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“Can you tell me about how you did ultimately get arrested?”

This all started a few years back when I wanted to sell my business. See, my legacy, it was to grow this, to a point that I would turn it over to my kids. I dated that said, I'm done. I want to give the business to my middle daughter and I told her Stephanie, I was 62 at the time.

I said, Stephanie, that is Ty, I got enough. I'm going to give you the business and I want no money. At the end of the year, the profits you split with your sisters. It's yours. So she looks at me and she says, "Do you think I want the kind of life you have and

she didn't want a company over $100 million just for that?" Any blamer? No. No, because I see what I did to my family.

I never got to spend time with them.

I never got to go to the school place and always have a shit. You can buy those things back, it's over. But if you get the American dream, it's a cinnamon of sacrifice, you've got to make, it doesn't come from heaven and they say, "Lock, lock bullshit.

“You have to go, look for lock, lock doesn't come to you."”

And by lock is, work your butt off in America and you will get a hat and see, I don't want that kind of life are you crazy? So that's why I love getting in a shade because if I were to get out at 62, none of this little shit would happen. Carlos Rafael leans back in light to cigarette, one of many over the course of our conversation.

Could you talk about all the Scarface pictures? I don't give me that one, she mugged that one in New York. Carlos's office is covered with images from the movie Scarface. There's an actual cigar from the set, a hand drawn sketch of Tony Montana, the cocaine kingpin, and a still from the film of Al Pacino in the big hot tub.

Carlos told me that Netflix once approached him about making a movie about his life and asked who should play him. Carlos didn't need to think about it, it was obvious. I said, "Scaface, you'll be the only one who could do the job the right way." Al Pacino.

Al Pacino. So you can picture an older Pacino if you want, but with jowls hanging under his chin and totally bald, except for the sides of his head, that's Carlos. And what did the producer from Netflix say?

Now I ask him, when I mentioned $20 million, I forget to look if I'm good at something

that's going to get done I want money. And you'll see as we go along, there are some parallels for sure between Carlos Rafael and Tony Montana.

that luck again and again and again, hunger, opportunity, excess ruin.

“There's a famous scene in the movie when Montana is out to dinner and gets an heated”

argument. It's out of fancy restaurant, everyone's very well dressed, lawyers and bankers, and they all fall silent, watching as Montana lunges across the table, spilling wine and food all over the white table cloth, but then Montana turns and addresses the crowd directly, calls out their silent judgment of him, saying, "You need people like me."

"You need people like me so you can point your fucking fingers to say, "That's the bad guy." Then he asks, "So what does that make you? Good? You're not good.

You just know how to hide.

How to lie." "Me?" "I don't have that car."

“When he's done, Montana stumbles out, shouting over a shoulder, "sake a night to the bad”

guy." "I can hear a little of Carlos in that scene. Even after he was investigated and labelled a crook, after federal agents carted him off to jail and dismantled his empire, he keeps pointing his finger right back as the government that brought him down, saying, "That right there, that is the real bad guy."

"They take this off the problem." Heaven's so shit. Because fishermen are a lot smarter than they are. From GPH news, this is the big dig. I'm Ian Coss.

Carlos Rafael is an American success story. He started from nothing, working in an elected industry, in an elected city, and he built something real. His business was fish, Carlos C. Food, and by the end of his run, he owned the biggest fleet of boats in the most valuable fishing port in America.

And why did it all, contrasting down, and why does Carlos insist to this day, that he did nothing wrong? Welcome to Season 3, Catching The Codfather.

It's a story about work, about dreams, and ultimately about how all of us relate with

our government. Part 1, Red Lobster. Hey there, I'm so glad that you decided to check out this show. And I want to let you know that as these episodes are rolling out, I will be doing weekly messages to our big dig mailing list with some behind-the-scenes photos and details

from my research process.

“So if you want to get all of that in your inbox every week, just go to wgbh.org/thebigdig.”

If you can sign up, also, if you're getting eager to hear the rest of the series that isn't out yet, you can go ahead and sign up for our membership program, the H.O.V. Lane, and get early access to the whole thing. You can find that at wgbh.org/H.O.V. Lane. Thanks for coming along and enjoy the show.

Profile grew up in the Azores, a string of islands in the Atlantic that are maybe a quarter of the way to North America, if you're coming from Europe, so way out there, and small enough that you have to really zoom in on the map in order to see them at all. The Azores are part of Portugal, and in the 1960s when Carlos was a kid, Portugal was fighting colonial wars on several fronts in Mozambique and Angola in Guinea.

Carlos had friends, who were drafted off their tiny island and sent abroad, who died in the jungle, fighting for a lost and distant cause, a pointless cause. His parents did not want that for their son, so they sent young Carlos to study at a monastery. That's the way deal with keeping me off the military if I stay in a monastery.

a monastery.

Oh, my friend says what a hell of a priest you would have made.

But once my sister, she told me dead as an American passport. Carlos's dad had an American passport. This revelation is not entirely surprising in a place where lots of families move back and forced to the US, but it was news to Carlos infuriating news, because it meant his dad had an easy out all along and was so comfortable in his island life, he just didn't want

to take it. And instead sent his son to a monastery. I freaked out. I said, oh, yeah, we're going to America says, you know, you're not going to America because you stay in a monastery.

“That's what they put you in a, so it's shit, so they put you in me out.”

Every night, the priests in training would have dinner, then go to prayer and by 930,

they'll go up to their dormitory. So, everybody went up to the dorm, I went to the football field and I jumped the fence and I took off. Carlos didn't care about actually getting away with this little escape act. He wanted to get caught.

He wanted to get punished. Then look to fire when for walk and tell that was about a quarter of 11 when I come back. I jumped the fence and I come back again. A little light no, the priest was of stays waiting for me. He says, you'll be an expel tomorrow, I'm calling you parents and we ship in you back

home. Now Carlos would find out if his gambit paid off. It looked like either way he was leaving the A's or us. Could be for the U.S.

“Could be for Angola, which one was up to his father?”

So I was terrified to get all my cities going to beat the leaf and grab out of me. My father says, I'm going to teach you a lesson. He's not going to win any plays. He's the one he wasn't a right place. He should have stood there and all that, but there was my mother's seat every day with the

arm and at him, which he says, you know what's going to happen and if he goes, you'll probably come in the coffin. Carlos was 15 at this point. At 16, he would register for the draft. So after she keep battling badly this side to come here.

So you got out just before your 16th birthday? I got he in much, Jill would have been too late. Carlos boarded a TWA flight and followed the same route across the sea that people from

“the A's or us had taken for generations to the small coastal city of New Bedford, Massachusetts.”

The flight attendant given a little set of plastic wings he could pin on his shirt. He was proud of those wings, proud to be starting fresh, proud to be in America, finally free.

When I arrived in the United States in 1968, I always said to myself, I am not going

to be working for anybody else all my life. I'm going to do this for myself. And it turned out that Carlos was arriving at the right time, a time of crisis actually for the industry that defined New Bedford. But as Carlos himself has told me, a crisis that that is when you can make a lot of money.

And Carlos Raphael would do just that. Throughout the world, New Bedford, Massachusetts, is best known as the Whaling City. New Bedford, as you may know, is the port that inspired Moby Dick, and where the author, Herman Melville, set out on his own Whaling Voyage. But if you stepped off about there in the 1960s, when Carlos arrived and wandered into the

neighborhoods along County Street or Rivet Street, you'd find a very different world from the one Melville knew. That entire area was all Portuguese. Maria Tomasia, like Carlos Raphael, came to New Bedford from the Azores. It's like every island or every tower had their own club.

You know, there's the Ponte de Agada Club, there's a Fiyal Club, there's the Medirez Club, there's a fisherman club, Central Loser Club, or for the Sosh Club. So everybody had their place to socialize. There were two Portuguese newspapers. There was a Portuguese radio station, a dedicated Portuguese library with over 3000 titles

in it. This was the capital of Portuguese, North America.

Whaling ships out of New Bedford would stop in the Azores and Cape Verde to pick up supplies.

“Well, God onboard as well, and then more people followed and more people.”

And they saw there was a fishing industry, you lived by the water, you used this, you know, once you lived by the water, it's very difficult to go any place else and not see that water. By 1970, Massachusetts was home to one third of all Portuguese immigrants in the entire country. And most of those people were clustered in the coastline near New Bedford.

Within the fishing industry itself, there's actually an interesting ethnic divide, historically at least. For many years, the scallop boats tended to be run by Norwegian immigrants, but the draggers, the boats that went after bottom fish, like cod and flounder, they were overwhelmingly

Portuguese, 80 to 90 percent by one estimate.

They will be the focus of this story, and in the 1970s, when Carlos was still new in town, those fishermen were in trouble. I would be mostly as a translator.

“The man the fisherman went to for help was Maria Tomazia's boss, New Bedford congressman”

Gary Studts. It was absurd about the fact that, you know, there were other people out there. Other people out there. Other people competing for the same cod, haddock, and flounder off the coast of New England, with bigger boats, bigger nets.

But the fishermen described was a foreign invasion. That's how they would talk about it. They felt that they were taking away what was theirs. It's a little hard to imagine now, but in the 1970s, foreign fishing boats could come as close as 12 miles off the coast, and they could catch whatever they wanted.

This audio is from a Coast Guard flyover, just off Cape Cod. There were German boats, Russian, Spanish, Japanese, all drawn to the rich coast of New England. And because they were so far from port, these ships were essentially floating factories. They flayed, froze, or canned the fish, right on board, working for months at a time on a massive scale.

I was probably averaging somewhere in an era of, say, 35 to 40 cuts a day. I used to see miles and miles and miles of these ships. They look like big cruise ships. Rodney Avala was a young fisherman at the time, just starting out. And I used to say, "I'm going to have no fish when I grow up."

Modern trolling techniques are sweeping everything from the sea. This foreign presence really ramped up over the 1960s, so that by the mid-70s, if you look at the total catch on New England's very best fishing grounds, 90% of it was pulled up by foreign boats, 90% and the fishermen and scientists alike could see the effect. "It could be like the heartache, and all of it is appeared.

The butterfish is all disappeared, the glucose is all disappeared."

“And that's how the whole thing came to be, is that they wanted something done about it.”

That's where Congressman Gary Studd's came in. "For several of the reasons that I cited in my brief remarks, I think that the time is right to ask to extend these protections."

Studd's was always a bit of an odd fit to represent the working class Portuguese hub

of New Bedford. He was formal, clean cut, Yale educated, in pictures of him from the 1970s. He looks like he could be in the 1950s, with black, horn-rimmed glasses and planes to make with some resources still available to protect. And on top of all that, Gary Studd's was also concealing the fact that he was gay.

The suggestive term people used from at the time was a confirmed bachelor, not a strong political brand in those days, but Studd's was driven. "When I first met a me introduced himself in Portuguese." "So when he ran for that sea, Studd's took a six-week intensive course in Portuguese, then spent another six weeks traveling around the Azores, Cape Verde, and mainland Portugal."

"Oh, Maria, come visit us. You know, step aside. Yeah, so that type of thing. You've got anything good lately." In 1973, New Bedford sent Studd's to Washington as their representative.

which meant he was actually in a perfect position to do something about the whole foreign invasion

“issue. So that same year, Studd's teamed up with Congressman Don Young from Alaska to introduce”

what they like to call the Young Studd's bill, but was commonly known as the 200-mile bill. "It's probably something like a 200-mile economic zone. It would establish a new ocean boundary that foreign vessels could not cross. An invisible fence exactly 200 miles offshore. And inside that fence, our richest fishing grounds would be reserved exclusively for American boats.

"A 200-mile extension of U.S. Coastal jurisdiction."

You would think that bill would be an easy win. I mean, who would oppose kicking out foreign

fishing boats. Gary Studd's was about to find out. "The problem, as it has so often been in

“subsequent years, was the United States Department of State."”

And it turns out the bad guy in this story is the U.S. Department of State, which makes some sense. The diplomats wanted to resolve these fishery issues diplomatically with an international treaty. They did not want to just unilaterally draw a line in the ocean. It could impact trade, military movement, intelligence gathering. Studd's was saying, "It can't wait." By the time a big international treaty is ratified, the fish will be gone.

That's when Studd's realized. There was a deeper problem underneath it all. "I discovered that the biggest problem that those of us who represent maritime areas have was that nobody in Washington knew anything about it." And the best example I can think of

“this is Studd's recalling the story in a speech a few years later, where he gave a specific”

example to illustrate the challenge. For years, Studd's had tried to get the American lobster designated as a "creature of the shelf," meaning it lived as the name implies on the continental shelf, and could be protected from foreign fishing boats. "We held hearings to find out why the State Department had not designated the lobster to be a creature of the shelf. And the State Department, I, kid, do not came in and testified. I can still picture them three men. There they

were all lined up in very, very fancy three-piece hoops to inform the House Committee on Merchantry and Fisheries that the lobster was not a creature the continental shelf, because international

law defined a creature of the shelf as an animal which never left the ocean floor. And the State

Department had verified that when the lobster was excited it jumped up and down, and left the ocean floor. Now, I wish I could tell you I was exaggerating and make point, but I am not. I asked the Department of State if they thought the kangaroo was a creature of the earth. And there was no response, whatsoever. I threatened on several occasions to put an unpaid lobster on the witness table in front of them to see if any of them had ever met one. I seriously doubt it. Washington is

populated by people who think that lobsters are red, and that is the source or at least the symbol of a great many of the problems that we have had over the years and trying to accomplish things. If you don't know lobsters when they are alive and uncooked are not red, they are greenish brown. That year the bill went nowhere. And the foreign harvest of the sea floor went on. Carlos Rafael is in his early 20s at this point. He's been in the country for maybe five years,

and while Gary Studts is learning the ways of Washington. Carlos is learning the trade of a fish cutter. What does it take to cut a fish? What does it take? A little bit of knowledge that you learn as you learn you get to it. And once you get to it, the name of the game is "Shop in your knife." Carlos started out working under a Cape Verde in man who showed him how to hone his blade until it was so sharp. He could shave the hair as office forearm. Once you got a gig of it,

once you know what you're doing, and you've got a shop knife, then it's like ice cream. It's easy. In an eight-hour shift, each fish cutter was supposed to fill 16 boxes, 125 pounds each, so 2,000 pounds of fish a day for an average cutter. I won't say I was the best one in a city, but a bed to you. I was the fort of the fifth best in a city as a fish cutter. I would cut 20, 22, sometimes 24 boxes, by 2 to 30 and you have to know, so I would go and

Get your butt to work. I'm not going to work now. I'm having a cigarette.

“You've been here for 20 minutes. It's too bad. You're fire.”

So I must have got fire 50 times working for this company, but it could never fire me because

I was all this way over. As Carlos said before, he did not come to this country to work for someone else. This was not his American dream, but it was also not a great time to strike out on his own. Even from the floor of the fish plant, Carlos could tell the industry wasn't trouble. You know, not much fish are rowing so far. You were going to a price as we beg then.

Caches were down. Some species had virtually disappeared and Gary studs knew all this too. So studs came back around for another try. This time smarter.

“The presence of the barn fleets out there who were literally raping the resource. The eastern”

block country is the Soviet. This time, studs mounted a public campaign for the 200 mile bill. He held hearings. He met personally with President Ford. He teamed up with the whole fleet of fishing boats that sailed down the coast and up the Potomac to DC. The barn fishing activity in the campaign worked. Legislation under which the United States laid claim to a 200 mile limit on its coastal waters. This time, the bill passed.

And in 1976, 50 years ago Gerald Ford signed what became known as the Magnuson Act. After Warren Magnuson, the senator who co-sponsored it. Today, I guarantee you, any fishing captain in the country will know exactly what you mean if you say the name of Magnuson. One of studs staff members told me that years later, as the Magnuson Act became increasingly controversial, studs would sometimes say, "Thank God, they didn't name it after me."

Around the time the 200 mile limit went into effect, Carlos Rafael became the formant of the fish plant, running the whole operation. It was clear that kicking out the foreign boats would be good for the local fleet. And pretty quickly, he made his next move. I went to the owner, and I told him, "I'm giving you two months to get somebody to replace me,

because I'm going to do this for myself." Oh, you're never going to make it. It's your opinion.

We will see if I make it or not. The rebellious teenager who ran away from the monastery and cherished his plastic wings was going to follow through on his promise. To work for himself in America. I went to a friend. I asked him for $5,000 alone. I asked for ten, but he had the time he says, "God, I don't have ten, but I got five I've had LPUs. The five will have to do." And I had 27 cents left in my own.

That was the beginning of Carlos C. Food. Just with $5,000 in $27 cents. And truly, Carlos's timing was very, very good. Now with extended jurisdiction, the fishing industry is booming again. Because after the 200 mile limit went into effect in the foreign fleets for gone, Congressman Studts helped use federal money to usher in a golden age for the new Bedford fleet. The government came now with his government guaranteed loan.

Again, Rodney Avala, new Bedford fishermen. So if you could prove that you were a fisherman, they'd loan you all the money you wanted and buy a boat. Interest rates at that time were quite high. If you were buying a house, you might pay

10 percent, 15 percent interest. But if you were buying a fishing boat, it was basically free money.

I had a guy who approached me to build 34 boats. He says, "Oh, you'll do a sit-home and manage the boats and I'll do all the rest." So it almost turned fishing boats into like investment asset. Operation is exactly. Accountants bought boats, lawyers bought boats. I know a dentist that don't vote. I know he was cast sales with it on the boat. And the kitchen was good because there was a lot of fish around. Remember, 90 percent of the fishing pressure had just been removed in some areas.

So at this point, over fishing was not really a concern. How could our dinky little fleet even

“approach the damage that those floating factories had done?”

She took that $5,000 in $27,000. What did you buy? What did you set up?

At first, Carlos was just a small-time dealer. A middleman scouting for side deals around the docks. But in those days, if you were making money in fishing, you'd be stupid to not put

“that money into a boat. So that's what Carlos did. He bought two boats, in fact. And I should clarify,”

Carlos did not capten those boats. He never capten his boats. In fact, Carlos told me he went out

to see just once, right around this time. And as well, never go again. Why? Because that's not fit for human beings. Carlos got so seasick on that trip. He offered to pay for all the extra fuel if the captain would just drop him off at the closest port. He literally leapt off the boat as it approached the dock. And from that point on, Carlos Rafael was not efficient. He was a businessman. So I think I did pretty big. But I would work 20 hours a day, 18 hours a day. I didn't have no

no breaks. Vass quantities of valuable, healthy protein can now be harvested by the U.S. industry if it expands its capabilities. Many feel like that. From 1976 to 1982, the New England fishing fleet doubled in size. From 600 boats to 1200 boats. And it wasn't just about the total number.

These were bigger boats with more powerful engines. They were made of steel. Instead of wood,

they had new nets, new fish finding technology. The skippers days close to the cabin during the tow, watching a remarkable collection of electronic instruments. If you ever look at footage or pictures of fishing boats, you can spot the differences right away. On the older boats, the pilot house, the enclosed area, is way in the back with the open deck space in front because the crews would haul nets

onboard by hand over the side. The modern boats have a pilot house toward the front so they can hold their nets up from the back of the boat with a hydraulic wind. Finally, the net comes winding back onto the overhead drum. The fish was shaken down into the caudance. It was like the leap from propeller planes to jet engines, a whole new era, a new generation of technology. Demand for seafood was growing very fast at that time. And so Magnuson offered a chance for the

U.S. industry to modernize to reclaim its ocean food chain. Studds himself called Magnuson a rebirth for the fishing industry and locally, at least, he was a hero. Please give a rousing new bedford welcome to Congressman Gary Studds. I talked to one congressional staffer who told me that he knew people in New Badford who would display a picture of Studds in their home

“right next to a picture of the Pope. And that's what Gary Studds was for that was they've saved”

you because they loved them. This fishing industry has known times in the past when everyone thought

always lost in the days when the wheelie. Maria Tomasia remembered that later on when Studds'

sexuality was revealed as part of a congressional probe when he was publicly censored and we need chose to run for office again as the first openly gay congressman in American history. Even then the city and the Portuguese community did not turn on him. As soon as they saw they would start yelling and applauding and I was like unbelievable. You have to understand that for coastal communities the Magnuson Act was like the New Deal

because each new boat employed a crew. Each crewman supported a family and together they supported a whole waterfront economy. We believe that the future of this city and the future of this fleet and the future of this industry will match in magnitude its magnificent past. Good luck to us all.

“So it was just tremendous in every way everybody was benefited from it and that's what the”

America dream was about. Carlos Rafael and Rodney Avalah were part of a whole generation who rode the Magnuson Wave. To this day you can walk along the harbor and new bedford and see the boats they built from 1978, 1979, 1980, the boom ties. But for the fishing industry Magnuson

what had been informal to regulate what had been unregulated. They got their wish but they also

“got more and my uncle again Rodney Avalah. He says to me you don't want the Magnuson Act that I”

kept saying why they're going to take my fish and he said to me till still be enough fish to support you. But once you let the government into your living room it's like your mother-in-law coming to visit

you. You never get them out. I want to introduce you to our sponsor for this season. Rodgers

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We'll be sharing more about what they offer as the season goes along but in case you were wondering who this Rodger is. Now you know, more at Rodgersfishco.com. We're going to jump forward in time because I want you to see where all these changes are headed, why they matter specifically to Carlos Rafael. It's 2015. Almost 40 years after Magnuson became law. 40 years after New England fishermen cautiously welcomed the government into their world.

Now the boom times are over. The fishing industry is struggling. A disaster is a disaster

“and that's true whether we're talking about crops or whether we're talking about fish.”

The years leading up to 2015 had been brutal for New England fishermen. A dramatic 77% caught in the cod catch. The catch quotas set by the government kept getting lower and lower. That's going to be a heck of a number of people out on unemployment. The regulations kept getting tighter and tighter. Prospects are the bleakest they've ever been. That I'm going to be to hide up for months. And that's the kind of draconian bureaucracy that fishermen are living with

and struggling to maintain. For many fishermen it meant the end of a career. The end of a way of life. We are the most regulated fishery in the world and Carlos is tired of it all. He employs hundreds of people, manages dozens of boats, but his own daughter doesn't want to take over what he's built. So he decides to put the empire up for sale. In May of that year Carlos got a phone call from a broker. Someone who helped very wealthy clients manage their money. This broker had a pair

of Russian businessmen in New York who had made an awful lot of money, something involving health care equipment. Now they're looking for a place to invest it. Carlos told the broker everything was up for grabs. The boats, the nets, the dredges, permits, property, a fish processing plant, the whole enchilada, as he put it. I gave him a silver bled at all in enchilada. The price

was $175 million. No problem. The broker said, let's talk. Two weeks later, the Russians drove

through the chain link gate and parked in front of the fish plant. A plain, blocky building made of corrugated metal, like a big shipping container with a sign on the side. Carlos seafood. The Russians drove a BMW 5 series. The sport version with a V8 engine. They wore Louis Vuitton shoes and Versace belts. Pinky rings, Rolexes. Carlos was in his usual outfit of jeans and a worn out flannel. The breast pocket stuffed with slips of paper and of course a pack of cigarettes.

He did not look like a man worth $175 million dollars. Carlos led the man through the plant

and up a metal staircase to his office the one filled with pictures of Scarface.

and they are recording everything. They're undercover feds. I'm picturing you in a white

van with headphones on. There are white bands. Ron Mullett was the case agent with the IRS. But I don't recall it on that particular day. White bands were involved. I was certainly somewhere where I could respond if things went sideways in there.

“So how did the IRS first get interested in Carlos Rafael?”

They recognized that he was growing in a time where the industry was shrinking. Most boats sit idle. Confined by federal rules, the limit when they can fish and what. People were having the hard time meeting their loans on their boats. Yet he was succeeding and he can step right up and has an abundance of cash to buy them out and buy their permits most importantly. That led to different theories from other law enforcement that he must be involved in some other

illicit illegal activity in it ran the gambit. Some agencies thought he was involved in human trafficking or smuggling. Some people thought it was drugs. People thought there was public corruption. Several different agencies had had feelings that it was something. But none of them could figure out what it was. The IRS, despite its reputation, does not just investigate tax fraud. As one agent put it to me, we do everything but crimes of passion. As long as there's money involved,

“we'll take it. That's why these other federal agencies wanted to brief Mulett on Carlos Rafael.”

There was obviously money involved here. It was just no one knew where it was coming from. I listened to their brief, I thanked them for their time and I left and put the briefing sheet

in my drawer expecting never to look at it again. A few months later, Mulett heard from a source

that Carlos was looking to cash out and figured maybe this was his chance to get a peak inside the fish plant. Mulett recruited a pair of undercover agents with Russian accents, then a third agent to play the broker and sent them in to buy Carlos C. Food. Again, none of them knew what kind of business Carlos was really in. It could be drugs, it could be arms dealing. So they had no idea what the man was capable of. And it didn't

help that the building was full of long sharp knives used to fill a fish. There was an uncertain moment early on when Rafael noticed his three guests were all wearing the exact same 18-carot gold Rolex watch, but the leader of the group didn't miss a beat. Those were Christmas gifts for the boys, he said. Saran Mulett was listening intently for any signs of trouble and also for any clues as to what Rafael's true business was. The man got to talking and Carlos was happy to talk

about his business. This was his life. He talked about scalippers and draggers. He talked about the regulations he had to deal with. The sectors, the quotas, the permits, stuff the IRS agents didn't really understand. And more than anything Carlos talked about the art of buying and selling fish. An obsession he has maintained since his days as a small-time dealer. But for the undercover agents who again were pretending they wanted to buy out the whole business,

there was a mystery staring them in the face that asking price of 175 million.

As big as Carlos seafood was, that number seemed like a lot. So the agents asked for some proof that this business was really worth what Carlos said it was worth. And he within probably the first ten or fifteen minutes, he called his accountant. Why do you go to the office, get the financial

“statement? Because I think I'm not allowed to just send this stuff over the financials and”

tax returns and stuff. So we'll take a ride. She's going to the office. She said about 15 minutes you'll be here. But early on, it was, there's a part of the business that she doesn't know about and we're not going to talk about that. Carlos, don't ask that question. Because he's going to go through a lot a lot a lot a lot of things because she doesn't know that thing. That's what I meant. We want to talk with you separately about it. Okay,

the financials. She'll be there in ten minutes. The plan had been to take a break and go down to the docs. But now everyone understands that there is a certain corner of the business that if it comes

“up, the accountant will cover her ears and go la, la, la, la, la. That's what he means by that.”

So what to do? These buyers seem serious and they are clearly smart enough to know that the

business on those official financial statements is not worth 175 million, which means Carlos

has a decision to make quickly. They come and make it. It says the numbers doesn't just to fire out when you're 75 million. So stupid of me. I go at a bottom drop of this desk where they're sitting at right now. And what he does, he opened a drawer and that guy at another set of books. And he put it on the desk. Righty. Tell me it's not worth 75 million dollars.

“This set of books was labeled simply cash. However, the lines of numbers on the”

ledger did not reveal a smuggling operation or a drug business. It was more fish, more prices, more lists of pounds and species. Because while other fishermen had been suffering and protesting under the system of regulations created by the Magnusen Act, Carlos Rafael had figured out a way to break the system entirely. To catch whatever he wanted to catch and get away with it for years. And this was not just about being a rebel and reeling in a few too many fish that he sold on

the side. This was an operation. Carlos falsified official documents. He manipulated gaps in the

“enforcement system. He built up a network for selling black market fish to high end restaurants,”

involving a mafia associate to corrupt cops, duffel bags full of cash and money hidden in offshore bank accounts. All adding up to millions of dollars worth a fish. The fishing was not a front. It was not a distraction. The fishing was the crime. With the tension broken in all his cards on the table, Carlos joked with these men who had only met that day. That he's really trusting them at this point.

I do not know you could be the fucking IRS any. This could be a fucking loss of fuck.

I regret that for the rest of my life. They were never

never got me. But hey, it's over. This is a story about one man's choice to break the rules. But I see it as part of a much bigger story. Americans, we've always hated government regulation. That rebellious attitude Carlos has is not unique. It's part of the American dream, really, that desire to be autonomous, to work for yourself, to make your own luck as Carlos put it.

That culture has always been there. But the place we are in now somehow feels different.

Today, the very idea of government regulation has become polarized. And I mean that on both sides of the political spectrum. It seems like people are instinctively for it or against it. Before they even know what it is, like as a matter of principle, people on the left are mostly focused on the benefits of regulation. How it can be a tool for justice, for safety, preservation. People on the right seem to be mostly focused on the harms and the costs.

To the point that there is talk of dismantling the regulatory state entirely, shutting down whole agencies, stripping it down to nothing.

look that close. It's boring. It's complicated. So we look away.

“Fishermen do not have the luxury of looking away. Nor for that matter to truck drivers or small”

business owners or nurses, farmers, a lot of us. And I should be clear here that I am one of the lucky Americans who leads a pretty unregulated life. I make podcasts that go out on the internet. I don't need to permit or a license. I can say whatever I want, including swears. I can make any number of episodes. Anyone can listen to them anywhere. It's a little hard for me to appreciate what it means to have your day-to-day work monitored by the state. To constantly bump up against

rules that feel arbitrary. It's hard for me to appreciate the anger that someone like Carlos Raphael

feels, but that anger is real. And that is why I am telling the story. The details of the operation aside, could you talk a little bit more about your motivations? Why it felt like these rules shouldn't be followed? It was not for the money. See, I'm the type of guy that I know the old team from the bottom up, because I started as a

“modern fishing boat. I know what it takes. What you need to raise a family and to get ahead in life.”

And they frost me to the bullshades I could keep all these people working. So you felt like you had to break the law in order to protect the people who worked for you? No questions ask. No questions ask. They force you to do it. They force me to cheat.

They forced me to cheat. When I walked out of Carlos seafood that first day,

I was skeptical of what I just heard. It all felt pretty self-serving. Of course, Carlos sees himself as the hero. The rogue fighting back against an overbearing state. On its own, he was easy to dismiss. But then again, I mean, we have to look at both sides of the story, every calling has two sides. As I've talked with more people who fished out of New Bedford, who worked for Carlos and who knew him, the image I get is not simple. When you first met him,

you'd say, oh, this guy's a mafia, so. But actually, he had a heart. In the fishing industry, Carlos Raphael remains a deeply divisive figure. If he wasn't born crooked, he must have learned it before he could talk. Someone who inspires jealousy, fury. Only Carlos turned into the biggest crooked America. Just Carlos. He is a product of his own moral, the private. And someone who, despite all his crimes, all his deceptions. A lot of people continue to root for him.

Do you blame him for what he did? Do you think what he did is wrong? No, I don't. No, I don't. So who is Carlos Raphael, really? A folk hero, a crock, a righteous rebel, a selfish

“con man? I believe in order to judge the crimes of Carlos, you also have to judge the whole system”

that he chose to break. So we're going to cover those 40 years from the passage of Magnuson to the arrest of Carlos Raphael to understand that system and the anger that grew up around it. And here is my hope for the series. If you are one of those people who instinctively thinks government regulation is good and necessary, this story will make you question that instinct. If you are someone who thinks regulation is flawed and burdensome and unnecessary,

this story will make you question that instinct. And if you are someone who before today thought Lobsters are red, then if nothing else, you were about to learn a whole lot about where your fish comes from. And we've got right here, police, lined up all down the street here all the way past the gate. In part two, what the government gives, the government can take away. What people are being taken into custody, Latin and right here, the lives of the dealers are now out of the lot,

it's the pavement police. That's next time.

[Music] Catching the cod father is produced by Isabel Hibbert and myself Ian Coss. It's edited by Lacey Roberts. The editorial supervisor is Jennifer McKim with support from Ryan Alderman and the executive

“producer is Devon Maverick Robbins. If you want to hear more stories like this one,”

produced by the same team, I want to make sure you know. This is the third season we have

done together and if you want to hear the rest of them, just search for the big dig wherever you get your podcasts. I talk to a number of Gary studs staffers for this episode, all of whom

“helped inform the story. They are John Sasso, Palma Carthy, Steve Schworden, Mike Forest, Tom McNott,”

Emery Bress Lauer, Susan Dudley, who you will hear later in the series, also provided valuable insights for the episode. For the archival material, we owe thanks to the ML Baron Historic Archives, the New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center, and the Portuguese American Archives at UMass Loll and UMass Dartmouth, and a special thank you to Roberto and Januario Leo.

You can find a video version of this episode on YouTube featuring incredible archival footage

produced by Joni Tobin and Annie Gerson. The artwork is by Bill Miller, our closing song is Viva Viva New Bedford by Georges Ferrera. The big dig is a production of GPH News and distributed by PRX. Hey, I want to make sure that you know this series you're listening to right now is part of an

ongoing feed, telling stories from the past to help us understand our present. Our first season is

all about infrastructure, the second season is about gambling, and we've got more seasons planned.

“So if you want to stay on top of what the team and I are doing, go ahead and follow or subscribe”

to this podcast wherever you listen. We've got some really exciting stories coming up, and I hope you'll stay with us. Thanks.