by Craig Welch
Volz cringed. The Feds were getting an award? Certainly the cases that agents Cohen and Samuels were finishing were complicated and important and appeared to be going smoothly. But many of those cases also involved state agents, and then there were the others that Tobin had helped botch. Volz knew how close they’d come to losing DeCourville. He had no expectation that as a state employee he would win a federal government award, but Severtson had clearly gone out of his way to keep his award quiet.
By 1999, the Feds had moved on. Assistant U.S. Attorney Micki Brunner was pulled into a long investigation of pipeline companies after a fatal gas-line leak near the Canadian border. Two ten-year-old boys had been playing with fireworks in a park near a creek on a summer day when one struck a butane lighter and sparked an explosion that sent a black cloud soaring six miles high. A pipe had ruptured and spilled a quarter of a million gallons of gasoline into the creek. Both boys died in the hospital the next day. The blast also killed an eighteen-year-old fisherman. Brunner was assigned to find out if the accident was the result of criminal negligence.
Severtson retired and began teaching law enforcement at a community college north of Seattle. He spent his leisure time bow hunting in the mountains. Dali Borden felt passed over, too, after being denied a shot at leading operations in Seattle. She took a job as a cop with the Food and Drug Administration, investigating food-safety cases from mad cow disease to pill tampering. Andy Cohen moved to Boston and rose within the agency. When Severtson left, Al Samuels took the helm and changed direction. Four federal agents had spent several years looking into the theft of giant clams. Samuels knew that they hadn’t rooted out corruption in the geoduck industry, but the agency needed to focus on other cases. There were a hundred other commodities to investigate. Federal resources were not endless, and there were many other fish being smuggled from the sea.
The geoduck world was changing, too. Since the 1970s, biologists had been searching for ways to farm geoducks like crops, which could help protect wild geoducks and bring consistency to products and markets. Scientists tried getting clams to reproduce in buckets and in hatcheries and in nature, planting them on beaches and dumping them haphazardly from boats, but the crop always ended up dying. By the mid-1990s, scientists had cracked a few basic riddles. Shellfish companies began rearing geoduck larvae as small as the half moon on a man’s pinky nail in tanks as big as brewery boilers. Clam farming was on its way, but it would be years before it produced geoducks in real volume, and when it did, it would stir controversy of its own. In the meantime seafood lovers still wanted wild geoducks and wanted them enough that people were quick to steal them.
Twenty-one people had already faced federal felonies, two had fled the country as fugitives, and several million dollars’ worth of shellfish had been stolen. But since the Feds had made clear they would no longer police geoducks, all the responsibility for clam crimes fell to state detectives. Volz’s superiors decided they needed a more systematic approach. Rather than just investigate individual crimes, Volz’s chief urged a handful of undercover officers to spend time documenting general trends within the geoduck industry. They would take a more holistic approach to understanding what was happening within the Northwest’s high-dollar fishery.
The detectives watched geoduck harvests and became better acquainted with the fishermen. They visited the docks and ran into regulars and spoke with everyone they could think of who might offer insight, including Doug Tobin, who had left word with the detectives that he had information. He wanted to meet to talk about it in person. That fit perfectly with the detectives’ own plans.
On a cold morning early in 2000, Volz called Tobin into his office. The detectives wanted Tobin to describe on videotape how things worked in the field, how poachers ran roughshod over those who followed the rules.
Tobin showed up looking haggard, his face swollen with exhaustion, a paper cup of coffee in his hand. He wore a purple-and-black down jacket, his flannel shirt open to midtorso. That was just fine; he didn’t need to look pretty. The detectives only needed him to start talking. Tobin spoke for hours for the camera, outlining what he knew about supplying geoduck to the world.
Tobin brought a yellow legal pad, complete with a suggested list of suspects to pursue. He told Volz about two men who overharvested four hundred pounds of clams a day and about a buyer he suspected did everything under the table. He mentioned a Canadian company shipping stolen geoducks by truck to California, and another that used shellfish as a front to smuggle untaxed cigarettes mixed with seafood. He said the man who had invited friends over to watch surveillance footage of himself stealing clams was back on the water, breaking the law again. And another longtime player was shipping clams by truck to markets in San Francisco and Los Angeles, about two thousand pounds each week. Tobin once more offered to sell geoducks undercover to help catch these crooks.
Volz stayed silent. He had other ideas.
A few weeks later, Volz dimmed the lights over a scrum of wildlife officials, including his chief, a former head of the Washington State Patrol, and the leaders of two natural resource agencies. Volz and the other detectives had prepared for weeks for this moment. Since the Feds had decided geoduck fishing was a state problem, they hoped to get more attention from legislators and rule makers by showing them how out of control clam fishing had become. Volz pulled the shades, then turned on a projector and his laptop. A headline flashed up on a wall: “A Resource in Peril.”
Volz flipped through slide after slide, recounting the half-dozen smuggling operations he and other cops had busted up. Special Agent Al Samuels’s investigation of the Brooklyn seafood dealer. The case Volz and Agent Cohen had followed to Boston. DeCourville. The room stirred, but Volz pressed on. He described the way his special investigations unit worked, then flipped to a slide he hoped would be the day’s showstopper: a videotaped interview with a geoduck insider.
The speaker’s face was blurred and his voice was altered to protect his identity, but his presence was commanding: flannel shirt open to an ample belly, revealing a whale-tooth necklace, and arms stuffed in a down jacket. “I’ve been a diver, and a buyer, and a packer, and I basically ship geoduck all over the world,” Doug Tobin said. “When I got into this industry, I was as green as a pool table and twice as square. But I’ve seen corruption from day one.”
Volz watched alongside the others like a coach sharing highlight reels. The day Volz had filmed him, Tobin had come to the office late, tired, and unprepared, his eyes puffy. Volz had edited out scenes of Tobin offering details about open cases. But now he watched as Tobin detailed on the fly the many ways poachers hid their work: Boat operators stashed clams in skiffs that sped off before the catch was tallied. Brokers forged paperwork to sneak loads in and out of Canada. Lately divers were attaching water hoses through their boat hulls to obscure evidence of someone prying clams down below with a jet sprayer. Divers increasingly used scuba rebreathers, which did not release bubbles that could be seen from the surface. “There’s no noise,” Tobin said, shrugging to indicate his dismay. “They could be anchored right off Alki,” West Seattle’s crowded recreational beachfront. “If this building was sitting on a beach somewhere, close to the water, they could harvest ’ducks right in front of your office and you wouldn’t know.”
There was a lilt of sadness in his voice. “I feel right now there is an incredible virus, kind of running rampant,” he said. Tobin offered his own family’s story as an example of how mismanagement had squandered the Northwest’s natural bounty. He spoke of his father’s business, Alpine Construction, and how well his family had once done cutting down trees and fishing. In the days of plenty, people took their share and nothing more, and everyone made money, Tobin said. There was something left for the next generation. Now the biggest old-growth trees were visible only in the faded black-and-white photographs hanging in area restaurants. Without strong action to protect the geoduck, the region would be left with nothing but its stories.
“I’v
e seen the demise of old-growth timber, to where our standards are today. I was also unfortunate—or fortunate—enough to see the demise of the salmon. With the logging, at one time, you could raise your family, and my dad did incredibly well. And we did incredibly well on salmon. It used to be that you could raise a family just on salmon. So, in my book, we’ve basically lost the heart of both of those. And I see the same demise being conducted with geoduck.” Not everyone, Tobin claimed, saw clams as wildlife worth protecting. They saw only the millions upon millions of dollars in the sand. “If something isn’t done, it’s going to be like the timber and the salmon,” he said. “The party’s over. We either do something, or we lose.”
chapter nine
A SEA OF ABUNDANCE
Doug Tobin hadn’t let inconvenient facts cloud his story—to suggest geoducks were in jeopardy was ridiculous, and everyone knew it. Puget Sound holds millions of geoducks. More than 165 million inhabit waters at fishable depths, according to official estimates. Millions more are presumed to live past the seventy-foot limit for commercial clam diving. Researchers using deep-sea cameras have captured fields of geoducks 350 feet below the surface.
And yet Tobin couldn’t entirely be dismissed. Geoducks are unusual creatures that reside in a complex environment. They live so long and grow so slowly, they are less like fish than trees, an irony not lost on shellfish biologists. Most people presume abundance alone is enough to ensure these ancient clams will thrive. But the same had been said of the Pacific Northwest’s salmon and old-growth forests. By the time Ed Volz made his presentation, Puget Sound chinook had dwindled to such low numbers they needed the protection of the Endangered Species Act. And lumberjacks had mostly been banned from the Northwest woods. After a century of logging, scientists had discovered that hacking down so many thickets of Douglas fir and cedar threatened the entire forest system. Timber harvests put at risk other life in the woods: northern spotted owls, thumbnail-size beetles, silver-haired bats, spatula-shaped mushrooms, and scurrying red tree voles. The Pacific Northwest had gone to great lengths to save those species, but by the winter of 2000 many were still in trouble. The forests that remained were just fragments of what they’d been.
Geoducks are the old-growth forests of the sea, but digging for them had been managed more conservatively from the start—fishermen were never allowed to take anywhere near as many clams as loggers took trees. They were restricted by law because scientists understood that the creatures’ extraordinary lifespans made the consequences of removing them tough to grasp. Thirty to fifty million in any given year were off-limits solely because they’d been contaminated by pollution or red tides. But rules protecting creatures from overharvest do little good when they’re not followed. The margin for error is slim for long-living marine creatures, and Puget Sound faced new ecological challenges. In a world beset by pollution, climate change, and acidifying oceans, massive poaching operations just complicated everything, and the marine world already was complicated enough. Scientists trying to gauge the long-term sustainability of geoduck fishing found answers elusive because they rested on a more fundamental query: How well did we really understand the sea?
History is filled with once-prolific sea creatures humans thought would last forever. The first of those appears to have been a clam. Long before the earliest people worked their way to the Red Sea, Tridacna costata, a huge, squiggly jawed shallow-water clam, was among the Middle East’s most plentiful marine animals, accounting for 80 percent of that region’s giant shellfish. Then humans showed up 125,000 years ago and discovered this accessible seafood treat. Soon after, the number of giant clams plummeted. Tridacna costata’s decline is the earliest known example of the overexploitation of marine life by humans. It wouldn’t be the last.
Stocks of the world’s most prized fish, Atlantic cod, collapsed in the 1990s in the world’s richest fishing grounds, bringing the risks of overfishing to the world’s attention. Fishermen for centuries had swept nets back and forth across the submerged plateaus of the North Atlantic east of Newfoundland and east of Cape Cod, places with names like the Grand Banks and Georges Bank. They scooped a bounty of cod for fish and chips or fillets. Then technology, advances in fishing trawlers, and the rising popularity of consumer staples like frozen fish sticks sent the catch into the stratosphere, and cod populations crashed. A single ship by the 1980s could net more cod in a day than an entire fleet centuries earlier could land in a season. By 1994, cod stocks off Georges Bank had plummeted 40 percent in just a few years. The government declared that fewer captains would be allowed to fish, and they would get to spend fewer hours at sea. Two years later, cod stocks dropped more.
Still, invertebrates such as shellfish, sea urchins, and sea cucumbers had once been thought naturally resistant to overfishing. In part that was because they were fished by divers; some number of the animals would always survive in deep water far beyond where divers fished. If fishermen took too many, regulators shut down seasons for a few years, believing wild creatures would rebound on their own. But Puget Sound’s pinto abalone already were demonstrating that nature rarely follows human rules.
Abalone had been popular as a delicacy long before poacher-turned-informant Dave Ferguson started stealing them. But the rise of Asian markets in the 1980s and 1990s helped generate a new boom in demand. Connoisseurs pounded the meat with mallets, boiled it in soup with cabbage, stir-fried it with pepper and garlic, or served it as steak stuffed with prosciutto and pine nuts. By the end of the century, illegal fishing threatened abalone around the world. Poaching by Chinese gangs in South Africa was sparking gun battles in Johannesburg. British Columbia authorities would soon employ shellfish-sniffing dogs on ferries and use a DNA database to track abalone poached from their waters. One team of crooks would be caught trucking eleven thousand abalone off Canada’s coast. Smugglers regularly took hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth each year from California, which holds the world’s last remaining populations of red abalone.
Washington had never allowed commercial fishing for pinto abalone. But by the time of Ferguson’s arrest in 1994, the creatures already had begun disappearing. Biologists knew poachers almost certainly were to blame, but they were eager to better understand the problem. For years, they dived along the San Juan Islands and investigated, and through the 1990s, they noticed the decline actually picked up speed. But the more researchers learned, the more confused they grew.
Abalone are voracious grazers, and unlike geoducks, they move about underwater. They cruise at night, scraping algae off rocks and feeding on drifting kelp. That ability to wander is how they survive. They must move extremely close to one another in order to reproduce. But that clustering makes them easy prey for thieves, who can scoop them up by the dozens during a single scuba dive. Yet while scientists found that abalone in Puget Sound were growing rarer, the ones that remained were also getting bigger. If poachers were the problem, that didn’t make sense. Wouldn’t poachers want the biggest ones?
Then the researchers hit upon a troubling answer: Average abalone sizes were getting larger because a greater percentage of the shellfish were older. That could mean only one thing. The shellfish were living longer but not being replaced by offspring. The abalone thieves in the 1980s and early 1990s had created an even bigger problem than first thought. So many of the shellfish had been removed from Puget Sound that the remaining abalone lived too far apart to congregate. The creatures that survived weren’t getting close enough to mate. Poachers years earlier had sent Puget Sound abalone into a death spiral. Not even the biggest ones were plentiful enough to make serious poaching worthwhile anymore.
About the time Ed Volz was making his video presentation of Doug Tobin, scientists were struggling to understand poaching’s effect on geoducks. They started by studying geoduck mating. Several times from January to June, male geoducks exhale sperm in billowy puffs from their siphons, prompting females to release millions of eggs into the water column. Researchers call this broadcast spawni
ng. Corals do it, as do some oysters, spreading their seed in milky bursts, some of which can be seen from satellites. Egg and sperm meet in the water, and within days shelled larvae begin to swim about. Nearly all of these infant geoducks are consumed by other marine life.