by Craig Welch
The agents belong to a family of federal wildlife cops, all with related or overlapping jurisdictions. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents police trade in endangered species and plant and animal sales on land and freshwater. Forest Service agents tackle crimes in the woods, but only within the boundaries of a national forest. National Park Service agents handle resource crimes from Yellowstone to Yosemite. Like cops with the FBI or Secret Service or Drug Enforcement Agency, most of these investigators are given the title “special agent.” Each special agent shares the advantages and shortcomings of police work for the U.S government: good pay, great benefits, and maddening internal politics.
Detectives Volz and Harrington were generally suspicious of federal cops. They usually approached the Feds for jurisdictional reasons—some crimes carry stiffer penalties in federal court. Most fish-related transgressions are simple infractions, but the crime’s severity is often linked to its scope. Catching a halibut in closed waters, for example, might lead to a state citation and a fine. Catching hundreds of halibut that way and selling them nearby could lead to a felony conviction and jail time. Organizing others to poach fish and sell them abroad could land an angler in federal prison. Such smuggling can result in conspiracy or racketeering charges or charges of violating the federal Lacey Act, a powerful wildlife-conservation law prohibiting illegal buying, selling, receiving, or transporting of plants and animals across state or federal lines.
Both detectives had been burned before, pushed aside by arrogant agents who thought they knew how to do the job better. Time and again they saw Feds swoop in, mess up, insult them and alienate their sources, and then head back to a cushy office and sell the results to their supervisors as a great case or someone else’s fault. Nothing got Harrington more worked up than reliving his interactions with special agents. Once, when he was helping a fellow detective investigate poaching of black cod and canary rockfish, the other detective suggested that they share information with a National Marine Fisheries Service agent. “I told him, ‘If you do, I guarantee you they will take over all of the cases,’” Harrington remembered. “‘There will be meetings you aren’t invited to. You will have no say in the outcome. You will be out of this case.’ And we were.” The Feds, Volz and Harrington believed, picked battles cautiously and took only cases they thought were sure things.
Federal agents, not surprisingly, saw things differently. They complained that state detectives lacked perspective. State detectives tended to see small infractions as criminally grave insults and sometimes wanted to make cases whether or not they mattered. The state cops had spent years dealing with the same bad guys and often wore their biases on their sleeves.
Still, Volz and Harrington held Severtson in high regard, even though he could be both better and worse to work with than other federal agents. He was a brilliant cop with a long record of successes, and he was too much of a troublemaker himself to use the detectives to advance his own career. But Severtson had a big personality and an ego, and was so into the role-playing of investigative work that he tended to keep secrets just because he could. Like Tobin, Severtson could be gregarious and talk to anyone about anything. Everyone who knew him joked about his elaborate stories. Those who knew him well got to watch him fabricate them on the fly. When one colleague, Special Agent Andy Cohen, called Severtson “a pathological liar,” he meant it as a compliment.
Volz and Harrington had worked with Severtson before. There was no denying his gifts. Once, the two detectives videotaped the special agent from afar while he posed as a fisherman illegally selling salmon at a restaurant’s back door. The restaurant owner, standing in the doorjamb, suddenly flipped open his wallet and closed it quickly. Severtson responded almost savagely. He whipped his head about, looking terrified. The agent and the restaurant owner chatted briefly. Then Severtson started yelling. When he finally calmed down, he completed the illegal buy. Severtson was smiling when he later explained his behavior to Volz and Harrington. The suspect had tried to play a joke, pretending to be a cop flashing a badge. Severtson, not missing a beat, had simply played along. To the detectives it had been a flawless performance.
But Severtson could also alienate his colleagues. He could appear so aloof and self-righteous that many agents refused to work with him. Even those who respected him found him mercurial. Agent Cohen once turned up the volume too loud on a listening device when he and Severtson were practicing with electronic body wires. Severtson overheard a stranger’s conversation on a nearby escalator—a brief, inadvertent moment of warrantless surveillance—and blew up. “That’s a federal offense!” he screamed at Cohen. “You could lose your job and go to jail!” When the National Park Service offered federal agents discounted entry into Carlsbad Caverns for a training exercise, Severtson refused on ethical grounds, even though the gesture was simply one government agency cutting costs for another. He disconnected the radio in his agency-issued sedan because the government hadn’t given him a car for pleasure. Behind his back, colleagues called him “Jekyll and Hyde.” Some days Severtson was their friend, other days he was something else entirely. Fellow agents only occasionally knew why.
If an agent showed insufficient interest in his job, Severtson quickly pushed the cop aside. He didn’t have patience for less than full commitment. But those who showed initiative got an education. During the early days of the Internet, while younger agents exploited new technology, Severtson pushed fundamentals. He believed in shoe-leather investigating. Rather than interviewing witnesses by phone, he made his agents show up early on Sunday mornings to catch people off guard and in person. On slow days, Severtson gathered his team members in cars and made them practice tailing one another.
Severtson’s disdain for administrators and protocol scuttled many of his shots at advancement. Fellow agents marveled at how often he talked his way into trouble. As an Oregon State Police officer in the early 1970s, Severtson once wisecracked to a fellow cop that his agency could shed all of its bad apples simply by blowing up the offices of the top brass. Headquarters caught wind and kicked off an internal investigation. The inquiry was short-lived—Severtson obviously had been joking—but the blemish trailed him.
But his investigative prowess was legendary, a reputation he cemented chasing fish pirates on the high seas. In the 1980s, squid fishermen from South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan had begun patrolling the open waters of the North Pacific using thirty-mile-long webs of plastic mesh, which they unspooled as deep-sea nets. Instead of chasing squid, they raked these floating death walls across the top forty feet of sea to illegally snag tens of millions of coho and sockeye salmon. The poachers flash-froze the fish at sea, stashed them in burlap bags, and offloaded them in open water to container ships from other countries. The practice hit the American salmon industry hard even though it wasn’t clear if the pirated fish had been born in U.S., Canadian, or Russian rivers. With fewer salmon returning in some years, domestic fishermen already struggled to get by. And even during periods when they had plenty to catch, they fought to sell it in a market flooded with illegal fish.
Working under the assumed name Dick Frambes, Severtson secretly recorded at least fifty conversations and telephone calls between smugglers. He persuaded his boss to convince Senator Frank Murkowski of Alaska to have the government front more than $1 million so Severtson could make an undercover buy of fish. At the smuggler’s demand, Severtson dropped the money in a Seattle safety-deposit box. After months of preparation, the National Marine Fisheries Service rented a refrigerated containership and met Taiwanese fishing boats two thousand miles off the mainland. After the crew started transferring the catch, a Coast Guard cutter barreled out of the mist. A C-130 transport dropped from the clouds and showered the boats with smoke bombs. The pirate boats fled, setting off a high-seas pursuit that lasted two weeks until the Coast Guard boarded the lead boat off the coast of Taiwan. Back in Seattle, Severtson stalked the head smuggler, who carried the borrowed $1.3 million out of the bank by hand in two suitcases and
into the waiting arms of police. It was at the time the nation’s largest covert fish operation. With Severtson’s help, the United Nations eventually banned high-seas drift nets and pressured an international antipoaching consortium to patrol the North Pacific.
If anyone could direct Tobin to what the cops needed, Severtson could.
The federal marine agency’s law-enforcement team worked from an industrial park in northeast Seattle, one of the farthest points from salt water in the city. But the building sat a few hundred yards from the state’s second-largest pool of freshwater, Lake Washington. Not that views mattered. The crew worked every day in cubicles in a windowless room. Severtson, the federal agency’s ASAC (assistant special agent in charge) typed his reports in his own small office where he listened to opera or classical music through headphones as large as gun-range earmuffs. He worked with his blinds shut and his door open. On the wall he kept a sign: IN GOD WE TRUST; ALL OTHERS WE MONITOR.
It was a mongrel crew. Special Agent Cohen had transferred from the National Park Service and came from a family of naturalists; his mother was an Audubon Society board member and his father led trips to the Galapagos. He was a thrill seeker with a weakness for spy movies and gadgets. Special Agent Al Samuels was a D.C. native raised by federal cops—his grandfather worked with the U.S. Capitol Police, his stepfather with the U.S. Park Police. At twenty-six, Samuels was the youngest and the most tech-savvy. He had returned to Seattle after a beachside posting in rural Oregon, where he grew so bored he almost quit. Special Agent Dali Borden came from Washington’s state wildlife agency. One of only a handful of women in law enforcement with the National Marine Fisheries Service, she felt certain old colleagues resented her advancement. She found the political maneuvering and jockeying among the Feds overwhelming but considered the agency less provincial than its state counterpart.
Within a few weeks, Severtson had a plan for a new type of investigation. Tobin would be a one-man clandestine act. He would play a version of himself and would carry a microcassette recorder in his breast pocket to tape conversations with fellow geoduck fishermen and brokers. Agents would meet him at pay phones where they might attach suction-cup pickups to the receiver so Tobin could record the calls. On rare occasions, they might attach a body wire so they could listen to conversations. The agents, led by Severtson, would work with detectives Volz and Kevin Harrington, who knew the fishermen and the buyers. Harrington, thanks to Clam Scam, had the most experience tracking geoduck harvest and shipping records. The detectives would play central roles, partnering with the Feds on some cases and chasing others on their own.
Questions lingered. Were the suspects a string of random criminals capitalizing on a hard-to-regulate market? Or were relationships organized? If so, who was at the top? The detectives knew they couldn’t take anyone’s word because everyone they spoke with had an agenda. Buyers called detectives and whispered that they suspected divers of poaching. Divers called to claim that buyers begged them to poach.
Now the cops had an untested weapon: Tobin. Volz and Harrington could sense Severtson’s excitement. The agent loved the cloak-and-dagger part of law enforcement. He rarely skipped a chance to leave his desk and chase a lead. He thought being in the field was the reason to be a cop. Working a big case, Severtson focused like few others, his hyperalert blue eyes penetrating and unnerving. One agent called them Severtson’s “hunter eyes.” Severtson’s plans for Tobin marked a new attempt at management. After years spent working undercover himself, Severtson would be a producer, not an actor. Agent Dali Borden would be Tobin’s handler, with Severtson looking on to guide and assist. Though Severtson might steer a bit from above, the ultimate success or failure would rest on Tobin.
Severtson had great confidence in his informant’s instincts. He and Tobin already seemed to share a bond, like brothers. In truth they were similar people. Both were hunters who loved to slip into the woods on weekends. Each was a chameleon and thrived on calculated risk. And Severtson saw in the informant a certain raw aptitude. Tobin’s verbal intelligence and reflexive shrewdness surfaced in conversation. Severtson had seen Tobin shift direction and recalibrate his thoughts in midsentence when he thought a listener was drifting away. Tobin’s hammy nature—like Severtson’s own—belied an intuitive grasp of people. If Tobin proved half as effective as Severtson hoped, the team could make some exceptional cases.
Still, it was a gamble. When possible, agents would stick close so that Tobin could get what they needed without entrapping suspects. Sometimes, though, Tobin would have no choice but to work alone. Cops would not be able to monitor his every action. It made Volz uneasy. He had learned with his previous informant, Dave Ferguson, that moles could get maimed or killed, even over wildlife. Tobin could blunder by doing or saying something that would jeopardize a conviction. His involvement ought to work to the cops’ advantage, but in covert wildlife work something always went wrong.
chapter five
METAMORPHOSIS: LIFE UNDERCOVER
On the surface it looks like a simple job: How tough can it be to outwit clam rustlers? Measured against cops who infiltrate drug gangs or mob snitches strung with body wire, undercover wildlife work can appear almost cushy. Chasing thieves with toucans taped to their backs, or dressing up in a gorilla suit—as one Miami agent did in 1993 to catch a buyer of black-market zoo animals—seems more like slapstick than crime fighting. But any undercover investigation demands intelligence and discipline, whether focused on cocaine rings or poachers pocketing snapping turtles. And unlike FBI agents, with their vast crews of techies, covert wildlife cops mostly work alone with little backup, even though wildlife crooks often carry guns, too.
Plus laws protecting wildlife are more bewildering than drug statutes. They vary by species and are influenced by ecology, biology, and geography. Possess just a touch of brown tar heroin and you’re a criminal. But take ownership of a flock of exotic birds and you could be a wildlife thief or a farmer. Sell a dozen common garter snakes and you’re no more a criminal than any pet store owner. Sell a dozen San Francisco garter snakes, an endangered reptile popular with underground collectors, and you might be part of an international smuggling syndicate. Supplying medical researchers with primates reared in captivity? No problem. But abduct the same species from the wilds of Indonesia, as one South Carolina lab did, and you may find yourself facing a federal indictment.
Wildlife crooks sly enough to skirt these laws for profit tend to make shrewd adversaries. For Tobin to pull off what the Feds had in mind, the informant would need to work within the rules but know how to push the right buttons and work his sources. In short, he would need the skills of a great undercover agent, someone like U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Special Agent Ed Newcomer. Considered one of the best covert operators in the business, Newcomer thrives on creativity, charisma, intellectual nimbleness, and persistence. He found out early on that even the simplest cases can disintegrate. But he learned he could recover by being a great liar.
Newcomer began figuring all this out one May afternoon inside a wing of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. The corridors that day were crawling with bug people: entomologists, bug collectors who mounted insects in display boxes, people who kept bugs as pets, bug sellers, bug buyers, artists who painted bugs, jewelers who made necklaces from bug parts, would-be tailors who knit clothing with bug designs, and adults with children who could appreciate a good praying mantis. This was one of the world’s largest annual insect shows. Folding tables formed rows of exhibitors’ booths where seated men and women hawked skittering arachnids or laminated insect-wing earrings or horned beetles from Borneo shrink-wrapped in cellophane. Visitors dickered over prices for pin-mounted scorpions or leeches swimming in Tupperware. Sixty vendors attended the fair each year, and most of them knew one another well. They bought and sold their wares on an international circuit of fairs or through eBay. Every vendor knew the butterfly baron, the guy Special Agent Newcomer had come here to meet. The butterfly baro
n got things few could.
The fifty-two-year-old man’s name was Hisayoshi Kojima—Yoshi, to his friends. Few who knew Yoshi hadn’t heard that National Geographic often hired him to scout rain forest jungles for insects. He said he kept a Mexican boy on a two-thousand-dollar-a-month retainer netting butterflies in Honduras. He owned a house in Japan and another in Los Angeles. He bragged about bribing border officials so he could sneak endangered insects out of South America. Yoshi usually got what his customers wanted, no matter how difficult or illegal it was.
If you wanted an Ornithoptera goliath samson, the golden birdwing butterfly found in the Arfak Mountains of Irian Jaya, Yoshi was the guy. If you needed live fist-size Dynastes beetles from Bolivia, Yoshi could get dozens, but they wouldn’t come cheap. He once bragged that he had sold thirty beetles in Japan for ten thousand dollars each. He could find rare swallowtail butterflies from East Mojave National Preserve or sell Papilio indra kaibabensis from Grand Canyon National Park. He snickered at warnings that collecting in those places was a federal crime. Yoshi once told a prospective buyer that eight people had been arrested for gathering green and yellow swallowtails from China, and then he offered to sell one on the spot.
Yoshi always had the rarest material at the best prices. He was thought to rake in several hundred thousand dollars a year. He was the world’s most notorious butterfly smuggler and was raiding the planet of some of its most endangered species.