Shell Games

by Craig Welch

  Volz’s detectives had also broken open a black bear gallbladder-smuggling ring in the mountains not far from Severtson’s former home in eastern Washington. A poacher had been selling dozens—possibly hundreds—of illegal gallbladders overseas. The overseas buyer, a wealthy big-game hunter, had previously been caught sneaking hummingbirds out of Ohio. Now he was in the States, perhaps to set up a meeting. Volz, from his desk, was watching blips on his screen, tracking the buyer’s every movement.

  Volz had been on the job for more than three decades. Sometimes, when he thought too much, he feared he’d made a mistake. He feared he had lied to himself that he made a difference. He wasn’t a cop at heart, but a biologist. He’d watched over the years as salmon and rockfish and other marine creatures continued to decline in Puget Sound. At least now there was talk of trying to clean it up. He wondered sometimes what he’d accomplished. Then the phone would ring and jolt him back to the work he’d chosen for good or ill.

  He had taken a particularly strange call in 2006 from Mexican government officials who wanted his help. Fishermen working the golden sands along Mexico’s Baja peninsula had discovered a few fields of naturally occurring geoducks. One field blossomed along the Sea of Cortez. The other showed up along the Pacific Coast, among the sugared sands and pearly lagoons of Magdalena Bay, where a series of sandy barrier islands provided gray-whale breeding grounds.

  The geoducks they had discovered were beautiful with scrubbed white shells, though the necks seemed lifeless and a bit flaccid, perhaps because of the warmer waters. The bay certainly produced incredible shellfish—abalone, blue crab, lobsters, shrimp, and scallops. But no one had expected to find geoducks so far south, especially with no other population source nearby. The leaders of southern Baja’s government recognized an opportunity and had wanted to establish a small geoduck industry, perhaps to supply lower-quality geoducks. But some authorities had handed out permits like cigarettes. Rumors spread of bribed Mexican officials, and poaching in Magdalena was already widespread.

  That spring, a group of Mexican cops and fisheries officials traveled north to meet with Volz and the agencies that managed geoduck fishing. They wanted to find ways to fish geoducks sustainably. To his astonishment, Volz learned that some Mexican fishermen were backed by familiar troublemakers from Washington and were smuggling the geoducks into the United States and then shipping them to Asia. Volz volunteered to send the Mexicans home with court documents so they could keep tabs on visiting Americans.

  “It never ends,” Volz said from his office, shaking his head. “It just changes.” I had already asked Volz if he still saw much clam poaching, and he said that he had cases working that very moment. But now his attention was divided between me and the screen. We both sat for a moment in silence and watched his bear-parts buyer move through the city, the blips popping up as the man moved down the road.

  Craig Welch

  March 2009

  Notes on Sources

  My interest in wildlife crime grew from a small story I read in the Seattle Times about the arrest of five poachers who had stolen more than $3 million in geoducks. I was the paper’s environment reporter, and I was floored. Who poaches clams and who hunts clam poachers? Pretty quickly I learned this wasn’t the first arrest of clam smugglers. A case in the 1980s was, at the time, the biggest white-collar fraud investigation in Washington history. Another geoduck smuggler had hired a hit man to muscle a rival. One poacher had worked as a federal undercover geoduck-poaching informant. I was hooked.

  Over the next few years I wrote a few stories about geoducks and about poaching, and I found myself noticing other strange plant and animal crimes. There was the theft of thousands of dollars in mosses from Mount St. Helens National Monument. Then there were the millions of dollars in grasses and shrubs that were taken illegally from national forests. Those crimes included shootings, armed robberies, and men threatening one another with shovels and machetes. One rural county employed a deputy sheriff who policed poachers full-time. He sometimes made a hundred arrests a year. I wrote about the secretive $100-million-a-year trade in wild furs and a Justice Department investigation into charges of price fixing and collusion among buyers of otter pelts. One thing linked most of these cases: The stolen plants and animals were usually bound for markets overseas.

  Individually, the crimes were strange and interesting and in some cases—though not all—added up to real ecological trouble. I was glimpsing an interesting pattern. I called experts with TRAFFIC—the worldwide nonprofit organization dedicated to cracking down on wildlife smuggling—and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who agreed that international wildlife smuggling was in transition. The types of creatures being stolen and the methods used by poachers were expanding. The number of goods illegally taken from the United States—while still much smaller than the number of goods shipped into the country—was on the rise. You could see it in the clams leaving Puget Sound for far shores or the turtles plucked from Pennsylvania woodlands bound for Asia. China’s influence was increasing daily.

  I was interested in looking into that world, but not from some exotic locale. Killing elephants illegally for their ivory was horrible, but it was unfortunately no longer surprising. More surprising was the scale of investigations taking place right here, in cities like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. I thought I could draw readers in with a fresh look at a story they thought they already knew, especially if I could tell it through a character most had probably never seen, one of the world’s least charismatic creatures—the geoduck.

  The foundation of this book is more than twenty-five thousand pages of public records, mostly from state and federal criminal investigations, some of which were unsealed by a federal judge at my request. Those records include: videotaped surveillance, audio recordings of interviews with suspects, recordings of undercover telephone calls, transcripts of interviews and undercover conversations, computer disks of undercover video conferencing chats, depositions, declarations, court transcripts, and the painstakingly detailed daily narrative reports filed by dozens of state and federal agents.

  I also interviewed more than one hundred people—some many times—including nearly every major character in this book and many whose names appear nowhere in it. A partial list can be found in Sources. Many went far out of their way to help, none more so than Detective Ed Volz. He put up with dozens and dozens of hours of interviews over the course of several years. Never once did he ask how I planned to use what he told me. He and Detective Bill Jarmon drove me around to each of the spots where they conducted surveillance on The Typhoon. Detective Kevin Harrington took time away to visit with me while vacationing in Seattle with his son and daughter. In San Francisco, Special Agent Roy Torres drove me around San Leandro and showed me Reverend Kevin Thompson’s home, his church, and the True World Foods distribution center where Thompson’s fishing crew stored illegally caught sharks. Before I visited special agents Andy Cohen in Massachusetts and Al Samuels in South Carolina, both went through their own notebooks many times to track down tidbits, jog memories, or dig out contemporaneous observations of ten-year-old events.

  Three biologists at the National Marine Fisheries Service forensics laboratory in South Carolina gave my family and a friend a three-hour tour of marine pathology none of us will soon forget. Special Agent Ed Newcomer put up with far too many prying phone calls from me asking about how his family felt about his work undercover. Geoduck expert Brent Vadopalas never refused to meet for lunch, or explain for the tenth time an obscure point of shellfish biology, or read a paragraph whose accuracy concerned me. Special Agent Sam Jojola told me about his stash of secret identities and made introductions on my behalf to several legendary undercover investigators. Special Agent Lisa Nichols drove me to the California-Mexico border at San Ysidro and helped me understand how complicated it can be to catch someone sneaking across with wildlife. Paul Watson, with the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, gave me his satellite phone number and took
my call while on break from chasing whaling ships in Antarctica. Bob Donegan, president and chief executive officer of Ivar’s, showed off Ivar Haglund’s collection of paraphernalia and tracked down sixty-year-old menus and videotapes of old commercials. Carl Sheats gave me all of his father’s papers, including letters the elder Sheats wrote in the 1960s describing his initial discovery of geoducks in the deep. Claude Tchao sat through several hours of telephone interviews after a freak snowstorm shut down transportation between Seattle and Vancouver on the very week I had planned to visit him. Robin Wright, curator of Native American Art at the University of Washington’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, drove me to a warehouse to show me the welcome pole carved by Doug Tobin, and enthusiastically filled me in about its style and quality.

  Doug Tobin, too, never refused a visit, agreeing to meet with me many times and putting up with me even as I asked the same questions over and again. Special Agent Richard Severtson and his wife invited my wife and me to stay with them for the weekend. In his living room, he played tapes of telephone calls he’d recorded between Tobin and Nichols DeCourville. His wife made us dinner, and he urged us to fish the stream that cut through his yard. He never once mentioned he was sick.

  I also relied on countless government reports, from congressional hearing minutes to a decade’s worth of annual reports by the law-enforcement branch of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to dozens of competing studies about overfishing around the world.

  Details about the case built against Brian Hodgson were drawn almost exclusively from several thousand pages of a twenty-year-old police investigative file that attorney Marilyn Brenneman retrieved for me from storage—more than forty legal boxes’ worth. The chapter about shellfish and the U.S. Exploring Expedition was almost entirely reported at the Ernst Mayr Library in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. Details of how geoduck and other contraband move illegally into and within China came from U.S. government documents and Chinese news reports. Ting-I Tsai, a freelance journalist based in East Asia, tracked down and translated news and documents written in Chinese.

  Throughout the book, thoughts and actions attributed to characters are from interviews or public records or correspond to what the person said he or she was thinking at that moment. The same holds true for gestures; when I wrote that Volz “pancaked both hands against the dash” it’s because that’s how he recounted the event. Extensive quotes or exchanges of dialogues are almost entirely drawn from video or audio recordings, official transcripts of interviews, or undercover recordings. Some were documented in notes and letters or in police reports, court testimony, or depositions. In a few cases, short quotes are recalled by participants as the precise language used at that time. I actually witnessed a handful of the scenes near the book’s end.

  Sources

  PROLOGUE: THE HUNT

  The boat didn’t look like much: I walked with the detectives the route they traveled on November 12–13, 2001. They carried the narrative reports they’d filed just days after their reconnaissance. We scrambled over the blackberry brambles, walked the eroding beach, and Volz showed me the precise spot where he had lain in the fallen leaves, looking down on Wyckoff Shoal. Descriptions of the boat came from surveillance videotapes and photographs. I also toured and photographed the boat inside a Washington State Patrol impound lot. Information about how it was maintained and operated, and how much detectives knew on November 13, came from my interviews and transcripts of taped interviews the detectives had with confidential informants Keith Smith, Heidi Mills, and Mark Purdue. I possess transcripts of every witness interview the detectives conducted between January 2000 and December 2005.

  Coarse-grained sand coated the bottom: C. Lynn Goodwin, interview with author; Alex Bradbury, interview with author.

  An informant had described crew members: Keith Smith, transcript of taped interview with Detective Bill Jarmon, August 2001.

  Four times in two weeks: Reports of surveillance by Ed Volz, Bill Jarmon, and Charlie Pudwill, on October 25, October 30, November 6, and November 8, 2001.

  couriers boxed geoducks with gel packs: Claude Tchao, interview with author; Casey Bakker, interview with author.

  traded for narcotics: Special Agent Richard Severtson, interview with author.

  Geologists call such cliffs: My understanding of the term “feeder bluff” grew out of years of reports on shoreline ecology prepared for the Puget Sound Nearshore Ecosystem Restoration Project, a joint rehabilitation effort by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the government of Washington State.

  CHAPTER ONE: SNITCHES

  Ed Volz slumped in a car: I watched Ferguson collect the abalone from his Jeep on one of several video clips shot by wildlife detectives during their surveillance on June 17, 1994. Most of the video was shot outside the Chinese restaurant. Details of the conversation that took place inside came from two sources: notes typed up days later by Detective Bill Jarmon, who watched the discussion through a mirror behind the bar, and transcripts of the recorded interview Ferguson gave detectives that night. Every little detail, from the refilling of their drinks, to the topics the men discussed, to how the abalone buyer was dressed, came from those sources. The quote—“You will learn and I will learn and we will learn together”—is recorded as a direct quote in Jarmon’s notes.

  The sheltered marine waters: Geoducks can be found from Southern California to southeast Alaska. Even as far north as Oregon or the outer coast of Washington, the density of clams is not enough to support any fishing industry.

  Elephant tusks, wild furs: All of the smuggling cases mentioned in this section are real examples. The bulk of them came from four places: U.S. Wildlife Trade: Overview for 1997–2003, Office of Law Enforcement, Intelligence Unit, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; the annual reports, Office of Law Enforcement, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 1995–2006; U.S. Illegal Wildlife Trade, LEMIS Data Analysis and Risk Assessment, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, November 2005; and interviews with more than a dozen federal agents.

  Baboon noses: A shipment of two thousand rotting noses bound for the United States was seized in Amsterdam in 2003. See: The TRAFFIC Report 3, no. 1 (March 2004): 11.

  cycads: Lauren Kessler, “The Cult of the Cycads,” New York Times Magazine, August 28, 2005. Special Agent Lisa Nichols showed me photographs of birds stuffed in pickup consoles, taped to smugglers’ bodies, packed into badminton birdie tubes, and shoved in curling irons and helped me find the indictment of a thirty-three-year-old Long Beach man for hiding iguanas in his prosthetic leg.

  eels: Todd Shields, “Eel Poachers Try to Slither Past Police; Tiny Fish, a Delicacy in Asia, Protected Here,” Washington Post, March 30, 1997; and Hannah Hoag, “Eels on Slippery Slope,” Toronto Globe and Mail, March 31, 2007.

  seismic shifts in the world economy: My grasp of the economic forces that fuel the global underground was aided by interviews with Crawford Allan of TRAFFIC; Craig Hoover with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; and Nancy Foley, chief of law enforcement for the California Department of Fish and Game and one who has studied the trends extensively. Their intuitions were confirmed by several studies, including “Shadow economies: Size, causes, and consequences,” Journal of Economic Literature 38, no. 1 (March, 2000): 77–114; and, by the same authors, “Hiding in the Shadows: The Growth of the Underground Economy,” Economic Issues Series, no. 30, International Monetary Fund, March 2002. Two books were also invaluable: Moises Naim, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy (New York: Doubleday, 2005); and Eric Schlosser, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003).

  illegal trade accounted for 10 percent of the world economy: Friedrich Schneider and Bruno S. Frey, “Informal and Underground Economy,” in International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Science, vol. 12 (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishing Company, 2001).

  one of the largest black markets in the world: S
tate Department, Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, Office of Environmental Policy, Wildlife Trafficking section: http://www.state. gov/g/oes/env/wlt/index.htm.

  every day at U.S. airports: Again, all examples are real, from sources cited above. For more about trends, or the scale and changing nature of wildlife crime, see: Liana Sun Wyler and Pervaze A. Sheikh, “International illegal trade in wildlife: Threats and U.S. policy,” Congressional Research Service, March 5, 2008; Jolene Lin, “Tackling Southeast Asia’s illegal wildlife trade,” Singapore Year Book of International Law, no. 9 (2005): 191–208; Dilys Roe, Teresa Mulliken, Simon Milledge, and Josephine Mremi, “Making a killing or making a living? Wildlife trade, trade controls and rural livelihoods,” International Institute for Environment and Development, 2002; and Mara E. Zimmerman, “The black market for wildlife: Combating transnational organized crime in the illegal wildlife trade,” Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 36, no. 1657 (2003): 657.

  Like narcotics officers nabbing street dealers: Ed Volz, interview with author; Kevin Harrington, interview with author.

  “He knows the product you are bringing him”: Dave Ferguson, transcript of taped interview with detectives Bill Jarmon and Ed Volz, June 17, 1994.

  An anonymous tip had led Volz to Ferguson: Details of Ferguson’s arrest come from: J. Janca and Larry Baker, statement of probable cause, Washington Department of Fisheries Patrol, March 10, 1994; Dave Ferguson, witness statement, March 16, 1994; Janetta E. Sheehan, deputy prosecutor for Clallam County, Washington, letter of cooperation and immunity, March 25, 1994; Ed Volz to Captain Ron Swatfigure, memo, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, August 10, 1994. Ferguson’s criminal record is outlined by Special Agent Dali Borden in USA vs. Tak Sum Ho, Jeffrey Scott Jolibois, and John J. Easterbrook, Jr. (CR-96-5031), criminal complaint, February 28, 1996.