by Craig Welch
Ed Volz prepares for the search outside Nichols DeCourville’s home in Las Vegas.
A computer expert tackled the hard drive while Volz and others went through the house. Severtson sat before a glass dining room table and started in on DeCourville. He moved cautiously at first. He had invited the FBI to participate in the interview, but the agents were late. They’d been in a car accident on the way to DeCourville’s house. Severtson read DeCourville his rights and asked about the suspect’s business, his personal life, and about seafood.
DeCourville seemed at ease and eager to oblige. He smoked his pipe, popped vitamins, and told the investigators how he planned to stay fit during his golden years. He told the agents he never bought illegal products, nor had he even seen a geoduck until the previous month. He made it a point never to touch the things.
When the FBI arrived, Severtson shifted gears and mentioned Casey Bakker. DeCourville blinked violently and his face twitched. He repeatedly asked for water. DeCourville’s demeanor changed so abruptly that several agents remarked on the shift in their notes. Severtson asked what DeCourville had done to Bakker.
DeCourville furiously smoked his pipe. He drew so much on his tobacco that a growing haze of smoke hovered above his head. He said he’d heard something about Bakker getting hurt but didn’t know anything about it. After Severtson said the agents didn’t believe him, DeCourville insisted he would never physically harm a competitor. That would be dumb, and he was not dumb. “Not my style,” DeCourville said.
Severtson showed DeCourville a picture of Rick Jones. DeCourville said he’d never seen the man. Severtson told DeCourville that agents knew Jones had been in the house. DeCourville said he suddenly remembered.
So it went. Asked about the wire transfers, DeCourville pretended he owed Tobin for refrigeration work. Told his phone calls had been recorded, DeCourville’s ticks accelerated. “I don’t want…If you’ve got things on tape, I don’t want to…” He did not finish the thought. “What do you want?” he finally asked.
Severtson told DeCourville that the cops wanted the truth.
At 6:35 A.M., Detective Kevin Harrington and several other officers moved toward a two-story blue-and-white farmhouse in Olalla, Washington, across from Puget Sound’s Vashon Island.
They crossed the damp yard and saw their subject, Gene Canfield, sipping coffee on his porch. A federal agent with Harrington handed Canfield a copy of a search warrant, and Harrington pulled him aside. While a team searched the house and gathered sales records, Harrington told Canfield he was not under arrest, but that could change. He encouraged Canfield to share information. Canfield laughed. “No offense,” the fisherman said, but “I’m a little distrustful.”
The men chatted, and Canfield loosened up. He acknowledged working with fishermen he knew were poachers. He even joked about laughs he’d shared at investigators’ expense. He told Harrington about a day when he and a group of men sat at a diver’s house, sipped beer, and watched police surveillance videos of their host loading stolen clams onto a truck. Harrington was annoyed. One of his colleagues had shot that video two years earlier for a case that prosecutors never took all the way to trial. The tape must have been turned over to the suspect’s defense attorney during discovery.
The agents in the house disconnected Canfield’s computer, seized the hard drive, and wrote down phone numbers from his caller ID. Harrington urged Canfield to reconsider. He could help himself by cooperating.
“I know how the game works,” Canfield said. He would get a public defender and “get on board.”
That same morning, a caravan of vehicles led by a Washington State Patrol SWAT team sped toward another cul-de-sac, this one along the southern edge of Puget Sound’s Hood Canal. The wildlife agents knew this fisherman—the one with the parrots and screaming children who told Tobin he bribed official geoduck monitors—kept weapons in the house. They feared what might happen if they didn’t catch him by surprise. The SWAT team, in full black tactical gear and carrying stun grenades, hit the house hard and fast. The cops battered down the door and moved room to room, clearing family members and rousting the geoduck diver.
They dragged the fisherman to the kitchen, where agents interviewed him. The fisherman kept laughing and staring off at his pet parrots. Searchers hunted for evidence of geoduck poaching, but after a few minutes one shouted from upstairs: “Ron, you need to see this!” An upstairs bedroom was crammed chest-high with antique furniture, lamps, chairs stacked on end tables, and an unusual assortment of cardboard shoe boxes. Inside the boxes, Detective Ron Peregrin found drilled-out tennis balls, cylinders cut the length of toilet-paper tubes, and hundreds of fuses. Scattered about the room were a number of coffee cans filled to the brim with some type of gunpowder. The wildlife cops called the SWAT team’s explosives expert, who called in the bomb squad.
The fisherman had been using his geoduck profits to buy raw materials to make bombs to sell as fireworks. Apparently not satisfied with homemade M-80s, he stuffed tennis balls and fist-size canisters with gunpowder to form grenades. A misplaced match would have leveled the house and taken out a good portion of the neighborhood. The bomb squad seized enough explosives to fill a truck.
Also that day, two FBI agents met Rick Jones at his Los Angeles apartment. They waited patiently while the ex–sheriff’s deputy called his employer to say he’d be late. Jones told the agents he did security and had worked as a driver, hauling around comedians Sam Kinison and Rodney Dangerfield. He said he occasionally drove for Dominic Montemarano, aka “Donny Shacks,” a capo in the Colombo crime family. Jones talked about his street-survival video and told the men about meeting DeCourville.
Jones said DeCourville had complained about a guy in Seattle undercutting his prices. DeCourville never mentioned violence, but his hand gestures left no mistaking his meaning: DeCourville had wanted to hire Jones to hurt this man. Jones said he knew DeCourville would find a high sum outrageous, so he suggested a flat fee of fifteen thousand dollars. DeCourville kicked him out. Jones told the agents he never would have gone through with it. He said it wasn’t part of his job description to physically harm anyone and that he’d only wanted to “fuck with” DeCourville. Before they left, the FBI agents hit Jones with a subpoena.
Two weeks after the raids, Special Agent Andy Cohen, with the National Marine Fisheries Service, badged his way through security at Sea-Tac International Airport to pick up Jones for his appearance before the grand jury. Cohen took a seat on a bench. The agent didn’t know whether anyone might have flown with Jones, or whether some criminal type might try to contact him between the gate and the car. The agent didn’t know what he was dealing with; someone could pass Jones instructions or cash to try and influence his testimony, so Cohen hoped to observe his witness unnoticed for a few minutes. Severtson constantly pounded his agents to practice their clandestine skills. To Cohen, a James Bond devotee, this seemed like the ideal moment. He poked a pencil-size hole in a newspaper and pretended to read while keeping an eye on the gate.
There was no mistaking Jones. He stepped off at 10 A.M., the last person aboard. He was a tank, with a fleshy chin that drooped diagonally to his neck. In early July, high summer, Jones wore a turtleneck beneath a sport coat. He planned to return to Southern California that night and carried no bags. He carried only a child’s stuffed animal.
Cohen made his introduction after watching for a few minutes. He asked Jones if he had ever been to Seattle. Did he know anyone here? Jones assured him he did not, but Cohen wouldn’t let it go. He was watching Jones’s face to see if he was lying. Are you meeting someone? Jones again said no.
“I figured maybe the bear was a gift?” Cohen finally asked.
“This,” Jones said, “is my bear.”
At the Federal Courthouse in downtown Seattle, Cohen walked Jones to a waiting room and asked a series of questions, but Jones gave Cohen the same story he had told the FBI two weeks earlier. After forty-five minutes with the grand jury, Cohen drove Jones
back to the airport. Cohen couldn’t stand it any longer and blurted out: “What in the world is up with the bear?”
Jones told him his first wife had died of cancer. He missed her so badly he was unable to sleep. At night he curled up with the stuffed animal on the floor. The ex-deputy DeCourville had tried to hire as a hit man said he was afraid of flying and took the bear everywhere. It was his security blanket.
chapter eight
AN INCREDIBLE VIRUS
Flipping through the DeCourville files, Assistant U.S. Attorney Micki Brunner saw what she would need to bring the loose threads together in court. The case had great potential, and Brunner knew what such cases required. Brunner had cemented her reputation five years earlier. She, Agent Andy Cohen, and two state wildlife detectives had brought down thieves who illegally killed sturgeon from the Columbia River and ripped out their eggs to sell to a New Jersey man People magazine had dubbed “The King of Caviar.”
Sturgeon, monstrous and bony fish that lived alongside and outlasted the dinosaurs, are among the world’s oldest and largest freshwater creatures. They can reach twenty feet, live a century, and weigh more than half a ton. Aside from salt, their eggs are the sole ingredient in caviar, which fetches higher prices than some precious metals. But by the mid-1980s, declining numbers of Caspian Sea beluga sturgeon and limited access after the Iranian revolution made it difficult for U.S. suppliers to get their hands on high-grade caviar. Producers turned to other sources, including white sturgeon from the Columbia, a river that marks the border between Oregon and Washington. But so few of the biggest slow-growing fish work their way along the river bottom that both states strictly limit how many can be caught.
Stephen Darnell knew just how to snag these huge fish, but he seemed an unlikely candidate to earn prison time for poaching them. Darnell was a great fisherman who lived near the base of the Grand Coulee Dam in central Washington. So fond was he of the Pacific Northwest’s sturgeon that he’d once written a letter to his local newspaper appealing to citizens to help save them. But Darnell was also an inventor who was low on funds and in 1985 he jettisoned his save-the-sturgeon principles for a fillet knife and piles of cash. His crimes might have gone undetected even longer if two thieves hadn’t finally robbed a small bank near Vancouver, Washington, in 1990.
White sturgeon, Acipenser transmontanus
FBI agents tracked the cash stained by an exploding red dye pack to the Value Motel, where a helpful desk clerk told the agents about the strange guests in room 124. Two men had paid $968.40 in advance for a month’s rent and requested no maid service. Another motel employee noticed a stench escaping from the room, though, and let himself inside. He found boxes that held white plastic containers with screw tops, along with fishing poles, waders, two-quart jars, a calculator, an outboard motor, and buckets of liquid that smelled like fish. He presumed he’d stumbled on a meth lab.
The FBI agents hid for several days in a neighboring suite and watched room 124 through the blinds. They saw a man dump an empty container of salt into a trash bin and two men going to Federal Express to ship hefty packages to a caviar company in New Jersey. The agents eventually realized these men hadn’t robbed a bank, and called in wildlife cops. State Detective Paul Buerger and Agent Cohen tracked shipping and bank records to find that the New Jersey buyer was a company run by Arnold Hansen-Sturm, who came from a long and storied line of caviar distributors. He supplied the finest restaurants and hotels from Europe to Japan, his top prices sometimes hitting $750 for a fourteen-ounce tin.
Yet caviar is actually quite simple to create. Catch a whiskered bottom-dwelling sturgeon, gut it, and remove its egg sac. Place the gooey mess over mesh and separate from it the mass of eggs, called roe. Rinse the roe, mix the eggs with salt, pack them in tins or squeeze them in cheesecloth, and process them into paste. It’s a decidedly low-tech luxury item, requiring little more than running water and a plastic bucket.
Darnell was resourceful enough to realize that a cheap motel room would suffice. He and a partner began catching and gutting Columbia sturgeon and shipping their product to Arnold Hansen-Sturm. Over five years, Darnell mailed nearly seventy packages of caviar, more than thirty-two hundred pounds. For the men to have collected that much roe, biologist would later calculate that they had killed at least two thousand of the biggest adult fish—almost 10 percent of the largest sturgeon in the Columbia River.
Wildlife cops often faced trouble convincing lawyers their cases mattered, and they tended to grumble most about federal prosecutors. Because the Justice Department likes victories, prosecutors often let defendants plea-bargain their way to lesser charges, which in wildlife cases can result in little or no punishment. When presented with Darnell and Hansen-Sturm, Brunner needed no arm-twisting. The caviar baron had paid the fishermen $247,000 and sold the low-grade product to his least-discerning customers, mislabeling it as imported beluga and earning well over $1 million. Brunner insisted that all three men serve prison time. The case received national attention and helped spark a broader look at the American caviar trade. It also earned Brunner the lasting respect of wildlife cops.
The DeCourville case could also make headlines. The geoduck kingpin had sold hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of illegal shellfish, and agents had intercepted and prevented a violent crime. Between the paperwork, the recorded calls, and the wire transfers, the detectives and agents really had him nailed. There were the cases against Gene Canfield and several other middlemen, too. Severtson and Dali Borden had used Tobin to document several illegal transactions. They also had the bomb maker’s case. Making it all stick would come down to Micki Brunner, but she saw a shadow hovering over everything.
Tobin was everywhere in this case—on the phone with DeCourville and Canfield, face-to-face with the bomb maker, and in contact with all the other minor players. Brunner needed Tobin to testify, but she could tell he might prove less than ideal as a witness. No one expected informants to be saints, especially prosecutors, but Brunner was worried. Tobin had been in and out of trouble his whole life, with a criminal record that included serious crimes, such as manslaughter. She had never met Tobin, but she would need to meet him soon. The way he described his past would dictate how she proceeded.
Tobin’s record was substantial. He had been sent to the state penitentiary twice. He argued both convictions were mistakes and had convinced many people he was right—he seemed too gregarious to be in any way a dangerous criminal. He was first incarcerated at twenty-one in connection with the assault of a former all-American defensive tackle at Washington State University. One day, a decade past his prime, boredom, testosterone, and perhaps a spot of depression had led the athlete to arm wrestle Doug’s older brother John. John Tobin was a powerful young man, and soon the arm wrestling escalated to a boxing bout. Witnesses claimed the football player won, and a few days later, on a cold rainy September evening, someone entered the ex-WSU star’s apartment and beat the man senseless while he slept in his bed.
Police arrested John Tobin. Prosecutors convicted him of assault and sent him to prison. After the trial, Doug came forward saying he had new evidence. John got a new hearing. Doug said he had driven another man to the athlete’s house that night and waited in the car while the man went into the player’s apartment to collect a debt. Doug told the court that he was still sitting there when the man sprinted out, shouting, “I got him!” The judge was unimpressed and denied John a new trial, but the prosecutor seized on Doug’s words. He’d just confessed that he drove a getaway car for someone. The prosecutor charged and convicted Doug as an accomplice, and he was sent to the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.
Doug’s attorney insisted his client had been railroaded. A columnist for the Seattle Times in 1977 argued Doug’s conviction had been a misapplication of justice, a travesty: “The things that happened in this case,” the columnist wrote, “can knock you over.” Doug ended up serving three years, longer even than his brother. After his release he moved to A
laska and worked as a logger but returned to fishing Washington’s waters after his father died in 1982.
Four years later, Doug was facing a murder charge. Joanne Jirovec was forty-eight and working as an administrative aide at Olympia’s Evergreen State College. On March 22, 1986, her husband, David Jirovec, called from a suburban Denny’s to say the family motor home kept stalling. He asked her to run his tools to the restaurant. By the time Joanne arrived in her van the other vehicle was running fine, so the couple went inside, drank coffee, then left for home in separate vehicles.
The next day, police found the Jirovec family van abandoned beside a freeway outside Chehalis, a farm community dotted with dairies and a mint plant. Joanne’s body was curled in the back. She had been shot three times in the head. The van’s CB and radar detector, along with Joanne’s purse, were missing.
The execution of a college worker attracted a lot of attention. A thousand people showed up for Joanne’s funeral. Her husband seemed inconsolable. But over several months, detectives pieced together an unseemly tale. The Jirovecs had been quarreling and faced serious marital troubles—David had had at least three affairs. It was no secret that David wanted his wife gone. Witnesses had heard David repeatedly ask an ex-con fisherman if he knew anyone who would kill his wife.
Tobin told police he had dismissed Jirovec’s solicitations three times as the requests of a loon. When Jirovec showed Doug ten thousand dollars he kept stashed in the Dodge van, Tobin said he gossiped about it to an out-of-work friend named Daryl Burns. Tobin and Burns talked about how easy it would be to take the money. Tobin told police that his friend was just supposed to steal the cash on the night Joanne Jirovec disappeared. Doug said he had no idea that Burns would kill her.