Shell Games

by Craig Welch

  One DeCourville patron was an attraction in his own right: Joseph Isgro, a record promoter the FBI suspected of having mob connections. Years later Isgro would face more than fifty federal charges of money laundering and racketeering, all of which would eventually be dismissed by a federal judge. A decade after that he would plead guilty in a new extortion case. But during the mid-1980s he drew so many undercover cops to Nick’s Fish Market that DeCourville’s friends called the restaurant the safest spot in L.A.

  By then DeCourville had remarried again, this time to a beautiful concert pianist who spoke four languages and claimed to possess the world’s fastest fingers. She would later travel the world as “The Piano Princess.” But at twenty she drove a white convertible Rolls-Royce and played alongside Liberace. Though she found DeCourville charming and handsome, she was a quarter of a century his junior and a bit naïve. She learned after they married that DeCourville faced serious problems with the IRS and, he told her, the Mafia. In public, DeCourville pointed out mob figures to her. There was a phone in their closet that he told her could not be tapped. He claimed he was an informant for the FBI and told her he used the phone to pass along tips about gangsters.

  The couple divorced at the end of the 1980s and DeCourville took a job as a seafood broker, which required him to travel to Asia and buy load after load of shrimp. Then he moved to Vegas to start NDC, through which he traded shellfish, particularly geoducks, over the phone. By 1996, he brokered much of the nation’s geoduck supply and made deals for customers all over the world.

  Gene Canfield and Doug Tobin kept talking regularly. They spent hours on the phone and met in person every few days, either in restaurants or on the water. They talked about how best to poach clams. Canfield told Tobin to harvest during the day and then leave the clams tied in net bags on the seafloor. With a GPS reading, Tobin could return at night to retrieve the clams with grappling hooks. He showed Tobin how to use radar to determine if anyone was on the water nearby, and he told him about running an air hose straight through the hull to conceal divers. If anyone approached at night, Tobin could simply lift the anchor and drift away from the evidence.

  But after that first phone call when DeCourville had yelled at Tobin, the informant talked regularly to the Vegas kingpin, too. By Labor Day, Tobin was helping the cops funnel seafood through Canfield to DeCourville’s customers. The Vegas broker quickly warmed to his new supplier. The men already were making plans for Tobin to come to Nevada, where Nick hoped they would celebrate their new business partnership.

  “You let me know when you’re going to be in Vegas and I’ll take care of you,” DeCourville said. “You got a girl or a wife or something? Bring her with you.”

  “I got a girlfriend,” Tobin said, “but if I don’t bring one, I’m sure you’ve got one down there for me, don’t ya?”

  The men frequently didn’t bother to include Canfield in their plans. Within days of getting DeCourville on the phone, the informant had begun worming his way in between the Vegas broker and his loyal libertarian diver. In early September, DeCourville called Tobin asking for five hundred pounds of clams in a hurry as “a personal favor.” Tobin tried to draw the buyer out. He asked DeCourville if he was sure that Canfield could be trusted.

  Canfield would “never rat anybody out,” DeCourville said, though he was convinced that others had spoken to the FBI. “You’re not going to believe this when I tell ya,” DeCourville said. He named another buyer both men knew.

  “Is that right?” Tobin asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ll be goddamned.”

  “Yeah, he brought them in last year to get rid of his competition…called the FBI,” DeCourville said.

  “That sleazy piece of shit,” Tobin said.

  “Yeah he is.”

  “I hate a fucking rat,” Tobin said.

  DeCourville laughed. “I do, too.”

  During these conversations, DeCourville explained bits and pieces of his operation. Tobin learned that DeCourville connected fishermen with buyers, but that the goods never went through Las Vegas. DeCourville made a point of never actually touching the clams. That way he could distance himself from any crimes. If one of his suppliers actually got caught poaching, DeCourville could shrug and blame the reckless diver. Once, Tobin asked DeCourville outright if Canfield had explained all the illegal ways they got his clams.

  “You know what?” DeCourville said. “Yeah, he did, but I don’t give a shit. I don’t even want to talk about it.”

  DeCourville confided that he controlled 70 percent of the domestic geoduck market. He said he bought from a variety of sources and moved two thousand pounds or more of clams per day. Depending on demand they might sell for $6 to $10 a pound. He had even befriended a woman at the airport who let his people stash their contraband in her truck. Each night, someone checked the truck and loaded what was needed on the appropriate flight. DeCourville bragged that he had so many illegal geoducks coming and going that even if authorities were paying attention they could never track them all. He did not buy just from Tobin. He told the informant he had “a lot of guys in on it up there.”

  By early fall, though, the state and federal cops had figured the system out and had settled on a plan to try and catch them all. Each time Tobin would make a deal, a cop would collect boxed clams and dump them at the airport’s cargo-delivery hub. Other cops would watch one of their suspects, a truck driver from a recreational diving outfit, transfer the load and deliver it to air cargo hangars at Alaska or United. After the suspect took off, an agent would slip in and photograph the boxes to track their destinations—Fresno, Illinois, Boston, Pennsylvania. The money in Tobin’s phony account started piling up, topping twenty-seven thousand dollars in just a few weeks.

  Sometimes it was the rookie federal agent Al Samuels who delivered geoducks to the airport undercover. He’d spent his summer and early fall getting up to speed, trying to learn all he could about the state’s clam business. He rode along with shellfish biologists on their research boat, the Clamdestine, and tended to the hoses as the scientists dived to survey and extract clams. He watched as they harvested the geoducks they planned to use during undercover stings. He listened as biologists explained how the legal geoduck industry was supposed to work. For the young cop it was a memorable summer. He spent most of it on the boat, baking in the sun as it glinted off the Sound’s gray waters, the twin volcanic pillars of Mount Rainier and Mount Baker forming the backdrop. Samuels, by early fall, understood the Sound’s illegal fishing industry and how the poachers operated.

  Other times, detectives Ed Volz, Bill Jarmon, and Kevin Harrington took turns hiding at the airport and shooting video of poachers delivering stolen clams themselves. Unlike Volz and Harrington, Jarmon had spent much of his career scanning the woods and mountains for deer and bear poachers or patrolling rivers for fishermen. He’d spent far less time policing crimes on Puget Sound. But while he hadn’t had as much exposure to geoduck theft, Jarmon understood the covert world. He’d once run a phony storefront for six months selling illegally caught steelhead. And he also had a feel for the intertidal zone, the oxygen-rich area where land and sea meet, the portion exposed when the tide retreats. He and his wife regularly took vacations at the shore and spent entire days digging clams off the beach.

  Night after night, state detectives and federal agents packed clams by the hundreds and took them to the airport or sat in the bushes and videotaped deliveries by other poachers. Through it all an oblivious DeCourville remained confident he could outsmart mere fish cops. The agents “don’t have any brains,” he told Tobin. “If they had brains, they would be out there making money.” If authorities confronted him, DeCourville said, he would just manipulate them. It was easier to do than most people realized, the broker added, unaware that at that moment the cops were listening in. “You’ve just got to make them feel powerful, any way you can,” he said.

  Federal agent Vicki Nomura began posing as Tobin’s secreta
ry, “Tori,” so she could make phone calls directly to DeCourville herself. A few times in late September, dangerous algal blooms that can poison shellfish had closed geoduck fishing beds when DeCourville needed his clams most. On the phone, DeCourville encouraged Tori to get Tobin to collect shellfish anyway. Knowing how deadly that practice can be, the agent even tried to talk DeCourville out of it.

  “I don’t want [Doug] to get caught,” Nomura said.

  “I don’t think he is going to get caught,” DeCourville insisted. “There are other boats that are allowed out there doing other fishing, you know.” He could just mingle with salmon boats or other legal nighttime fishermen.

  “Yeah, well, I just don’t want to see him get in any trouble,” Nomura said.

  “Well, I don’t want him to get into trouble either, but I know he is a smart guy.”

  DeCourville had been getting divers to “pencil whip” the harvest—counterfeit documents so they could bypass health regulations. But those regulations protected people who ate clams from stores or restaurants. The rules made sure consumers didn’t wind up sick or dead.

  DeCourville had told Tobin that he didn’t worry about poaching, but he didn’t dare sell a load of shellfish without a health certificate, whether real or fake. Health officials across the country under orders from the federal government must sample commercial shellfish beds and certify that they are safe before allowing fishing. They do it to make sure that seafood isn’t contaminated by pollution or toxins. The documentation then follows each shipment from the water to the restaurant. Even the most unscrupulous of DeCourville’s customers wouldn’t buy oysters, clams, or mussels without it. If people got sick or died from eating shellfish, anyone who’d sold it could be sued or sent to jail—unless the shipment included documents that suggested the clams were safe. “It is,” DeCourville said, “the thing that clears me.”

  The rules are necessary because filter-feeding shellfish suck nutrients from the sea, which makes them particularly susceptible to pollution. When the shellfish draw in water, contaminants settle in their tissue. The most dangerous toxins occur naturally, are absorbed by shellfish with no warning, and can lead to paralytic shellfish poisoning in humans. The phenomenon may begin with tiny dinoflagellates, single-celled organisms that give marine waters the azure glow of bioluminescence and feed the lower rungs of the marine food web. Thousands of varieties of dinoflagellates populate marine waters. Some use sunlight to manufacture food. Others attach themselves to fish and munch on bacteria or algae. And a handful of these algae produce neurotoxins. With the right mix of nutrients, temperature changes, sunlight, or shifts in the salt content of marine water, dinoflagellates erupt and bloom like starbursts, sometimes giving waters the maroon tinge known as red tide. The blooms increase until they go dormant and settle to the ocean floor, but by then the damage already has been done. The neurotoxins get sucked up by the shellfish. In some cases, toxins can last almost a month. In butter clams the poison may stick around for two years. The neurotoxins don’t harm shellfish, but they can be deadly to humans who eat them. Some of these neurotoxins are considered a thousand times more toxic than cyanide.

  The symptoms can come on frighteningly fast. When shellfish poisoning strikes, the human body begins to freeze. Lips, face, and throat prickle, tingle, and go numb. Speech grows labored, and swallowing becomes impossible. Motor skills falter, and victims seem drunk. Paralysis can set in, leading to respiratory failure, coma, and sometimes death. Two years before cops started investigating DeCourville, a twenty-eight-year-old man ate several dozen raw mussels off an Alaskan beach. Ninety minutes later he was nauseated and throwing up. Within half an hour, he was on a ventilator, his pupils barely reacting to light. He lost all reflexes and did not respond to voices. Four hours later, his pupils dilated. He was essentially comatose. Then he wiggled his toes and opened his eyes. The hospital released him less than twenty-four hours later, tired but healthy. A few days later, a sixty-one-year-old woman ate fewer than a dozen mussels off another Alaskan beach. An hour later her lips went numb. Five hours after that she was dead.

  The United States began testing shellfish beds in 1925, after a typhoid outbreak in Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C., was linked to oysters contaminated by sewage. But clam smugglers don’t bother waiting for official health-safety declarations. They tend to harvest in neglected regions that are more likely to be contaminated. DeCourville’s suppliers often dug clams near sewage outfalls or from areas where no one had looked for harmful algae. With forged documents there was no telling if the clams were contaminated. Resulting illnesses would be untraceable, and much of the catch ended up on the far side of the world. If someone in China got sick on illegally harvested clams, no one would know whom to blame—or what part of Puget Sound the geoducks had come from, or even how many other unsafe shellfish were still out there.

  It’s what health officials and biologists fear most about trafficking in wildlife: globalization and the unmonitored trade in plants and animals amplifying and compounding the spread of disease. Half of the fourteen hundred most common human pathogens initially jumped from animals. New diseases, from Ebola hemorrhagic fever to West Nile virus, have been helped along by wildlife traders. The outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) that later would kill hundreds in Asia ultimately would be linked to the Chinese trade in tropical ferretlike masked palm civets.

  But the risk isn’t just to the other side of the world. In 2003, on a farm in Wisconsin, a sick pet prairie dog bit a three-year-old girl’s finger. The prairie dog later died with swollen and crusted eyes, and the child’s wound blistered into a welt the size of a pumpkin seed. After developing a fever and lesions that mottled her head and face, the little girl’s condition worsened until dermatologists took photographs and biopsies and sent her to a specialty clinic. Researchers eventually identified her illness as a strain of virus from the smallpox family. By then the pet vendor who sold the family its prairie dog developed lesions and chills, too.

  Doctors alerted the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, which sent disease hunters to Illinois to investigate a shipment of coughing and sneezing prairie dogs near Chicago. Just as doctors arrived at the pet distributor’s home, the CDC informed them that they’d identified the infection—monkeypox, a flulike virus found in central and western Africa that hadn’t been seen in the United States in nearly thirty years. Inside the pet dealer’s house they’d find out how it happened. Prairie dogs sat in a parrot cage on the floor near the refrigerator not far from pet Gambian pouched rats kept in cages on a kitchen table. Gambian rats are from Africa and are known monkeypox carriers, and prairie dogs are particularly susceptible to infections. Somehow the illness had jumped across species.

  The CDC traced the rats to a shipment of African animals that included rope squirrels and brushtail porcupines brought into Dallas from Ghana. Law enforcement knew the Texas importer. Ten years earlier, he’d had an illegal shipment of Southeast Asian wildlife seized by federal agents at Los Angeles International Airport. He’d been convicted of smuggling five green tree pythons from Jakarta by strapping them around his waist beneath his clothes. He’d told customs agents he’d just been trying to keep them warm. His wildlife dealer’s license had since been revoked, and he’d borrowed a customer’s credentials to get the rats into the country. Many of those animals showed up dead, or dying, but survivors were passed on to pet sellers across the Midwest who sold them to families at weekend swap meets. Soon monkeypox had exploded across the heartland. Investigators eventually would see seventy-one cases. No one died, though one child at a day care developed encephalitis, and another would lose part of an eye to lesions.

  Federal prosecutors eventually would wonder if the health risks of geoduck smuggling warranted stiffer penalties, but first the cops had to figure out how to make their cases. Not that the agents and state detectives could complain about their progress.

  Still, some investigators remained skeptical of Doug Tobin. He was
playing an intrinsic role in the investigation even though he’d gotten off to a very rough start. He’d completely blown one of his first recorded calls to an Asian geoduck buyer who had approached him with a scheme. She’d offered to overpay for clams if Tobin slipped an extra 10 percent illegally into each load. Tobin was just settling into his role and hammed it up, lacing his conversation with profanity and ethnic slurs. Investigators were aghast. They were hardly strangers to salty language—they heard it plenty when they were in the field—but Tobin’s over-the-top vulgarity made the tape useless as evidence. Taped conversations got played before juries of eighty-year-old grandmothers. Agent Samuels pulled Severtson aside and suggested someone coach Tobin to tone it down. Tobin promised to clean up his mouth, but there were other troubling incidents.

  Early on, after hearing the suggestion from Canfield, Tobin asked if he could sell his own legally gathered geoducks to DeCourville while he was arranging illegal undercover sales. Tobin was a fisherman, after all, and DeCourville had much of the geoduck market cornered. Tobin complained that he still had to make a living, and one sympathetic agent took his request to the U.S. attorney’s office. The answer came back quickly: absolutely not. In fact, the mere suggestion made prosecutors uncomfortable. They made a special effort to remind the cops that Tobin must record every conversation with DeCourville. They didn’t want to give a defense attorney any opening to imply that Tobin was making secret side deals.

  Ed Volz, in particular, thought Tobin was too slick for his own good and that Severtson and Dali Borden gave him too much leeway. Volz knew Tobin whispered to his fishing buddies about working with the Feds. The informant also went off on his own to spy on suspects or engage them in conversations without recording anything. Tobin usually reported back on his encounters, but Volz considered it undisciplined. Anything incriminating would just have to be repeated on tape.