze.
Harrington pulled into the parking lot of the Poodle Dog, a family-style café in the tiny Tacoma suburb of Fife, and strolled through double glass doors to the dining room. They had agreed to meet here because the nearby Tacoma Narrows Bridge led across the water to Gig Harbor, the peninsula community where Tobin ran Blue Raven, his small seafood company. When Tobin wasn’t on his boat or packing fish, he spent countless hours on this strip flirting with waitresses and wolfing fried food. The detectives had arranged several times to interview him, but their would-be informant had always been a no-show. Tobin blamed the missed meetings on mix-ups over rendezvous points, but it was enough of a slight to annoy Ed Volz. Trustworthy people didn’t blow off cops. The detectives decided it might be better if the more easy-natured Harrington made the trip instead. Harrington could be the one to introduce the fisherman to the cop who would decide what to do next: Special Agent Richard Severtson of the National Marine Fisheries Service.
Tobin made an immediate impression. His bracelets, rings, and gold chains and his wild hair made it difficult for Harrington to look anywhere else. Seated together in the spacious restaurant, Harrington, Severtson, and another federal agent listened as Tobin recounted precise details about a dozen poachers. Tobin told them that fishermen were hiring small skiffs with outboards to greet them on the water so they could off-load illegal geoducks before official monitors tallied the day’s take. He knew a diver who boxed illegal geoducks by the thousands in his garage. He said an antigovernment zealot who thought everyone was bugged was secretly fishing for geoduck off his speedboat and trying to get fishermen who owed him money to pay off their debts by helping him doctor paperwork. One woman had asked Tobin if he would harvest illegally and sell clams exclusively to her. In exchange she’d promised to give him a houseboat.
Tobin was a wonder in action. He spoke with authority and didn’t seem to have missed much. Geoducks were worth more than ever, thanks to rapid globalization and China’s growing wealth. Hong Kong and China were on their way to consuming more than 90 percent of the geoducks sold in the world. The lure of fast money was attracting new fishermen to Puget Sound, and Tobin knew the waters, the markets, and how to move top-drawer mollusks. He was serious, although funny, and comfortable with strangers. Harrington found himself enjoying the man’s company. And Harrington could see that Severtson enjoyed Tobin, too.
Midway through lunch Harrington knew Severtson was sold. He would find a way to put Tobin to work. Severtson was clearly charmed by the fisherman and later admitted that he thought Tobin should have been a stand-up comic. “People would have paid good money to see Doug, and he’d leave them rolling on the floor,” Severtson said. By the next afternoon Severtson’s decision was formal. The National Marine Fisheries Service registered Tobin as a confidential informant: CI#9603825.
By then the list of people stealing shellfish had grown so long that investigators had trouble keeping their suspects straight. The cops could name more than forty potential bad guys—only one was a woman—and had mapped the smugglers’ tangled alliances with a flow chart that took four pages. Dozens of lines connected circles and boxes representing poachers, unlicensed fish dealers, restaurants, and grocers. Poachers worked the water every day. Divers fetched six dollars or more a pound for good clams, and good divers could gather several hundred pounds in a few hours. Single three-pound geoducks resold in Asia’s retail markets for the equivalent of $60 to $100 U.S., sometimes more.
This seafood crime wave was gathering steam in part because similarly creative smugglers in Asia had found new ways to tap the Chinese market. Beijing had embraced high import tariffs to limit products from the West. But through the mid-1990s, according to the U.S. government, a half-billion dollars in American wildlife and agricultural products—from fresh vegetables and tree nuts, to oranges and frozen chicken meat—illegally crossed from Hong Kong to China. The United States suspected that 20 percent of the 2.5 million boxes of apples sold to Hong Kong by Washington farmers were funneled into China this way. The seafood operations were among the most lucrative.
Night after night, shipments of seafood arrived in Hong Kong from all over the world: lobsters from Australia, abalone from South Africa or the United States, and geoduck clams from the Pacific Northwest. These food items typically moved into China through its southern exotic-food capital, Guangzhou. Truck drivers in Hong Kong ferried the imports to a beach where a cargo ship moved them a few miles offshore to a rural fishing village, Kat O, also known as Crooked Island. From there, dozens of poor fishermen in speedboats motored the catches across to Chinese beaches in nearby Yantian. Efficient boaters made the trip three or four times before dawn and earned the equivalent of a month’s wage in a single night. Hong Kong fishermen sometim
es made enough money to hire boat pilots and lookouts and bribe Chinese customs agents. Beijing’s occasional smuggling crackdowns sometimes left crates of clams dying on the dock and fishermen facing prison time—or worse—in China’s unpredictable justice system. A few smugglers were killed in boating accidents or in gunfire during confrontations with Chinese coast guard officials. But the payoff was great because demand just kept rising. One restaurant seafood buyer in Shenzhen would later tell a local Chinese newspaper: “If there were no smuggled seafood the previous night, seventy percent of the restaurants would have nothing to cook the next day.”
Back on the other side of the Pacific, poachers jockeyed for a chance to reach that market. Money was suddenly floating around everywhere. The wildlife cops around Puget Sound got tips about tax evasion and mail fraud. They knew that one regulator, assigned to oversee and tabulate the harvest, collected a hundred dollars each day in bribes from divers looking to avoid quotas. It was so easy to make money selling stolen clams, they heard, that a diver’s biggest fear was setting the price too low. Legal divers paid a tax on harvested geoducks. Overly low prices were a sign to competitors that a diver’s clams were being taken outside the law.
There were far too many cases for state detectives to track alone, so they already had been in regular contact with the Feds, which in this case meant Severtson’s agency. The fisheries service oversees the health of the country’s marine creatures, and the agency’s law-enforcement branch is like an FBI for sea life. The agents work under the Department of Commerce, a carryover from days when fish were seen as just commodities. They investigate fishermen who take rifle shots at sea lions or boaters who harass whales. They police the import and export of everything from lobsters and rockfish to tuna and shrimp. If sharks are killed illegally anywhere in the world, their fins cleaved for soup and smuggled into U.S. restaurants, a National Marine Fisheries Service agent will investigate. If someone sells undocumented scrimshaw carved from sperm-whale teeth, fisheries agents will check that out, too.