Catching The Codfather | 2. I Hope Those People Sink

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Listen to Swindled at Swindled.com, or wherever you listen to podcast. Support for catching the cod-father comes from Rogers Fish Company, founded by Roger Berkowitz, offering an array of New England seafood and entrees, shipable anywhere in the U.S., more at RogersfishCo.com. And also from the law firm of Davis Maum, whether you're a buyer, seller, investor, or

lender, their business attorneys understand that each deal has unique needs and requirements, building client relationships one transaction at a time. More at Davis Maum.com. For generations now, the port of New Bedford has been organized around a daily ritual.

“The moment when all the key players converge and everyone's economic fate is determined,”

the fish auction.

Back in the early '80s, the auction took place in a small city-owned building right at

the dock, called the Warfinger Building. It was so small that the fish dealers would stand shoulder to shoulder, in the haze of cigarettes smoke, was thick enough to catch the morning light coming in the windows. At the front of the room, there was a railing to hold back the crowd, and behind that a giant chalkboard divided into columns.

It listed the catch from each boat broken down by species, so many pounds of cod, so many pounds of yellow tail flounder, so many pounds of dabs, and so on. But this was not anything like the kind of auction you might expect. It was much, much more confusing, because instead of going down the list and auctioning off the species one by one, they would auction all the species at once, on all the boats at

once. The deal in one of those options, you gotta be definitely good with numbers.

“And if you want to know how Carlos Raphael really made a name for himself, how he came”

to dominate this port, it all started here at the auction. And I have nobody to tank, but my Godfather, he was my teacher back one man, he banged my head and a black body says, "I'm gonna get this tank table through your skull." I would be piss at that age as it is, son of a bitch, I hope you died, but today I got nothing but to tank him, for making me dead with with numbers.

I mean, he was just like lightning, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Fisherman Bill Plount used to watch Carlos at the auction, and I teeds him once in a while. He'd get mad at me, shout out for it, shout out. But he was brilliant. The fish auction began at 8 a.m. sharp, and it ended at 8.22.

Exactly 22 minutes to bid on everything you could keep track of. The dabs, the caud, the flounder, all of it. I could have run anyone on that auction, I could bet in 8.9 bolts at a time by doing the metal and my brain like a computer won't even do a dead fox. The thing that made the auction so confusing and made Carlos so good at it was this final

quirk in the rules, whoever put in the last high bid on any individual species from a given boat got all the species from that boat. So even though you're bidding on the species, you're really bidding on the whole boat via the species. If you're feeling lost, don't sweat it, you don't really need to understand how this auction

works. Just know that there is some interesting strategy to it. Like if Carlos could see the guy next to him really wanted the haddock, but that same

He'd make the caud like huge money, he'd make the flounder small.

“For now, the competition would be forced to outbid Carlos on the caud just to get at that”

haddock they really wanted. That is, unless the competition gives up in which case Carlos would be stuck with the overpriced caud, plus the haddock, plus whatever else was on the boat. That was the game. I mean, he was really cool.

It was fast, it was risky, it was ruthless. It was exactly the kind of business Carlos Rafael excelled at. You can read his eyes, you know exactly if he's shaking, if he's not shaking, if he's going to drop, if he's not going to drop. When you do it in person, you can tell.

Was it a rush to be on the auction floor? Oh yeah. Twenty-two minutes, that was a eye to get the, I couldn't wait for the next state to see if that could even get better than to the vehicle. By the 1980s, when Carlos came on the scene, this whole system had been in place for decades.

The fish dealers bought their fish from the boat owners, the boat owners paid their captains and crews, the crews risked their lives to go out and catch the fish. Everything was in a delicate balance, held together in that little brick building owned by the city. But a shock was coming, that would up end that balance forever.

From GBH news, this is the big, big season three, catching the cod father. I'm Ian Coss.

The shock I mentioned would allow Carlos to consolidate power like never before, but it

would also leave a mark on the whole port, a feeling of bitterness and mistrust that lingers there to this day between the fishing industry and their government. This is part two, I hope those people sink. . Hey, hope you're enjoying the show so far, and just want to make sure you know that the

big dig has a membership program called the HOV Lane.

“So if you want to get early access to all our episodes, as well as members only events,”

all while supporting the show, go to WGBH.org/HOV Lane to sign up. Thanks so much. When I go down to New Bedford to do interviews for the series, I would often stop by one of the fish markets in town, I'm away home, just to see what was fresh, maybe get something for dinner, and it reminded me that a great fishmonger is really a special

treat. And I'm not just talking about a fish seller, but somebody who can really make sure that you're only getting the best quality fish. Tell you where it came from, maybe even off of your tip on how to cook it. That is what you get from Rogers Fish Company.

You can order online at Rogersfishco.com or check out their new location at Logan Airport in Boston. So I was wondering could you to start telling me how long is your family been fishing in New Bedford? Well, it started with a great grandfather, he came over on a wheel ship from the Azos,

and then I started my career when I was nine years old. Rodney Avala is a fourth-generation Portuguese-American fisherman. His grandson's fish now too, so that's six generations total, all drawn to the same sea. Today I add off for school, I go fishing with my grandfather on the little lobster boat out of

you.

“So as we grew up, fishmongers in our lives, that's what we did.”

On the fourth of July, the whole extended family would ride out to one of the islands, off New Bedford, and pitch tents for the weekend. The women and young kids would hang out on the beach, while the men would take one of their boats out and hunt for supper. What fish, clams, corg, scallops? I mean, we did everything.

And growing up in a fishing family here, one of the rights of passage is your first trip

to a place known as George's Bank. George's Bank is one of the richest fishing areas in the world.

with an underwater peninsula invisible on the surface. From New Bedford, it takes a whole day for a fishing boat to get to the outer end of the bank. So this is not a quick trip you can make on a day off from school. Usually boats would spend at least a week fishing out there, far from shore, where the

weather and currents were notoriously dangerous and unpredictable. These are the wildest waters in the world, it's called the great yard of the Atlantic. The boats have made that trip for centuries because the shallow water and swirling currents

make an incredible habitat for fish.

“I think it's one of the few major spawning grounds for Haddick and Cod in the internet.”

And as soon as Rodney Avalo was old enough, he made the trip there too. Avalo remembers that the day he graduated high school, his mother drove him straight from the school parking lot down to the dock where a boat was waiting for him to take a seven-day trip out to George's bank. He was a man now and those fishing grounds were part of his family heritage, just like

the Portuguese clubs and the 4th July cookouts. So now just imagine how the port responded when they heard that their government wanted to give it away. To Canada, I can go get a chart if you like it.

Jeff Pike was a staff member for the Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee in the U.S.

House. He worked with Congressman Gary Studts, the man who led the charge and kicking out the foreign fishing boats. But as Pike explained to me, that move had consequences.

“So if you had the coastline, the coastline would be going up this way, right?”

Yep. And you've got Nova Scotia here. Two months after Gerald Ford signed the Magnus an act, the bill that created the 200 mile exclusive fishing zone, Canada's Secretary of State announced that they were going to do the same thing.

The problem is that if you draw a line 200 miles out from the coast of the U.S. and another

line 200 miles out from the coast of Canada, those two lines cross. And the disputed zone was essentially here. They crossed on George's bank. In 1977, delegations from the U.S. and Canada met for a series of negotiations on how to settle the disputed zone.

On the American side, the delegation was led by the State Department. The people who, as Congressman Studts put it in the last episode, thought lobsters were red. My involvement was representing the seafood processing industry from the city of New Batford, which was major and being a adviser to the State Department.

Harvey Nicholson was there for the negotiations, too, and horrified by the outcome. The final compromise was this. The two countries would split George's bank. In the peace that the State Department was ready to hand over to Canada, it was the richest part of the whole bank.

It meant American captains like Avala would lose access to some of their best fishing grounds, areas they had relied on for generations. But there was still hope. The treaty had to be ratified by Congress, and Nicholson knew his congressmen very well. It was Gary Studts.

"But if that he called me on the phone, it needs to have a, it was the story you want to set the treaty and not and I said no." Nicholson and the other industry reps told Studts, "We want a fight." The thinking was that if Congress rejected the treaty, then the dispute would then go to the International Court, and Nicholson believed they had a solid case there.

Historically, it was U.S. fishermen who had made the most trips to George's bank, and just looking at it on a notion chart, it's clear that the bank is an extension of the U.S. Continental shelf. It seemed intuitive to give the whole thing to the U.S. "When he said okay, that was the end of it."

The Canadian Parliament ratified the treaty, but the U.S. Congress rejected it. The fight was on. Do you remember on that phone call weighing the, like, "There's a bit of a gamble here?"

“I mean, it's sort of like choosing whether to go to trial or take a plea deal, right?”

Anytime you work at the court, you don't know what you're going to walk out with, we all know that. In 1981, the dispute went to the International Court in the Hague. For Rodney Avalha, life went on as normal.

Well, of course, God used to fly over us, we used to see the Canadian Kutta, the Shibukto, that wasn't any of it.

“Used to pass us all the time, and they'd wave, we'd wave, like that.”

But down in Washington, Jeff Pike was worried about the case. The U.S. legal team was from the State Department, the people who had opposed creating

the 200 mile limit in the first place.

And Pike was getting the sense that this fishing dispute was just not that team's top priority. Whereas Canada was putting everything they had into winning the case. The Canadian lawyers were all in. They were presenting videos, they had historical documents, it was a good show. I guess you could say we got out lawyer.

On October 12, 1984, the ruling finally came down from the International Court in the Hague. And it was bad. I was in the Nebefford office, and it was in the morning around 9 o'clock, because as soon as I got the call from State Department, I called Harvey, it called a number of the industry leaders.

I got out the chart on Gary's desk and the Befford, and I said, "You got to come here." We got to talk about this. On a regular map, in which the ocean is just a flat uniform wash of blue. The so-called Hague line makes perfect sense. It basically takes the midway point between the US coast and Massachusetts and the Canadian

coast in Nova Scotia and follows that all the way out to see. For the new Bedford fishermen, who knew what was under that expansive water, the line was unthinkable. The court had not only split George's bank, but the split was even worse than the original treaty.

The US had gambled and lost. It's, you know, and they were shocked, it was just betrayal. Now the American boats had 14 days to get back on their side of the new line, then the invisible barrier became hard. Some fishermen started calling the line "The French Fence."

What did that loss feel like? Well, we lost everything. We lost the best yellow tailland. We lost the best scallop and we lost the best swordfish grounds. I would say, we lost a good 40 to 50 percent of our revenue.

“Did you have an emotional connection to that place?”

Was it like a farmer losing their field? Yeah. Like I said, I started when I was nine years old. My first trip to George's banks, I was 13 years old. I mean, I didn't hate a lot of people, but I wasn't happy with that government, really.

Because they, I figured they just threw the fishing industry away to Canada. Avalas Uncle had warned him about the government getting involved in their business. He said it was like your in-laws coming to visit.

Once they came, you'd never get them out.

And here was the twist of the knife. The government had kicked out the foreigners only to give up the crown jewel of their fishing grounds. There's a lot of anger, a lot of anger.

“And I think, in hindsight, now you really see how losing that is really impactful in the”

New England industry. There's a phrase you hear a lot in the conversation about fishing in New England. Too many boats chasing too few fish. In the '70s and early '80s, the government had encouraged fishermen to build new boats, to invest in their industry, to create jobs for their children mining this vast resource

that was suddenly all theirs. Like I said before, a whole generation answered that call, including Rodney Avala and Carlos Rafael and many others. But the promise was false. And now the whole industry built on it was about to crack.

From whaling to textiles to fishing, New Bedford has always put all its economic eggs

in a single basket, only to see each industry collapse for other cities. In 1984, the year of the Hague ruling, New Bedford was the richest fishing port in the country in terms of the total value of the seafood landed there. Times were good. Then the French fence went up.

In the next year, 1985, total landings dropped by 20%. So when you shrink the pie, when you overfished the resource, it puts everybody under strain. This is John Bullard, former mayor of New Bedford. And when you put everyone under strain, the pressure and the pressure cooker bills.

To make matters worse, the cost of running a fishing boat, the fuel, the insurance, kept

going up.

“To do better, they fish harder, squeezing the pressure cooker even more.”

It's some flavor. It's going to blow. And to happen below on your watch. Yeah, definitely blow on my watch. John Bullard was sworn in as the mayor of New Bedford on Monday, January 6th, 1986 at the

high school auditorium. This was a little more than a year after the French fence went up.

So in auguration days, you know, pomp and circumstance, it's figuring out which family

Bible you want to put your hand on, I chose two. He chose two Bibles, because two of his ancestors had also been mayor of New Bedford before him. Bullard comes from a legendary local family.

“His ancestors had built up the whaling industry here, back in the 1700s.”

For centuries, literally, centuries, they had been engaged in the life of the city, and they had been known by the name John Bullard, and how many John Bullards are there before you? Well, my grandfather wrote a letter to the Harvard admissions guy, saying they're 13 John Bullards.

11 of them went to Harvard and one who didn't was fighting the Revolutionary War and one

is my grandson. George John Bullard, by the way, did become the 12th John Bullard to attend Harvard. And now he was following through on another family tradition, becoming his city's mayor. As soon as he was inaugurated, Bullard knew exactly where he needed to go. And I said, well, before we get to the mayor's office, Ed Craig from the Police Department

was going to drive me there.

“I said, Ed, could you take me down to South Terminal?”

Down inside the pressure cooker. Bullard and his 12-year-old son got into the mayor's black buick with a blue municipal license plate. The police sergeant descended the hill and approached the waterfront. You may have an image of coastal New England as something quaint, colorful little boats

tied up but wouldn't pierce a lobster shack. But the New Bedford Waterfront is not that. It's industrial warehouses, it's loading docks, it's concrete and steel. It's a place built to move fish. But in 1986, all of that had come to a halt.

The fishermen were on strike. As the mayor's car approached the scene, Bullard could see on one side of the street, there were about 200 angry fishermen. On the other side, about 100 police officers with riot shields and German shepherds. The car stopped in the middle.

Bullard told his son to stay put and he stepped out to meet the crowd. He could tell the situation was volatile. The men crowded around him, angry that Bullard wasn't taking a stronger stand on his first day in office. Bullard then crossed the street to speak with the police officers and went back to the car

where his son was waiting. As they pulled away, someone threw a rock in their direction. It missed, but the message was not lost. There's no such thing as being in the middle of the street. Fishing is a kind of tricky business to unionize.

A single port like New Bedford could have dozens of different boats with many different owners, each of whom hire and pay their own crews. There is no single employer to bargain with, but the fishermen of New Bedford had managed to band together nonetheless and to win real concessions from the boat owners. I was a union member before I was a boat owner.

Rodney Avala had been in that union when he was starting out and remained a strong union supporter even after he owned his own boats. I kept my boat city union because I thought it was best for the crew because it gave him a retirement package and it had some control over the work. On a dragon it was 8 and 4.

On a scalper or 6 and 6, you worked 6 and you got 6 off.

“According to Avala, the union even limited how many pounds of fish a boat could catch”

per crew member, 6,000 pounds per person per trip. The point was to protect jobs, but it also functioned as a kind of conservation measure at a time when there were very few limits on what you could catch. By the mid-1980s only about a third of the boats in the port were officially union boats, but even still, the union was powerful enough that the non-union boats would mostly follow

these same guidelines. If you didn't go by those regulations, you'd lose your crew to union boats.

As long as there was a critical mass of union boats, it kept the same standards in the

whole fleet. Right. Yes. So it was better working. It's just for the crew.

It was better priced for the crew because the price gave up. And it was better for the consumer because I thought it was the best. I didn't want to see the union break-up. So now we can see all the main players in this particular story. There are really three of them.

The boat owners, their crews, who are represented by the union, and then the assorted dealers and processors who buy their fish, people like Carlos. So owners, dealers, and crew. We're going to spend the next few minutes focusing on the conflict between the boat owners

“and the crews because that's how the strike started.”

But soon enough, Carlos and the dealers will be dragged into this fight too. boat owners and union officials haven't met since contract negotiations broke down last Thursday. Then this weekend with our owners. In the fall of 1985, back when John Bullard was still campaigning for mayor.

The boat owners and the fishermen's union were meeting to negotiate a new contract. There are several issues separating the two sides.

The first and foremost is pay, and that's determined by the split of the catch.

Instead of receiving a salary or set rate, each crew member was paid a slice of the value of the catch, which of course was determined at auction. So in the fishing was good, and the prices were good, everyone benefited. Under the old contract, the revenue from each trip was split so that the crew got the bigger share.

Back then, we used to get 42% for the boat, and 58% of the catch went to the crew. Now 5842 split, favoring the crew, and it was the best settlement for the crew. But with rising expenses and now falling catches, thanks to the French fence, the group of owners that negotiated with the union was demanding new terms. An even 50/50 split of the catch.

“What do you think of the contract they've offered you, the boat owners have offered you?”

I think it's not fair, it's not fair.

Commercial fishing is generally considered the most dangerous job in America, period. Rates of workplace death are 40 times the national average. So even in good times, that kind of pay cut the owners proposed would be a tough sell. In 1985, it was devastating. The fishermen would be getting a smaller slice of a smaller pie.

I think my family home, one of them was going to happen to my wife and the kids to make 200 or the weeks, it's not worth it, it's not worth it. The final ingredient in the pressure cooker was the union leadership. The union had gone through its own internal struggles that year, and the leader left standing was a controversial figure named Joe Piva.

Joe Piva is of Portuguese descent, and he now is the business agent for the Teamsters Local in New York. Piva was known as a bit of an agitator. Fisherman I've met described him to me as a badass, a hoodlum, and a tough character. In pictures, Piva usually has a union jacket and a white newsboy cap, pulled down over

his face, which you can't see in the pictures, is that the four letters of his last name are tattooed between the knuckles of his left hand, P-I-V-A. On the day after Christmas, 1985, with contract negotiations stuck, Piva's union decided to up the pressure. That's when they declared a strike.

"It's the proud day. I must let the city know that we must let that it's been known. We are working people, we create with our hands, we work with our hands, and all we want is a fair shake." Like I said before, less than half the fleet carried union crews, so if those crews simply walked

off the job, it would not shut down the port and forced the other side to bend.

However, there was another way to apply pressure on boat owners, a weak link in the whole

supply chain, which is the auction.

“Shut down the auction, and you shut down the port.”

"It's a matter of right and wrong. That is perfect!" So a week into the strike, on January 3rd, 600 union members surrounded the small brick orphaned building, marching in a slow loop with picket signs against their shoulders. Two boats were waiting nearby, tied up at the pier and ready to put their fish up on the

blackboard. Now in theory, the building was still open. The fish dealers could simply cross the picket line and buy fish from any boat willing to sell. But inside the building, they found that the phone lines, which the dealers used to communicate

with their own customers, had all been cut, and the clock that counted down the 22 minutes had been disabled. That day, there was no auction.

“As the New Bedford Fishman strike gets older, it's not getting any closer to a settlement.”

And act both sides or so. This situation went on for over a week. The same week, John Bullard was sworn in as the city's new mayor. The associations were stalled and the auction was closed. In fact, both sides are so far apart, even the mayor of New Bedford is wondering whether

anyone wants to settle. That's a question in my mind whether both sides are. It was January. So the union members out on the picket line, lit fires and trash cans to stay warm. A local cafe provided free chicken soup and trays of baloney sandwiches.

Everyone seemed dug in, ready to wait it out.

The mayor said his city was losing more than a million dollars a day worth of business.

“So now, what it started as a feud between union and the boat owners of a pay, had expanded”

to include the fish dealers. The people like Carlos Rafael, who made their living cutting deals at the auction. Because every day the auction stayed closed meant another day of no deals, no action. Until the last week of January, when the stalemate finally broke. Because they still was America, you ain't going to stop my apparition, you get whatever

you want. I will keep biking fishing, doing even trying to stop me. Harvey Nicholson, the seafood industry lawyer, was at the center of what happened next. His clients were the fish dealers, who wanted desperately to restart the auction and get back to buying fish.

He recalls the decisive moment came first thing in the morning right outside the warfinger building.

Somebody pushed one of the buyers from behind that had never been anything like that before.

Didn't hurt him, but he pushed him. That day, Nicholson and his clients made a decision. The buyers were going to take control of the auction. For decades, the fish dealers like Carlos had been guests at the auction. They could come, they could bid, they could play their games, but they did not run the

place. It was the union that officially ran the auction and it was the city that owned the building. That was about to change. I was able to get an office, moved all of the telephones, 14 houses of telephones, into that place overnight.

With those newly installed phone lines, plus of course, a big blackboard, the dealers had everything they needed to run an auction. Without any involvement at all, from the union of the city. Nicholson knew this move was dangerous. It was a provocation.

I mean, from everybody's perspective, I can understand that. And the union would respond to that provocation. Now, they're out in the lot right now. The private fish auction opened for business on January 20th, 1986, so almost a month into the strike.

The building Nicholson had found was the warehouse for a trucking company called Yellowbird Motor Lines, so people called it the Yellowbird auction. And it had a very different feel from the old Warfinger building, high ceilings, fluorescent lights, fresh carpeting, and a chainlink fence all around the outside.

This was one more blow to the crew, again John Bullard, the city's new mayor.

“So they got even angrier, because now they were being screwed twice, first by the boat”

owners, then by the dealers, and so they surrounded the building. Joe Piva and the mass of striking fishermen simply relocated about three quarters of a mile down the waterfront to the Yellowbird building and set up a new picket line. But after a month on strike, the crowd was getting restless. There were reports of broken windows and vehicles being lit on fire.

Everything could happen now. See, righty, I got in my silver knee if that's strike. In his office, along with all the Scarface memorabilia, Carlos Rafael keeps Iraq, the size of a fist.

This rock was true and true, the deep top of my firebird, the one that is strike.

Where were you? I was going into the auction and they had a picket line, I got my firebird, I went to the driveway, they were blocking, I went stop, I went right through and I saw the guy do it through the rock, I went to animation, okay. Which you date, I will not forget, and if you think you're going to scare me with a rock,

you'll be the biggest mistake you ever made. Carlos says that some dealers didn't dare cross the union, but their loss was his game. Carlos hired security at his warehouse around the clock. He started carrying a gun when the tires on his trucks were slashed, he replaced them, and he kept going to the auction.

Because for whoever could make it in the door, there was good money to be made. Every time it surprises, that's when you make a lot of money. And we've got right here, police, lined up all down the street here, all the way past the gate, they're several police cars in the L for me.

“Like we remember leaving my car at one of the members' locations.”

Harvey Nicholson told me that as the standoff war on, groups of buyers started meeting at a separate location and all loading into a delivery van, like the kind with a refrigeration unit and no windows. The van would pull into the closed parking lot at Yellowbird and back up to the building as close as possible.

People were across the street, fishermen with wives and dogs and kids throwing rocks. Once the van was in place, the dealers would kick the rear doors open and sprint the final 15 feet to the safety of the building. The way Nicholson described it sounded like the beach landing at Normandy. "And I'm getting into better position here to see exactly what's going on, the dealers

are out. They're out in the lot right now." But the fish dealers, remember, they thrived on cutthroat action, unbluffing, backstabbing, brinkmanship. That was all part of their business.

“And so they were not going to back down now.”

"I come out, Mrs. One of you steps in the front of my truck, I'm going to shoot you. And I mean it don't take days as a threat, it's as a promise. You blocked that driveway one more time. One of you is going to go down." "No flying at a very fast pace out of the lot, more rocks flying, more guys coming

out. So people are being taken into custody like you're right here. The lives of the dealers now are a lot of the lot, it's the pavement pretty fast and they're all continue to." They cleared out of your way.

"They didn't know I meant it. I got to have a nice soul, it was making good money when the face to the other dealers because some of that was gay after the load on the boat. I wasn't gay. This is a free country, you keep doing what you do when you believe in a strike, you strike

you the world at, do not interfere with my trucks." Joe Piva and his union were starting to lose their grip on the port. Non-union boats continue to fish. The private auction continued to sell dealers like Carlos continued to profit, but the union did succeed in one thing, drawing the city government into the fray.

And that allegiance between the city and the union made sense. New Bedford was historically a democratic city. The Democrats were historically the party of labor, and especially at that time when the Reagan administration was actively breaking public unions.

Bullard, as the Democratic mayor, always kept his distance from the contract negotiations,

but it's clear to me that his sympathy was with the striking fishermen. "What about the strike itself?

"I think it's very little we can do."

“And there was one thing that Bullard could do for the fishermen.”

One bit of leverage that he still had to at least protect the public auction. There was a city ordinance that said it had to happen in public, so anyone could go down and see that take place. This ordinance had been on the books for decades. It said that any fish unloaded at city peers had to be sold at the city auction.

All enough, but the rule had never been controversial before, so it had never really been

enforced. "I said, yeah, well, let's find out what's going to happen if we do that. We need to arrest the first captain who tries to auction at Yellowbird. Will enforce the ordinances against them?" That first week, the so-called Yellowbird auction was open, citations quickly piled up,

or against fish dealers, and eight against boats to get them to act in what we believe is the end.

“Bullard was no longer in the middle of the street.”

He was now in the fight. "We'll probably find out in the next few weeks whether the ordinance is legal enough." But again, it was still unclear to everyone if these penalties would hold up in court. "So I called up the judge who would sworn me in." On the phone, Bullard explained to the judge about the ordinance and the arrests, the

question of its legality and all that, but it turned out no explanation was needed. "Judged Jake had said, thanks for the call, Mayor. I know that ordinance very well because I, before I was a judge, I was a city solicitor, I actually wrote that ordinance." "I said no kidding."

From moment, Bullard's heart lifted. I mean, you'd think the judge would be on the city side if he had written the rule in question. "You wrote the ordinance."

“He said, "Yes, I wrote that ordinance and therefore I know it's unconstitutional because”

I wrote it." And with that, his heart dropped. I said, "Judged you telling me you wrote an ordinance that you know it's unconstitutional yes, I did. And so I'm going to throw that case out of court faster than you can just blink an eye

at." The law was a hollow threat.

It had always been a hollow threat.

Now Bullard knew it, and that the fish dealers didn't know it, too. They were bound to find out pretty soon. The strike was now into its second full month. Bode owners and crews remained stuck, and so far the only winner was their mutual enemy, the dealers.

Then this weekend, the boat owners came up with a different tact. Instead of talking to the union officials, they decided to make an offer directly to the union membership. So a week after the Yellowbird auction opened for business, the boat owners delivered an ultimatum.

Our boats are going back out to sea. You can work on our terms, or we'll find crew who will.

The terms were basically what the owners had been demanding all along, an even split

of the catch, 51% of the crew, 49% to the owners. The union under Joe Pive quickly rejected the offer, but the offer wasn't really directed at him. It was at his members. "I mean this very sincerely, there were some vessels that got out of here, and it

made good press, and I watched this press take me on." This was now the ultimate test of the union strength, and Pive and Newwood. His members pulled the line. When I talk to fishermen, who are working at this time, I found a lot of them have mixed feelings about the strike.

In principle, they supported the union and what it stood for. But in this case, there was some personality and ego involved that hurt the process. I'm thinking specifically about Joe Pive, the union leader who once set up himself, some people think I walk on water, and some people think I should be in the water. Pive up promised his members a lot, maybe more than he could deliver, and when the negotiations

went poorly, he didn't shy away from antagonizing the boat owners. And then of course, there was the violence and destruction of property. It's hard to judge now, and Pive would sometimes accuse the media of fixating on the

He'd probably say that about this podcast, but it's clear from my research that this

“strike did have an aggressive edge that ultimately undermined its support.”

How did you respond at the time as a boat owner? Well, as a boat owner, I respected the strike. One of those conflicted fishermen was Rodney Avala.

At first, Avala kept his boat tied up and didn't ask his crew to work.

He didn't want to defy the union that he had once been part of, and still believed that. And then I had a leak in my boat. And my son went down and saw a crack. I mean, the hobba was ice-thub, saw a crack in one of the wells. So I called up Nalanic, which was a shipyard over here, and I asked them, I said, "Could

I bring the boat over, you have welders?" So he said, "Yeah, bring the boat over, I'll get a welder right on it." So I told my son, "Start the engine up, I'll be right down."

“When they heard the engine start up, boarded a guy, he says, "Oh, Rodney's going fishing."”

They brought everybody down.

Well, by the time I got to the boat, that's a bit at least 50 guys are all so my boat.

And I said, "I'm not going fishing. I've got a leaking laser at and I'm going to weld it." And one of the guys there said, "No, he's going fishing." And then they threatened my son, so I said, "Why am I even into this?" So I called up my crew, but I helped anybody know when I asked, "Hey, if I take my boat

to Luport, you guys want to come to Luport Fish." That's Newport Road Island, a nearby port that was not on strike. Everyone but one said, "Yes." So that's fine. So I ended up coming down one night, starting the boat up, and my son was talking to Luport.

“As someone who had been in the union, was it hard for you to ultimately cross that pick”

at line and go out fishing? It was, but it wasn't the same union that I joined. It was a different leadership. The benefits were the same, everything was the same, the percentage was the same, but wasn't the same core people inside.

By the time Avala did come back to New Bedford, it was clear that the striking fishermen knew where he'd been. "I had to call it, I had to call full new tires. They slashed the tires and broke a mirror, kicked in the door, but they did what they had to do, I did what I had to do."

It started as a trickle of boats leaving the harbor, then ten, all at once, then another ten, one striking fisherman told the local paper, "I hope those people sink." The strike did not formally end, but over several months the picket lines dwindled, trash can fire, stop burning, the trays of baloney sandwiches, stop coming. The court cases from that hollow city ordinance were all thrown out.

For the spring of 1986, when the last patches of ice were gone from the harbor, you could

walk the waterfront and never know that technically it was still on strike.

To this day, the city run fish auction has never reopened, and the fishermen's union has never recovered. Do you feel like if they had held on, is there a world in which they could have won that strike? "I don't think so.

I don't think so." So, the boat owner's got what they wanted, the deal is got what they wanted, and the crew got screwed. John Bullard told me that from the time he got into politics in his hometown, he understood that he would have a delicate relationship with the fishing industry, that his world and

theirs were not made to mix. The fishermen are anti-government because fishermen are fiercely independent, that's why they go fishing. Bullard is a liberal Democrat, someone who fundamentally believes government exists to help people, and specifically those people who can't help themselves.

He acted on that belief, he took aside, but in the strike, just like in the border dispute with Canada, when the government tried to help the fishermen, the government failed. It couldn't help them. "You know, I've been told I do have a short statement here." In the summer of 1986, so a few months after the strike fizzled, President Ronald Reagan

were facing tough economic times, and he delivered to them one of his favorite mantras.

“"I think you all know that I've always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English”

language are, I'm from the government and I'm here to help." "I'm from the government and I'm here to help. By the end of the 1980s, you can see why many fishermen would fear those words too." After the strike, there were really only two power centers left in the port. The boat owners and the fish dealers.

And of course, Carlos Rafael was both. Remember, these were the years when the federal government was still offering up big incentives to build new boats. By 1986, Carlos had started to build his own fleet with a trademark CR on the bow. So the strike was a gift.

“It gave him more control of his boats, more control over the auction, more control over”

his entire business. Once again, and not for the last time, a crisis for the industry was an opportunity for Carlos.

"I mean, he'd days I'd buy up one of a million pounds."

And it was around that same time that he also got a new nickname. "He'd days would be twelve boats and a board I'd buy ten out of the twelve." One morning, when Carlos had been buying up boat after boat, cod, flounder, and all the other so-called ground fish. Someone he knew walked up to him at the auction house and declared, "We didn't have to

start calling him the cod father. Because I would buy heavy cod fish. I mean, 80% of the ground fish special cod fish, they arrived in the bed but I would buy it all."

But the strike was just the first sign of more trouble to come.

It had not even attempted to address the underlying issue of falling catches and shrinking stocks, issues that would require collective action, maybe even government action. All through that decade the warnings kept coming. Tonight, are the world's oceans running out of fish. Until 1990, when a group of environmental lawyers took matters into their own hands.

That independence, the fishermen had cherished, it was over. "It's a doomed day situation if we keep on the way we're going." That's next time. "This is the spirit, this is the spirit." "This is the spirit, this is the spirit of the police."

"It's the one that has the consequences of the murder, this is the one that has the consequences of the murder." "It's the worst of the fish that has been caught, it's the worst of the fish." "It's the truth, it's the truth." "It's the truth, it's the truth." "It's the truth, it's the truth."

"The cod father is produced by Isabelle 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, produced by the same team, just search for the big dig wherever you get your podcasts.”

You can also find videos of every episode with incredible archival footage on YouTube, edited by Johnny Tobin and Annie Gerson.

We owe a very special thanks for this episode to the new Bedford Fishing Heritage Center for generously sharing their archival material. It is such a gift that the city has an institution to preserve that history and make it available to the public. I also want to acknowledge some of the reporters you hear in the old news features, specifically Gary Golis, Meg Valencourt, and Christy George, as well as Nancy Drucker.

The artwork is by Bill Miller, our closing song is Viva Viva New Bedford by George Ferreira.

“The big dig is a production of GPH News and distributed by PR.”

I really hope you're enjoying the show, and before I let you go, I just want to drop in with that constant podcast of reminder to please write the show, leave us a review, subscribe, and of course, tell our friend.

All that stuff really, really does help us keep the show going. Thank you so much.