by Craig Welch
The geoduck compensates for this poor rate of survival with a robust libido that allows it to procreate for a century. The baby clams that survive this open-water gauntlet tumble to the seafloor after just a few weeks, remaining exposed until they dig safely into their burrows, where they can finally live unscathed by predators. Sea otters and starfish occasionally tunnel into these hideaways, and crab or spiny dogfish might graze on exposed siphon tips. But while other clams must scoot away to avoid hungry fish, a geoduck merely retracts its neck like a turtle. Most geoducks get to live in peace, grow old, and expire.
Yet geoduck populations fluctuate wildly, and no one really understands why. Once, in an area of Puget Sound that had never been fished, a scientist randomly pulled out a thousand wild clams. Thirty percent of them were exactly the same age. For an animal that can live 150 years and spreads its seed randomly many times each year, the odds against that happening should have been astronomical. But the giant clams appear to reproduce in spasms. Some years the creatures are monstrously fertile, producing an exceptionally large crop of baby mollusks. In other years offspring survival is horrific. Scientists have no clue as to what most influences reproduction and continued existence. It could be food or water temperature or tides or wind. Regardless, the rate at which baby clams survive to adulthood dropped in half after the Great Depression, even though commercial geoduck fishing didn’t start until 1970. Then it picked up again.
That’s part of the reason divers each year can legally take less than 3 percent of the clams at fishable depths—a rate scientists presume is sustainable. To know for certain, they need an accurate count of geoduck populations. So, since the late 1960s, researchers in scuba gear have investigated the Sound each year. Working two by two in straight lines, they move row by row and bed by bed, slowly counting the geoducks they see. Once the clams are tallied, biologists log their totals in a database they call the Geoduck Atlas, which they subject to mathematical modeling. That helps them recommend where and how much to let divers fish.
But this strategy is only as good as the raw data, and there are significant gaps. Clam counting is slow and arduous, and once a bed is mapped scientists rarely waste time going back. It might be twenty years before an area is revisited. And when clam beds are closed to fishing, regulators assume the geoduck population stays the same. Often that’s not the case. Thirty years of massive poaching, combined with basic gaps in knowledge, can undermine their assumptions. “If something happened to those clams—if they died or someone fished that bed illegally—we wouldn’t know it,” said Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife shellfish biologist Alex Bradbury.
Many things can happen to those clams. Climate changes and environmental damage already were unraveling some of Puget Sound’s natural systems in ways scientists were still just coming to understand. Logging, warming seas, and pollution from leaky septic tanks starved creatures in Hood Canal of necessary oxygen. Anchovies, sand lance, cucumbers, octopuses, perch, and other fish sometimes suffocated in mass die-offs. When scientists finally surveyed a section of Hood Canal’s geoducks, they found that roughly half were dead.
There was also the looming threat from ocean acidification. Seawater typically is slightly alkaline, but when oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—as they have by hundreds of billions of tons since the Industrial Revolution—the waters become slightly more corrosive. Climate modelers in the 1990s predicted greenhouse gases would lower the pH of marine waters by the year 2100. They expected to see it first in parts of the Pacific Northwest, where waters already are more acidic. But scientists would find evidence that ocean acidification appeared to be accelerating and altering the chemistry of the seas far sooner than expected. The animals most susceptible to these minute changes: shellfish. Baby clams and oysters are particularly at risk of erosion from less alkaline seas, which can completely dissolve their protective calcium carbonate shells.
Biologists also worried about waste from another type of illegal fishing, a practice called high-grading. The difference in market price between smooth gleaming-white top-quality clams and stubby dirty specimens could be several dollars a pound. The only way divers could tell which they had was to dig them up and take a look. Many pulled out clams, took a look, then illegally tossed the bivalves aside. Removed from their beds, all geoducks die. The question for researchers was: How often did it happen?
In 1999, biologists had accompanied the detectives on an unusual undercover operation. They hung out onshore near geoduck beds, hiding or trying to look inconspicuous while commercial divers worked nearby. When these divers left at sundown Volz ferried the biologists in an undercover boat out to where the fishermen had been working. The researchers slipped into their own scuba gear and counted the dying clams they saw loose on the seafloor. They also tallied the empty shells after the season ended. What they found was startling—divers in just one location had discarded seventy thousand pounds of unwanted clams. On some beds, scientists concluded, illegal waste probably added 30 percent to what regulators presumed was harvested each year.
Predicting how poaching might change the population of marine creatures is almost impossible. Illicit activities are by nature hard to quantify. Just the number of geoducks people could prove had been stolen would add another 10 percent to the annual catch. And as the DeCourville case showed, cops usually caught poachers stealing only a fraction of what they actually took. That means the calculus used to set sustainable fishing rates is based on numbers that may be mildly—or wildly—inaccurate. Scientists understood this and tried to adjust accordingly, but that involved a fair amount of guesswork. And there was no accounting for the shifting ecology of the seas. Geoducks certainly would remain abundant for some time, but no one could predict how long that would be the case.
By the turn of the century, overfishing and seafood smuggling were commonplace. The seas’ biggest fish—sharks, tuna, marlin, sailfish, swordfish—were disappearing, and scientists around the world struggled to trace illegal fishing’s role. Perhaps $1 billion in fish caught illegally from the high seas would soon be sold each year in European markets. Fishing pressure was rising faster than the ability of modern science to comprehend the marine world’s complexity. Poachers and smugglers increasingly made off with fish species that researchers had never studied much at all, and not just fish species chefs served for dinner. Fish of all descriptions—big, small, tropical, ugly, razor-toothed, even poisonous—were being taken illegally, often for purposes that had nothing to do with food. And just as researchers were learning with geoducks, it was impossible to really understand the consequences, even among those creatures that were long presumed to be abundant. Nowhere was that phenomenon playing out more strangely than along the California coast.
The trouble came to light on May 15, 1991, during Kenneth W. Howard’s fourth dive of the day. It would be the last of his life. At seventy-three feet, something went wrong. Howard untethered himself from his air line and began sucking an emergency oxygen bottle. It ran out before he reached the surface. Authorities never learned precisely what happened, but the accident would reverberate through the public consciousness. It wasn’t the fact of Howard’s death that the public seized on, but what Howard had been doing when he died.
Howard was one of dozens of people who regularly dived the east side of Catalina Island off the coast of Southern California to collect fish. The thirty-four-year-old knew well the fertile stretch near Isthmus Reef where divers moved among moray eels, lobsters, and the blue sprigs of Christmas tree worms. It was a popular inlet, a fish-rich scuba-diving paradise, but Howard did not use scuba gear. A partner fed Howard oxygen through a hose from a compressor on board a boat while down below Howard and other divers bagged tiny snails and baby octopuses, stingrays, eels, orange Garibaldis, pipefish, and sharks. The divers sold their catches to brokers in the marine aquarium-fish trade, who in turn sold them to pet stores around the world. Howard typically sold fish for $5 to $7 apiece and often pocketed $200 a d
ay. On an exceptional day the week before his death, he caught forty-eight baby leopard sharks—creatures popular enough to command a premium. Howard walked away with $654 for a day’s work.
Howard’s job as an aquarium-fish wrangler caught California citizens and the government by surprise. Few had heard of aquarium-fish smuggling. Freshwater aquariums around the world were stocked with fish raised mostly in captivity, but the $300 million saltwater marine-aquarium trade was almost exclusively supplied by wild fish. Most came from waters off Indonesia or the Philippines, but fishermen worked this trade all over the world, including Florida and Hawaii. In California in 1991, that type of fishing was legal and entirely unregulated. The California Department of Fish and Game had no idea how many aquarium divers there were, or how many fish they took. Authorities who investigated Howard’s death learned that other divers had been working the bays off Catalina since the 1970s, using makeshift vacuum hoses and plastic tubes attached to motorized generators (“slurp guns”), which they jammed into reefs and rocky crevices. These devices sucked up all nearby fish, even though the aquarium business targeted only a few species.
Howard’s accident alarmed those who cared about marine fish. “The death of that diver opened Pandora’s box,” the head of a Catalina Island conservation group told the Los Angeles Times in 1992. “We had no idea that kind of commercial fishing was going on or how destructive it is. They’re raping the ocean, taking everything they can catch.”
Biologists turned to state lawmakers for help. That year the California legislature banned fish collecting around the reefs of Catalina Island. Up and down the California coast, aquarium-fish gatherers now needed special licenses and were required to document their catches. Lawmakers named the Garibaldi California’s state fish, and collecting it, too, was soon prohibited. The state also outlawed catching or possessing baby leopard sharks, which were extraordinarily popular with aquarium owners. Thin and bendy with gray-and-white skin, leopard sharks are graceful and docile and roam coastal waters from Mexico to Oregon. They can grow up to seven feet but age slowly. Aquarium owners bought young pups between eight and forty inches, and when the fish outgrew their tanks, homeowners tossed them down the drain. After Howard’s death, researchers realized that practice was dangerous to the species. “Removing too many pups could have huge significance,” said Suzanne Kohin, a shark expert with the National Marine Fisheries Service. “We have such poor data on these types of sharks that if someone removed a bunch of them, we might not notice the decline for years.” In 1994, California lawmakers outlawed catching or keeping leopard sharks smaller than thirty-six inches. The law let fishermen catch adult sharks but protected the babies needed to sustain the species. At least that’s what lawmakers thought.
Several years later National Marine Fisheries Service special agent Roy Torres heard from a colleague in Miami that Florida wildlife detectives had raided a pet dealership that had sold eighteen baby leopard sharks. The pet distributor got the sharks from a supplier in Los Angeles not far from Torres’s office in Pacific Grove. The investigation also turned up the name of a second supplier: Kevin Thompson of San Leandro, a small suburb on San Francisco Bay. Thompson had shipped boxes marked LIVE TROPICAL FISH to Florida a year earlier. Thompson was apparently a regular shipper, and Torres spent the summer learning about him.
Meanwhile, that spring, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Illinois received a tip from an angry pet dealer that a rival near Chicago was illegally selling baby leopard sharks. When a federal agent visited the Chicago shop the owner and his wife confessed they’d just received 101 leopard sharks from California sent by Kevin Thompson. Torres staked out Thompson’s address and noted an odd decal in a window of the house, a line-drawn symbol he had never seen before: a yellow cartoon depiction of a family. He saw the same sticker in a window down the street, at a brick building known as the Bay Area Family Church. It was the symbol for the San Francisco–area chapter of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. Kevin Thompson was its pastor.
The Reverend Sun Myung Moon, leader of the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, may be most recognized for presiding over mass weddings, his ownership of the Washington Times, or his conviction on tax-fraud charges in the early 1980s. Less visible is his ownership of vertically integrated fishing and seafood businesses.
The Korean-born Moon considers himself a messiah, and in the mid-1970s he urged his disciples—“the Moonies”—to dominate the seas. The Moonies bought land in many of America’s busiest fishing ports: Miami, the Gulf of Mexico, Norfolk, Kodiak, San Francisco Bay, and the cod-fishing village of Gloucester, Massachusetts. They bought shipyards, fleets of tuna-fishing boats, and seafood processors and launched what would become the country’s dominant sushi distributor, True World Foods. In one sermon Moon christened himself “King of the Ocean” and outlined his vision. Land would soon be inadequate to feed the world, but the ocean was boundless and everything in it was edible. “I have the entire system worked out,” Moon said. “After we build the boats, we catch the fish and process them for market, and then have a distribution network. This is not just on the drawing board; I have already done it. All these ideas I conceived many years ago, and I knew just where to start—with tuna fishing—because it is the essential way to train people in the fishing spirit.”
Kevin Thompson had worked his way to San Leandro in the 1980s from the tuna industry and a Moonie church in Gloucester. Thompson was a doughy, amiable Brit raised in Manchester, England, and spoke with a disarming Scottish brogue. Towing his twenty-eight-foot boat called One Hope, he moved west to serve as the Bay Area Family Church’s youth leader and set about instilling Moonie values in children through fishing.
The parishioners called their sanctuary Ocean Church. Years later, after becoming pastor in San Leandro, Thompson would tell his congregation how he stumbled into selling sharks. “Some of you know that Ocean Church…has had this little shark business,” he said, in a sermon that was recorded and later shared with authorities. “The way we got into that business was totally by accident. Anybody who fishes in the bay knows these little leopard sharks are a pain in the neck. They steal your bait all the time. Fishermen hate them. So for years, we’d take people fishing, and these little sharks would be the pests. So we’d throw them back.
“One day we found out that in pet stores they were selling these little sharks for seventy-five dollars for one shark. These things that we throw away by the hundreds! This one brother who was with us said to this pet store, ‘How about if I catch you a few of these sharks? Would you buy them from me?’ They said yes, and he went out the next day and he caught five. He took the five sharks to the pet store, sold them for twenty dollars each, and said, ‘Here’s my number, give me a call. When you sell out I’ll get you some more.’ That night he gets a call from the pet store. They said, ‘We talked to all the other pet stores that we’re associated with and we want you to catch us some sharks. And we’ll cut out the middleman. And we’ll get them for cheaper from you. And we’ll make more profit and you’ll get some money.’ And that’s how we started this business, catching little baby sharks.”
Thompson’s sermon wasn’t far from the truth, though he diminished his own role and ignored an important fact: What Thompson had done was illegal after 1994, but he did it anyway. His leopard shark business was at the center of the largest shark-smuggling ring in the country’s history. Torres would learn that over many years as many as sixty thousand baby leopard sharks were illegally plucked from California waters and sold into the aquarium trade. Tens of thousands of those sharks, worth more than $1.2 million, came from Reverend Kevin Thompson. For years, his crew stashed fishing gear and stowed stolen sharks in special bins at True World Foods. The sharks were incorrectly labeled as TROPICAL FISH, COMMON SHARKS, or HARLEQUIN TUSK and wound up in pet stores from Texas to Maine. The preacher’s outfit took enough sharks to supply international pet dealers in Hong Kong, Germany, Italy, France,
Spain, the Netherlands, and other countries, too.
Even to an eighteen-year-old, it seemed obvious that this was wrong.
Brandon Olivia worked and lived with Thompson, who like many Moonie family patriarchs opened his home to lost young men. In 1991 when he came to stay with Thompson, Olivia roomed with another teenager, John Newberry, the nineteen-year-old son of a British policeman. The two young men got on nicely. They took church members fishing and sold flowers on the street. They had no bank accounts and made no money, but they lived for free and bought clothes at Goodwill with money provided by Thompson and his wife. Newberry and Olivia treated Thompson like a father. “They basically did whatever I asked them,” the pastor said.
It was with Olivia and Newberry that Thompson learned they could sell the baby sharks they hooked by accident. At the time, doing so was still perfectly legal. Thompson met with a pet distributor in Los Angeles who needed a regular supplier of leopard sharks. Thompson had boats, equipment, and experienced fishermen. Yet Olivia and Newberry struggled at first. They fished under the San Mateo Bridge, using squid or worms for bait, but the sharks they caught were too big and died before reaching Los Angeles. The buyer eventually told Thompson that the sharks needed to be starved temporarily in a large holding tank. That way, the fish could eliminate their recent meals and not poison themselves during shipping.
Leopard shark, Triakis semifasciata
Newberry built a handful of twenty-five-hundred-gallon tanks, which he stored behind a True World Foods distribution center. For a while, things went smoothly. Then one day Olivia did not come home from being out on the water. By 8 P.M. the pastor was worried and ran down to the docks, certain something terrible had happened.