by Craig Welch
On a damp summer afternoon years after Tobin was sent to prison, Ed Volz pulled his pickup onto a side street in Tacoma and walked a few blocks to the county jail. The floors shined in the new towering facility, even though the county was too short on cash to hire corrections officers. It had been forced to grant early release to nearly three hundred felons since January.
Volz was joined by two assistant attorneys general. They had convinced the Department of Corrections to let them interview Tobin inside the jail. It had not come without a fight. Before agreeing to talk, Tobin’s lawyer wanted guarantees that his client would face no new charges. He tried to ban the detective from the meeting. Volz and the AGs were so suspicious of Tobin that they didn’t expect anything useful to come of the conversation. They just wanted to assure themselves that they had pursued every angle. They didn’t want any surprises, so they told Tobin’s attorneys they would talk only with no strings attached.
The attorneys assumed Tobin agreed to the meeting because he felt burned by the Canadians. Volz thought Tobin liked talking to the authorities. He was a player. He wore lots of jewelry, drove fast cars, and carried thick rolls of bills in his breast pocket. And he liked matching wits with cops. Volz figured that was the juice for Tobin: going mano a mano with opponents. But who did Tobin consider his opponent now: Volz or the Canadians?
Volz and the attorneys headed into a small meeting room with glass windows and a view of the hall. Tobin looked nothing like the attorneys expected. Instead of magnetism, generosity, salesmanship, and charm, they saw a pale, broken lump in jail slippers and a jumpsuit. Tobin looked so gray and sickly they feared he’d been drugged. At one point he stepped outside to receive medication from a nurse.
Volz’s team started the meeting with a speech. The state wanted every scrap of information it could get on the Canadians. But given Tobin’s track record, everything he said would be worthless without corroboration. Unless Tobin could point them to independent evidence to support any accusation, nothing he said would make a difference.
They emerged from the meeting at 4 P.M., tired, but upbeat. Tobin claimed Albulet had been on the boat with him poaching at night more than twenty-five times. But many of his other recollections did not fit with the evidence. On the few occasions when the attorneys pointed that out, Tobin said things like, “Hmm, let’s think about this. If we all put our heads together, we can find an explanation.” Talking to Tobin hadn’t helped them much. But he hadn’t said anything to torpedo their case.
The matter settled sixteen months later. Volz and the state decided that even if they went to court and won big, the whole thing could back-fire. Albulet and Ng were foreign defendants, and their company was incorporated on Canadian soil. Any judgment in a Washington court would still have to be enforced by Canadian courts. The two men had threatened that if the state won, they would declare bankruptcy and no one would see a dime. The attorneys were unfamiliar with Canadian bankruptcy laws and did not consider it an empty threat.
So they settled the case for less than the attorneys and Volz thought it was worth. But the Canadians were banned from ever again participating in Washington’s shellfish industry. The state could keep and sell The Typhoon, and the Canadians would pay an additional $112,500 in restitution. On the day the state received the check, one of the attorneys made an extra photocopy so he could hang it on his office wall. Along with the Brian Hodgson case in the late 1980s, the two biggest wildlife poaching rings in Pacific Northwest history had been about geoduck clams. Now both had ended with poachers behind bars and big checks cut by the businessmen who profited.
It wasn’t a million bucks or even full restitution. It would provide barely any help for Puget Sound. But it sent a message. At least that was the hope.
Epilogue
“It was like a Walt Disney movie that turned into Stephen King,” Doug Tobin said. He looked around, waggling his nose, as if catching a whiff of something sour. Tobin was talking about the years he had spent harvesting geoducks, but he might also have been referring to far more.
He sat at a wood table, an empty water bottle before him. Around him families chattered the way they do at holiday gatherings or Sunday brunches. Tobin spoke of himself as if he were somehow separate from those around him. I understood the impulse. This wasn’t Thanksgiving, and no one was celebrating. It was just another Sunday, visiting day in prison.
I had driven up from Olympia on a wet slate-gray morning. I motored past hundreds of salmon fishermen wading elbow to elbow in the rain, so many in one estuary that I heard the spring-loaded snap of a door to a plastic Porta Potty clang shut. Authorities had dumped it there to discourage peeing in the woods. I stopped for gas at the Kamilche Trading Post, a convenience store and gas station run by the Squaxin Island Tribe. Another few miles and the woods gave way to grass fields and strip malls along the outskirts of Shelton, a quiet mill town. A sign pointed the way to the four-hundred-acre Washington Corrections Center compound.
Except for the razor wire and guard tower, the prison looked from the outside like a forgotten Cuban piano bar, a single-story square of white-splashed concrete with brick latticework and aqua trim. Inside, I stuffed my belt, wallet, and keys into an aluminum box in a bank of lockers and stepped through a metal detector. Past two gates I ended up in a sterile room the size of a hospital cafeteria. A guard stamped my wrist like a club bouncer, leaving a pattern visible only under the black light on her desk. My exit pass. She looked over a seating chart, sent me to a corner table, and told me to wait.
About two dozen square tables filled the bulk of the room, each with four cheap stackable chairs. One wall held a bank of six vending machines. A corner housed a children’s play area lined with mats and plastic toys, the walls painted to look like a desert island surrounded by warm blue waters. Families played Scrabble, poker, and board games like Clue. Some inmates wore jeans, others shuffled about in jumpsuits with WCC in block letters on the back. The prisoners all sat facing in the same direction. At the far end of the room family members could stand before a wall designed to look like a waterfall flowing through a rain forest while a guard snapped portraits with the felon. I tried not to look anyone in the eye.
Prisoners entered and exited through a door that looked like it belonged on a submarine. After about ten minutes, Tobin strolled through. He wore jeans and a zip-up khaki sweater over a white T-shirt. His hair was still long, but he looked forty pounds lighter than he had years earlier. Seeing me, he ducked playfully behind a pillar, waited a few beats, then snuck a peak around it with just one eye, like a grandfather teasing a toddler. After a few seconds he smiled broadly and sauntered my way. I lost my hand in one of his huge leathery mitts, and before I could speak he deadpanned, “Let’s go do some shopping at the mall.”
Offenders could not touch the vending machines; visitors used special prison-issue debit cards to treat them to Cokes and Snickers. I fiddled with the turnstiles while Tobin frowned at his options from behind a line taped on the floor. He pointed to a ham sandwich—“Just give me whatever that is”—which I bought and stuck in a microwave. I couldn’t help but notice how powerful he looked. Now in his midfifties, he appeared lean and fit as a boxer. On his jeans he wore an ID card with a mug shot of an earlier, bloated Tobin from the start of his incarceration. The man before me looked twenty years younger.
A phone at the guard station rang, and Tobin joked, “I think that’s gonna be for me.” The female guard threw him a pleasant, mischievous smirk and grabbed the phone with a singsong: “Tobin’s Answering Service.” They both laughed, and she turned her attention to the call. Tobin looked at me with a nod and a wink.
“They like me around here,” he said.
I had interviewed Tobin shortly after his arrest, just hours before he pleaded guilty. He had bemoaned his predicament and hinted at what he’d seen. “This much I can tell you with one hundred thousand percent accuracy,” he’d said in a near whisper. “I can only think of one or two people who are on the s
ame level I’m at in this geoduck industry. I’ve seen it all—everything from prostitution to dope to contract killings. Everything you can imagine. Everything for a goddamn movie.” After I’d revisited the events of the previous decade, I wrote asking to see him again. I wanted to hear how he thought he had wound up behind bars. He wrote from prison encouraging me to come. “I do believe you could use some insight into the geoduck world—the good, the bad, the ugly,” he wrote. “I can be reached at my office 24-7…so let’s dance.” In an earlier note he’d referred to himself as “The Geoduck Gotti.” This one he signed “Elvis.”
We returned to our seats and chatted while he ate. He opened up about his childhood and his years in rain-soaked Alaskan coastal villages. He spoke respectfully of his father even while describing how hard the man had pushed him. His family had moved a lot, and so had Tobin as an adult. “I was kind of a nomad, I guess,” he said. He attributed his love of muscle cars to being born in the 1950s and to having fished and logged at a young age. “I never had much of a childhood,” he said. “I didn’t really get to be a kid.”
Doug Tobin describes the geoduck industry during an interview in jail.
He boomeranged between topics. He recalled wilder episodes of the tribal fishing wars, such as the moment he watched a woman level a gun at a marine officer. Then he returned to discussing fast cars and his youth. He laughed about his poaching exploits as a young man. He launched into long digressions, including one about cutting open an ice-cream truck with a blowtorch so he could fill it with salmon to sell at Seattle’s fishing port. They were good stories, funny and well told, if rarely on point. He made frequent and direct eye contact and nodded often, as if to acknowledge his wandering and the fact that I was waiting. “I’ve got to tell a story to tell the story,” he would say and hold up a hand, as if seeking patience.
He agreed to be an informant because he saw fishermen with “greed twinkling right out of their asses.” He insisted he had started geoducking on the level, “but by then you were so choked with all the corruption, all the madness, the conning.” For a moment it seemed as if he would explain how he had crossed the line, but instead he said, “So I reached out to try and find some way to help clean the industry up.”
Tobin spoke fondly of federal agents, describing them as a surrogate family. When Severtson outlined plans to zero in on smugglers, Tobin said, he’d reminded the agent that he already knew how best to play it. “I told him, ‘I know these people; your way isn’t going to work.’” Tobin said he recommended the cops put him out front, letting them “use my past as a shady individual to get into doors they could never get into.” He wistfully recalled Severtson pretending to be a tourist while secretly videotaping a poacher. He recounted Agent Dali Borden posing as his half sister and crashing at his home when others arrested Nick DeCourville in Vegas. Tobin said he felt good working with the cops. It gave him a nice feeling giving something back. He liked doing good without asking for a return. “Money means nothing to me,” he said.
I suggested I found it difficult to know when he was telling the truth. Once, he nodded slightly, as if to say he understood. Another time he exploded. “I’m not blowing smoke up your ass. These are facts!” I began to sense my own foolishness. I had wanted to hear how someone of such talent kept getting himself into such messes. He knew the geoduck industry well enough to have made it rain money legally. Adrian Lugo had all but promised him wood-carving contracts that would have paid more per piece than most people made in a year. Everyone who knew Tobin spoke about his hunger to succeed; he hated being less than exceptional at anything. But he remained unwilling to engage in self-reflection, apparently reserving the worst deceptions for himself. Perhaps his half-truths had just become part of him.
In a strange way he embodied the clam that had defined his last decade: large, obscene, and ugly from one angle; comic and charming and clearly part of the fabric of the Pacific Northwest from another. That charm worked on federal agents, a highly successful entrepreneur, and government officers at the Port of Olympia, until in each instance a darker side emerged. During our many talks, I found Tobin a mix of good-natured cheer and ferocity, a firecracker with a short fuse stuffed inside a pastry. In the middle of a story his affability would evaporate, and he would rage about fellow fishermen, DeCourville, and, most often, state detectives. He referred to the detectives by his own special nicknames for them—the jovial Harrington was “Hee-haw Hound Dog” the toothpick-twirling Volz was “Fast Eddie” or “Hollywood Ed.” Mostly he complained that they just weren’t that good. “They’re somewhere between whale shit and the bottom of the ocean,” he said of the cops. “If I was going to poach, they’d never know it.”
Tobin admitted the detectives had caught him. But he insisted he’d gathered only about six thousand pounds of geoduck and three thousand pounds of crab, little more than a few nights’ labor and a mere fraction (less than 3 percent) of what the judge ruled he owed restitution for taking. Tobin’s calculation didn’t jibe with the confessions, the months of surveillance, the diving logs, or the eleven thousand pages of evidence against him. It wasn’t even clear it was really what Tobin thought. Not two years earlier he’d told Volz and the attorneys that one of the Canadians had ridden aboard The Typhoon at least twenty-five times while he was poaching. With me, Tobin insisted he had been railroaded.
Then, almost as quickly as he would work himself up, Tobin would be polite and funny again, apologizing for his outburst. “I’ve got a good heart,” he said after one long silence. “Even my worst enemy knows that’s true.”
Detective Volz’s partners were mostly gone. After Tobin’s arrest, Detective Bill Jarmon got promoted to deputy chief for state wildlife enforcement, where he oversaw detectives and all the marine patrol officers and game wardens. From his office, he could have walked over and visited with the governor, but he wouldn’t do so unless work required it. The new pay was nice, but mostly the job ate at him—the politics, dealing with lawmakers, dealing with other agencies, worrying about budgets. He missed going after bad guys. His father had been a cop and so was Jarmon’s son, and now suddenly Jarmon himself was an administrator. But after three decades in law enforcement, he knew he could stomach it for a little while, which he did. Then he retired and started spending part of the Northwest’s long, wet winter driving along sunny Arizona highways in the family RV.
Kevin Harrington retired, too. Ed Volz and Charlie Pudwill helped plan his going-away bash. They put on a PowerPoint slide show of Harrington’s life. They started with photographs of an infant in a crib, a cigarette dangling from his lips. The next shot was of a puppy, a cigarette poking from between its paws. Harrington wrote a song for the occasion:
When I go to Olympia, there’s danger everywhere
I forget to wear my gun, they think that I don’t care
But I am just forgetful, so I quit coming ’round
Now that I’m retiring, please quit patting me down
Retirement, retirement
Sounds like lots of fun
But how do I tell Bill Jarmon
That I can’t find my gun.
After retiring, Harrington moved back to Michigan, where he kept writing songs. He also spent time fishing midwestern lakes. On trips to Seattle to visit his son and college-age daughter, he still groused about the traffic.
Rich Severtson and his wife moved to a place in the mountains near the Canadian border in eastern Washington, an area thick with bear and deer. A river flowed through their backyard. Severtson toyed with writing a book about his career, or maybe just about Doug Tobin. He kept copies of videotapes from his undercover work and copies of the taped phone calls between Tobin and DeCourville. He was just waiting for time to pass so he could write up his experiences without triggering the wrath of the National Marine Fisheries Service.
Then, almost overnight, Severtson got sick. He developed fast-moving and painful pancreatic cancer. In early 2004, less than a dozen weeks after his diagnosis, Seve
rtson died in his sleep. Paul Watson and his Sea Shepherd Conservation Society issued a press release mourning his passing and highlighting his accomplishments. “Rich was a man with a great love for nature and was a fierce protector of marine wildlife,” the group wrote. “He will very much be missed.” The activists had never done such a thing for a federal cop, and they have not done it since.
Detective Ed Volz earned a promotion, too. He was bumped to lieutenant and then to captain and put in charge of a crew of mostly new detectives. He oversaw long-term investigations and undercover operations. He still saw Jarmon from time to time, and he missed butting heads with Harrington. In fact, he needed a guy who was comfortable around paperwork. His new charges were more action-oriented.
The last time I visited Volz he still worked from the same corner office in the same whitewashed warehouse, though the nearby Boston Market was now an Azteca. He had his feet on his desk while he watched a blip appear intermittently on a map on his laptop. He was following a signal from a transmitter attached to an illegal wildlife buyer’s car as it tooled around Puget Sound.
It had been a busy spring. His colleague, shellfish biologist Don Rothaus, had been working with scientists from the University of Washington in a desperate attempt to save Puget Sound’s abalone population. Scientists had been breeding the creatures in a laboratory. Rothaus planned to take the juvenile shellfish out that summer and transplant them into waters near the San Juan Islands. Researchers in British Columbia were doing similar work to restore abalone, but nobody knew how the projects would fare long term. Volz worked a dozen feet from Rothaus’s cubicle and had been following the effort closely.