Shell Games

by Craig Welch

  Years later, Thompson would recall for his congregation what happened when Olivia finally showed up.

  He yelled and huffed at Olivia, but Olivia just said, “I, uh, I ran out of gas.”

  “You ran out of gas? The law of fishing is you don’t go out without enough gas. There’s no gas station you can just pull into, right?”

  The congregation chuckled as Thompson told his story. Olivia had run out of gas and got stuck in mud at low tide, and he’d kept himself busy fishing while he waited for the tide to rise enough to paddle home. “So I’m mad,” Thompson continued during his sermon, “and, you know, I’m giving him my best speech. And then he said, ‘But guess what.’ And he opens up the lid of the buckets that hold the sharks and he had one hundred sharks in there. The most we had ever caught before that was twelve.” Olivia had found the leopard shark pupping grounds, where pregnant females give birth in spring and summer. Soon Thompson and his fishermen had a system. They fished with trout hooks, four to a line, and could catch fifty babies after dawn and be back on land by 9 A.M.

  But by then the diver had died off Catalina Island and scientists and California lawmakers were growing wary of the aquarium trade. For every few thousand baby sharks taken, the biologists figured out that the rate at which the species replaced itself actually dipped about one percent, which over a few years could prove quite troublesome. Thompson’s buyer in Los Angeles heard lawmakers were about to end fishing for baby leopard sharks. He told Thompson the church should lobby lawmakers in Sacramento. Thompson ignored him, but the buyer faxed the pastor newspaper articles about the pending ban. Thompson ignored that, too.

  For years and years after the legislature banned fishing for baby sharks, the church operation continued. When buyers asked if what they were doing was illegal, Newberry would tell them, “Nobody’s bothering me.”

  Only Olivia seemed concerned. He told Thompson after the law took effect that they should do something else. Olivia offered to search for a new way to make money, but Thompson said no. “I was very upset about it but I just lost all power to try and say anything,” Olivia later told Torres through tears. “I just couldn’t see eye to eye with him about this whole mess. Kevin still was the leader of Ocean Church. And I believe in the underlying fundamental premise of Ocean Church.”

  Thompson later admitted he didn’t leave the business because demand was so high that he couldn’t resist the money. On the retail end, his sharks fetched up to two hundred dollars each. He told his congregation that he stayed with fishing in order to stay in the good graces of Reverend Moon, who had been excited to hear about the project. “When I had a chance to tell our founder, Reverend Moon, about it…he told me, ‘You need twenty boats out there fishing!’ He had this big plan drawn out. I said, ‘No, no, no, we can’t do that.’ But he doesn’t like the idea that you can’t do anything.”

  No clear evidence ever surfaced that Thompson shared what he was doing with Moon, but authorities were still able to extract a financial penalty from Moon’s church, which contributed a half-million dollars to marine habitat restoration in San Francisco Bay. Thompson spent a year in federal prison, and Newberry was sentenced to six months. Four others were also convicted.

  Because scientists still don’t fully understand the ocean, the precise impact of the poaching may never fully be known. Particularly disturbing is the fact that fishermen targeted the young. “Killing babies before they’ve had a chance to reproduce is never a good idea,” said Greg Cailliet, program director for the Pacific Shark Research Center at California’s Moss Landing Marine Laboratories.

  But leopard sharks aren’t great whites or hammerheads. They haven’t been exhaustively researched like other shark species. Scientists who intuitively understand their role in the marine world could only say what shellfish biologists said about geoduck rustling: It would have been far better if the poaching had not happened. “Sharks are the apex predator of the oceans,” said University of Washington shark expert Vincent Gallucci. “They’re at the top of the food chain. And if you disturb the top of the food chain the ramifications reverberate all the way down.” Christopher Lowe, the head of the shark laboratory at California State University at Long Beach, was far more blunt. “Those guys took a lot of shark pups out of the environment. And taking all of those young out has to have an effect. We just don’t know what it will be.”

  chapter ten

  CRAB MEN

  Geoduck enforcement improved marginally after Ed Volz’s video presentation. A newspaper reporter on one of the peninsulas across the Sound wrote about the seventy thousand pounds of wasted geoducks biologists had found discarded in mud the previous fall. A handful of editorial writers across the state demanded stricter rules and better policing of clam divers. Over several weeks, wildlife managers monitored geoduck harvests with global positioning systems, underwater video cameras, and unannounced spot checks.

  They could have used more cameras elsewhere. In early June, a recreational fisherman who lived near Detective Bill Jarmon stopped by to offer a complaint. In the waters near the Nisqually River Delta, he had seen an aluminum boat pull up some unusually large crab pots from the deep. Commercial fishermen used circular cages as traps, which they baited and dropped to the seafloor. Crabs skittered in and scratched against the mesh but could not escape. The neighbor and a friend, in their own vessel, pulled alongside the boat and saw three large containers that held the largest Dungeness crab they’d ever seen. There were dozens of the brownish purple discs piled on top of one another, some approaching a foot long across the back.

  Dungeness crab, Cancer magister

  Commercial-scale crabbing had been illegal in the marine waters near the mouth of the Nisqually River for years. In fact, most areas in southern Puget Sound had been closed to commercial crab fishing as biologists learned more about the crustaceans’ sensitivity to pollution and disturbances. Even sport fishermen could take only six a day, and these individual crabbers could no longer use dip nets or personal pots during molting season, when crabs shed their old shells to reveal the delicate new ones beneath. It was too easy to injure females carrying eggs. Eager fishermen had to wait until later in the year, when the new shells had expanded and hardened.

  Jarmon’s neighbor was stunned by the huge piles of the critters. He caught the eye of the big man on the boat who was clearly in charge of bringing up the pots. As the two boats passed, the big fisherman leaned over and urged Jarmon’s neighbor and his friend to keep what they’d seen a secret.

  Neither man did. After the neighbor spoke with Jarmon, his friend called the Tacoma News Tribune. The newspaper wrote a nine-paragraph story asking: Who was operating this illegal mystery boat?

  Detective Bill Jarmon’s mind was elsewhere a few weeks later as he wandered from the kitchen to the living room in his Tacoma home. The house sat on a rise overlooking Puget Sound and had a million-dollar view few cops could afford. Jarmon and his wife had built on the property before the region’s software boom, and before a tsunami of transplants fleeing congestion from bigger cities shot Puget Sound real estate prices into the stratosphere. The Jarmons had installed huge west-facing windows in each room to capture every possible view of the sparkling water.

  On the morning of June 28, 2000, Jarmon sipped his coffee and stared. This was his daily ritual. He would look across the channel below to the tip of the Key Peninsula or look north toward the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The mile-long span offered the fastest way to reach the Sound’s isolated western peninsulas without taking a ferry ride. Farther south Jarmon could see Fox Island, named for John L. Fox, a ship’s doctor on the U.S. Exploring Expedition. Jarmon had lived in this area his whole life. He knew this landscape like he knew his own living room.

  Jarmon had been a wildlife cop for twenty-five years. Some years he’d spent weeks at a time undercover, sizing up everyone he met. He’d once been attacked in his car by a drunk with a gun. Over time Jarmon developed a few occupational tics. One was that he noticed thin
gs—whether he wanted to or not. He’d gotten deer poachers to confess by watching their faces and pretending he already knew their crimes, and his curiosity about an elk poacher once led him to solve a long string of burglaries.

  On this clear morning, as the dawn gnawed through morning shadows, Jarmon caught a glint of sunlight hitting aluminum—a vessel cutting north, hugging the shoreline. Jarmon had always taken such pleasure in this view that his wife bought him a telescope, which sat on a tripod at the window. Jarmon trained the lens on the boat and nearly spit his coffee. He saw a thick center mast, loudspeakers, and a row of cabin windows. He was staring down the Narrows at The Typhoon, their informant’s boat, which chugged up Hales Pass toward Fox Island, where Doug Tobin kept it moored.

  From its route, Jarmon presumed Tobin was headed to the marina, but it was odd that the boat was returning at dawn. Either Tobin got up ridiculously early or the vessel had been out all night. Fishermen collected geoducks south of the spot Tobin was motoring through, but it was legal to do so only during daylight hours when monitors were there to watch the harvest. On some mornings, the detective would see several geoduck boats heading home from a sunrise harvest. That could be the case with The Typhoon, but it would have to have wrapped up its fishing pretty damn quick.

  Bill Jarmon after a promotion ceremony.

  Jarmon had been on the periphery of the DeCourville case and had worked other clam investigations, but he didn’t share Volz’s rich background in geoducks. In the last year, though, he’d been part of the team assigned to study the clam industry, and he’d had a chance to speak with Tobin as an informant. That had been odd. Unlike some of the other cops, Jarmon had known Tobin his whole career. Jarmon first met him in 1975—he’d caught the young fisherman on a December dawn illegally stringing a net to catch salmon. That incident had frozen Tobin in his mind as someone who bent rules. Having heard Volz grouse about the informant, Jarmon, this morning, couldn’t shake his curiosity: What was he doing?

  Jarmon grabbed his .40-caliber Glock, a notepad, and a radio and headed out over the Narrows Bridge. He radioed Volz, who knew geoduck rules as well as Jarmon knew the south Sound. Volz told him the only geoduck fishing open nearby was on the far side of the island and not on Tobin’s route. The Typhoon clearly wasn’t returning from a morning harvest. There could be a reasonable explanation for Tobin’s travels, but Jarmon saw no harm in taking a closer look.

  Jarmon raced toward the bridge that crossed over to Fox Island, reaching it just as The Typhoon puttered between it and a tiny sister island. He pulled over and sat back, watching through binoculars. The Typhoon docked between some boathouses and a sailboat. Jarmon surveyed the scene, not sure what he was looking for. He watched for a moment from his truck, then rolled in closer for a better view. He hid behind a mass of Scotch broom across from the marina. He slunk down in his seat and peered through a spotting scope.

  Jarmon could see maybe a half-dozen people wandering The Typhoon’s deck. None looked like Doug Tobin. They offloaded several plastic garbage cans and covered them with damp burlap, then packed the cans into a wheelbarrow-style hand dolly that was so heavy it took two men to roll it up the dock to a white van. They loaded seven garbage cans into the van and packed two more in a red Ford pickup. Jarmon couldn’t tell precisely what was in all those containers, but he had an idea. A man and a woman climbed into the pickup’s cab and took off.

  Jarmon tailed the truck as it crossed back onto the peninsula. He lagged behind, trying to remain out of sight on the rural roads, but he was low on gas and not sure how far he could go. Soon enough he’d dropped so far behind that he’d lost the truck. He pulled into a minimart to refuel and thought about the story he’d heard a few weeks earlier. Jarmon hadn’t known Tobin to deal much in crab, but that certainly seemed like what he’d seen being covered in burlap. Could The Typhoon be the mystery boat? It was possible; there was no telling what went on in the informant’s head. It also was possible that Tobin didn’t know crabbing was banned, possible that there had been a special tribal season Jarmon didn’t know about. The Typhoon also might not have been anywhere near the Nisqually. Jarmon couldn’t say where the boat had last anchored.

  What he knew for sure was that he didn’t know that much. The cop had seen a bunch of strangers offloading what looked like crab. But unless Jarmon could prove the crab had come from the Nisqually, he might have difficulty proving there’d been any crime. The crew could have taken the crab from someplace else. And, of course, he hadn’t actually seen Doug Tobin. He would have to talk it out with Volz and see what came next.

  Jarmon finished fueling and looked up and saw the red pickup. It was pulling out from a strip mall across the street. He’d caught a break. Jarmon slipped in behind it as the truck headed back to the Narrows Bridge toward Tacoma. Jarmon passed the truck and noted the license number before settling in a few paces ahead. He tracked the truck with one eye on his rearview. It crossed back into the city, and Jarmon let it overtake him near the concrete behemoth of the Tacoma Dome. He followed it off an exit and among the billboards and fast-food chains of Fife. Then the truck slowed and pulled into a small warehouse wrapped in chain-link, where someone opened a garage-style door and began unloading.

  There wasn’t much left for Jarmon to see. He drove back to the Fox Island marina once again and photographed whatever he could find left behind at the scene. He relayed the morning’s events to Volz and wondered: What now?

  The detectives had not paid much attention to Tobin lately, though they heard from him from time to time. After Severtson’s retirement, calls came at random, offering rumors and kernels of inside information. Tobin always had an angle. He worked the detectives like a high school flirt, chatting them up and dropping tips and pumping them for information, too. Tobin was always feeling them out—in the fishing industry, like any business, information is currency. The cops didn’t mind; it’s how the game was played. They shared gossip that didn’t mean much and listened, because they didn’t get to choose their snitches. Plus sometimes Tobin’s pointers were right on target, and a good tip was a good tip.

  Just the previous fall, Tobin had offered an observation. The detectives were missing out on a lot of poaching, he’d said, and one of the illegal harvesters was someone they knew well—Brian Hodgson. Now in his sixties, the godfather of the country’s geoduck industry was back on the docks and appeared to be buying and selling clams, even though he’d faced prison time, paid fines, and been banned for life from fishing in Washington. Tobin said he saw Hodgson every week on the waterfront, leaning on the hood of his truck and filling out what looked like clam-buying paperwork. The information dovetailed with something the investigators had seen themselves. While parked outside a marina that summer, Jarmon had elbowed Volz and pointed to Hodgson, who was chatting up several geoduck buyers and sellers. By the time Jarmon had followed The Typhoon, Harrington and another detective were officially investigating Hodgson again.

  The detectives weren’t sure what to make of what Jarmon had seen on Fox Island. Given their busy schedules and the lack of clarity, they passed the tip to some marine-patrol officers, who it turned out already shared Jarmon’s suspicions. One of the marine officers a few days earlier had been in contact with the Squaxin Island Tribe. Someone had reported to tribal police that a crab boat working in the Nisqually region had “Typhoon” emblazoned across its stern. Those officers passed the information Jarmon had given them to tribal police. The tribal guys knew Tobin and would know if there’d been a special season for tribal fishermen. Perhaps the tribal police could sort it out themselves.

  Squaxin Island stretches like a knife handle across the openings of several finger inlets on Puget Sound’s southwestern shores. The island itself is only five miles long and narrow enough to walk across in ten minutes. The Squaxins, along with the Nisqually and Puyallup Indians, once dominated the southern lands of Puget Sound all the way to the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, but they signed away thousands of square mile
s to the United States in treaties. The tribe retained the island as its reservation lands, but tribal members soon left to make their homes on the mainland. By 1862, fewer than fifty people lived on the island. A century later, the number had dropped to four. By the year 2000, the island was empty.

  Tribal members were scattered everywhere, but a small tribal community existed on the mainland not far from the island. The tribe operated a midsize casino outside the southern Puget Sound community of Shelton, which was one of the county’s largest employers. It ran a gas station and trading post and a small tobacco plant that made cigarettes and cigars. It oversaw a museum and cultural center, with a totem pole out front that had been carved by Doug Tobin.

  The tribe’s small police force dealt with crime on Indian lands and shared some jurisdiction with local law enforcement. Tribal cops policed the tribe’s portion of its fish and shellfish harvest and could cite offenders for poaching on Indian grounds. Chief Rory Gilliland was not a Squaxin Island Indian, but a professional cop and a member of the Delaware Tribe from Oklahoma. He’d been a sheriff’s deputy in Olympia during the Northwest Indian fishing wars of the 1970s and had often been ordered to stop Native fishermen from catching salmon. He had seen bloodshed and gunfire and dismissed the period as “ugly.” He left the sheriff’s department after a long career and took the top cop job with the tribal police in 1993.

  Gilliland had known the Tobin brothers for years. Gilliland liked Doug but they’d had run-ins over fishing. Gilliland had watched Doug bend the rules before and then try to talk himself out of trouble. Stopped by a tribal cop, Tobin once dialed Gilliland directly on his cell phone. “He’d play everyone to his advantage,” the police chief later said. “And I considered him a friend.” Tobin sometimes paid his tickets and sometimes fought them in tribal court. The Squaxin Island Tribe ran a small outfit. Gilliland knew Tobin didn’t see him as a threat.