by Craig Welch
That June, the tribe had been swamped with tips about the mystery boat. Several suggested The Typhoon was the culprit. By the time Gilliland heard from the officers in Jarmon’s shop, he’d already begun his own little inquiry. There was no tribal opening for crab, and Tobin didn’t have the right license anyway. If Tobin was taking crab, it definitely was illegal, but he knew the waters better than they did. His boat could travel in zero visibility and could race from Squaxin Island in the morning to the Strait of Juan de Fuca the same night, a journey that might take a smaller boat several days. Catching him in the act might not be that easy.
Usually crab pots were marked by buoys, but just in case, a sport fisherman gave tribal police a GPS reading on a spot where he’d seen a vessel drop its pots. The tribal cops planned to wait there and see if someone came back to pick them up. Several nights passed with little action. Then one night at 4 A.M., a patrolling tribal officer spotted a boat shining a light in the Nisqually Delta. By the time the officer was able to approach, the larger vessel had switched off its lights and vanished.
Gilliland had no doubt that it had been Tobin, but the tribal force never got much more detail. They mailed Tobin a citation for fishing in closed waters, based on the information provided by witnesses. Tobin paid a small fine and that was the end of it. “My guys never really got it together,” Gilliland said. By early July any buoys that might have marked crab-pot locations were gone. Whatever Tobin or his crew had done seemed over.
Ed Volz growled at the news. In truth, no one really knew exactly what Tobin had done or if he’d stopped, but it seemed clear that getting a handle on it would require more than just a bunch of cops passing around tips. If the detectives wanted to know what their informant was up to it appeared they would have to try and figure it out themselves, but it was hard to know how much time to invest. The detectives had no new leads and plenty of other cases. They weren’t even sure he was still doing anything. They decided it was best to just hang back and keep watch.
In early October 2000, Tobin dangled an opportunity that made that easy: He offered to rat out another seafood dealer. Ken Li was currently driving shellfish to Canada on behalf of another broker. He and Tobin had done business before, but now the man wanted to start his own outfit and was looking to get some inexpensive stolen clams. Harrington and Jarmon headed south to meet Tobin in Fife, this time at Mitzel’s restaurant, another family-style café, this one just a few hundred yards from the Poodle Dog. The restaurant sat less than a mile from Tobin’s warehouse, and had become his hangout. The fisherman had grown so popular there that restaurant workers treated him like royalty. He arrived early each morning with a six-person crew and often came back later the same day. He sat at a round bench in front of the fireplace and was easily the restaurant’s single biggest customer. He left hundred-dollar tips for waitresses and sometimes dropped five thousand dollars there in a month.
Tobin told the detectives that he wanted Rory Gilliland with the Squaxin Island Police to be present if Tobin sold Li illegal clams during a sting. The detectives had no objection. They saw Li as a minor bust but thought it might lead to some insights. It might help them learn how geoducks moved through Canada—and it would get them inside Tobin’s plant.
At 2:30 P.M., they followed Tobin down a short dead-end road to his warehouse. The place was made of concrete and stainless steel and was filled with tanks, tubs, and refrigeration units, an unspectacular place that smelled vaguely of crab. Tobin would work the sting but demanded the cops reimburse him for any clams he used. They might exchange several thousand dollars’ worth, and Doug knew the detectives would confiscate them at Li’s arrest. The detectives stayed noncommittal but agreed to address it later. Finally Tobin called Ken Li while Harrington listened in. “You give me the product and I’ll pay you cash,” Li told Tobin. “Don’t worry. I’ve done this many times in the past.”
The next afternoon, Gilliland boxed clams in the warehouse, pretending to be just another of Tobin’s workers. Jarmon crawled into the loft where he could watch. The hard plywood floors put his legs to sleep, and he could barely hear over the whir of a nearby generator. But from here he’d be able to see Li and Tobin. This was merely a dress rehearsal. The two men were only meeting to make plans.
Tobin opened the warehouse doors for Li’s green Mazda minivan. Li was well groomed and graying in a denim shirt. He looked like a young grandfather on his way to play golf. He helped Tobin unload several empty milk crates near a set of holding tanks. He complained that during their last transaction Tobin had shorted him fifty pounds. Tobin dismissed the weight difference as an oversight and promised to make it up this time. He joked that Li’s minivan looked like something an old woman would drive. “It’s great,” Tobin said. “No cop would ever follow you in that.” Li laughed and agreed it was very discreet. Then he made Tobin promise not to tell anyone else he was branching out. He was pocketing nearly five thousand dollars a week, and he showed Tobin a wallet stuffed with one-hundred-dollar bills. When Jarmon crawled down after Li left, Tobin could barely contain his excitement. He was clearly pleased with the way things went.
Two weeks later, the detectives set up their sting. Li made his illegal purchase as the cops looked on, then drove off toward Interstate 5. Tobin had insisted the detectives make a show of arresting him, too. He’d said he didn’t want it to be obvious that he’d turned in Li. The cops slapped handcuffs on Tobin and put him in a car and drove him to where patrol officers had pulled Li over down the street. With Tobin looking on from inside the car, the cops searched Li’s van and found several thousand dollars’ worth of geoduck hidden beneath a tarp. They also discovered a little surprise: a quart bag stuffed with marijuana. Li’s eyes widened with concern: “Not mine! Not mine!”
The detectives didn’t really doubt him. Li seemed far too panicked to be lying, and the cops had other suspicions anyway. They had never known their informant to use drugs, but they knew weed was common among his fishing buddies. Tobin had asked to be present during Li’s arrest—an unusual request, even for him. The detectives figured Tobin tossed the dope in the van just to see what would happen next. Volz wondered if Tobin had really wanted to see Li’s arrest just so he could watch the seafood dealer freak out.
They didn’t say anything about their suspicions. The cops didn’t want Tobin to know they were paying attention. They didn’t want him to suspect they were watching him that closely. They needed him to think he was smarter than a bunch of fish cops.
By early spring 2001, word filtered back: Tobin was out there poaching crab for sure. Volz was too tired to be that angry. He’d hesitated to work with Tobin in the 1990s in part because Dave Ferguson had been so draining. But Volz had only kept tabs on Ferguson for a year. He’d now dealt off and on with Tobin for almost five, and no one else in law enforcement felt any responsibility for him. Volz discussed the matter with Detective Kevin Harrington. They agreed it was time to take Tobin seriously. No other agency had the means or inclination to stop him. Given how frustrated they’d been about the DeCourville case, any investigation might look like a vendetta. The detectives talked it over with their colleague Bill Jarmon and agreed that he should lead the probe. Jarmon had played only a cursory role in the DeCourville cases. No one could suggest he had an ax to grind. Plus Jarmon had shown interest the previous summer when he chased The Typhoon all the way to Fox Island. Once set in motion, Jarmon was relentless. He wouldn’t stop until he found out everything.
But what exactly was there to find? They didn’t know much at all, only that Tobin was taking crab from somewhere. Where, and how much, was anyone’s guess. They had whispers. Chasing Tobin would be like grabbing at smoke.
In early March, the detectives attempted to spy on The Typhoon and its captain, but they had little to go on. Jarmon slipped out at night from his home in Tacoma and watched through binoculars as Tobin and his crew loaded the boat off Fox Island. Another detective returned a few nights later and did the same. A tipster told E
d Volz he’d confronted Doug, who’d claimed he was working on an undercover project with the Feds. But this man was certain that Tobin was just stealing and keeping his efforts quiet by threatening other fishermen, promising to make them targets of his investigations if they made a stink about his activities. It was laughable, but actually pretty smart, Volz thought. Only Volz and the other cops knew how crazy that would be; Tobin hadn’t worked with federal agents in years. But fishermen wouldn’t know what to think. Many didn’t dare ignore his claims.
Investigators watched from the bushes on five more nights in March and April as Tobin and his crew shoved off in the darkness. Sometimes the detectives drove back to the mainland, where they could see the boat anchored near the Nisqually. Other times they were fairly certain they saw the boat offloading geoducks. No doubt, the activity was suspicious. But while fishing for crab in a closed area was against the law—as was fishing for geoduck after dark when monitors weren’t watching—boating at night was perfectly legal. What exactly was Tobin into, really? They still needed to know a whole lot more.
Their first significant break came with another whisper, a tip from a crab fisherman who lived along the coast. The fisherman had spent a lifetime in the salmon capital of Westport and for years had been a source for Volz. He said a woman he knew, Heidi Mills, had fished illegally with Doug Tobin but was tired of fighting him over pay. The crabber urged Volz to reach out to her.
Heidi Mills and her boyfriend met the cops in Olympia in late April 2001. She was a thin chain-smoker in her late thirties who had spent more than a decade in commercial fishing. She told detectives she’d rented plant space from Tobin a year earlier planning to pack and ship her own crab. But Tobin had also hired her and her boyfriend to work on The Typhoon. Heidi told the detectives that over time she’d figured out that Doug regularly broke the law, not just with crab but also with geoducks. He didn’t bother much with any kind of paperwork and regularly went out fishing at night. When she’d confronted Tobin about the lack of documentation on one shipment, he’d tried to tell her it didn’t matter because the load was bound for Canada. He swore to her that at night he only fished for crab—not clams—and did so only to keep fishermen from trying to steal his gear. But Heidi hadn’t just fallen off the salmon boat. She’d managed the line on a factory trawler in Alaska, had spent time in the wholesale lobster business, and had worked on crab boats on the Pacific. She understood the law and had known plenty of cheaters. Tobin apparently hadn’t even thought through the lie he’d told her; he’d even taken her boyfriend out night fishing. Her boyfriend had driven the red Ford pickup the morning Jarmon had followed from Fox Island. “You’re poaching,” Heidi said she’d told Doug. Tobin had just shrugged and snapped: “Call it what you want.”
The detectives wished Heidi’s story weren’t true, but they believed it. It was what they’d suspected all along. Their informant didn’t just bend a few rules. He twisted the law he’d spent years helping them enforce. To the wildlife cops the message couldn’t have been clearer. Their informant had become the equivalent of a rogue spy who no longer answered to anyone but himself. He did as he pleased, and thought he was untouchable. It wasn’t as if law enforcement had done much to convince him otherwise.
During their interview, Heidi and Detective Kevin Harrington frequently stepped outside to smoke. During his academy training years earlier, instructors had urged Harrington to keep witnesses off balance by withholding cigarettes. But as a chain-smoker, Harrington knew how he’d respond: He’d be pissed. He took a different tack. When he wanted information from someone who shared his habit, he usually found a way to join them for a smoke. It gave him a chance to connect in a looser setting, and witnesses usually let their guard down.
“He said he was working with the Feds,” Heidi told Harrington after one such break. “I didn’t know if he was blowing smoke or what, but that’s what he said.” And it seemed to her that Tobin was pretty good. At night he used radar and night-vision equipment to ensure no one else was on the water. He mixed clams he collected legally in with the ones he poached, which made it much harder to tell what had been stolen. He’d found an elegant way to smuggle. When a business shipped seafood to or from the United States, laws required paperwork that told authorities the shellfish were obtained legally. Tobin’s approach was low-tech and low-risk. He doctored the paperwork and put the clams in a van and simply drove them across the border. Once in Canada someone else would worry about Canadian rules and figure out how to fly the geoducks to Asia. Tobin also shipped clams by air to California and often doctored those records, too.
Heidi didn’t like what she’d been doing but figured to get paid at all she had to keep working. When she complained about the situation to Tobin’s brother, he just shook his head and said Doug was begging to get caught. But still her money never seemed to come. Heidi even recalled a night when Tobin had gone out with her boyfriend and illegally collected several hundred pounds of geoduck. Tobin had refused to pay him because he said the geoducks were to be used in an undercover sting.
Harrington thought about what that meant. Tobin had stolen the clams he’d used during the Ken Li sting. And not only had he demanded reimbursement from the cops, he’d also ripped off the fishermen who helped him get them. Harrington had to admit: The guy had balls.
Frustration mounted that summer as the detectives struggled to grasp the depths of Tobin’s deceit. Through May, June, and July, they gathered some new evidence but nothing that would break their case wide open. Then a new lead came to them. Tobin had forgotten the key lesson that had led to Brian Hodgson’s downfall—take care of the people working for you. Sooner or later aggrieved employees strike back, and one of them might have enough to hang you.
On a late summer day in 2001, one of Tobin’s workers, Keith Smith, appeared out of the blue and stood at the front counter of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife headquarters in Olympia. He was stout, with a shaggy brown mop, sunken eyes, and weight lifter’s shoulders. He told the receptionist he knew about a crab-poaching operation. No cops were around, but the receptionist offered to take his number and have a detective get back to him. Smith said he lacked a telephone but left his name and address and said he would call back. He never did.
The message worked its way to Detective Jarmon. Another officer in the department might have tossed it in the trash—it was a random tip with no details from a man named Smith who had no phone—but Jarmon didn’t think like other cops. When he saw that the tip involved crab, he headed through the lowlands and back roads and into the woods, trying to read the address Smith left in his scrawled handwriting. Early one evening in late August, after several wrong turns, Jarmon pulled into the forested driveway of a tiny rental home along a road connecting southern Puget Sound and the coast. He stepped from his Expedition and introduced himself to Smith.
Smith and Tobin had met three years earlier when Tobin started carving his welcome pole for the Port of Olympia. Smith worked in the warehouse next door, and Tobin wandered in, asking if he could drop his shavings in the Dumpster. The men chatted, and within weeks Smith was working on the pole. Tobin talked the whole time about the great money they could make fishing and quickly convinced Smith to join him aboard The Typhoon. The arrangement worked for a while, until Smith felt cheated on pay.
Smith knew he was in trouble. He had worked with Tobin when Tobin broke the law. He apologized to Jarmon for ever getting involved. When Jarmon asked why he bothered to come forward, Smith gave an answer that caught the cop off guard. Smith was angry that Tobin had cheated him, but he also said he felt guilty about what he’d done. He wanted to do something to put an end to it. Jarmon tended not to buy such lines, but Smith struck him as sincere.
As an informant Keith Smith was no Doug Tobin but he had something the cops could use. He’d come to know Tobin’s operation inside out. He knew where Tobin worked and with whom he fished. He could identify locations on a map. In a series of taped interviews over the ne
xt several weeks, Smith outlined everything he knew and provided the names of nearly everyone who had ever worked on The Typhoon. What Smith described was far larger than the cops had thought: Just before midnight three to four nights a week, sometimes five, The Typhoon slipped away from the Fox Island boat ramp. Some nights were crab nights, others were for geoducks. With Tobin at the helm, the boat headed for clam-rich destinations, areas Doug knew from survey maps, or places he’d explored using underwater video. Once in place, Tobin ordered all lights extinguished and sent a crew member to the stern with night-vision goggles to scan the horizon for oncoming vessels. No one could speak, and smoking was usually banned; another boat or someone on shore might see the glow.
Smith was a deck boss who oversaw the other workers. On geoduck nights, he tended to the divers below. He helped them dress and enter the water and managed their hoses while they pulled clams off the floor. He stacked geoducks in cages and assisted divers out of the drink. A rotating crew of more than two dozen men and women worked on or around The Typhoon, many known to one another only by nicknames. Spook. Hollywood. Slim.
What Smith described sounded like a circus. One of the best divers was afraid of deep water and panicked at the sight of floating logs. Another lived in mortal fear of sharks. A third sometimes surfaced with his hoses snarled in a dangerous rat’s nest. And he was among the more safety conscious. When one diver’s oxygen ran out sixty feet down, the worker monitoring the air compressor didn’t even notice. Another crewman sprinted from the cabin in such a rush to flip on the reserve air supply that he tripped and broke his leg. The high rollers in the crew worked geoduck rather than crab. An average diver like Slim, a six-foot-six twenty-six-year-old who weighed less than two hundred pounds, made $500 to $900 a night. The best diver sometimes pulled down two thousand.