Catching The Codfather | 4. Mosquitos on the Balls of an Elephant

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“And also, from MIT Sloan Executive Education, offering two to three-day courses and executive”

certificates for professionals seeking cutting-edge business insights on innovation, cybersecurity, AI, and more. [email protected]. Build Blount is the image of an old salt, tall, white beard, weathered face, full of stories, but also possessed of the Yankees stoicism.

That makes you wonder if these stories are even more terrifying than they sound. It was in Hurricane Bob. This story is from the summer of 1991. And I had posted a little slow coming home, and I saw the wind switch. It switched too early.

When I saw that, it soaps. This thing's coming really fast. As soon as the wind switched that day, Blount started steaming west towards the tip of Natucket away from the incoming hurricane. He didn't know if he could make it back to New Bedford in time, but he had another

idea. Natucket Island is a big crescent, with a rounded side facing out to sea. So if Blount could get around the backside, he could wait out the hurricane there, then bring the fish to auction as soon as the storm passed. It was a little risky, but the payoff would be great, since the rest of the fleet would

be stuck in harbour, he'd have the only fish in town. So Blount rounded the north point of Natucket into the lee side. The wind was gusting well over a hundred miles an hour, but here at least there was some shelter. I got as close to the beach as I dare again.

He hugged the coast, pointed his bow into the wind, and did his best to hold position. The front front windows were just white. You couldn't see out them, you couldn't see anything, and it was hot. Ricking is hot, and now you could see the water accelerating right into the sky. Occasionally, Blount would throw up in the door at the back of the pilot house, just to

let out the humid air. But mostly he was enclosed, surrounded by white, wind, water, blinded to the outside world, and just relying on his radio navigation unit to keep from running a ground.

“And in this particular situation, a good stoic front was important, because Blount”

also had his 12-year-old son, Luther, on board with him. Luther later told his mother, "I wasn't scared, because Dad wasn't scared." So father and son rode out the storm together, and three days later, they made their way back to New Bedford to sell the catch and pick up the check from the fish dealer. Everything was tremendous money, because it was nothing behind us.

This was all a fish going to be in the ring on the next week, and I looked at my check on wasn't, I said, "Where'd the sand that?" The check in his hand was short. In fact, one of the fish species, the sand dabs, was missing entirely from the payment. The man writing the check was Carlos Rafael.

I said, "Where'd the sand that?" He said, "Send up his son." So I said, "Okay, so I sent my son to go up and see college." So we went up and saw college, and Carlos caught him a check by the sand dabs. The turned out Carlos had saved the last piece of the payment for Luther, and he handed

the kid his own check for $500. Because he was with me on the trip and went through the storm and everything.

So I mean, that's Carlos, when you first met him, you'd do a run over, you'd say, "Oh,

this guy's a mafia, so in the way he talks and everything."

I gotta say, when I first met Bill Blount, I thought, "This is the last person in New Bedford. I expect to rise in defense of Carlos Rafael." I mean, the old salt made his career working a single fishing boat named for his wife.

He says, "Grace, before dinner, I never heard him swear once."

And here he is, singing the praises of a man who models himself on the movie Scarface. If I was struggling, he's the one that would say, "I'll give you another 10 cents on your fish."

“You should be able to make it then, right, Bill?”

Yep, okay. I've seen him do that. He did that for you. Yeah. Lot of fish dealers had no heart, they're ruthless.

The Carlos wasn't like that. He had a heart. [music playing] From GPH news, this is the big, big season three, catching the cod father. I'm Ian Coss.

Carlos Rafael is a hard man to pin down. In some stories I heard, he comes across as a simple crock, a swindler.

“Someone you could never turn your back on.”

In others, he's more like a benevolent overlord that docks, even a pillar of the community. And these two versions of Carlos would collide dramatically in the early 2000s, because just when it looked like the cod father had reached the peak of his power, the whole game of fishing changed, revealing the true extent of Carlos's ambition. Or some would say, his greed.

This is part four, mosquitoes on the balls of an elephant. Hey, so if you're curious to actually see what we're talking about in these episodes, coming up on our big, big mailing list, I'm going to have a whole photo essay about a trip I took to the new Bedford auction house, we're almost all the seafood in the stories unloaded.

It was really amazing I got to watch the whole process unfold from the deck of the boat

to the warehouse to the auction floor and everything.

“You can get all that in your inbox by signing up at wgbh.org/thebigdig.”

So let's see and more to come, thanks so much. It's hard to say when the public image of Carlos Raphael started the shift, when the reverence and charm started to fade. But back in the 1990s, he still had some shine to him. When ABC News came to town for a piece about the closures on George's Bank, Raphael was

presented as a kind of spokesperson for the industry, a plucky entrepreneur doing his best with his back against the wall. Carlos Raphael, who owns the biggest fish processing plant in town. Carlos is shown in a bright blue jacket in his pristine filet plant, doing business on a giant mobile phone, and speaking really as a voice of reason.

"They could have solved the problem if they would act at any time." "The irony is, even the government now agrees, Carlos Raphael is right." In addition to being called the codfather, people also called him the waterfront wizard, the oracle of the ocean. He employed hundreds of people. He supported the local Portuguese clubs. Every year,

he would show off his famous fish cutting skills at the local waterfront festival, holding court with his white glove, yellow smock and pile of glistening flounders. The man was a fixture, a local character.

But with Carlos, there was always more going on, and by that, I mean he was also getting

in trouble with the law, repeatedly. I told you in the last episode about the price fixing case, but that wasn't even Carlos's first legal trouble. Back in the 1980s, he was convicted of tax evasion and spent four months in jail. That time, he simply ran his business from inside. "It was an easy but free get to the go away."

Then in the 1990s, federal investigators came knocking again, that time with the price fixing case. Carlos was able to beat that one back, and it's hard to say if that brush with a law left Carlos more cautious or more emboldened, but it did not teach him to tow the line. Nobody had any doubt about Carlos being a crook. One of the stories that everyone tells, including John Bullard here, is about the time Carlos

got up in a fishery management meeting and declared to the regulators themselves, "I'm a pirate. It's your job to catch me."

And they did, repeatedly. In 1999, Carlos was investigated again, this time for lying on a

“permit application for squid. He pled guilty in that case. Then in 2003, he was sued by the”

EPA for dumping a derelict fishing boat in a federal cleanup site. Carlos was fined for interfering in a coast guard inspection for submitting false catch reports for fishing in closed areas, and once had a nearly 900 pound tuna confiscated from one of his boats. The tuna had been caught illegally. Yet none of it really seemed to hold him up. Carlos had his gorilla of an attorney, plus all the money and spite he needed to fight off any

legal challenge. He seemed unstoppable. Like no amount of legal trouble could slow down his growing

empire. So, they stopped to shape an app. That was one of the vessels they had left this

mini vessel. In his office, along with the Scarface posters, and that rock a picketing fisherman once threw it as car window, Carlos also keeps a miniature model of one of his prized boats. Carlos was a master at what stock investors would call buying the dip. Even when catches were down or regulations were tight, he was big enough that he could still afford to buy boats, fishing boats and some scallop boats too. If his timing was good,

a vessel that cost a million dollars to build, he might get for a few hundred thousand. About three vessels for six hundred and fifteen thousand dollars. Dings was so bad. Did everybody said that was a nut case when I bought the mess I say shake. So I bet in things be. Then when the fishing pick back up, he'd be ready to make a profit. So I paid for the boats in one

he is fishing. Like he always says, a crisis. That is the best time to make money.

By the early 2000s, Carlos owned or co-owned 15 boats, plus his own processing and distribution plan. Many of those boats had names from Greek mythology, the Athena, the Poseidon, the Hera, the Apollo, they all had the same shade of sea green paint and the letters "CR" on the bow. Everyone knew Carlos had a long rap sheet, but he was also the biggest game in town, at least when it came to ground fish. He was someone you had to deal with.

And that was before the big change. The one that set his most elaborate scheme in motion. The one that lifted Carlos to new heights and ultimately brought the entire empire crashing down. I want to set up this change and why it was such a big deal with the story of a fishing trip in 2004. This was the Christmas trip. I don't know, four or five to ace before Christmas. That December, Tony Alvarnas was the captain on a scallop boat. They were far from sure in

bad weather, along with another boat called the Northern Edge. It's getting rough. I was like, says Paul, I'll handle the gear, secure the dredges, turned around, just had it fair wind. That's so I can eat and calm weather. And better weather, you know, Paul comes up. It's like, hey, with the Northern Edge, go. The thing to know about this fishing trip is that given the choice, neither boat would be out this

far in this weather the week before Christmas. But because of the regulations we talked about

“in the last episode, these fishermen didn't feel like they had a choice. Remember, after a”

amendment 5, boats got a set number of days every year to go out and fish and they're only allowed to fish in certain areas. This area, these boats were in had been closed entirely for a while, part of that effort to prevent overfishing. And so when these scallop boats were granted permission for a single trip to this area at a specific time, they weren't going to miss it. No matter the weather, no matter at the danger, it was a chance to bring home a big catch to put real money

in the bank. But now the weather had really picked up and no one could see the Northern Edge. Should have been off the start. So, Alvarnas got on the radio and tried channel 68, which he and the Northern Edge captain used to communicate. Nothing. Got on 16. No, nothing. Nothing. It's like, I don't know, you ever get that feeling where your brain's been in something's wrong. That's when Alvarnas called the Coast Guard.

“So, I get on 16 again. It says, "Hey, I think something's wrong with the Northern Edge."”

So, then Paul of a sudden he says, "Hey, look, you know, well, fire!"

I can only pop.

“He knew the Coast Guard would never respond in time. So Alvarnas spun the boat around and headed”

towards that distant glow. The waves were now 15 feet high. The wind was whipping spray off the water,

and he couldn't be sure what he was looking at. What it was was a flares. As he got closer, Alvarnas realized the boat itself was gone. It had taken a couple of waves across the deck and quickly capsized, but a single crewman was rolling in the waves. He was barefoot, shirtless, clinging to a rubber life boat with a flare. So, I know now I got to go into the wind, put him underneath alongside me, and then I got to turn

around broadside and let the wind hopefully push me on top of him and grab him. Alvarnas had

to execute this home maneuver in a 110 foot boat in 15 foot seas. The first pass failed, so Alvarnas

came around again. Got the boat back in position, got him just off my paw, bow, and the sea comes and basically throws him out of the raft. Paul looks at me, he's like, "I could blip read a few well." He got thrown out. He got thrown out. He got thrown like, "Fuck this guy's dead. This guy's dead. What the fuck do I do now?" Then Alvarnas said, "He's back in. He's back in." I'm like, "Bug, I'm trying to, so this boat is a twin screw." Twin screw meaning two independent

propellers. Meaning more maneuverable. I was treating it as a single screw. So, finally, I just, you know, hide, forward on one end, hide over, seeing Paul walking along the side, looking down off the bow and like, "Shit, now I'm going to run this fucking guy over." And I jammed the engines in reverse and then put it in idle and the good Lord, he was put him on the least side and he used the judge that was hanging over the side as a ladder. Alvarnas remembers the young man

coming over the edge and then walking across the deck half naked, cutting up his bare feet on the scallop shells. When they got him inside, he was red as a cooked lobster, barely able to talk.

“From the crew of six, he was the only survivor. Did you find any other sign of the northern edge?”

No, no sign at all. The sinking of the northern edge just one week before Christmas was devastating in New Bedford and the deadliest single fishing disaster in the whole region since the famous perfect storm of 1991. Afterwards, the Boston Globe asked Carlos Rafael for his comment on the sinking. He was blunt as usual. It's their fault. They being the federal regulators. The people who had granted those boats a one-time opportunity to fish in this area, a chance they could either use

or lose. And the sinking became one of many events that shifted the conversation around fishing

regulation. It's important to note that the northern edge was a scallop boat and they've always

had different rules and ground fish boats, but the sinking highlighted the flaws of the larger system, how it forced boats to fish at certain times in certain places in certain ways. It's like imagine if you wanted to regulate air pollution, but you did it by telling people they could only drive on certain days of the year and on certain roads. It was around about way to achieve a simple goal. To the extent that it worked, it worked by making the fishermen

less efficient and sometimes less safe. So all around the region, there were fishermen who believed something had to change. When the change came, Carlos would be ready for it. And all of New England

“would find out just how ambitious he truly was. When did you first join the management council?”

I was nominated a few times, but I was actually appointed in 2004. The same year, the northern edge sank David Gethel joined the New England Fishery Management Council, the group that sets the rules for fishing in the region. And I used to say when I went to these meetings, if you're not at the table, you're on the menu. So if you're not there to represent yourself, you're going to get carved up and you're the one who's going to pay the price.

Fishing regulation is a little different than most kinds of business or environmental regulation in that the rules actually vary region by region. This was part of the original vision of the Magnus an act. So you have a northeast region, you have a southeast region,

again, John Bullard. And this was revolutionary. I mean, a lot of environmental legislation was

“top down, all wisdom resides in Washington. And there's a single standard that everyone has to meet”

in clean air and in clean water. Under Magnuson, there are standards like preventing over fishing, but each region can decide for itself how they meet the standards. So that is what David Gethel became part of in 2004, the original Council for New England. He was on the Council when this big change I've been talking about took place. And I want to explain that change through his eyes because Gethel represented a very particular perspective on that Council. Gethel is based out of

New Hampshire, which has smaller ports with fewer boats than its neighbors, main and Massachusetts.

And he was appointed to the Council by his governor in part to be a voice for the little guys.

Instead of operating a big fleet of boats that traveled far offshore to hunt fish, Gethel ran what's called an insure boat, doing short trips just off the coast of New Hampshire. He's like the equivalent of a small family farm. Not in LLC, I'm not anything. I'm just me, myself, and I, you know, my return is to feed my family. That's it. So we joined the Council in 2004 and pretty soon there were signs that something big was coming their way. It started when a pair

of environmental foundations sponsored a trip to New Zealand for the Council members. The goal was to show New England fishermen a whole different system, a different paradigm really for managing the ocean. I knew it was a very different management style, but the proponent seemed to vastly outnumber the detractors. Gethel was curious to see how this system worked in practice.

“So he went. That was a very interesting trip. Remember that up to this point,”

the New England Council had used a hodgepodge of measures to limit how much fishermen caught, to limit it how many days they could fish, where they could fish, what kind of gear they could use. In New Zealand, the government had taken a very different approach. The system was, at the beginning of the year, they decided the total amount of fish that would be caught, literally a specific number of tons for each species. Then they let the fishermen

decide when, where and how to go and catch it. So no limitations on how many days people fish just a limit on the total catch. The key to this kind of system is that the individual fishermen are each assigned a share of that total catch, their personal slice, which they are then allowed to buy, sell, and lease between them. It's called catch shares. So they were turning fishing into a commodity. I wanted to ask you about the trip in New Zealand, anything that stands out in your

mind. Just that they drove on the wrong sides of the road, we tried to run a car, we almost got ourselves killed. Also on that trip, fellow fishermen and councilmember Rodney Avalah from New

Bedford. It wasn't bad to say we go into a roundabout and I'd always pull to the right.

I don't know why it's thick. So Avalah and Gato were in New Zealand together to see this catch share system in practice and get a glimpse of a possible future for their own industry in New England. The groups funding this trip, which I should add, were big supporters of catch shares, had set them up to meet with some local fishing companies. We're going to show you the people who

“you have to talk to. And everywhere we went, they'd send along a guy who was like the tour guide.”

Anyway, we went with them. He wanted you to see how great everything was and nobody'd say anything bad on the record. But strange things started happening. We ran into a couple of fishermen at the local bars and as soon as they'd recognized us, they came over. And hey, this is the real story guys. You're going in the men's room and some guy had fallen you're in and while you're standing there, he'd start spout north. So as you were sure, there was nobody in the stalls about what he thought

was really cool and it was totally different story. These fishermen did not talk about the wonders of this new management system. They talked about being shut out and exploited by it. So far, these were just scattered stories from strangers. But when Gaito and Avala tried to get more concrete information down at the waterfront, they kept hitting a wall. Couldn't confirm it, because nobody talked to us. These guys would clam right up, just not say anything.

So the man I was with was quite large. He's a big guy, big Portuguese man.

“The big Portuguese man is Rodney Avala. He says, "I'll detain if we call him the mind of”

by then the KGB mind. I'll detain the mind of you go talk to the crew and he just basically

back the guy into the corner of the rail and a scallop on him when I went out. The guy couldn't get by him. He's going like this. He's all nervous trying to see what was going on. He's trying to look around him. And I call the crewman aside and he says, "What's going on here?" Gaito says that in private, the crewman confirmed what they'd already began to suspect. A few large companies had bought up most of the fish quota and now controlled the industry.

He said, "If people won these companies, he said they're building a race in America's

cup of yachts and we don't get paid a living wage. And that pretty much told me everything I needed

“to know." As David Gaito looked around the docks, he didn't see a lot of small boat”

operators like himself. The ones that did find were hanging on by their fingernails. Mostly fishermen had to work for the big companies, since that's who owned the fish quota. They literally owned the fish in the ocean that had yet to be caught. And we got an earful, but people were scared. These companies had enormous power. Fishmen and crew were called human capital and they were whatever hours whenever the company wanted

them to work and if they complained or tried to unionize or did anything to better their conditions, they'd be fired and replaced with more human capital. It was stark. It didn't help that there was a lot of corporate money backing this trend towards catch shares. For Gaito, the whole system looked like a money grab that would turn fishermen into helpless ponds. And we came back, at least the tool of us came back, with a very jaded view of what we were

entering into. I could explain it like this. You leave the cattle into a slaughter, but it was leadless into when it was to go. Let me tell you about a personal pet peeve of mine. You order a bowl of clam chowder. Get

about two spoonfuls in before realizing. They're hardly any clams in it. You're basically eating

warm cream with potatoes. Fortunately, there is a better alternative from Rogers Fish Company. They do a double clam chowder, which as the name suggests is loaded with real Cape Cod clams, and like all Rogers seafood, its restaurant quality, flash frozen, at peak freshness, and delivered to your door. Find it at Rogersfishco.com.

“I'm hoping that some of you out there remember the classic school house rock song, How A Bill”

becomes a law. I'm just a bill. Yes, I'm only a bill. And I'm sitting here on Capitol Hill. It captures out to the emotional journey of how an idea becomes an actual law. How it has to wind its way through committees through both chambers of Congress and all the procedural hurdles along the way. If they vote, yes, what happens? Well, there ought to be a companion song called how a law becomes a regulation. Something like, I'm just a law. Yes, I'm only a law. But you know,

I'm not specific at all. Because really, if you get down into the actual nitty-gritty rules that govern day-to-day life in this country, they're not written by Congresspeople. They're written by bureaucrats. And what is sometimes called the administrative state, or even more ominously, the fourth branch of government? I'm not going to further attempt to put this whole process into song, but I will attempt to break it down with the help of Susan Dudley, who is a Professor

of Public Administration at George Washington University. Our Constitution conceives of three different branches of government. And yes, we're starting with the very, very basics. And it was the legislative branch that was responsible for writing all laws. That's the language of the Constitution. And so early in our government, the idea that Congress could hand over or delegate that authority to the executive branch was unheard of. When the country started, there was no EPA, no FCC,

no FAA. If Congress wanted to make a rule about road construction or banking, they had to roll up

country then decide that we needed these other agencies? As the country got larger, and issues

became more complex, members of Congress felt it was less able to write the details of these laws and so they thought it would be important to have expert agencies. In effect, Congress wanted to delegate some of its power to the agencies. We give you the general idea and you get into the weeds on exactly how to make it happen. The whole issue came to a head during the New Deal. When Congress was setting up a whole bunch of new agencies, the SEC, the FDIC, the NLRB, the WPA,

so on, and that huge delegation of power sparked a debate. Raging debate between scholars and legal theorists about whether this was constitutional,

“this delegation of authority to essentially set laws. And how is that debate ultimately settled?”

A compromise was reached, and that was with the passage of the Administrative Procedure Act of

1946, and that is probably the most significant law affecting the quoted administrative state today. The Administrative Procedure Act clarified that yes, Congress can delegate authority to agencies, and yes, those agencies can then write rules that carry the force of law. But as a compromise to the skeptics, the agencies are not free to just make whatever rules they want. They can write binding laws as long as they do it within the authority that was delegated

to them by Congress and be they follow certain procedures. And this gives rise to some language that might be familiar, like notice of proposed rulemaking and public comment period.

Those are the hoops laid out in 1946 that every agency has to jump through in order to issue a new

rule. It's how a law passed by Congress becomes a regulation. And when it comes to our story, the people scrambling through those hoops are the members of the New England Fishery Management Council. Would you bring there for reading material? How I brought my copy of the Magnuson Stevens Act, in case I need to look up anything. Maggie Raymond is a former boat owner in Maine, who for many years also advised the New England Council.

“The copy of the Magnuson Act she's holding is from 2007. That's important because”

Magnuson, just like the Farm Bill and a lot of other legislation, gets reauthorized periodically. And the 2007 Bill had some language tucked into it that would change American fishing forever. And that's on where it will page around here. 76, this is section 109, Daesh 479. From the very beginning, Magnuson had provided some general guidelines for fishery management,

like preventing overfishing. But in 2007, the guidelines changed. Establish a mechanism for specifying annual catch limits. As of that year, all fisheries in the country were required to implement an annual catch limit. That meant all new regulations would have to look something like the system in New Zealand, where fishermen received individual shares of the total catch.

A lot of U.S. fisheries had already switched to that model, including, for example, the Alaskan King crab boats you see in the show Deadliest Catch. Now New England would have to make that switch too, and they had a deadline of two years. And it meant that we needed to move quickly. John Papalardo was the chair of the New England Council, which would have to turn this new law into actual regulation. And perhaps not have the luxury of enough time to fully vet a lot of the

things that we ended up doing. The big challenge in switching to a catch share system

“is that you have to decide who gets how much quota as a starting point. It's like dealing”

out the cards at the beginning of a game. The cards have to start somewhere before all the wheeling and dealing can begin. And you've got thousands of fishermen from small boat operators like David Gaithol, all the way up to fleet owners, like Carlos Rafael, all of whom expect a piece of this new market. So the Council started working out a system for deciding how the cards would be dealt out based on who owned what permits and how much fish they'd landed in the past few years.

But like any system, it could be gameed. I mean, at the time, you know, you had one big owner

quota into two few hands. Who was that biggest boat owner at the time? Carlos Rafael.

“Carlos had been buying up boats and permits for decades at this point. So he was already the biggest”

player in the region. But once he saw what was about to happen with the catch share system,

he went into overdrive. According to an interview he gave later, Carlos C. Food spent $10 million

buying up boats in the years leading up to the new system. The goal was to make sure that when the shares were dealt out, Carlos received as much quota as possible. He's exhibiting of why managing fisheries based on economics is a bad idea. He was out to maximize the money for calls. This again is David Gathel, the dayboat owner who went on that trip to New Zealand. And my response was since one is great good. Early on, as the council was developing the catch share plan,

it had included what was called an accumulation cap. Basically something to say that any one person can only own so much of the fish quota. But adding even a small provision like that requires public notice and comment and review that whole process of how a law becomes regulation. In other words, it takes time. Something the New England Council did not have. So the accumulation cap was scrapped. One of several choices that in hindsight had real consequences.

If I were to do it all over again, I would have said we're going to get it done when it's ready. But I felt like, oh man, I got to get this done. (Music)

“For afternoon, everybody, I think it could take your seats.”

In June of 2009, John Papalardo called the New England Fishery Management Council to order. And one of their usual haunts, the Portland main holiday in. Also there was council staffer, Tom Nees. The holiday in by the bay. Have you, if you've ever been there? No, I'm just private. No, not politely. The council members were seated at a series of tables arranged in a horseshoe shape.

They had name plates, bottles of water, microphones, and before them, it packed audience. Because this was the last chance to make any changes to the new Ketshare plan, a generational shift known as Amendment 16. Ground Fisher Amendment 16, how to handle public comment and still get through all of the decisions we have to make. Just a few weeks earlier, permit holders had been notified how much of the total quota they would receive as their

starting share. The cards had been dealt. So now for the first time, Fishermen across the region

could start to glimpse their future. Some were lining up an opposition, some were lining up in support. Was Carlos one of the people who wanted Ketshare's? Again Rodney Avala, who was on the council for this vote? Because he knew it would be good for him? I'd be Carlos doesn't do anything, that's not a good thing. Under Amendment 16, Carlos Rafael would get the biggest share of quota, almost 10% of all the ground fish in all of New England. And of course, there was no limit

on how much more quota he could accumulate. It's just going to drive the industry into consolidation to large operating units. A number of speakers rose to share this concern. The excessive consolidation that would eliminate the day-boat fishery, including David Gathel, who was up front at the council table. Right now, I see consolidation happening the minute you go to any of these systems because once the process is unleashed, you won't be able to stop it. As far as I can tell,

Carlos Rafael is never mentioned by name, but one commenter says that under this system,

every damn ground fish vote in New England will wind up in the city of New Bedford. They're going to be miles and miles of coastlines and communities that never will have access to fishing again. Another concern that comes up again and again is that the region was just not ready for this change, especially when it came to enforcement. With the government, really be able to keep track of what every boat was catching that they were actually staying within their

“slice of the quota. Without that enforcement, I think they'd be nothing but problems.”

The lack of an accumulation cap and the lack of enforcement would ultimately prove to be a dangerous combination. But after four days cooped up at the Portland Holiday Inn in two years of bureaucratic process, the council had truly run out of time. The deadline had arrived.

Can you take me to the day of the vote? Yeah, it's hot. The room was overcrowed and overheated.

People spoke passionately. Again, David Gaethel. People got tired. They get tired. They tend to get more irritable. The public started to become deeply disillusioned that the fix was in, that they'd wasted their time coming. Voices were raised. It wasn't a pleasant day. When you're dividing up a common resource into private property, there is no way to do that without benefiting some people and hurting others. So the feelings were strong on all sides.

When that vote was coming up, you got pressure from the environmentalists. You had pressure from other fishermen that wanted cashiers. This vote cut right to everyone's bottom line.

“And do you remember anything about the final vote? I would like to make one final motion”

that we submit the amendment 16 document to the service. The final vote was the vote for submission. He's answer yes, no, or abstain. Frank Blown. Yes. Rip coming him. Yes. David Pierce. Yes. Jim Fair. Yes. David Gaethel. No. Michael Sallie McGee. In the final roll call, Rodney Avalah despite all his reservations voted yes. The loan no vote was David Gaethel. I was the one. Motion carries 14 to one with one abstention. You know, this is just going to

unleash greed, which is the basis human emotion on the planet. And I do not today's day understand how greed is going to manage a fishery sustainably. And right from the get-go, we at problems. This month, US fisheries officials implemented more new rules. They say,

“well, finally bring local fishing grounds back to full sustainability. Once the new system went into”

effect, every permit holder had a certain amount of quota attached to their permit, a percentage of the total allowable catch. With a quota they gave my vote, my season would be over in about two months. But for some smaller boats, their quota for certain species could be so small. It didn't really make sense to go out and try and catch it. Or making it hard for small fishermen to stay in business. And of course, that little slice of quota could be bought and sold, it had real value.

So for Carlos, those little guys were now ripe for the picking. Maybe Dean, it's taking place today, was to be taken way back then when they shit started. This is Carlos recalling that moment to the undercover IRS agents.

Hey, tell them what was going to happen. I told them, I said, you're going to put all the little guys out of this, this small guy can never get into this business.

Well, what's up, what's going on, I mean? What's going up? The strong will get struck in the week or the severe. Remember, there was no accumulation in that month, so he could acquire as many permits as he wanted. Again, Council Stafford Tom Nees. And he did. Like I said before, Carlos started out with about 10% of the total catch quota. Within a few years, he had 25%. That means he owned 25% of all the groundfish caught between the Long Island Sound

“and the northern tip of Maine. By then, I think he'd pretty much bought up everything you could buy.”

And he was unabashed about saying he was going to squash all the mosquitoes, you know? He was going to run things. I think this is when the public narrative of the cod father fully turns from a colorful character to something more sinister, exploitative, even. Carlos himself used to call the little fisherman, the guys like David Gaythol, quote, "masquitos on the balls of an elephant." Carlos, of course, was the elephant. What the government has done so far? As put me in a few other guys, same booty,

because we make it money. We make it serious money.

The Council did ultimately come back to the idea of an accumulation cap on quota.

The problem was that by that time, Carlos was already well beyond the initial limit that had been considered than abandoned, so to put the cap in place now would mean forcing him to sell off his shares. Carlos was furious. He told a reporter that these smaller fishermen who are advocating for a cap were "magots" screaming from the sidelines. They can scream all they want. Nobody can save them. According to David Gaythol, Carlos rarely came to fishery meeting himself.

But I don't think it's going to be the case because I will fight days to the dead.

“If somebody tries to take what I worked for 40 years, I'll lose it all, but I will prove a point."”

I'll sue you guys back to the Stone Age. He met it. He wasn't shy about dropping a good chunk of money on a lawyer, and so they backed off. The Council had to write rules that grandfathered him in.

The new accumulation limit was ultimately set just above what Carlos already controlled.

And now it's strictly for Carlos, nobody else came even close. You know, you get to lose papers sometimes. They come up with a bullshit that pisses the women's shit out of me. They come up and they say, "Oh, he took advantage of some of these people will go and broke when these squatters come in. That was not so." Carlos rejects the narrative that he somehow took advantage of the smaller owners who sold him their boats in quota.

“A lot of the people that I booked their boats, they would come and they would tell me,”

"Do you want to buy my boat?" Because I'm having trouble. I'm I lose the boat. I lose my houses. Look, I'm much, you want for the boat. The guy would say, "I won 300,000." And I would do the math. I say, "A little too steep." But I will give you two 170,000. I say, "But I'm going to do a much better deal to you." You go and see if you can get 300,000. If anybody gives you the 300,000, sell the damn thing. If they nobody wants the boat for 300,000,

you come back to me. My office still 270. I'm not going to try to beat you up because nobody wanted to give you the 300,000. And this is every deal I did was like that. I love to make money, but I also have a conscious. It's a little hard for me to reconcile sometimes. The Carlos that I hear in this interview with the other version of Carlos I've heard. The one on the undercover IRS tapes, where he is much less charitable towards those little fishermen he was

buying out. And he's a little hard to understand in this last part, but Carlos says,

"I don't know if it's greed or if it's ambition." But I always had the ambition to get fucking

control of the whole fucking thing. I don't know if it's greed if it's ambition, this is from the heart. I always had the ambition to get fucking control of the whole fucking thing. The easy explanation is that the man I talk to is just a farce. And the real Carlos is what

“you hear on those undercover tapes. But I don't think that's quite right. I think both versions of Carlos”

are performances to some degree. On the tapes you hear Carlos playing the tough guy for what he believes are a pair of Russian mobsters. I know he's playing up the crime lord drama because there are some numbers in there. We can actually check. For example, he told the agents he was facing 20 years in jail for price fixing. He was facing three years. I should also add that I don't have the full audio of those recordings. I have what the U.S. Attorney's Office chose to enter into the

public record. So no question, those tapes are cherrypicked to present Carlos at his most malicious moments. His most obnoxiously overconfident. In our interview on the other hand, you hear Carlos playing the nice guy trying to correct what he sees as an unfair portrayal in the media. The papers twist things the way they want. The make me look like a scumbag and then they keep calling my ass. Do you want to sign up to get a newspaper says F.T. you worked the over. The way

you guys did, you never wanted the true we went with everything else. But you never asked me anything. You

just write up the bullshit that the government tells you. Say don't quote my ass no more. When Carlos was eventually sentenced for his crimes, all these quotes are referenced came back to haunt him. The mosquitoes, the maggots, the little guy hanging by his shoe strings. They were used as proof of his vicious contempt. But they can also be read almost as pity. When Ket shares came to New England, those little guys were screwed. They were sidelines. They were hanging

by their shoe strings. According to Carlos, when the fishing was bad and people were looking for a way out, he was often the only option. The only one crazy enough to keep buying fishing boats with everything that was going on. They wouldn't do any police house because it was no money.

Am I kind of say you're crazy? I think maybe the most honest moment I hear in all those recordings

“is the one where Carlos questions his own motives. I don't know if it's greed or if it's ambition.”

He says greed or ambition. I thought it was telling that when the federal prosecutor quoted that recording in their sentencing document, they omitted that rare moment of self-reflection. It's reduced to an ellipse dot dot dot. Followed by the more eye catching last line,

I always had the ambition to get fucking control of the whole fucking thing.

The rapid consolidation of boats and permits into Carlos Rafael's hands was a warning sign. But from a fishery management standpoint, it wasn't necessarily a bad thing. There were after all too many boats, too many permit holders and not enough fish. Consolidation was to some extent

“the goal. The system was doing what it was designed to do. I think things were going pretty well in”

general until, you know, Rafael showed everybody that he knew how to break the system. But it turned out that Carlos's rapid growth had also opened a door for an entirely new kind of fraud unlike anything he had attempted before. It would become by one account he most significant case of admitted illegal fishing behavior in U.S. domestic fishing history. What did that mean on a day-to-day basis? That was very complicated. That's next time.

[Music] [Music] Catching the cod father is produced by Isabel Hiverd and myself Ian Koss. It's edited by Laci 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,”

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, produced by Joni Tobin and Annie Gerson.

Thank you to the Bedford's cable access and the New England Fishery Management Council for generously sharing their archival material for this episode. I also want to give a special thanks to Tom Nees, who was incredibly generous with his time and shared a lot of information to help me understand the inner workings of the council. The artwork is by Bill Miller, our closing song is Viva Viva New Bedford by George Furera. The big dig is a production

of GBH news and distributed by PRX. ♪ Viva Viva I know that I'm mine ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Hey, I want to make sure that you know

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