Shell Games

by Craig Welch

  Severtson, Samuels, and Bakker stood outside a Starbucks in Tacoma. The agents warned the clam salesman that he might be the subject of a contract hit. They offered protection, but Bakker was prickly. He asked if some wiseguy was going to jump out of a black Lincoln with a crowbar. Severtson’s answer ignored the sarcasm. Yes, that’s exactly what could go down, Severtson said.

  Bakker found the cops’ concern disconcerting and wasn’t sure what to make of it. He knew DeCourville only as a businessman and competitor. But he believed that under the right conditions people were capable of just about anything. Bakker didn’t like being bullied—not by DeCourville and not by the cops. He told the agents he’d take care of himself. Severtson said that was the very thing that concerned law enforcement. He begged Bakker not to do anything rash. Bakker said he’d be fine. He would move underground. Severtson relented, recognizing a lost cause, but quietly planned to send someone to keep watch on Bakker anyway.

  The agents weren’t clear on just what DeCourville wanted. They couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t try to kill Bakker. It was possible DeCourville just didn’t want to tell Tobin, so they cooked up an excuse for their informant to call back and ask for clarity.

  This time DeCourville didn’t equivocate. He had contacted his helpers that morning. Casey Bakker, he said, “had to have the shit beat out of him, plain and simple.”

  “They’re going to call me back tonight with the cost and make arrangements. They’re going to use one guy from up there and another guy from L.A.”

  “Wow,” Tobin said. “They’re that good, huh?”

  “Let me tell you something in confidence,” DeCourville said. “I used to do things for the mob. These are mob guys, OK, and this is a retired sheriff who used to work for the mob, while he was a sheriff…a three-hundred-pounder. These guys are pros. He trained Robert De Niro in a movie, you know, about how to be tough. He’s expensive, but see, I got a friend. We have mutual friends.”

  Tobin asked to hear more.

  DeCourville sounded happy to be encouraged. “I got to tell you. Got a minute?” He settled in. “I had a guy cheat me on twenty-seven thousand dollars. Oh, this was back ten years ago. I called a guy in and he went over to his house at night, broke in, and was standing there by the bed so silently nobody knew it. Plugged a [defibrillator] in, put a piece of tape over his mouth—that woke him up—and says, ‘This is the first and last visit. When I put this on you and turn the juice on, you’re going to have a heart attack. I’ll pull the tape off, won’t be a mark on your body, and you’ll be in the hospital.’” His friend applied the paddles, DeCourville said, and shocked the guy, who convulsed and went into cardiac arrest. Then his friend called 911. The ambulance came and took the guy to the hospital.

  “I’m up there the next day with some roses,” DeCourville said. “I said, ‘I don’t want to bring you roses twice, OK?’ I said, ‘The next time it will be on your bed. Your deathbed.’ And, ah, I got my money. When he got out of the hospital, I got my money. Bang. I don’t know what the hell he did to get it, but he got it.”

  Tobin pushed on with Dali and Samuels at his side. “This guy in Seattle…is he an ex-cop, too?” Tobin asked.

  “No,” DeCourville said. “He’s part of the fucking Mafia.”

  “So I don’t know him, right?” Tobin asked.

  “No,” DeCourville said. “He’s a Mafia guy.”

  Tobin told DeCourville to be sure and let him know when the deed went down. Tobin told the broker that he wanted to be two hundred miles out to sea with friends when it happened so he could be free from scrutiny.

  “I feel, as a friend, I feel, you know, pretty safe saying that, that you’re my friend,” Tobin continued. “You’ve been there and I hope I’ve been there for you.”

  “You’ve been there for me. I would…I treat you like a brother,” DeCourville said. “I treat you just like I do my brother.”

  “So we’ve got a common interest here,” Tobin said. “And the sooner this cocksucker quits gouging into my pocket and yours then the better our relationship…I mean, it’s just a…business thing.”

  DeCourville said he didn’t know precisely when things would happen, but he had been told the attack would take place in fewer than ten days.

  “These guys don’t miss,” DeCourville said. “They do precisely what you tell them to do…They’re professionals and they’ll disappear. These guys are pros. They don’t fuck around.”

  “Well, look…there’s no way this is going to come back on you, is it?” Tobin asked.

  “I don’t see how,” DeCourville said. “You’re the only link and I trust you.”

  Tobin clarified. He was talking about Bakker. Wouldn’t it be obvious to Bakker that DeCourville was responsible?

  “He knows you’re connected,” Tobin said. “Who else can sit in the middle of a fucking pile of sand and control eighty-plus percent of all geoduck sold in the U.S…. and never touch one of the son of a bitches? It’s a no-brainer. The guy knows you can pick up the phone and have him taken out.”

  “I don’t worry about that,” DeCourville said. “There’s no way you can trace what I’m doing. It’s clean.”

  “Because I need you to buy geoduck,” Tobin said. “That’s honesty.”

  “They give me a mobile phone in jail and I’ll still sell ya geoduck,” DeCourville said. Then he added, laughing, “I’ll still never see the sons of bitches.”

  They still didn’t know who the hit man was, but Severtson would make the other agents track him down. They had to. Severtson would order special agents Andy Cohen and Al Samuels to trace all the calls DeCourville had made or received in the last three days. In the meantime the two cops would work the phones. They knew the man DeCourville mentioned was an ex-sheriff’s deputy, probably in Los Angeles. They knew his weight but had only a first name: Rick. The agents needed to reach this guy before he reached Casey Bakker. Severtson needed to alert the U.S. attorney’s office. Severtson told his people: Find this guy now!

  Assistant U.S. Attorney Helen “Micki” Brunner was incredulous. “Are you kidding me?” she asked Severtson. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Severtson was in Brunner’s downtown Seattle office. He’d just told her and Detective Ed Volz about DeCourville. Brunner and Severtson had known each other for years. In fact, Brunner knew most of the state and federal wildlife agents and was well versed in the geoduck investigation. She had been involved for months and would prosecute the cases they brought forward. She knew her way around wildlife crimes. But a hit man? Over clams?

  In Brunner the agents had an enthusiastic champion. She was an outdoorswoman, a hiker, an unstoppable skier, and a kayaker who liked watching ospreys dive in the bird-rich Nisqually River Delta. She had handled cases for the Environmental Protection Agency and had come to Seattle from the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the Justice Department in Washington, D.C.

  Brunner brought an encyclopedic knowledge of environmental law. She had taken on timber companies, metal-plating operations, and plastics manufacturers. Once, she had sent steel-company executives to prison for hiring a driver who dumped hundreds of drums of toxic sludge in a Washington cow pasture. She went after a city official who ordered hazardous waste buried in a sandy trench, where it leaked into the Pacific Ocean next to a wildlife refuge.

  Brunner had become the go-to prosecutor on wildlife-trafficking cases. She was smart and decisive and had no trouble recognizing the urgency after Severtson filled her in about Casey Bakker. They needed to resolve this before someone got hurt. She told Severtson to let her know what else he needed.

  Severtson checked in on agents Cohen and Samuels as they made calls. Samuels, the computer whiz, was told to work his digital magic on law-enforcement databases. If the hit man had been a sheriff’s deputy, maybe they could find him that way. The two agents scrambled for several hours. Severtson repeatedly stuck his head in their cubicles and demanded updates.

  By morning, the agents were
certain they’d found their man: Richard “Ricky” Jones. Jones had worked as a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy during the 1980s. He retired on a partial disability after being struck in the head by a baton during training. Since leaving law enforcement he had run a security company with a Beverly Hills Police sergeant, worked as a bodyguard, and been a driver for convicted mob figures. The agents got a copy of Rick Jones’s driver’s license, which showed a picture of a baby-faced six-foot-two man with a wide forehead and jowly neck. The license listed his weight at 280 pounds. It had to be him.

  On a Sunday in June 1997, Jones rolled out of the Los Angeles basin and over the San Gabriel Mountains and cut across the Mojave to Las Vegas. In his younger days, he’d been a bouncer and kickboxer who bragged that he’d fought prizefights in Mexico. He was headed to Vegas to work as a consultant for a friend who published personal security newsletters with titles such as Weapons & Tactics for Personal Defense. For fifteen dollars, the company also mailed gamblers lottery picks from a secret strike-it-rich system they claimed had been passed down from Al Capone.

  Jones had made the drive often in recent months to proofread security articles. The two men also were making a video: How to Recognize and Avoid Violent Street Crime. Jones checked into the Heritage Inn Best Western and, for the next two days, hopped down to the Tropicana to check out a survival seminar.

  Wednesday morning Jones’s friend paid him five hundred dollars for his work and gave him a new Colt Python revolver. Jones checked in with an attorney in Los Angeles who told him an acquaintance, Nichols DeCourville, wanted to see him about some investigative work. In the 1980s, the attorney’s law practice had been across the street from Nick’s Fish Market.

  Jones pulled up around 1 P.M. DeCourville lived five miles down Tropicana Avenue from the Strip, near the end of a short cul-de-sac. His two-story white stucco town house had a red-tile roof and a black wrought-iron gate across the front walkway. His girlfriend lived two doors down. DeCourville was bare-chested and wore a ponytail. The maid was cleaning inside, so he led Jones to the backyard. Fifteen minutes later, Jones was headed back to Los Angeles.

  Severtson had an idea. Tobin should convince DeCourville to hire Tobin to do the job, instead of Jones. That was Severtson’s way. Take what circumstances provided and turn them to his advantage.

  On June 9, DeCourville and Tobin were back in touch.

  “How are we coming with our little buddy?” Tobin asked.

  “Ahh, well, I don’t want to talk about it,” DeCourville said. “It’s coming—it’ll happen.”

  Tobin backed off but tried again that evening, calling from a pay phone at a truck stop along Interstate 5 outside Fife. Beside him, agents Al Samuels and Dali Borden listened in.

  “How’s it going tonight, OK?” DeCourville asked.

  “No,” Tobin told him. “It’s not so good, my friend.”

  Bakker had raised the price yet again. Less than two weeks ago, DeCourville had paid $4.50 a pound for geoducks. Now Bakker was offering divers $8 a pound. DeCourville couldn’t afford to buy at that price.

  “That puts me out of business,” DeCourville said. “Fuck. Couldn’t get any, huh?”

  “I couldn’t at the price you wanted to pay,” Tobin told him.

  “Jesus Christ,” DeCourville said. “Goddamn. I’m in trouble.”

  Tobin offered to help. Tobin said he had a few tough guys coming over from the coast to help him settle an old score. If DeCourville was inclined, they could take over the Bakker job. “Without a fucking question, they can take care of this little problem you want done here,” Tobin said.

  His answer came quickly.

  “OK, I’ll call off the other,” DeCourville said. “I’m losing, you know—I’m losing my ass.”

  Tobin agreed. But, he asked, what exactly did they want done to Bakker?

  “I’d say punch him in the nose, break his fucking arm, and tell him to stay away from the Indians in the south Sound, period,” DeCourville said. “Don’t you think that’s enough? I think that’s enough. And if he doesn’t listen…”

  Tobin told him the job would cost five thousand dollars. DeCourville agreed to pay, after some grumbling. He had easily lost that much in the last week, or even in the last twenty-four hours, DeCourville said. If Tobin faxed DeCourville a fake invoice, DeCourville would wire a portion of the money the next day and cover it through his business. The rest he would send later in the week. He didn’t want to send a lump sum: “That’ll show out like a sore thumb.”

  Samuels prepared a fake bill for the purchase of 546 pounds of geoduck, valued at $3,003. He backdated it to January 5, and stamped it with a seal from Tobin’s company, Blue Raven. At the bottom, Samuels wrote: CORRECTED INVOICE FROM MISBILLING. Tobin signed it. Samuels paid $2.50 to the clerk behind the counter at the truck stop, who faxed it to DeCourville.

  Three minutes later, Tobin called DeCourville, who suddenly seemed eager. “I got to get this thing done. Is it, is it being handled? As we speak?”

  Tobin said he’d already called the guys. It could happen as soon as the next day.

  “Good,” DeCourville said.

  Tobin joked that when it was over, DeCourville should send the boys from Las Vegas up to Seattle for lessons on how to really get things done. Then he reminded DeCourville what he had paid for: a broken nose, a broken arm.

  “Leg would be better,” DeCourville corrected, then muttered, “That son of a bitch.”

  “Everything’s a done deal. Everything’s in motion,” Tobin reminded him. “I didn’t know if it was an arm or a leg so I gotta make one more call and yeah, it’ll be a leg.”

  “Just tell ’em it’ll be an arm, the next time it’ll be a leg or vice versa,” DeCourville said. Then, laughing, he added: “Just make sure he’s not to go near the Indians in the south Sound. That’s the message.”

  “I made that abundantly clear,” Tobin said. “They’ll pound that into him.”

  Three days later, Severtson and Borden drove south from Seattle again, crossed the Tacoma Narrows Bridge to the Key Peninsula and visited Seafirst Bank, where they’d opened Tobin’s business account. The wire transfer had arrived from Nevada.

  On Friday the thirteenth, Severtson and Borden met again with Tobin at their office in Seattle. They called DeCourville, catching him just after 10 A.M.

  “How is everything with the headache problem?” DeCourville asked. “How is that coming along?”

  Tobin said he’d paid for half upfront. The rest would come when the job was finished. DeCourville told Tobin to send a new invoice, this one marked for the purchase of an ice machine. The next day, $1,997 arrived in Tobin’s account.

  By Monday night it was over. Tobin called DeCourville one last time around 10:30 P.M.

  “You taken care of business?” DeCourville asked.

  “I’m here to report that your money was well spent,” Tobin said. Tobin actually sounded almost joyful.

  “Oh, that’s good,” DeCourville said. He started laughing and made a joke.

  “Nick, listen to me,” Tobin interrupted. “Nick, I kind of think they went just a little overboard…”

  “They didn’t throw any names around did they?” DeCourville asked.

  “Absolutely not,” Tobin said. “They just threw him around.”

  Tobin told DeCourville he had to meet the thugs the next day to finish paying them their share. DeCourville said they should lay low. But within two weeks, he wanted Tobin out getting more geoducks for him.

  “I’m hard up for tomorrow, I’ll tell you,” DeCourville said.

  “I know you’re hard up, Nick,” Tobin said.

  “Next week, all this week and next week, and then it will be balls out,” DeCourville said.

  “Balls to the walls, huh?” Tobin asked. “All right.”

  A phalanx of state and federal agents descended on Las Vegas after midnight and settled in for a short, restless night at the Excalibur. An hour after dawn the next day, June 19, 1997, R
ich Severtson, Ed Volz, and a line of other officers crouched around the corner from DeCourville’s home off the Strip. Vicki Nomura, posing again as Tori, Tobin’s secretary, walked up alone and rang the bell. No one answered, so she called DeCourville’s cell. She said she was in Vegas and needed to see him. DeCourville told her he was at his girlfriend’s house down the street and would be right there.

  Days earlier, another Washington State wildlife investigator, Ron Peregrin, had bought wraparound casts, arm slings, and Ace bandages and had driven to Casey Bakker’s Olympia-area home, which was dark and shuttered, as if abandoned. Peregrin had found Bakker inside, had bandaged him up, and put him in leg braces and an arm sling in preparation for a photograph to show around the docks. The cops had hoped DeCourville would get word of Tobin’s hit from other fishermen.

  DeCourville stepped outside a few doors down. Nomura waved—a signal to the agents to move in. DeCourville wandered up to his front door. The broker shoved his hand into his pocket for his keys, and Severtson and Volz pushed him against the wall. They patted him down for weapons and led him inside.

  The agents fanned out and searched each room. Like the cherry 1984 Lincoln in the garage with fewer than twenty thousand miles on it, DeCourville’s home was elegant and immaculate. Indian art and Buddha statues adorned the shelves and halls. Downstairs, the agents found a tidy computer room with monitors linked to outdoor surveillance cameras. DeCourville had run cables from his office out his window and down the street, linking to a room in his girlfriend’s home where he could work. Upstairs, searchers found little of consequence: copy machines, file cabinets, a rolltop desk, a stereo. They seized a tiny, loaded .25-caliber Beretta from under a bed.