Shell Games

by Craig Welch

  Tobin cooperated with police. Burns did not, until it became clear he was going away. He confessed to being the trigger man, but claimed Tobin had said Burns would be paid. Burns and Jirovec were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Tobin pleaded guilty to manslaughter. He maintained all along he thought he’d aided a botched robbery, not a contract killing.

  In prison Burns backed Tobin’s story. He recanted his confession and insisted he’d made it under duress. At another point, he said a fourth party had done the shooting.

  Tobin’s story sounded implausible, especially to the fish cops, and Tobin knew it. But to the detectives Tobin’s past didn’t matter all that much. They cared more about his ability to gather facts—and the truthfulness of the information he provided. Even the most forgiving among them, Agent Severtson and Detective Harrington, assumed Tobin actually was guilty. Severtson had been a highway patrolman in Oregon, and Harrington had worked in a juvenile-detention center around teenage murderers. Both had spent so much time around thieves and killers that they didn’t waste energy analyzing reputations. Besides, many of law enforcement’s most famous informants either witnessed or participated in dozens of murders. The cops were interested in how their informant performed.

  But Brunner needed to think strategically for the courtroom. Before an informant testified she usually walked him through his life. Brunner needed to hear what he said about his past and how he sounded when he said it. She needed to understand whether defense attorneys could use him to submarine her case. A prosecutor needed to know if her star witness had problems with the truth. Brunner could not call a liar to the stand.

  Three weeks after DeCourville’s arrest, Doug Tobin showed up at Brunner’s office. By then she knew his background well. She also knew her prosecution faced serious trouble. Brunner’s position was clear: Tobin would have to admit his involvement in the Jirovec and assault cases. He might still be credible if he admitted his role. If he did not, defense attorneys would shred him.

  Seated at an oak table in a spacious conference room with agents Severtson and Borden, Brunner asked Tobin to tell her about his history. As Tobin spoke, Brunner pressed with increasing vigor. Why would Jirovec feel he could approach Tobin about a murder—and more than once? Why didn’t Tobin call police? Why did he tell Daryl Burns about the money? Why did he plead guilty if he didn’t do anything?

  Tobin was a physical being. He often employed his body as an instrument of enthusiasm or intimidation. He’d touch an elbow in a playful gesture to sell a point, or lean close and lock eyes and glower like a caged bear. Tobin found Brunner vexing. He towered over her and outweighed her by 150 pounds. But Brunner was unfazed by his indignation. Over and over Tobin claimed he had done no wrong, and still Brunner grilled him fiercely. She was surprised that Tobin seemed so unprepared for confrontation—he had been in and out of court enough. Tobin barked and huffed and stuck to his story no matter how unlikely it sounded. At times, Agent Borden even jumped in to defend him.

  By the time the meeting ended, everyone was on edge. Brunner felt her time had been wasted and that she had been lied to repeatedly. Tobin later complained about being dismissed by the cops and lawyers he had worked so hard to help. For Severtson and Dali Borden, the consequences were worse: Every case they had made with Tobin as an informant was now tainted. If they wanted to convict and put away poachers and smugglers, someone would have to reinvestigate their cases.

  No one stated the obvious: It appeared a year’s worth of work had just spiraled down the drain.

  Ed Volz tried to keep silent. He had always feared it would come apart. Now, thanks to Tobin, it had.

  Outwardly, Severtson took the meltdown in stride, but Volz knew it was a tremendous blow. Severtson’s own agent, Dali Borden, had too quickly and passionately defended Tobin. Borden had gotten worked up in the U.S. attorney’s office. Severtson felt she’d grown too attached. Tobin had somehow spun her head around, a testament to the informant’s charisma. Volz shared the concern but saw denial, too. There was responsibility to go around. The one person Volz didn’t blame was the attorney, Micki Brunner. The prosecutor had done what she could. If their snitch sounded like a liar with her, defense attorneys would have chewed him up in court. Tobin hadn’t given her much choice.

  Brunner in the end still salvaged a conviction, in part thanks to another case worked by Severtson and Volz. Volz had prepared search warrants for Henry Narte, the diver who had been featured in the Los Angeles Times story, and was pulling the rest of that case together. Brunner indicted the fisherman and his crew for funneling four hundred thousand dollars’ worth of poached clams to DeCourville and another buyer who sent them overseas. Narte had made 191 illegal shipments and would ultimately be given a five-year prison sentence. But the cops’ work tracking those sales also gave Brunner the leverage she needed to convict DeCourville. Brunner rattled DeCourville enough that he pleaded guilty to extortion and trafficking. She chalked up a conviction without ever needing Tobin. In early 1998 DeCourville would begin a forty-month sentence in federal prison.

  The other cases involving Tobin were lost. Canfield, the bomb maker, and five other bit players would never face federal charges. Severtson pushed Agent Dali Borden to make at least some of the allegations stick, either using what she had without Tobin or by getting more information. But everyone else saw the odds against her. Borden would never get the information she had again without having someone inside.

  Detective Kevin Harrington fumed. He’d wasted a lot of time investigating Canfield, and now it would go nowhere. He stormed around, swearing about the Feds. Harrington knew Tobin’s history was a problem, but he didn’t think it should have been enough to kill the case. Someone could have made more undercover calls, he said. Something else could have been done.

  The rest of the geoduck investigators were still busy. Wildlife trafficking cases had only multiplied while they had been chasing after DeCourville. The agents investigated three separate groups, each of which took contraband valued above six figures. Agents Andy Cohen and Al Samuels and another state detective took on another peculiar and unrelated group of divers. One of these divers feared telephones. One threatened to force-feed dog food to his enemies and bury them in a backyard pit. Another suspect was the son of Officer Obie from the song “Alice’s Restaurant,” who arrested Arlo Guthrie for littering and kept him out of Vietnam. William Obanhein’s son and the team of poachers fished for clams from a boat with a pickup camper hanging three feet off the stern. The fishermen draped carpeting around the back to hide divers slipping into the water. It was the most obvious poaching operation the agents had ever seen. Tracing the sales proved more complex.

  After state detectives came across the boat on the water they searched the boat and the crewmen’s homes. They found three handwritten invoices that were addressed with fake names and addresses but included a working pager number. At the airport they searched through thousands of bills until they found others listing the same number. Obanhein told the agents the divers sold to a buyer in Brooklyn who bribed customs officials to get the clams into Hong Kong. Agent Cohen spent part of June in New York chasing information, while Samuels worked the case from Seattle. They eventually caught six men stealing twenty-three tons of clams. In a separate case he worked with Detective Volz, Cohen chased another six geoduck thieves to Boston. Those two cases alone had involved nearly $2 million worth of shellfish.

  The DeCourville investigation seemed in some way to have sapped Severtson, who increasingly confided in Volz that he was restless. His career had stalled. He did less investigating and more fieldwork. He castigated boaters for harassing killer whales. He responded to calls about sick seals on a beach. He dashed off an angry letter after a lawyer griped that Severtson’s cases were too small. This was not him. The old Severtson turned over rocks relentlessly and practiced evasive maneuvers in his free time. This Severtson was a bitter shell. During an interview with a suspect during this period, Volz gl
anced over at Severtson. He found the agent dead asleep.

  Doug Tobin, on the other hand, had been hustling to make his mark, both as an entrepreneur and as an artist. The year since he’d begun working with the cops in July 1996 had been a whirlwind. Tobin tended to launch new ideas in bunches and at lightning speed, but they usually fizzled. During the last year, though, even some of his grander dreams took root.

  Tobin spent hours carving, which gave him a creative outlet to focus his chaotic perceptions. He displayed wood sculptures at festivals and fairs. Tobin worked in the Salish tradition, characterized by circles and swirling crescents, and the colors red, white, blue, green, and black. He claimed he could look into a slab of wood and see internal forms. He cut masks of frogs and oval-headed wise men, dug flowing feathers into wishbone-shaped driftwood, and shaped and painted paddles and canoes. Tobin showed his work in Olympia galleries and gained prominence at Native art fairs. Wealthy collectors bought his work, as did the Boeing Company and the state ferry system. More than once he declared himself among the best carvers in the world.

  In mid-spring 1997, he won the type of lucrative commission he’d long hoped for. A local maritime group wanted the region’s rich history represented in an elaborate art piece—something to celebrate nature, European and Native culture, and the meeting of land and sea. The Port of Olympia, which ran southern Puget Sound’s marine cargo terminal, would pay sixty-six thousand dollars to a local artist to carve a Salish welcome pole from ancient cedar. The pole would tower over the water from a new public plaza, just a few miles from the Washington State capitol dome. Tobin eagerly sought the slot and got it.

  Tobin bubbled with images and ideas for the commission. He drove out to a studio run by Duane Pasco, a powerhouse of Northwest art whose wood sculptures could be seen everywhere—national parks, Disney’s Wilderness Lodge in Florida, a Johnny Depp movie, the Neiman-Marcus Christmas catalog. Years earlier Tobin had convinced Pasco to mentor him. Now he sought Pasco’s help again. Tobin’s ideas spilled out in a jumble. He envisioned lapping waves and leaping salmon, a moon face, a killer whale, harmony and dichotomy, tradition, and expansion. Pasco didn’t bite at first. Tobin had energy but only half-formed concepts. Pasco knew Tobin had a thing about wanting to be the best. He feared Tobin just wanted to associate with a big name.

  He told Tobin he was too swamped to work for free, but when Tobin yanked more than two thousand dollars from his pocket, Pasco changed his mind. The two men and a Pasco protégé sketched some patterns. The pole would include a canoe, a schooner, a seagull. Mother Earth would encircle images of man and woman. Tobin would later add a geoduck shell. His career as an artist was finally taking off.

  Tobin seemed equally triumphant in business. In 1996 he’d met two Canadians, Jeff Albulet and Julian Ng, who marketed crab, sea cucumber, and manila clams through a seafood company outside Vancouver, British Columbia. Ng spoke Cantonese, the dialect of southern China’s food capital, Guangzhou. Albulet, a retired commercial-airline pilot and horse-racing enthusiast, had money and could fly trade routes. The Canadians wanted a steady geoduck supply to sell in Taipei and Hong Kong.

  The three men met at a friend’s suggestion and formed a partnership. Albulet saw Tobin as a wiseass with perfect comic pitch and a generous spirit. Early in their partnership, he watched Tobin shout “Ya hungry?” to a homeless man outside a Red Robin and then throw his arm around the man’s shoulders and take him inside for lunch.

  In May 1997, just weeks before DeCourville threatened Casey Bakker, Tobin started another business venture. In between spying on geoduck thieves, Tobin partnered with a friend, Adrian Lugo, who ran one of the region’s most successful minority-owned construction companies. Growing up, Lugo had moved from one dusty south Texas town to another as his father worked odd jobs, sold vegetables, or fixed cars to pay rent. He served in Vietnam, worked briefly as a painter and sculptor, and put himself through college. Now Lugo owned a construction company that employed sixty people, brought in $20 million a year, and earned a spot on Inc. magazine’s list of the country’s five hundred fastest-growing businesses. He won civic awards for assisting minority workers. Lugo prided himself on being generous, too. He was an entrepreneur, but he was a Christian first and believed in helping others where he could.

  A mutual friend years earlier had introduced the two men when Tobin was in need of work. Tobin was fast, disciplined, and unmatched with a bulldozer, and he impressed his new boss with his eagerness. Tobin followed Lugo around and asked about the nuances of his business and how Lugo had made himself so successful after starting with nothing. Lugo saw initiative worth encouraging. When Tobin tracked down Lugo again that May, he arrived with a proposition: Native American divers made less than whites selling geoducks, but as a licensed seafood dealer, Tobin could pay Indian divers more, and in cash. He could draw most Native divers and build a bigger, steadier geoduck supply with larger profits. They could package clams themselves and sell finished product to the Canadians Albulet and Ng. It would be good for Lugo and good for Indians. Though he grilled Tobin, Lugo was won over. The two talked for hours about making profit and helping out hardworking souls. For Lugo it seemed a Christian way to do business.

  They named the corporation White Duck. Tobin and Lugo rented a thousand-square-foot warehouse in Fife. Lugo Construction fronted the cash to pay divers. Because Tobin would be diving and sluicing through the Sound gathering shellfish, Tobin convinced his partner he needed a bigger, better vessel than his arthritic boat The Judge. The bank had just repossessed a sparkling twin-engine crab boat packed with a sixty-four-mile-radius radar, GPS plotter, ship-to-shore radio, an air compressor, water pump, and dive package. With Lugo’s capital, Tobin took a trip to the coast and returned with that vessel, his new baby: a forty-two-foot fishing boat, The Typhoon.

  They transformed the warehouse into a fish processing plant. Lugo’s workers hung drywall and painted and installed refrigeration units, stainless steel sinks, and tables. Julian Ng visited the facility from Canada. Health inspectors showed up to ensure it met health codes. Halfway through an already great year, Tobin was poised to make a killing.

  It went bad almost immediately. Lugo noticed within weeks that business wasn’t exactly booming. He sent Tobin out with thousands of dollars, expecting him to come back with big returns. Instead Tobin would come back with less than Lugo had given him. Tobin blamed his staff and a side partner, a glad-handing former tractor salesman, who Tobin said pocketed the company’s profits. Tobin even called in the wildlife cops. Unfortunately, so did the tractor salesman. He told them Tobin had ripped him off. To the cops the two men sounded like squabbling children. The men agreed to part ways, so the cops left it alone.

  Lugo listened to Tobin’s excuses for weeks before making his decision to get out. “I felt like I was in a scene from The Producers,” Lugo later said. If someone stole from Tobin, that was Tobin’s problem; Lugo wanted the money he’d invested. He filed liens against The Typhoon and threatened to padlock the warehouse. When the Canadians finally called, offering to buy Lugo out, pay off the liens, and take ownership of The Typhoon, Lugo was relieved. After a tough round of negotiations with the Canadians, Tobin even urged his new partners to toss Lugo a little extra.

  “Don’t worry, pay him,” Tobin said. “You know the kind of money we’re going to make.”

  Ed Volz could feel the Feds’ priorities shifting. Severtson and his agents were wading into new issues, and Volz feared that would leave him and his fellow detectives alone dealing with shellfish poaching. Severtson was moving on to a more high-profile assignment, helping police the nation’s first whale hunt in more than half a century.

  For thousands of years the Makah Tribe on Cape Flattery, at the far northwest tip of the Olympic Peninsula, had hunted barnacle-encrusted humpbacks and Pacific gray whales. Gray whales rebounded when commercial hunting stopped in the 1920s, and by the 1990s they were no longer an endangered species. The Makah sought a special permit to resume
whaling from canoes. Word of a pending hunt spread as far as Israel and Japan. Antiwhaling groups and animal-rights activists flocked to America’s wettest corner to try and scuttle the hunt. By piloting jet skis, boats, and planes, they would try to get between eight tribal hunters and a great gray whale. Tribal police were there to handcuff protesters and confiscate their rafts while several hundred armed state and federal cops waited on the cape, fearing an explosion between the tribe and protesters.

  Severtson served as a mediator, but his sympathies lay with the antiwhalers, particularly with Captain Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Watson, large and white-haired, sailed the seas like an eco-Rambo. He hounded sea cucumber poachers in the Galapagos, rammed Japanese whalers, and tried to convince a Las Vegas casino tycoon to buy a submarine that would spook sea-turtle poachers. One of the founders of Greenpeace, he was voted out in 1977 because he was seen as too aggressive. The previous year, a Norweigan court had convicted him in absentia of trying to sink a fishing boat after Norway defied an international whaling ban. Captain Watson policed the seas in ways Severtson wished he could, unburdened by bureaucracy. Watson arrived in Neah Bay in a navy peacoat and jeans and carrying a bullhorn. Severtson brokered meetings between Watson’s Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and law-enforcement groups. He tried to help show other cops that Watson’s group didn’t intend to spill blood.

  Severtson’s enthusiasm was back. Watson called him “the first federal agent who really worked with us as a straight shooter,” but that didn’t improve Severtson’s relations with his bosses. Watson had been jailed in more countries than most of Severtson’s colleagues had visited. Many federal cops considered Watson an eco-terrorist. Severtson called him a friend.

  Volz juggled complicated emotions watching it unfold. Government work, especially police work, was inherently political, and Severtson had spent thirty years refusing to get along. Good for Rich for sticking to what he believed, Volz thought, but why intentionally antagonize the brass? Severtson’s obstinance kept hurting him. He was one of the best cops Volz knew, but the agency would never put him in charge in Seattle, the only job he had ever really wanted. Those thoughts were jumbled in Volz’s head in the winter of 1998, when he happened into Severtson’s office and saw an announcement on his desk. Volz picked it up and Severtson reddened. The federal agents—Andy Cohen, Al Samuels, Dali Borden, and Severtson—would be called back to Washington, D.C., and feted by their superiors. They had been awarded the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. Department of Commerce: gold medals for service. The secretary of commerce granted the awards for “rare and distinguished contributions of major significance to the department, the nation, or the world.” In Severtson’s case it was a truly rare tribute—he was one of the few who could now claim to have received the award twice, the first time for fighting salmon poachers in the 1980s. The new medals applauded the agents for their multiyear undercover investigation into the illegal harvest and sale of more than a million dollars in geoduck clams. The citation pointed out that “they discovered that this shellfish was illegally marketed through back channels of interstate and foreign commerce to customers in Canada, Japan, and Hong Kong. They uncovered organized criminal activity which threatened the health, welfare and safety of the public.” The agents “removed tons of contaminated seafood products destined for American and international markets. During the investigation, they exposed and terminated the largest illegal bomb factory in Washington State history.”