Shell Games

by Craig Welch

  “Have fun in there,” Newcomer shouted, teasing, as Yoshi stepped from the car. He had heard and understood Yoshi, but Newcomer wanted his reaction to seem ambiguous.

  Yoshi laughed and headed inside.

  Newcomer was thrilled to be back in Yoshi’s good graces, but the agent now balanced two operations, alternating between different personalities in different underworlds. Yoshi was frumpy and middle-aged and had just confided a romantic interest in men. He was manipulative, frequently suspicious, and smart. Ted Nelson had to remain gentle and well spoken. If Yoshi suspected anything, he’d vanish in a flash.

  The pigeon breeders, on the other hand, were a menacing pride of lions. Some were ex-cons who carried weapons or made their money dealing coke. One was wanted in connection with a rape, another bragged about fights he had won in an L.A. jail. Another sported gang tattoos across his back. If these guys figured Nelson for a cop, they would discard him in a ditch.

  The day after the Korean barbecue they met again. Yoshi pulled a small, clear plastic box from a fanny pack with five cocoons inside. Papilio indra kaibabensis, from the Grand Canyon. Yoshi wanted to know if Ted Nelson could get more. The indras could earn them a fortune in Japan, he said. Newcomer couldn’t believe his luck. Yoshi apparently trusted him fully.

  Newcomer returned that weekend to San Bernardino and the pigeons. The following Wednesday, in an online video conference on Skype, Yoshi promised to send the Queen Alexandra from Japan. That weekend, Newcomer hit a new bird show. Sometimes he would spend all day talking about killing hawks, then head home and grill Yoshi about bugs while Yoshi made lewd comments about sex.

  The identity shuffling began to take a toll. Newcomer kept a checklist on his dresser to remind himself of what to wear or carry, depending on which version of himself would surface that day. If his undercover phone rang while he was relaxing with friends and family, he’d change his voice pitch and tempo and talk illegal activities as Ted Nelson. At times he felt dirty and a little guilty, as if he had actually done something wrong. Then he would hang up, and friends and family would expect him to snap back to Ed Newcomer. Once, driving with his mother on vacation in Colorado, Newcomer pulled over to take an undercover call. Newcomer could see that his coarse gang talk worried his mother. The strain spread to Newcomer’s wife, who expressed frustration that her husband always made time for the suspects.

  Ted Nelson, on the other hand, was making great progress. Before leaving for Japan, Yoshi had looked over Nelson’s list and agreed to supply every species on it. During a video chat, Yoshi held endangered Corsican swallowtails up to the camera from Kyoto. He would sell six for seven hundred dollars a pair, even though they were banned from trade. Yoshi confessed that his personal butterfly inventory now topped a half-million dollars. He also promised he would send Newcomer endangered peacock swallowtails. In exchange, Yoshi wanted Arizona maps. He planned to mark areas in the Grand Canyon where Ted Nelson should start collecting. Then he offered Newcomer the rare hybrid Southeast Asian butterflies Ornithoptera allotei. The price: thirty thousand dollars.

  Newcomer’s packages began rolling in. Six weeks after their reunion at the bug fair, Nelson had bought twenty-six thousand dollars’ worth of illegal butterflies. Yoshi had offered three hundred thousand dollars more in merchandise, and now Newcomer had digital video of Yoshi committing felonies. He faced one last hurdle: his suspect was in Japan, with no immediate plans to return.

  The smuggler ultimately provided the solution. He grew bolder the more the men talked, which was now almost daily. He openly acknowledged an attraction to Ted Nelson. Yoshi made lurid comments when dickering over prices. He asked Nelson to remove his shirt when showing cocoons to the camera, and though Newcomer tried to steer them back to butterflies, an idea began to percolate.

  The roller pigeon case would go on for months. Newcomer eventually set up hidden cameras outside a breeder’s backyard, and fellow agents pawed through the man’s garbage. In a white plastic bag they found a dead hawk dripping blood. Newcomer sent the carcass to Ashland, Oregon, where the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service operates the world’s most sophisticated wildlife forensics laboratory. Scientists identified the species as Accipiter cooperii, a Cooper’s hawk. They determined it had died from “massive blunt force trauma to the head and spine.”

  In a recorded telephone call the next day, the breeder told Nelson he never shot hawks, preferring instead to pummel them with wood. “You’ll see,” he told Nelson. “You get a lot of frustration out.” When Nelson asked how he pulled it off, the pigeon man happily explained in detail. After catching the hawk in a trap “you can just open it slightly, about three inches, just get a stick in there…Once you ping them one good time they’re going to be somewhat dazed and then you can just go for it.” Hidden-camera photographs later showed the breeder marching toward his backyard hawk trap carrying a stick.

  Federal agents eventually arrested seven roller pigeon suspects. They mostly faced small fines. Killing birds of prey is a felony under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act only if it accompanies intent to sell. The case would lead some in Congress to pursue changes to make intentional and malicious bird-slaughtering a felony.

  Newcomer brought Yoshi down, too. A month into their regular video chats, Newcomer saw his opening to coax Yoshi back from Japan. During one conversation, Yoshi groused that Ted Nelson owed him too much money. Newcomer made his play, grinning into the camera. If they could meet in person, Nelson would “make it up to him.” He let the double entendre linger.

  “Really?” Yoshi said, drawing out the word.

  “You’ll just have to wait until you get back to L.A.,” Newcomer said.

  “You’re a tease,” Yoshi muttered.

  Newcomer laughed. “How else am I going to get you to come here?”

  Two months after reuniting at the bug fair, Yoshi landed at Los Angeles International Airport. Federal agents greeted him. Six months later, he pleaded guilty to seventeen criminal charges and was sentenced to almost two years in federal prison. Newcomer stayed in hiding during Yoshi’s arrest but visited the smuggler in jail the next day. Yoshi saw the handcuffs, the badge, and the empty gun holster and asked Newcomer: You’re an agent?

  In the end most of what Yoshi said had been lies. He had never held two passports and he never worked for National Geographic. Once, Yoshi had called to say he was in the United States, offering details of his stay in St. George, Utah. Two days later, an informant confirmed the story for Newcomer: He’d heard that Yoshi was collecting just hours outside St. George in the Grand Canyon. Newcomer discovered that neither claim was true. Yoshi had been in Kyoto the whole time.

  The butterfly king had created a thoroughly coherent world of lies. He got caught in part because he let down his guard—and because his adversary ran a better con.

  Tobin shared Newcomer’s talents. He knew how to cater to an audience. Seniors drifting by his vessel during sightseeing tours would see Tobin the Fisherman, the coarse bad boy, turn his back and dangle a geoduck from his waist so the gangly siphon drooped to his knees. While elderly tourists gasped, Tobin would squeeze the clam’s neck and make it ejaculate water onto the deck. Tobin the Carver spoke like a mystic, cloaking discussions of Salish masks and totems with such reverence that art aficionados begged him to whittle pieces. Then there was Tobin the Storyteller. One earnest acquaintance asked Tobin to visit his home and offer it a Native blessing. Tobin the Informant cackled when he recounted the scene to Special Agent Rich Severtson and Detective Ed Volz. He bragged he’d made up spiritual gibberish on the spot.

  Severtson wanted Tobin to get close to Gene Canfield, a hardworking fisherman with a mop of straw hair, a houseful of sons, and a powerful libertarian streak. Canfield knew the industry’s secrets. He’d grown up on the Washington coast, had been a diver with the navy, and started gathering geoducks in the mid-1970s. Canfield loved the adrenaline rush of diving. He’d fished for sea cucumbers and gathered abalone in Alaska but always found his way back
to geoducks. “When you’re down there diving you see all this money just lying on the ground,” Canfield once explained. “Not only do you see it, but you know that you have the ability to get it out. Not only can you get it out, but you can get a lot of it out in a short period of time.” He spoke of breathing underwater as “cheating nature.” Federal agents suspected he cheated in other ways, too.

  Canfield had told Tobin about a California clam market that would take improperly collected geoducks. The packages just had to be boxed nicely and include counterfeit documents. Canfield suggested a friend could do the deal, one who claimed to control most of the world’s geoduck market. This was exactly what Agent Severtson wanted—a connection leading straight to the top illegal geoduck dealer.

  Late on a hot August night in 1996, Tobin telephoned Canfield as an agent listened in.

  “Oh man, I just got in,” Tobin said. He had been out netting fish and said he planned to smoke them.

  “For what’s-his-name?” Canfield asked.

  “No,” Tobin said, not missing a beat, “for Doug.”

  He steered the conversation to complaints about a fellow fisherman who illegally sold inferior clams masked as high quality.

  “The product is no good,” Tobin said. “It’s shit—I’ve seen it.

  “Something else I’d like you to put some thought on,” Tobin continued, hesitating, “is, ahh, uhm, I trust you there, so I wouldn’t tell anybody this, but this…it’s completely wide open out there.” As a one-man operation, Tobin said, he could get several dozen tons of wild geoducks. If Tobin poached in large volumes, could Canfield sell it all?

  Canfield told him to just box the clams and get them to the airport. He could keep their hands clean by finding a market for the clams with another company.

  “Right,” Tobin said. Canfield had said exactly what the agents wanted to hear. Tobin tried to get Canfield to be more explicit. “You know, that company you had down south, whatever it was…”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Canfield said obliquely. “He’ll do it.”

  Tobin scratched and prodded a bit longer, looking for dirt. When he sensed he had pushed Canfield too hard, he slid back into banter. He talked briefly about carving and asked Canfield if he had delivered one of Tobin’s prized masks to an acquaintance. He complained about a rival fisherman who stole geoducks at night. Canfield shrugged it off, suggesting Tobin should do the same. They talked about the organized criminal gangs that everyone had heard controlled geoduck smuggling in the People’s Republic.

  “In China?” Canfield asked. “Yeah, I believe that. But I don’t think it’s the Mafia.”

  It was close. The more China’s economy exploded, the more corruption flooded in with the dollars. Hong Kong thugs ran protection rackets like the Italian Mafia and demanded bribes from seafood importers even in China, threatening violence to those who didn’t pay. Gangs sometimes even ran the police and leveraged influence with businesses and the political elite.

  Tobin told Canfield that sooner or later it would make sense if he could make a trip south and meet this secretive broker himself. Canfield said he’d work on making the arrangements but first he and Tobin should get together and talk. They agreed to meet later that month.

  Less than a week later, Tobin slipped out to Canfield’s house on a dead-end lane in the secluded central Puget Sound village of Olalla, across from the western shores of Vashon Island. Inside the two-story blue-and-white farmhouse, Tobin got to work. Canfield tutored him in illegal geoduck harvesting, suggesting that he properly document only half of what he harvested. Canfield’s contact in Las Vegas would direct Tobin where to send five hundred pounds each day. He said that Tobin should sell the rest legally. Canfield’s broker would wire six dollars for each pound shipped, though Canfield would subtract a dollar per pound in finder’s fees. Still, it could mean as much as three thousand dollars a day for six hours of work. Tobin taped it all on a hidden black Panasonic microcasette recorder he called his “little black buddy.”

  These conversations were a pipeline to the underground markets. It’s what the agents had been missing. With Canfield, Tobin found his rhythm, intuitively sensing how to steer conversations. Severtson was pleased, but to make solid cases, the cops would need to document every step of each illegal act several times. Poachers often got off lightly, claiming they didn’t know the rules.

  The next day, Severtson opened an account in Tobin’s name at Seafirst Bank. Later, over dinner at Pearls by the Sea, Tobin told Canfield that he had collected 1,347 pounds of clams that day but had declared only a bit more than half on his quota. The men agreed they would ship the excess that night to buyers recommended by Canfield’s Vegas friend. They talked more about divers and boats, the timber industry, horse clams, and an upcoming Squaxin Island tribal council meeting. Canfield warned that Tobin should keep cash moving in and out of his bank account. The bank would be the first place suspicious state or federal agents would check.

  That night, Severtson, Borden, and Bill Jarmon, a Fish and Wildlife detective, met in a warehouse and packaged 410 pounds of geoducks in eight shipping boxes with Tobin’s contact information. They put no marks on the outside, as Canfield had instructed Tobin. National Marine Fisheries Service special agent Al Samuels, the most computer savvy, used a graphics program to make a label for Tobin’s company, Blue Raven. Severtson took the packages to Sea-Tac International Airport and left them in a cargo truck, which would ferry them later to a waiting plane.

  The next day the Las Vegas broker called Tobin directly. He complained that the labels on his packages were incorrect and made it clear that he was not happy. Federal agents might notice. Future shipments needed the date and location of the harvest stamped on the outside. Nevertheless a wire transfer arrived later that day for twenty-four hundred dollars.

  Canfield had led Tobin and the cops to the geoduck kingpin: Nichols P. DeCourville.

  chapter six

  KINGPIN

  The detectives knew the name. Six months earlier while investigating a small seafood shop, a state health inspector had found illegal pinto abalone for sale in the merchant’s tank. Detectives came and riffled through this South Korean seafood dealer’s black address book. He admitted he’d been buying tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of bootleg clams from a diver named Henry Narte, who was already under investigation by Ed Volz and Richard Severtson. This dealer told the detectives that Narte and his crew paid lookouts $150 apiece to make sure no one saw them fishing from secret, illegal spots so rich in clams the spots had nicknames: “Shell City” and “Swiss Bank.” The men sometimes worked the water for nine straight hours, bringing up twenty thousand dollars’ worth of geoducks in a day. One crew member bragged that they had made a quarter-million dollars in eight months. They bought cars, stereos, jewelry, and televisions. The lead diver owned a Corvette and a Mercedes and negotiated on the docks from the seat of his black Porsche. Most interesting to detectives: The South Korean dealer resold most of these clams to a seafood broker in Las Vegas named Nichols P. DeCourville.

  DeCourville had contacted the cops several times in years past to complain about rival dealers. Federal agents in Los Angeles had even seized a shipment of clams from Washington with an invoice from NDC, DeCourville’s company, because its paperwork was not in order. The documents on the shipment belonged to a company that had folded years earlier. At the time it was not clear if it was a minor case of fraud or a simple mistake. Then that spring while researching records at Sea-Tac International Airport, Special Agent Severtson saw a box that read: FRESH SFD. Federal law requires that seafood be identified by species, either on the outside of the box or in accompanying documents, so Severtson called the number on the container. He was connected to Nichols P. DeCourville, who owned up to the blunder and promised future compliance. The guy had set Severtson’s antenna quivering. Now it appeared DeCourville’s clerical errors added up to something more.

  The investigators learned about DeCourville slowly. He’d led
an unorthodox life. A bout of polio had put him in leg braces as a child and left him with a slight limp. When he was young, his mother had kicked his father out, and she forced Nick to deliver papers and set pins in a bowling alley to help pay the rent. Nick left home as a teen, hitchhiked to West Virginia, and paid his way running errands for prostitutes in the Ohio River brothels. By sixteen, he was washing dishes in a bar and playing poker on the side. When a drunk pulled a gun on him during a card game, DeCourville finally split. He doctored his birth certificate and joined the navy, which sent him to the commissary at Pensacola. DeCourville ran the kitchen and found his true calling: food. He got out, married, had two sons, and became an accountant at an auto-supply outfit. He divorced, remarried, and got divorced again, then married and divorced a third time.

  DeCourville eventually worked his way into running an elegant seafood restaurant and dance club on L.A.’s Sunset Strip. He also co-owned a Beverly Hills Porsche dealership, but the restaurant, Nick’s Fish Market, was his real love. It drew celebrity guests like Chuck Norris, Casey Kasem, and Stevie Wonder. DeCourville’s obsequiousness kept them coming back. Every day at 5 A.M. he hit the fish market in downtown Los Angeles, selecting only the freshest creatures. He ordered waiters to arrive early so they could call diners about their evening’s special requests, and he insisted his celebrity chef make rounds among the patrons. A scribe trailed the cook, jotting down suggestions. When Hugh Hefner hosted a party to close the original Hollywood Playboy Club in 1986, DeCourville promised “to keep the memory alive” by hosting former bunnies at weekly parties at the restaurant.