Shell Games

by Craig Welch

  “I know,” Tobin agreed, then perked up. “I still say them was the biggest sons of bitches that ever been caught.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Those are the biggest fuckers that have ever been caught,” Tobin said. “I still stand on that.”

  “Who, you? Were the biggest fish that ever been caught?” his friend asked.

  “The biggest crab that ever been caught,” Tobin said.

  In court, Doug Tobin crumpled into his seat at the wooden table. He was still a big man, but his pallor suggested something insubstantial. He looked drained. He had never been comfortable spending long hours indoors, and now months of living beneath fluorescent lights had taken a toll. Most of Tobin’s adult life had been spent in, on, or near water, aside, of course, from his previous stints in prison. He seemed to draw energy from the sea.

  Those days were gone, as were the self-effacing charm and the magnetism. The jailers had taken his rings and bracelets and his whale-tooth necklace. Instead of a flannel shirt and rubber boots he wore slippers and a jumpsuit that sagged at the neckline. Even his once-flowing silver locks seemed listless. He sported a gray goatee and had his hair pulled straight back in a high, tight ponytail. He placed his head on the table.

  It didn’t last long. When his head came up, his dark eyes darted about the familiar faces in the courtroom. Behind clear plastic in the gallery sat Keith Smith and Heidi Mills, such a hard-core worker that she’d returned to Tobin’s employ after falling into The Typhoon’s crab hold and breaking a few ribs. Tobin’s eyes lingered longest on his oldest daughter. She sat in the second to last row behind him, hugging a friend, her eyes damp with tears. He dipped his head slightly in her direction, an almost imperceptible hello.

  Ed Volz sat to his right at the other table, beside the prosecutor. With his mustache, bolo tie, and vest, Volz looked a bit like an Old West sheriff in Tombstone, Arizona, even down to the toothpick he kept ready to twirl between his lips.

  Tobin had been charged with nearly 160 crimes, including violations of wildlife law, charges of first-degree theft, criminal racketeering, and being a felon in possession of a gun. Because of his two previous convictions, he faced Washington’s equivalent of a third strike. He could be sent to prison for life, and after more than thirteen months in jail, Tobin decided not to fight. He agreed to plead guilty to more than thirty crimes and face anywhere from seven to twenty years in prison. The decision would be up to the judge.

  Before Tobin’s plea six months earlier, his lawyer had approached Volz outside the courtroom.

  “That’s an awful lot of time for a bunch of fish, don’t you think?” he had asked.

  Volz had twirled his toothpick. “It wasn’t about fish. It’s always been about money.”

  Now it was a rainy December day in 2003. Tobin and everyone else waited for the judge. Tobin whispered to his attorney. They argued briefly, and then the attorney pushed himself from the table and walked toward Volz.

  “He’d like a word with you,” the attorney said, exasperated.

  Volz and the prosecutor both looked up slowly.

  “That so?” Volz said. “What about?”

  “You should let him tell you.”

  The bailiff led Tobin and Volz into an empty room. The other detectives followed. Fifteen minutes later they emerged and took their seats in the courtroom. Volz and Jarmon were whispering among themselves, and Tobin looked more drained than before.

  Moments later, the bailiff stepped forward: “All rise.”

  Pierce County Superior Court Judge John McCarthy sentenced Tobin to fourteen years in prison, the longest term in Northwest history for a wildlife smuggler. Before Tobin was taken away, the judge launched into a lecture.

  Tobin’s criminal operation demonstrated greed and “a great deal of sophistication,” the judge said. “We often lose sight of crimes against our natural resources. These types of crimes, I think they’re hard to track and probably difficult to prove, and don’t have a great deal of pizzazz.”

  But Tobin hurt fishermen, he hurt his fellow tribal members, and he sparked untold changes to marine life in the southern Puget Sound. “The state suffers, the individuals of the state suffer, the tribes suffer, and the individual members of the tribes suffer,” McCarthy said.

  Offered a chance to speak, Tobin apologized to his family, in particular his mother, and thanked his attorney and the authorities who cared for him in jail. “That’s it,” he said, wiping away tears.

  Outside the courtroom Ed Volz explained what had happened behind closed doors. Tobin had made one final pitch. He wanted to offer up one more list of poachers.

  “He was mad that he got caught and there were other poachers who didn’t,” Volz said. “He didn’t think it was fair.

  “We no longer trust him. But we’ll check it out.”

  A month after Doug Tobin began his incarceration, a bustling crowd filled the seats and lined the walls of a small conference room a few hundred yards from the waterfront in Olympia. They were gathered to witness a meeting of the three-person board that oversaw that city’s port, normally a staid proceeding. The packed house included Tobin’s mother and one of his daughters, but nearly everyone else was there to take Doug’s name in vain.

  When the port hired Tobin in 1997 to carve a totem pole for a new public plaza, the move went almost unnoticed. The port leaders who chose Tobin knew he’d been in prison, but they didn’t know the details of Tobin’s crimes. They viewed the sixty-six-thousand-dollar commission as another step in his rehabilitation. The agency would help a troubled, talented artist, and he would provide a fitting tribute to the region’s past, commemorating the end of Puget Sound’s inland marine highway. The painted, peeled piece of wood produced from the arrangement delighted everyone. It was elegant, depicting a killer whale, a seagull, and a schooner, a moon face, and an eagle in shades of red, white, black, and green. A few years after its completion, the thirty-six-foot old-growth cedar post still lay under a blue tarp in a warehouse, waiting for construction of the plaza where it would one day stand prominently against the water with the state capitol dome silhouetted in the background.

  When a local newspaper story about Tobin’s poaching arrest mentioned his artwork, it was an unsettling reminder to Joanne Jirovec’s friends and family of Tobin’s role in her 1986 death. A man who had helped kill their friend had been paid with taxpayer money to create a welcome monument for their city. It was not the civic salutation their city deserved. A few demanded his pole be soaked in gasoline and set afire.

  The controversy raised questions about how or if governments procuring artwork should vet artists; about whether displaying the pole demeaned Jirovec’s memory; about whether not displaying it disparaged the artistic and cultural heritage of the Squaxin Island Tribe, which it depicted. After all, Olympia sat on land the government had seized from its original inhabitants.

  The elected leaders overseeing the port faced difficult choices. They hired an ethnologist to assess the piece, who pronounced it a “monumental” artistic achievement. The pole, in fact, had grown in value. Reducing it to embers would be like burning stacks of money. In the face of public outrage they decided to auction the piece, advertising it in art catalogs and magazines. Not a single offer approached the pole’s worth.

  Eventually the port impaneled a commission to figure out a course of action. A local artist and an arts advocate, a retired Washington secretary of state, the president of the Evergreen State College (where Jirovec had worked), a Jirovec family friend, and a prominent member of the Squaxin Island Tribe had planned to meet several times over the weeks to form a recommendation.

  Olympia residents streamed into the meeting chambers on a January night to hear the news themselves, even though word of the panel’s decision had made the local paper days earlier. A local artist stood and gave a report. The commission had voted 4-2 to urge the port to raise the pole, but only after it asked tribal leaders to bless and cleanse it in a ceremony. The pole should in
clude a plaque with the names of all the designers and carvers who created it. Several designers had put in more time than Tobin. Any action the port took should be about the art, not the artist.

  The college president and Jirovec’s friend objected, arguing that the port should sell the pole for whatever it could get and use the money to commission another. “If you put that up in this community right now, that pole’s going to be divisive until after my grandkids are gone,” Jirovec’s friend Jim Snell said. “And I don’t know if you want to live with that legacy.” Snell said raising the pole would lend Tobin distinction, “and he does not deserve honor in this community.” He held up two fingers a quarter inch apart. “Not even that much.”

  Tobin’s daughter reminded the port that it had hired her dad because he was a significant artist who had artwork displayed in galleries and museums. One man reminded those present that even the Republican White House had just encouraged prisoners to reenter society. “Those of us who heard President Bush in his second State of the Union address mention second chances for people reentering society after having served their time might understand the [Port of Olympia’s] frame of mind when they signed a contract with a known felon,” said sailor Paul Deranleau. “Who was to know that Mr. Tobin would return to bad actions? Art often transcends the character or behavior of the artist. Indeed we would have little in the field of art, music, or dance to enrich our lives if only the righteous were represented.”

  Jim Peters, a member of the Squaxin Island Tribe, didn’t dispute that Tobin’s actions were inexcusable. But he reminded everyone in the room that Native Americans every day compartmentalized their own history. It was the only way they could live among so many monuments to settlers who had perpetrated violence against their ancestors. “There are a lot of things that have happened that I am told that I need to forget about on a regular basis,” he said, “and I do, because I have to.”

  Still, Snell had set the tone for the evening. One by one, community members stated their objections to the commission’s recommendation. Some read letters from Jirovec’s children and siblings. A family friend read a newspaper editorial. Another suggested the pole had split the city already. One woman called it a “slap in the face” to law-abiding citizens and suggested it be dumped in the Sound and allowed to float away. A man who knew Tobin when he poached said, “Putting up a plaque that recognizes Tobin in any way only gives him the notoriety he seeks.”

  The port overruled its volunteer panel and decided to get rid of the pole, even though one port commissioner said, “It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.” In the end, it was no longer about the art, another port official said. “It’s about Doug Tobin.” Within six months the pole was gone.

  But neither the pole nor Tobin was forgotten. Hearing the pole would go to auction again, the director of the University of Washington’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle nudged a wealthy collector of Indian art to pay thirty thousand dollars for the pole and then donate it to the Burke. This donation was not well received by Jirovec’s friends. “Can you imagine the City of Modesto putting up a monument made by Laci Peterson’s killer?” one asked. The University of Washington had been Jirovec’s alma mater.

  Eight months later, authorities hauled Tobin back into court. A diver had belatedly told detectives that while Tobin was poaching he’d helped firebomb a rival fisherman’s boat. The new accusation emerged from Slim, the six-foot-six diver from Tobin’s crew. Slim had been quite forthcoming after his arrest. He’d filled the detectives in about the crab and clam poaching, and about the identity of other crew members. The detectives saw Slim as a decent kid seduced by the promise of riches. They encouraged the prosecutor to let him go home to Port Angeles while he awaited his own court case. A shot at a light sentence hinged on his cooperation. In return the detectives demanded he keep in touch with the prosecutor. Slim did so devotedly for a while.

  Then one day, Jarmon heard from the prosecutor that Slim had not phoned in. Jarmon was annoyed that he’d been played and he wanted an explanation. He and Volz confronted Slim at his home and called him a liar and told him the deal was off. Slim looked stunned and said that he’d left the prosecutor several messages. The detectives asked what other lies he’d told, what else he knew. If he had more to say, now was the time.

  He told a jarringly familiar story. Sometime after midnight on September 4, 2001, Tobin and his brother had been looking for a place to steal geoducks. They wound up not far from the Purdy Spit, where the brothers first met their diving instructor. They recognized the wooden Laurie Ann docked offshore. The Typhoon pulled up, and Slim said Tobin ordered him to hold the boats together while he and John stepped aboard the ninety-year-old ship. The brothers slipped into the engine room, cut open a fuel line, and soaked and lit on fire a swatch of carpeting. The brothers jumped back aboard The Typhoon and pulled away as smoke billowed from the Laurie Ann. Doug then leaned in to Slim and said, “This never happened.”

  The detectives shot back toward Seattle, thinking about Dave Ferguson. Another boat had been blown up over clams—at least that’s how it looked. They met again with the prosecutor, who sheepishly confessed that he might have misplaced Slim’s messages. The detectives held their tongues.

  Back in 2001, the fire had not even been considered suspicious. A fireboat called at dawn that late summer morning had found the Laurie Ann engulfed in flames. The orange licks reached too high to douse from the water. Firefighters towed the burning husk to shore and boarded it with ladders, but they were too late. Investigators presumed that the fire had started in a malfunctioning electrical panel. A deputy fire marshal photographed the boat’s interior, planning to give it a harder look later, but slipped in greasy water and ruined his camera.

  The Laurie Ann’s owner had infuriated lots of people, particularly tribal divers, and was in a legal skirmish with the government of a local county over millions of dollars in geoducks. He’d been experimenting with planting geoducks much like shellfish companies farmed oysters and had leased forty-seven acres of public tidelands just off a county park near Purdy Spit. Since the land was underwater and not suited for building, the county charged just twenty-five hundred dollars. But in readying his farm for planting baby clams, the Laurie Ann’s owner had set about removing obstacles—namely an entire colony of wild geoducks. For the bargain price of twenty-five hundred dollars, the Laurie Ann’s owner had dug up and sold $2 million worth of clams. Angry neighbors complained that he was openly poaching, and it seemed plausible to the detectives that Tobin or his brother might hold a grudge, too.

  The Tobin brothers went to trial in 2005. One of Doug’s crew members confirmed Slim’s story, but another maintained two other men set the fire. The fire marshal had initially ruled the fire an accident but later decided it could have been arson. Still, his photographs were gone, and the boat’s remains had since been scrapped, leaving no hard evidence for anyone to examine.

  John Tobin had a friend ready to testify that he had been fishing the day of the fire. Doug Tobin claimed he was at a car show in Indiana. Defense attorneys sliced the case to ribbons. Both were acquitted.

  It would not be the last battle over a boat.

  Detective Volz wanted The Typhoon. The court had ordered Tobin to pay more than a million dollars to repair the damage he’d done to southern Puget Sound. But Tobin had either hid his earnings or spent them. Between his jewelry, his daughters’ private schooling, and his five-thousand-dollar-a-month restaurant bill, Tobin had expensive tastes. He’d put more than a hundred thousand dollars into a souped-up Nova, but that had been stripped by friends who took the parts. Though the cops heard rumors of offshore accounts and of real estate holdings in someone else’s name, no one had been able to find the money.

  But The Typhoon was worth something. After detectives seized it, the forty-two-foot boat sat on blocks in a state impound lot off a southern Puget Sound beach. It had been Tobin’s most precious possession and perhaps th
e most valuable one; at one time it was worth at least four hundred thousand dollars. But the state could do nothing with it. The Canadian company run by Jeff Albulet and Julian Ng held liens on the boat. It could not be sold to pay Tobin’s restitution unless the Canadians released their interest, which they refused to do, because they believed that Tobin owed them money.

  But over just the last two years of his operation, cops found evidence that Tobin had sold geoducks to the Canadians at least 150 times. He’d sold them 135,000 pounds of clams. He also had sold more to other customers at their suggestion. The Canadians had fronted Tobin thousands of dollars to keep cheap shellfish coming over the border. Yet they insisted they’d never known Tobin was acting illegally. “The man, as an individual, seemed like a nice, funny person,” Albulet said shortly after Tobin’s conviction. “It’s just that he knew how to con people. Unfortunately, he got me for a lot of money.”

  Neither the detectives nor Washington State’s attorney general believed Albulet. The detectives asked around. Adrian Lugo had found Albulet and Ng fierce negotiators and well versed in the legal intricacies of shellfish brokering. One of Tobin’s daughters and several other people told the cops that Albulet had been on Tobin’s boat several times at night while Tobin poached. Heidi Mills remembered people at the plant hearing from both Canadians that they wanted to know if the “mystery boat” from the Tacoma newspaper was The Typhoon. Albulet knew, Heidi Mills told the detectives. “He’s no dummy.” Tobin’s brother said he’d attended a meeting when Doug told the Canadians he was getting their product illegally. Mills, Lugo, Doug’s daughter, and John Tobin all signed affidavits detailing the Canadians’ role in trafficking.

  But prosecuting a Canadian company was difficult. The state could file a lawsuit and try to force the Canadians to relinquish their interest in The Typhoon, using the civil equivalent of the racketeering and fraud laws that had forced Brian Hodgson sixteen years earlier to shut down Washington King Clam. There was no guarantee how it would turn out, but the attorney general’s office would give it a shot. There was just one more person to interview.