Shell Games

by Craig Welch

Harrington simply waited Tobin out. He suggested they meet at Mitzel’s in Fife for a chat, and Tobin agreed.

  Volz and Harrington drove down the next week, but Tobin never showed.

  In January and February, Tobin was still calling the detectives and questioning everyone around him. Maybe he knew, or maybe he sensed, that things were closing in. His paranoia rattled those around him. In early February, Heidi Mills’s boyfriend left a message on Harrington’s answering machine: “Sir, if you guys do anything to jeopardize Heidi with this Tobin case, I will fuck you to the end of the earth. I’ll blow your case against Doug Tobin right out of the water. So you guys better make sure that you have her best interests at heart,” he fumed. “Other than that, have a great day.”

  Then the cops almost blew up the case themselves. Well after midnight in early February, a pair of patrolling game agents came across parked vans and an empty boat trailer near the docks on Fox Island. The patrol officers thought someone might be collecting clams illegally and waited for the boat to return. Around 2 A.M., two crewmen came ashore with the small skiff, and the two officers approached and searched the little whaler. When they found nothing but a handful of old mussels knocking around the boat’s floor, they let the men go.

  Immediately after hearing about the incident, Volz dialed his command and let loose a tirade. Patrol officers had been told to stay away. They had no business poking around the detectives’ investigation. They might just have screwed up everything.

  Tobin called Harrington’s car phone a few mornings later. He started out cagey and didn’t mention the incident, but managed to suggest that someone was setting him up—possibly DeCourville. Then he mentioned Ken Li and a fellow tribal member Tobin said had once asked him to dive illegally. He acknowledged there were stories floating around about him poaching, even about his involvement in money laundering and racketeering. But the truth was, Tobin said, that he’d started the buzz himself. The Feds had instructed him to, as a diversion. Now friends told Tobin they saw him being followed.

  “I know it’s not fair to ask,” Tobin finally said, “but…do you have me under surveillance?”

  “Not that I’m aware of,” Harrington said. He tried to sound bored and slightly amused. “This is the first I’ve heard about it.”

  Tobin started making excuses. He told Harrington he’d made a game where his crew would go out for several nights and pretend they were poaching. Sometime after midnight, he’d ordered two crew members to sit in a skiff near Drayton Passage. Tobin wanted to see if anyone would notice. Sure enough, officers were waiting when they got to shore. But it wasn’t even possible for them to have been harvesting geoducks from the skiff, he said. It wasn’t big enough to hold diving equipment! Then again, having his employees “fake poaching” was perhaps a dumb idea, he admitted. He asked Harrington to find out what he could and call him back.

  Harrington called back that afternoon as another detective listened in. Harrington reassured Tobin that the officers who stopped his boat had merely been conducting a routine shellfish-poaching patrol. It hadn’t been part of any surveillance. Just a couple of rookies checking stuff out.

  “That’s not what they told my boys,” Tobin said. “They told my boys they’d been watching for a while.”

  “That’s what we tell them to say. Sometimes when they do, people confess to all kinds of things.”

  Tobin snorted and said he guessed that made sense.

  Tobin could not have known how many of his colleagues had already turned against him. Several informants now fed detectives information. In addition to Heidi Mills and Keith Smith, Tobin’s crab fishing contact in Westport had finally had enough. He felt Tobin owed him eighteen thousand dollars for a deal he’d made with Doug for some crab pots. Increasingly frustrated with Tobin’s refusal to pay, the man started calling detectives after every conversation with Tobin.

  Crab fishing is the country’s most dangerous profession, and this contact had been engaged in the deadliest kind—fishing for Dungeness crab off the coast of Washington. Fishing the protected waters of Puget Sound is nothing like working the open waves of the Pacific Ocean, where crabbers fish through early winter and where squalls turn seas their roughest. The Seattle-based fishermen who ply the rough waters off Alaska’s North Pacific for king crab get all the attention. Soon they would be featured in the Discovery Channel hit The Deadliest Catch. But for sheer statistical probability of death, Alaska’s king crabbers didn’t come close to matching the risks of Dungeness crab fishing off Washington and Oregon. Powered by cowboys and mavericks, the small fleets regularly lose crew members to falls, see boats crushed against hidden sandbars, and watch entire rigs capsize in ripping crosscurrents. Dungeness crabbers die twice as often as Alaskan crabbers.

  The contact was a cool customer. He’d done some business with Doug Tobin and spent time touring The Typhoon. Finally he paid a visit to Volz’s north Seattle office. He confirmed information the cops had from other moles and told them Tobin was unaware that his crew was imploding. Tobin had become so tightfisted that the mother of one of his geoduck poachers actually had threatened to sue him for not paying her son. This informant agreed he would keep visiting Tobin and share the information he gathered with Volz.

  In mid-February Tobin called Harrington again. The phone calls had become tiny quick-burst chess matches, as Tobin tried to manipulate their relationship. He was still waiting for his money from the Ken Li sting. Harrington said he was working on it.

  “Rumors are flying about me poaching,” Tobin said. “I hear my tribe might even pull my quota.”

  Tobin asked again for Severtson’s number. He said he was still angry that no one let him know DeCourville was out of prison. But Harrington said he shouldn’t blame Severtson, who was done working and probably not even aware of DeCourville’s release. Tobin dialed it down. He wanted Harrington to know he didn’t really blame anyone.

  “You could come down here right now and slap handcuffs on me and I wouldn’t take it personally,” Tobin said.

  Harrington wondered if Tobin knew what was coming.

  Volz’s crab fisherman called a few days later to say he’d had coffee with Tobin, who wondered aloud why so many of his old employees had disappeared. He also said he now had 250 crab pots and that he was fishing more than four hundred feet down. Tobin was looking to buy 200 more, and if he got all of them going at once he said he might take a break from chasing clams.

  Early in March, Adrian Lugo called his former partner to say he was concerned. Despite dissolving his business relationship with Tobin five years earlier, Lugo still felt empathy for him. A few years earlier, one of the last times they’d spoken, Lugo had put Tobin in touch with a developer from the Seattle suburbs. Lugo had been in a discussion with the developer about fine art. In the guy’s office hung a gallery of Native American carvings: Salish paddles and tribal masks, carved wooden fish, and cedar totems. He showed Lugo a book of photographs of all his other pieces. Lugo recognized one as Tobin’s work. When Lugo mentioned Tobin’s name and that they were friends, the developer’s eyes had widened. He would eagerly hire Tobin to carve more pieces, and he particularly wanted a sixteen-foot canoe. He said he would pay up to seventy-five thousand dollars. The developer assured Lugo he knew others who also would buy Tobin’s art. Lugo was excited for his old friend. He introduced the two men, then stepped out of the picture.

  Lugo felt he’d presented Tobin with a promising opportunity, but now he was hearing disturbing stories. He invited Tobin to come see him in his office. There, Lugo sat his old friend down and asked about the rumors. A mutual friend had told Lugo that Tobin was stealing shellfish. Lugo wanted to know: Was it true?

  Tobin’s response caught Lugo off guard. He put a finger to his lips and quietly got up and closed the office door. He told Lugo he was working a big case for the Feds as an undercover agent. He couldn’t say anything more about it. He asked Lugo to trust him—it was all aboveboard.

  Lugo admitted he was ske
ptical. No way would the Feds encourage Tobin to dive illegally, certainly not at night. He reminded Tobin that art buyers would still pay him tens of thousands of dollars for his carvings. Lugo had already made the arrangements. Doug would just have to follow through.

  “Don’t ruin this,” Lugo pleaded.

  Tobin assured Lugo that he needn’t worry. He wasn’t doing anything wrong.

  Lugo let it drop, and the men parted ways.

  On March 13, 2002, Tobin called Harrington one last time and begged for a meeting. He had information about a huge smuggling operation. He didn’t want to talk about it on the phone but asked if Harrington could meet him in a few days.

  Harrington had been expecting this call. The detectives had discussed just what he would say. Jarmon had given Harrington an idea. Harrington had built up his rapport with Tobin over years. He’d shared numerous gripes, usually about his superiors. This time Harrington would put on a show. Harrington told Tobin he would really like to get together, but he’d be stuck in meetings at the U.S. attorney’s office over the next two days. And that wasn’t all.

  Harrington worked himself into lather. After that, he said, he would be out of town for at least a week. Despite being buried with his own poaching cases, the bureaucrats who ran his department had other ideas. In the middle of one of his busiest periods, they were pulling Harrington off for mandatory training in eastern Washington. Thirty years on the job and he still needed training?

  That wasn’t even the craziest part, Harrington confided. He told Tobin he wouldn’t believe what came next. Not a single cop was going to be around the office or on the water all week. The people in charge won’t let any of us stick around.

  Harrington spit his final words in disgust: “There won’t be anyone watching Puget Sound!”

  chapter twelve

  THE WHOLE WEST COAST

  Detective Kevin Harrington’s gambit paid off: The Typhoon went out poaching that very week.

  Between Doug Tobin’s calls and information gleaned from tipsters, the detectives were now more in sync with The Typhoon’s maneuvering than Tobin’s own team. On March 17, Detective Bill Jarmon called Heidi Mills to ask when the crew would pack the geoducks poached the night before. Heidi told him the divers had not actually gone out. Jarmon quietly assured her they had. She called back fifteen minutes later, mildly amused. She’d been wrong. Workers were boxing up the merchandise as they spoke.

  Detective Ed Volz drafted detailed search-and arrest-warrant affidavits, and the cops prepared a plan of attack. Detectives, patrol officers, and cops from other agencies gathered that night in a Gig Harbor motel. No one would be allowed to leave the building until morning. Gig Harbor wasn’t a large town; the detectives didn’t want someone to overhear cops chatting about their assignments over chicken fried steak at Denny’s. From inside an undercover motor home, Coast Guard officers and others watched The Typhoon tie up at a dock. They would wait to take Tobin and his team the next morning. Some of Doug’s crew carried guns.

  At 6:30 A.M., police and detectives moved across the region. On Vashon Island, officers in bulletproof vests boarded The Typhoon but found no one aboard. Someone saw one of Tobin’s crew on a nearby boat. They held him at gunpoint. On Fox Island cops arrested four more Tobin workers as they puttered ashore in the small skiff. In downtown Seattle, not far from the Mariners baseball stadium, cops arrested another geoduck broker.

  Thirty miles south in Fife, Jarmon had been watching Tobin’s seafood plant and adjacent apartment since 4:20 A.M. Temperatures hovered around freezing. Light rain turned to a dust of snow and then back again. Two hours after Jarmon arrived, Volz led several officers into Tobin’s warehouse. They seized .22-caliber rifles leaning against a television stand. They saw scuba tanks and dive bags stuffed with drysuits and posters of fish species tacked to the walls. Taped above a desk was a list of rules detailing how to legally ship clams. Officers found twenty-five containers of undocumented geoduck stacked on the concrete and several more clams in cold storage. The cops didn’t know whether Tobin pulled the clams from polluted waters, so later that day officers would dump the geoducks in a landfill.

  With two quick swings of his boot, an officer smashed in Tobin’s apartment door. His oldest daughter, a teenager, stood in a hallway outside the bedroom. His six-year-old daughter ran down the stairs into her sister’s arms. She’d been upstairs watching Shrek with her father. When the officers handcuffed Tobin and started hauling him away, he asked if he could speak briefly with Ed Volz.

  Detective Pudwill retrieved Volz from the warehouse next door and brought him to Tobin, who was sitting at his kitchen table. The two men by now knew each other well. They had worked as teammates and opponents, had spoken civilly and otherwise. Tobin appeared to be taking it all in, trying to think quickly and grasp the moment and his place in it. To Volz he looked overwhelmed.

  “How much trouble am I in?” Tobin asked.

  Volz couldn’t think of a snappy retort. “Frankly, Doug, you’ve had it.”

  Volz saw that Tobin had more to say, so he asked Pudwill to read Tobin his rights again. The fisherman and the detective waited, staring at each other. Tobin complained that his handcuffs were too tight, so an officer wrapped his wrists in plastic restraints. Tobin asked to speak with his daughters, and Volz nodded. They whispered for a few minutes, and then Tobin asked for his coat. The officers checked the pockets and removed $2,737 in cash.

  Volz took Tobin aside, and the fisherman offered to squeal on another poacher. He said he had lots of fresh information about several new poaching operations. “I can give you the whole West Coast,” Tobin said.

  Volz stared. “Too late for that, Doug.”

  Volz helped Tobin find his lawyer’s phone number in an address book, and then he held the receiver while Tobin spoke to his attorney.

  The wildlife cops eventually arrested more than thirty people. They served twenty-six search warrants and seized ten thousand pages of records at seafood companies from Seattle and Oregon to Oakland and Los Angeles. Over the next several weeks, they visited Sea-Tac International Airport, reviewed Tobin’s air-freight bills, and gathered documents that would prove he shipped more geoduck to Canada and California than he bought or dug legally. Owners of a fish company in Oregon distinctly recalled Tobin telling them with a wink how lucrative their relationship could be. He’d promised them geoducks, clams, crab—anything they wanted he’d said he could get at great prices. In Los Angeles, a shellfish broker estimated he’d bought $50,000 to $100,000 a month of Tobin’s seafood.

  The detectives didn’t stop there. Brian Hodgson, the original geoduck kingpin, had been arrested four months before Tobin on unrelated geoduck-poaching charges. During his trial he’d taken the stand in his own defense. Hodgson convinced the jury he’d done nothing wrong and they acquitted him. The detectives would make sure the same thing didn’t happen with Tobin. They continued gathering evidence. They would make their case unbeatable.

  They deployed their biologists, got Harrington working on documents, and even hired a forensic accountant. They reviewed every possible piece of paper: shipping records, sales invoices, receipts, canceled checks, wholesaler distribution records. They compared this paperwork to diving logs from Tobin’s crew and GPS data from The Typhoon. Since the airlines kept shipping records only back to January 2000, the detectives only did accounting over the previous two years. They found that during that time, Doug Tobin and his crew had stolen nearly seventy-five thousand pounds of Dungeness crab and two hundred thousand pounds of geoduck, valued at $1.5 million. Tobin had taken nearly eight times more crab than all other recreational and commercial fishermen combined take from the southern part of Puget Sound each year—almost one-third of all the adult Dungeness crabs in the Sound’s southern reaches. Given that interviews with informants suggested Tobin’s poaching dated to 1997, the wildlife detectives suspected he’d made off with $3 million in contraband, probably more.

  The closed geoduck beds would tak
e thirty-nine years to recover, scientists estimated, and Tobin’s shallow-water poaching near the shore jeopardized sensitive eelgrass beds that serve as aquatic nurseries for herring and endangered salmon. To protect surviving geoduck populations, wildlife managers would have to adjust overall quotas, but doing so would require a certain amount of guesswork. It would be decades before the ecological damage could be fully understood.

  Sorting through the documents the detectives learned something else. They figured out why Tobin seemed so haggard that January morning in 2000 when they’d videotaped him railing about the evils of poaching. He had been out all night. Records showed that he had illegally gathered more than $13,500 worth of geoduck before coming in the next morning to lecture the camera about smuggling. The poaching tricks he’d been warning about had been his own.

  Tobin waited month after month in jail while his lawyer prepared his case for trial. During that time he learned that nearly everyone involved in his operation had talked to the police. Once, Tobin used the jail telephone to call the old chain-smoking crab poacher who’d helped him find the sweet spot off the Nisqually River Delta. He listened as the old poacher admitted that he, too, had confessed. He even told Tobin the call he was making was being recorded. Tobin didn’t seem to care.

  Nor did he seem to hold a grudge. “Hey, how you feeling?” Tobin asked.

  “Oh, I’m feeling fine, Doug, you know.”

  “Yeah,” Tobin said. “Well, I worry about you, my friend.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” the old poacher said. “You save your own ass right now.”

  “Well…it was a good run,” Tobin said. “I was sitting here grinning and I—they can never take away…There were some good moments with ya. I’m just glad I was part of that history, to share it with you.”

  “Yeah,” the poacher agreed. “But I wish that the penalty wasn’t going to be so damn tough.”