Shell Games

by Craig Welch

  Volz was confrontational and grilled Tobin whenever he saw him, but Tobin didn’t think he deserved such treatment and complained that Severtson ought to make it stop. He told the agent that Volz had “a dark air” and whined that someone who was just trying to help shouldn’t have to put up with abuse. The long history of antagonism between state wildlife cops and Native American fishermen didn’t help. Nor did it help that Tobin and Volz had both come of age during one of its rougher patches.

  For much of the twentieth century, long after the U.S. government signed treaties promising Northwest tribes access to fish, state game wardens rousted Indian fishermen as poachers. The cops crushed boot heels into their backs, dragged them up stream banks, and tossed them in jail. When salmon really started declining in the 1960s angry white fishermen blamed Indians, even though Native Americans caught a fraction of the fish. They carved up tribal nets in the night and spit on Native competitors. Indian fishermen fought back with “fish-ins.” Some drew celebrity supporters like Marlon Brando, who rowed into the Puyallup River in 1964 with tribal fishermen and pulled a steelhead from a tribal net and got arrested. “Just helping some Indian friends fish,” he told reporters.

  The next decade grew increasingly ugly. Wildlife officers armed with rifles lined riverbanks, and one patrol boat rammed a Nisqually fisherman’s canoe. At one fish-in, wildlife agents arrived in daylight with heavy flashlights and cloth-covered clubs. Rocks, sticks, and punches were thrown. One witness, a reporter, flew to D.C. and complained about how the Indians were being treated. Another caught abusive cops on film. When clashes grew too violent to ignore, the federal government stepped in and sued Washington State, hoping to force it to recognize treaties.

  Judge George Boldt’s 1974 ruling shocked the region. He ruled that treaties made clear that the tribes should get an equal share of the region’s fish. Suddenly the state owed half of Puget Sound’s catch of fish to tribes who made up less than one percent of the population. And there were no longer as many salmon to go around, thanks to pollution, loss of habitat, and years of overfishing.

  White fishermen took their anger out on Native Americans and on a new generation of wildlife patrol officers, including rookie Ed Volz. By 1976 the clashes were boiling over. A gillnet fisherman in Hood Canal rammed a state wildlife boat. One night Volz watched an onshore sniper’s bullets pierce the water around him. An angry fisherman smashed Volz in the face with a dogfish shark. An officer lobbed a smoke bomb onto a gillnet boat, which set the boat ablaze. The worst came in October 1976 when a white gillnetter in a fifty-foot boat named Alaskan Revenge rocketed toward a small patrol boat. The officer fired his shotgun and showered a twenty-four-year-old fisherman’s head and neck with pellets. One lodged in the man’s brain, leaving him paralyzed.

  A few years after that incident, at the end of a busy day, Ed Volz and several officers drove along Whidbey Island on the northeast side of the Sound and happened upon Doug Tobin. He was fifty miles north of his tribe’s fishing grounds illegally stringing a net across a secluded beach to catch perch. Volz was exhausted and had never encountered Tobin, but figured the fisherman would work all night. So he slipped out of the car, snuck around Tobin’s truck, and quietly drained the tires of air. The officers drove off and caught some sleep. The next morning a new shift arrived with a citation. They found Tobin pushing his tires uphill to a gas station.

  Severtson didn’t want the hassle. He agreed to separate the two men and for a while he tried to freeze Volz out. Severtson wanted to reward Tobin’s enterprising spirit and saw no cause for alarm as long as Tobin reeled in poachers. Volz thought informants should be managed with caution. Severtson acted like Tobin was his pal.

  Severtson tried in subtle ways to keep Tobin in check. When Tobin bragged about shooting a bull elk, Severtson quietly asked him, “As a convicted felon, what are you doing with a gun?” Tobin mumbled something about borrowing it from a friend just in time to take the shot. At Severtson’s urging, Al Samuels created a fake internal memo, claiming the government had purchased an undercover minisubmarine for underwater Puget Sound surveillance. Samuels stamped the document CONFIDENTIAL. During a meeting with Tobin, Severtson let it spill from a folder so Tobin could see its contents before Severtson stuffed it back in his briefcase. The document was intended to test Tobin’s loyalties. If a rumor spread among fishermen that they should watch out for government mini-subs, the agents could trace it back to Tobin. They never heard a word about subs.

  The agents weren’t sure how to interpret that. But they couldn’t argue with Tobin’s results. By fall 1996, the agents and the detectives had built what they considered solid smuggling cases against DeCourville and Canfield and several other bit players. But another case working its way through the federal courts made it clear that it was risky to file charges in any case before all the others were ready to go to court; the informant’s identity could leak prematurely and quickly spread before they were ready.

  Special Agent Richard Severtson (with camera) turns to Agent Andy Cohen during the arrest of a geoduck poacher in 1996. Agent Dali Borden speaks with a passenger beside the pickup. Severtson hated having his picture taken.

  The cops’ previous informant, Dave Ferguson, had kept a low profile since moving to Alaska to work on boats. That fall, the first geoduck-poaching arrest made with his help went before a federal judge in Washington. The judge briefly let the defendant out of jail to attend his brother’s funeral in Alaska. But up north the defendant made a side trip. He took documents that showed Ferguson had been a snitch and gave them to friends who distributed them on the Alaskan docks where Ferguson worked. “The only intent in doing that was to cause some type of problem for Mr. Ferguson,” a furious assistant U.S. attorney told the judge. It was a reminder that Tobin’s identity could easily be revealed before the cops were ready unless the agents wrapped up every case at roughly the same time. Best to take the smugglers down all at once.

  Tobin kept in touch with DeCourville to maintain appearances and checked in with the federal agents, particularly Dali Borden. When he phoned the cops with new tips, Severtson or Borden would race out the door to meet him. Borden once responded in such haste that she drove off from a gas station with the nozzle hooked in her fuel tank. Fellow agents teased her mercilessly, nicknaming her “Blaze.” Tobin clearly relished the attention. He came to meetings with a yellow legal pad that contained lists of suspects. When the cops told Tobin to hide the Panasonic recorder in his breast pocket, Tobin padded the device inside a fourteen-thousand-dollar roll of bills.

  Tobin seemed to know everyone and everything happening on the water. On a cloud-free spring afternoon in 1997, he met with several geoduck divers at a marina not far from the tiny hamlet of Brinnon, home of The Geoduck Tavern. He heard that one of the clam monitors was being paid off. With Agent Borden watching through the trees, he weighed out fifty milk crates of illegal clams, calling out precise numbers of pounds for the recorder.

  “Where’s the monitor?” Tobin asked the clam sellers.

  He’ll be around soon.

  “What, does he get a chunk?” Tobin started counting out the money.

  “About a hundred dollars,” the man said but would add no more.

  Two days later Tobin went to meet the same folks, narrating directions as he went, pointing out a Chevron station, traffic signs, even a garbage bin near a driveway. Inside a house he found a woman and her husband counting clams. They warned several screeching children to keep their distance. A television blared and pet parrots squawked in the background.

  “So who paid the monitor?” Tobin asked again while sorting clams. “Do you want me to?”

  “No, we all paid him,” one diver said. They might even toss him a bonus later. “If he stops by he gets another cut.”

  Tobin asked if the monitor could be trusted.

  They said he would be fine as long as the pressure didn’t ratchet up.

  If it does, Tobin joked, they should just “hit him with tha
t cash.”

  A week later Tobin returned to the house. A fisherman sold the informant thousands of stolen clams, then confessed he was using the profits to manufacture “bombs.” Severtson later told Volz he wasn’t sure what that meant, but it was something they would need to investigate.

  Demand for geoducks had reached a frenzy. Prices fluctuated by the day—sometimes by the hour. Weeks earlier, the Los Angeles Times had described Asia’s growing geoduck craze in a front-page story. The reporter traveled to Puget Sound and hung out with a diver, Henry Narte, unaware that Volz and Severtson were investigating him. The reporter watched Narte race in a speedboat to pick up geoduck samples for wealthy customers from the Pacific Rim. Narte told her he had been a crabber in Alaska but was now convinced that these clams would bring prosperity. “He is angling to make himself the middleman of choice for the Indian fishermen and wealthy Asian buyers,” the reporter wrote. ‘“I’ve got the gift of gab,’ he confided before racing off to shore with the clams.” The reporter didn’t know that most of Narte’s product was obtained illegally and brokered under the table by DeCourville.

  So tight was supply that buyers and brokers took ever greater risks to get clams. Casey Bakker, another broker, sold clams to a company in British Columbia, which then sold the geoducks all over Asia. In May, desperate for product, Bakker offered fishermen better money if they sold exclusively to him. For weeks, DeCourville complained to Tobin that Bakker’s gambit was costing him.

  Then one morning in June, DeCourville told Tobin he wanted Bakker out of his hair for good. He even knew exactly how to make it happen. DeCourville planned to hire a friend who could plant a bomb in Bakker’s truck. Tobin had not bothered to record the conversation, but he immediately telephoned Special Agent Dali Borden.

  chapter seven

  “IT’S JUST A BUSINESS THING”

  Special Agent Rich Severtson gathered his crew and outlined what Dali Borden had just heard. A few of the cops cursed their informant. Had Doug Tobin recorded all his conversations with Nick DeCourville, they would already have this on tape. Severtson hastily set a meeting with Tobin. He wanted to hear this story for himself.

  Severtson and Dali headed south to a McDonald’s across Interstate 5 from the Poodle Dog restaurant, where they had first met Tobin a year earlier.

  DeCourville’s threat wasn’t entirely surprising. Wildlife trafficking attracted violence, organized crime, and other types of contraband. Severtson had seen it his entire career. Criminals saw nature as just another avenue to make money. Asian gangs and criminal syndicates from Hong Kong and Japan traded in illegal shark fins, whale meat, and tigers. Drug runners stuffed cocaine-filled condoms down the gullets of boa constrictors and packed crates of exotic snails with heroin. Federal inspectors once found a secret shelf beneath a shipment of lizards, sloths, anteaters, and kinkajous that entered Miami from Guyana. Underneath they uncovered $1 million in illegal drugs. Wildlife inspectors combing through shipments of plants and animals in Anchorage seized four hundred thousand dollars’ worth of counterfeit silver dollars and one hundred fake New Jersey police badges.

  The more the trade was worth the more likely it involved violence. In 1991 Brooklyn police found a thirty-nine-year-old Korean immigrant stabbed so many times he had nearly been decapitated. Blood stained the man’s bedroom and living room walls, and tufts of fur littered his apartment. Jars of snakes and other creatures in formaldehyde lined the walls. A giant stuffed bear guarded one room. A collection of freezers filled another. The only things the killers took from the apartment were several dozen black bear gallbladders.

  New York City Police Detective Thomas Dades worked the mystery nearly every day for five months. The victim, Haeng Gu Lee, had no job or bank account and had made his living trading animal parts, particularly bear gallbladders, which are used in traditional Chinese and Korean medicine. The gallbladders typically were dried until they wrinkled and curled like giant raisins, then they were ground into fine powder. They were used to treat cancers, burns, and liver and stomach problems. A few grams of bear bile could draw several hundred dollars. The dead man had bought from hunters who cleaved bears open near the liver, extracted the slimy fist-size pouches, and tied them closed to keep the bile intact. There were no fingerprints, and the crime was never solved, but police are certain they know what happened. Lee’s customers arrived to buy his bear parts but instead ripped him off, killed him, and left the country.

  Even members of Severtson’s team had found themselves in harm’s way. In the 1980s, Special Agent Andy Cohen saw a Canadian boat illegally hauling Dungeness crab from Puget Sound. When the boat’s pilot saw Cohen, he made a beeline for the Canadian border. In a move rarely seen outside the cineplex, Cohen, gun drawn, launched himself from the patrol boat onto the crab vessel. He righted himself amid the spray just as one of the fishermen rushed toward him with a meat cleaver. Cohen disarmed him without firing a shot.

  Severtson wouldn’t have blood spilled over clams on his watch. But to stop it he needed to understand every nuance of the exchange between Tobin and DeCourville. Then the federal agents and detectives could map some sort of intervention. Tobin arrived twenty minutes late and repeated what the Las Vegas broker had told him: Ravenous customers were buying up Casey Bakker’s clams. Desperate for a line on new supplies of shellfish, Bakker had offered Indian divers an extra two bucks per pound to sell to him. It was 40 percent more than DeCourville normally paid, and divers flocked to Bakker from DeCourville, who refused to match his competitor’s price. Instead DeCourville had settled on another plan. He would hire a three-hundred-pound hit man from Los Angeles to blow up Bakker in his truck, Tobin said. DeCourville had asked Tobin to meet the guy and point out Bakker.

  Severtson needed more. That night he wired electronic surveillance equipment to a nearby pay phone and told Tobin to call DeCourville back. Severtson would coach him through the call.

  Without prompting, DeCourville started railing about Bakker. Earlier that day, Bakker had purchased nearly all of the available geoducks. The few that remained were more expensive than DeCourville said he could afford.

  “That’s not right,” he barked into the phone. “I’m short yesterday because Bakker got ’em all, now I’m short today.” Worse, he had big orders for Friday and Saturday, and his divers weren’t working.

  “I’m screwed for the week,” he said. “I’m just…I’m dying, man.”

  “He’s hurting me, too,” Tobin said. “I’m taking it in the shorts just as bad as you are.”

  Tobin’s nimbleness never ceased to amaze Severtson, but this time a great deal rode on his performance, including Bakker’s life and Severtson’s career. The veteran agent could not take chances. He needed DeCourville to be explicit, but Tobin couldn’t plant ideas in his head. Nor could he push the geoduck broker where he didn’t want to go. Severtson was getting antsy, and DeCourville had only briefly mentioned the “truck situation.”

  Finally Tobin snapped in either real or calculated frustration. He told DeCourville to spit it out. What did he want?

  “I don’t want to do him in,” DeCourville blurted out. “I don’t want to do that. I just want to hurt him.”

  Severtson felt some relief, but only for a moment. Just about anything could still happen.

  “So, you know, how do we do that?” Tobin asked.

  “Well, I can take care of the truck,” DeCourville said.

  What the hell did that mean? Tobin urged DeCourville to explain. DeCourville said he was at his girlfriend’s house. He couldn’t get into it right now. He had to be discreet.

  “If that truck goes, that truck breaks down, then he’s hurting,” DeCourville said. “And if he’s talked to, he’s hurting more. You know what I mean?”

  “I’m trying to,” Tobin said, frustrated. “Do you mean ‘if he’s talked to,’ you know, in a physical way?” Was DeCourville suggesting he could blow up the truck without Bakker in it, and then send a guy to smack him around?

 
; “Yeah, physical.”

  “So is that what the three-hundred-pounder is for?”

  “Yeah,” DeCourville said of the hit man he planned to hire. He snorted. “He’s a sheriff, retired.”

  “He’s a retired sheriff—that’s great,” Tobin said.

  “The boys use him all the time,” DeCourville said.

  “Well…it sounds like you’ve mellowed since this morning here,” Tobin said. The scenario, while serious, was not as straightforward as Tobin had described to Severtson. Was DeCourville having second thoughts?

  DeCourville changed the subject. They talked about Tobin’s family, briefly, and chatted about DeCourville perhaps going to Canada to get geoducks.

  Then DeCourville said, “I’d like to see an arm or leg, you know? You know what I’m talking about?”

  Tobin did. “I understand. Arm and a leg will work,” Tobin said. “So…what can I do to help you? I’m trying to relieve the strain on you. Know why? Because I need you to buy geoducks. So the less strain you have the longer you’re going to fucking live. That’s a Native thing, Nick.”

  “The man’s name is Rick,” DeCourville blurted out. “About three hundred pounds, blond hair. All I want you to do is point him in the right direction…I don’t want the wrong guy hurt.”

  Once Tobin was off the phone, the agents talked about this. Rick. Shit. No last name. They still didn’t know anywhere near enough.

  The next day Severtson and Special Agent Al Samuels drove south to meet with Casey Bakker.

  Bakker, a fast-talking broker with a quick wit and disarming grin, had been a fixture in the geoduck industry since 1980. His father had worked for an oil company, and Bakker as a kid had moved every few years, the family landing in many of the country’s energy hot spots: Denver, Houston, Pittsburgh, New Orleans. He’d come to Washington to attend Evergreen State College in 1976 but ran out of money toward the end of his senior year. He’d learned scuba as a kid on Colorado’s high lakes. The next thing he knew, he’d stumbled into the industry that gave his alma mater its mascot. Seventeen years later—with a house and a family and a clam buyer’s license—Bakker found himself face-to-face with federal agents.