Catching The Codfather | 5. Painting Fish

No. But there is something to be said about leaping into the unknown.

“That's what our podcast outside in is all about.”

It's a safer way to explore all the weird, wonderful and uncomfortable questions you have about the natural world. Like, what's it like to decompose? All of the germs in bacteria is in a K-baby who got a get rid of this person. Or why the hell do we have lawns? Who the hell needs five acres of ornamental grass?

I'm Nate Hege, host of "Outside In." A podcast where curiosity and the natural world collide.

Sometimes it's serious, sometimes it's ridiculous, but it's always a wild journey.

That's "Outside/In" from New Hampshire Public Radio. Support for catching the cod father comes from Rogers Fish Company, founded by Lifelong Fish Monger and seafood advocate Roger Berkowitz. Rogers Fish Company brings responsibly sourced seafood and chef-crafted meals straight to your door, order online at roger'sfishco.com.

Also from safety insurance, offering auto-insurance policies designed to help for when the worst happens. You can ask an independent agent about safety insurance. Safety insurance will help you manage lifestorms. We're back in the office of Carlos C. Food. The Scarface posters, the model boats, the big rock, on the desk.

At the moment that Carlos Rafael will regret for the rest of his life. When he reached into the bottom drawer of that desk and pulled out the secret set of books. The books that were labeled "simply cash." His guests of course were undercover IRS agents.

And as they eyed the books, those agents could see rows and rows of digits, adding up to more than half a million dollars in unreported income in just the last six months.

But for the case agent, Ron Mullett, those numbers didn't mean anything yet. He's up to something but we can't tell what it is. And even when Mullett brought this information back to his contacts at the Coast Guard, they stuck with their original theory, its drugs do. They still thought it was drugs.

“Yeah, they were convinced that that's what it was.”

But they had nothing to back it up and I wasn't going to buy that just on a word. So where do things stand at the end of that first meeting? What's your process from there? So we set up to have another meeting with him within like two weeks. And this time can you bring your financial statements, your tax returns?

We just have to know that we're going to get a return on investment in a reasonable period of time. In the meantime, I got the recordings downloaded and then just listened to it and started transcribing. And I was just all day, I take it home at night. My kids are running around in circles and delivering room listening to all the single

ladies. And I've got the headphones on, trying to type... I'm going to meet a free submission. This is from the heart. And so I listened to two hours for probably 20 hours.

I'm going to meet a free submission. Replaying, replaying, and getting this is as near a perfect transcription as I could. I almost had the ambition to get fucking control of all fucking things. At the same time, I'm digging through what tax information I have because he's given me the predicate to do that saying that the IRS doesn't know.

So now I'm digging through his tax records and trying to find soft spots for him, I guess, that would open him up to deeper conversations that could then bring even more out of him.

Two weeks after that first meeting, Carlos and the buyers met once again in his office.

“We don't want you to surprise him, that's why we're asking for you.”

We don't want you to surprise him. We don't want you to surprise him. Somebody told us, well, this is how we used to do this as a priority. In this meeting, the agents were much more direct. If they were going to buy the business and continue the business, they needed to understand

the business. Yeah. That's a problem. So Carlos explained it to them. He did 30,000, I'm more on the MSV, you got to get the anger 25,000, 30,000 in a bill of

fun. The problem with Carlos Rafael, and this was my experience with him too, is that once he starts talking about fish, he talks very fast and automatically switches into his own language. It's a weird mix of technical jargon, lots of numbers, and his own personal euphemisms,

plus of course, a lot of profanity. The agents slash buyers are clearly confused, they're not just playing dumb, but even as

code words.

“There are references to jingles, to a dance, something about making fish disappear, and”

even more confounding, painting them.

What did you think he meant by painting the fish? Yeah. I had no idea. Once again, Ron Mullett was listening nearby as the meeting came to a close. Trying to make sense of what had just happened.

I really didn't, and it wasn't like a focused discussion. They were walking out of the office to go somewhere else, and he stopped next to his sales rep's office, reached inside, pulled up a piece of paper, and said, "You see this right here?

This is the fish we paint."

I can paint these fish, any color I want them to, no one knows, and I don't even know. But this time, instead of bringing the tapes to the Coast Guard, who are still stuck on their drug theory, Mullett brought the tapes to Noah, the National Oceanic and atmospheric administration. The people who actually understand the rules of fishing.

They listened to the recordings, and they right away had a thing it up. From GBH News, this is the big day season three, catching the cod father. I'm Ian Coss.

“To understand Carlos's scheme, you have to understand how the fishing industry is set up,”

how the regulations around it are set up, and how Carlos C. Food in particular was set up. Now that we've done all that, it's time to talk fish fraud. And also fish science, because the two are deeply connected. In fact, someone saying the science itself is the true fraud.

This is part five, painting fish. Hey, just want to let you know that if you are enjoying the series and you want to binge the entire thing right now, you can do that and support the show at the same time by joining what we call the HOV lane. You can find all the information and sign up at wgbh.org/HOV lane.

Thanks. Linda DePray grew up on the coast of Maine, watching Jacques Cousteau on TV, and spending the summer's fishing tuna with her dad. She learned to scuba dive when she was 18, and in her high school yearbook declared that she would one day be an oceanographer.

So over the summer in college, she took a volunteer job at a research institute nearby, sorting through plankton, looking for shrimp larva, pretty tedious work, but her foot was in the door. And one day I was asked if I wanted to go out on the boat and actually collect the samples. This would be an overnight trip, so DePray packed her things and went down to the dock.

But just as she was about to board, she was informed you can't go.

“As I was told, what would the wives think of a girl staying on a boat overnight?”

This was in the 1970s, by the way. The crew on the research boat was all men. And God bless the captain, who said, "We'll get you out there." So instead of leaving at 8 o'clock at night, we left at one minute past midnight. And so I was technically not on an overnight cruise.

And because I had that experience of going to see collecting samples, sorting fish, just for that one day cruise that gave me a leg up.

A few years later, when DePray applied for her first proper research job with Noah, the

form asked if she had experienced doing sample collection at sea. And she could honestly say, "Yes, I do." I didn't say it was for one day, I just had experience. I didn't lie. By the time DePray retired decades later, she had logged a total of 1,560 days at sea.

In the last episode, I introduced this idea of a catch share system, in which fishermen buy and sell shares of the total catch for any given species.

As one fisherman told me, that number is a hard number, no ifs and/or buts. And that number was determined by among other people, Linda DePray. As you can imagine, counting how many fish are in the ocean is extremely difficult. It's not like counting trees, or even counting deer or birds, it's much harder. It's blind.

You have no idea what's down there. The scallops and lobsters, at least they stay mostly in one place, but fish like

cod are always on the move.

They can travel hundreds of miles in a single year.

“I think we forget this sometimes because we talk about fishing as an industry, but fishermen”

are hunters. They stalk their prey in the wild. To survive, they have to be experts at knowing where the fish are going, where they're concentrated. For the scientists, like DePray, the goal is very different.

We're not devouring it. We're just tasting it. Scientists want to survey the health of the whole population. So instead of looking for fish, they just fish randomly. Beginning in the 1960s, no scientists literally divided the ocean into quadrants.

Every spring and fall, their computer would spit out a series of locations. One fisherman I met likes to call the lottery numbers, and that's where the Noah boat would go. Random spots. Sometimes it was where the fishermen were, sometimes it wasn't.

“They would drop a fine mesh net in the water, just like a fishing boat would, tow it”

for exactly 30 minutes, and see what came up. What's called a survey troll? We brought up anchors. We brought up the kitchen sink. We brought up tires.

The prey has colleagues who have found fossils, unexploded bombs, even human remains.

And of course an incredible array of fish, most diners have never heard of.

Balloonfish, cowfish, borefish, dogfish, even the occasional barn door skate. Six feet, eight feet long, and they were huge skates. All mixed in with the stuff we do know, the haddock and cawn and flounder. The idea was to capture a random sample of the ocean, to get a sense of how many fish of each species are actually out there.

All that data would then be crunched and combined with other information, to determine the numbers that fishermen lived and died by, the total allowable catch. Now this is my opinion. Your data sucks.

“This is fishermen, Tony Alvernas, out of New Bedford.”

He holds the pretty common view among fishermen that the NOAA troll surveys are deeply flawed. But unlike most fishermen, he's actually worked on those surveys. Back in the 90s, when the New England Council started closing parts of George's Bank and limiting days at sea, Alvernas took a steady job with NOAA on their research boat

the Albatross. I didn't realize that was the ship that determined what fish was out there. So I thought, hey, you know, get paid by the hour, benefits, what, no, let's, I can't beat him. I'm going to join him.

Tony was one of our fishermen. Linda and Tony actually worked together on a number of these troll surveys. She was there as chief scientist. He was there to handle the actual fishing gear. Oh, yeah.

I know Linda well. We had a big Tony. We had a little Tony on at the same time. Was he a big Tony, a little Tony? He was big.

He was a big Tony. Yeah, good person. But she defend their method blah, blah, blah, blah, I knew Linda very well and he had opinions. Alvernas used to scrutinize all the net gear on the Albatross because once he realized what that boat was for, he knew that net helped set regulations for the entire industry.

The more the Albatross caught, the more his fellow fishermen would be allowed to catch. As Alvernas puts it, that net would make scripture and he found the net lacking. This is a true story. Once when the Albatross was in port, Alvernas noticed something really off with the net. So he called over one of the Noah staff people named Tom.

Oh, what is the Tony? I was like, wow, Tom, I'd like you to explain something to me. Okay, give me a few minutes.

I would stretch the net out so that he'd basically trip over the problem.

He spent a minute looking at the net together. The net that made scripture so fast is look, look at the role as Tom. This net was designed to hug the ocean floor, where species like cod and flounder, the so-called ground fish could be caught. It's go round fish, it's on the go round and to do that, the net had a set of rollers on

Solid, that's the way this should be. You want that net on the bottom, heavy, you want weight. These things could practically float, you know, and it's just Tom, you're, you know, you're a broad side on a current, what's going to happen to that net, you know, it's going to collapse. It's going to, you know, and would you ultimately fix those issues with the net with the rollers

of the doors? Oh, yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. I kept it standard as best as I could, yes, most definitely designed by a friend's. I know what it's like to make a living.

I wanted to make sure those nets fished as proper as they could, yes.

He was always suggesting new ways of making the net better, fish better, work better.

To catch more fish. To catch more fish. And it's like, we can't do that Tony. Part of the disconnect here is that the albatross was not supposed to be the best fishing boat possible.

The goal was to be the most consistent fishing boat possible. Noah started doing its trial surveys in 1963. And so to keep that data comparable over the decades, they continue to use the same net design on the same boat with the same method. Eventually it became completely outdated by the 90s when Tony and Linda first served together.

It couldn't even buy that style of net anymore. But if it was flawed in 1963, then to keep the data consistent, it should still be the same kind of flawed in 1993 or 2003. Anytime I questioned the integrity of the nets in blah, blah, blah, blah, I was wrong. For the fishermen on board, who knew how much more fish they could be catching and whose

friends depended on this data, it was all hard to swallow. This is a joke.

The Troll Survey has always been controversial and there are many stories out there like

the ones Tony Alvarez shared, just search for Troll Gate and you'll see what I mean. But in 2010, the Troll Survey took on a whole new meaning, whole new stakes. Remember the old system of regulations was based on soft measures, like limiting wind and where fishermen could fish. The new catch share system was based on a hard limit, a number.

This is how much fish you can catch. And almost as soon as the system was introduced, those numbers started to swing.

“Do you remember getting the stock assessment and seeing the change?”

Oh yeah. Tom Nees, we met in the last episode, was on the staff of the New England Fishery Management Council. He helped develop the whole catch share system. And so as soon as that system went into effect, he was watching the data very closely

to see how much quota they would have to divvy up.

And it just so happened that wind catch shares first rolled out the most recent fish counting

data. We're showing there was a lot of fish out there. I mean, the 2008 assessment for Gulf of Minkot was very optimistic. Things were looking really good in 2010, the fishery was doing well. So the total catch limits that first year were set pretty high.

You know, bluntly, we set the quota too high. They caught it.

“I think it was 2011 when we did a stock assessment for Gulf of Minkot that said,”

"Guess what? It really isn't that good." This new data was a little hard to make sense of because just around this time when the cod numbers started to swing, two unrelated things were happening at once. The first is that the waters off New England got warmer very fast, truly a spike in

temperature unlike anything we had ever seen in records going back more than a century. The second is that Noah chose this same moment to overhaul its entire survey method. So after decades of using the same boat with the same net with the same tow time, like a sacred ritual of fish counting, suddenly all that changed. The albatross was finally retired, and a newer bigger boat took its place.

You build this monstrous ship and they're going to tow this big net, I'm like, oh shit, fuck. So the already skeptical fisherman, like Tony Alvarez, the whole thing didn't smell right, because the new data from the new boat with the new net had to be somehow adjusted to match the old data from the old net on the old boat so that you could compare them apples to apples.

“They have a formula, what would of the albatross caught?”

And again, just as the scientists are trying to make this adjustment, the entire ocean

So yeah, the timing of this new boat was very bad.

One Noah scientist told me, "It's like changing the prescription on your glasses, while the world keeps moving around you. It's hard to know if what you're seeing is real. Were the fish really declining that fast? Or was it just the boat?"

Ooh, let's do that little modeling, little whatever magic numbers and voila, can you imagine that basic science on that? The scientist told me it was a perfect storm for mistrust. So to this day, I've got no respect for that troll survey, especially today with that monstrosity.

Now in fairness to the scientists, there is an elaborate methodology for these stock assessments.

“They don't just dip a net in the water and say that's how many fish are out there.”

They're looking at historical data, they're looking at what fishermen are catching. There are a lot of inputs and they're coming up with a range of possible scenarios. At the end of the day, though, the catcher system could not deal in nuance or complexity or uncertainty. The system required a number, every year, a hard number that could be sliced, diced and

swapped among the fishermen of New England. As clusters best known industry struggles, the mood in the city is bleak. So just as fishermen were getting used to this whole catch share system, the New England Council slashed the all important cod quota, which historically was the big money fish for the region.

And of course, when the total cod quota gets smaller, every fisherman's individual slice of the catch gets smaller too. The declining fish stocks and new federal quotas have dramatically changed the industry. We did another stock assessment, I believe, in 2012, because everyone was so shocked at the 2011 one, that didn't come out any better.

Year after year, the assessment numbers for cod kept going down, and so year after year, the quota for cod went down too. That's the house. And now fishermen have little choice, but to observe the new limits. How was devastating?

That is, it was devastating for everyone, but Carlos Rafael. Did you captain for Carlos? I did. Paul Valente worked on several of Carlos's boats, both scalpers and draggers. In those years, when as Carlos likes to say, all this shit started.

“Would you mind telling me what he was like to work with?”

Here we go. People have a bad, bad persona about him, but he was actually very fair and honest man, to his cruise, to his cruise. And if you were one of the boats that really drove and they would just supposed to do, he paid you really well.

It took good care of you. Philanth remembers that when he was out on ground fish trips, he'd constantly be on the phone with Carlos back at the dock, checking fish prices, making sure he was chasing the right species. How to be the one calling him all the time, hey Carlos, I found this or I found that.

What do you think? And he would be like, yeah, keep getting prices good or get that fucking boat back to the dock. You already got a trip, let's go.

One thing they never talked about though was fish quota.

As Philanth describes it, Coda for Carlos was a non-issue. He just holds catch whatever you catch, I go say, I have Coda for everything, don't stop catching fish because of Coda, that's these to tell us. Really? He just said like, I have so many boats, I have so much Coda catch whatever you can catch.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now, was that manipulate a later on beforehand? I don't know.

What he did behind the scenes, I don't know.

“Remember that the total Coda for each species was based on what the science data said”

about that species. Now just so happened that in those same years when the cod Coda was extremely low, the Coda for Hattock was pretty generous and because Carlos controlled 25% of all Coda for all ground for species in all of New England, he had a lot of Hattock Coda. And he had a special way to use it.

When did you first realize that?

2010 when that bullshit coming, because I never had to do any other shit, but after 2010

when they came with the rules and regulations and all that bullshit says, I got to do what I got to do, I'm going to survive. What do that mean on a day-to-day basis? That was very complicated. You acted to do some serious maneuvers.

According to Carlos, the maneuvers started here at the dock of the new Bedford auction house. So if we think back to the fishermen strike, one of the outcomes was that the fish buyers abandoned the city-run auction and set up their own private auction.

hands.

But for many years now, the auction has been run by two brothers, Richie and Ray Canastra.

They came up in the same era as Carlos in the same city and like him built a very successful business. In Portuguese, Canastra means fish basket. I want to state clearly that the Canastra's were not prosecuted along with Carlos, and that they deny any knowledge of his scheme.

But there is no doubt that the so-called painted fish passed through their building.

“Can you walk me through how the arrangement with the auction house worked?”

You've called it and you've got so much fish that it would give you a tighten-to-get day at the end of the road. The auction house is a big gray box built right at the harbor's edge.

One side is lined with loading docks for trucks.

The other side has an opening the size of a garage door facing the water. Standing on the inside, it looks like a door to nowhere. All you see is water and sky. This is the portal between the worlds of land and sea, and almost every fish sold in New Bedford passes through.

Once a boat arrives, the fish and crew are free to go. They've probably been out for days, maybe only sleeping a few hours at a time. So at this point, the shoreside team takes over.

“The lumpers, as they're known, go down into the hole to the boat and start filling baskets”

with fish, shoveling them out of the ice with long pitchforks. As each basket fills up, the team and the dock will lower a rope with a hook on it, so that the team on the boat can swing the basket across to land. They pass the rope back and forth like this for hours. It's really very elegant, but also gives you an appreciation for why this entire industry

is so dangerous. Everything is moving, everything is heavy, everything is under high tension. Each time a basket swings over from the boat, someone is waiting up on the dock to catch it and dump the fish into a shoe. The fish flow into a big tank and then up a conveyor belt to get sorted, weighed, and packed

into crates. Because Carlos Raphael was both a boat owner and a fish dealer, he could then choose whether to send his catches to the auction floor like everyone else or send them directly to his own facility. If the catch was going to auction, the fish would all be weighed, the species would be identified,

and all that information would be reported to the government by the auction house. But if it went straight to Carlos, technically, the exact weights and species did not need to be reported. Carlos says for these loads, he made sure to pay the auction house in cash for unloading the fish and to be safe as the truck drove around the block from the auction house to

Carlos C. Food. Carlos would have a lookout, making sure there were no regulators or environmental police who might inspect the load. But assuming the truck arrived at Carlos C. Food without incident, Carlos, as the fish buyer, would prepare his own report to submit to Noah.

The total weights would all be accurate, but the species would not. On paper, at least, a codfish or flounder could become a haddock. The fish had been painted.

"Hey, we'll never drag that out."

"Racer, it's not much good. I call them other fuckers. If they're not around my phone, fucking call it. So I call them haddock, or I call them any amount of fucking teeth on the side." Later, when Carlos was under investigation, he explained to the agents his process for deciding what color to paint his fish.

In the catch share system, fish quota is a market like any other. Its price is governed by supply and demand. So for the fish with very limited quota, like cod, or dabs, or grayshole, the quota itself is expensive. "The quota for grayshole is about 40%.

Sometimes the quota for a given fish would cost more than the value of the fish itself."

“Let me say that again. In order to buy the right to catch the fish, you have to pay”

more than what the fish is worth. So when his boats came back with cod, or grayshole, or dabs, those fish with very limited quota, Carlos would paint them into Pollock, or haddock. Fish had a lot of quota for. Plus, if you ever needed more quota, it was cheap to buy.

"Because as a safeguard against exactly this kind of fraud, boat owners and fish buyers were

each required to submit their own report on each load of fish. But again, because Carlos was both the boat owner and the fish buyer, he could control that entire chain of paperwork. So if regulators ever checked the boat reports against the dealer reports, everything would match. Carlos made sure they matched. "From the boat to meet the all sale. So was only one guy in the middle, nobody else, but

their fingers in the cake."

In Carlos' telling, which is usual, makes Carlos look good. The fish painting scheme was just

a way to help his boats hold on. "To keep them going, because of all these bullshade with sectors and quarters and all that." Like you told me back at the beginning, it was not for the money. Carlos has maintained that ever since his arrest. "Because I had tons of money. I didn't need any money. But I wanted to protect the people around

me because a lot of them worked for me for 30 years. They were loyal to me. So you pay back

“with loyalty. That's the only way to pay back."”

Carlos says that in many of those same years he was painting fish, his dragger fleet still lost money. That he would subsidize them with profits from his scalpers just to keep the boats working and his people employed. The people who like him had bought houses and pickup trucks would put their kids in college who were chasing the same American dream Carlos had chased through those very same boats. He was not ready to give up on them now.

"Be guys, I build my wealth from there. I mean for somebody to start with 5,000 dollars in 27 cents. And you build a company to that size. It was true those bolts too. And I kind of would say you're crazy." They sent a street will come back with Tawa. But if Carlos truly did think the trouble would pass and business could go back to normal,

he was very wrong. Soon enough he would need his painting scheme more than ever because in 2012 a new federal bureaucrat took charge in New England. It was someone prepared to make hard choices, unpopular choices. And it was someone Carlos Raphael knew very

“very well. What did you think when Bullard became the original man?”

I felt like the electricity was about to shit. The main TV game I know that everything was about to shit. 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 now we're in Memorial Hall. For many years this room is with a collection of Massachusetts state flags from the Civil War, both World Wars, the Vietnam War and the Korean War. I've talked a lot this episode about codfish in particular.

“And there's a lot more of that to come. So I think it's time we took a tour of the Massachusetts”

state house. Sidebar, I love this tour. The state house is filled with all kinds of neat

artifacts and artwork. It's basically a big gallery with a lot of politicians wandering around.

And if you've ever been on this tour, you know exactly where I'm going. Now we're in the house chamber to the house chamber where you can behold the most distinctive artifact of all the sacred cod. Up there you see the sacred cod fish that was presented to the legislature as a good luck charm in 1784 and has served as one ever since. In 1933 that fish was

students a little while later it was mailed back. Any questions before we move on? The sacred codfish is about five feet long carved out of wood and painted realistically in a model green that fades to white under the belly. It occupies a central and honored position in the chamber so that if the speaker of the house looks up from their raised desk, they look right at the sacred cod. Because in its early days much of Massachusetts's economy and the reason

this plane looking fish holds such a place of honor is that the codfish with its mild and flaky white flesh is baked into the politics of this state. It was part of the reason English settlers

founded a colony here in the first place. Historian Samuel Elliott Morrison remarked that

Puritan Massachusetts derived her ideals from a sacred book or wealth and power from the sacred cod. There's a famous story in which the pilgrims went to King James to seek his permission for their

“voyage and the king asked for a justification. How was this colony going to make money?”

He was answered in a single word, fishing. We're upon James replied so God have my soul to his an honest trade towards the apostles' own calling. Early English settlers wrote of codfish in abundance almost beyond believing. This cod was the basic resource that made the Massachusetts

colony wealthy that gave it the power to expand and ultimately become independent. The cod was

the prize catch. Other species were used but for centuries the cod dominated the fishery. 400 years later, cod is not abundant beyond believing. Yet it is still the iconic fish of New England and in many ways of the United States. When it comes to cod, the issue cannot be reduced to simply a matter of commerce or science or food. It's a symbol of our abundance, our God-given fortune, our very political nature. And in 2012, the humble codfish was once again the subject of high-level

politics. The White House under Obama was getting concerned. That year our old friend John Bullard got the phone call. A chief of staff at Noah told me that what we got a memo from the White House saying here are 10 problems Noah faces. And you know, a satellite systems were delayed and over but you know various kinds of problems that Noah had. And each problem had a 10-page paper on how to solve the problem. And then one of the 10 problems was groundfish crisis in New England.

And it didn't have a 10-page paper it just had hired John Bullard as the answer to that problem.

“This job would be the final act for John Bullard's life in public service. Remember back in the”

80s he was the mayor of New Bedford during the fisherman's strike. And in the 90s he went down to DC to work inside the federal fishing bureaucracy. So he knew the system at many levels. In that last job, Bullard got to play the good cop delivering relief money to fishermen. The new

job would be different. He would be what's called the regional administrator. That's basically

the person here in New England who speaks for Noah for the Department of Commerce for the whole administration really. And if you can't tell, that's more the bad cop. How well did you know John Bullard? How would you describe him? He wrote in my cough about two years, three years, they were counsel meeting. Rodney Avala had known Bullard for years at this point. They used to carpool together from New Bedford to the council meetings, and he had high hopes for John as regional administrator.

I like John, John's all right, but you know, I expected a lot more of John and produce. You had helped you to help protect the industry? Yeah, because he wrote in Akai, he read our souls, everything that we went, he knew what we were going through. It's like me going to a priest that tells us a priest saw my problems. You know, this is what I'm going through. I don't give it shit.

“I think the whole city was expecting more John Bullard. By 2012, it was clear that all the”

problems the catch share system was supposed to solve were not going away. The scientists continued to say the fish docks were in trouble, and the fishermen continued to say that they were in trouble. No one was happy. So when Bullard arrived at the regional NOAA office, he called an all-hands meeting to address the staff. There was anxiety in the room. Everyone knew Bullard was there to make changes,

to be governed by not what the law is, but by do the right thing. Do the right thing. And a staff

“member raised his hand and said, "But we're legal entity. We deal with regulations. Only have to”

pay attention to the law." I said, "Well, of course we do, but we have good lawyers. Figure out

first of all, what's the right thing to do? Then figure out a legal way to do it. But don't get

a backwards. Don't start with what's the law. That's a cop-out." January meeting of the New England Fishery Management Council, the current agenda is yellow in color. Typically, the regional administrator will take a hands-off role with actual management decisions. They're there to oversee an implement policy. It's usually the regional council that sets the policy. But when Bullard arrived at his first council meeting in January of 2013, he immediately

made his presence felt. He recalls giving a speech and announcing to the council members, "We are headed slowly, seemingly inexorably, to oblivion." John, do you have any more good news for us?

Mercifully, that concludes my report.

Everyone had seen the same numbers. Everyone understood the situation. Now, it was time to act. Back to today, which marks by the way, the start of the 2013 fishing season. Something that fishermen usually look forward to, but new catch-limits announced by the federal government have cast a dark cloud over the season.

I know I keep playing these news clips until the same basic story. The regulations get tighter. The fishermen say it's the end of the world. Somehow life goes on. Any other that same basic pattern does repeat many times, but what happened in 2013 was remarkable. And this is a really drag-hungian cut. To give one example, the quota for all cod on George's bank was cut by 61%.

Cod in the entire Gulf of Maine was cut by 77%. 77%. So if you could catch a thousand pounds before, you were catching a couple hundred pounds now. What's certain is that a 77% cut will wipe out the human end of it in the business end of it. Bullard recalls at that same meeting when the cuts were decided. Carlos Raphael even showed up to voice his outrage.

I'm leaving here in a coffin, he said. But some officials say the real disaster would be letting fishing boats just keep pulling more fish out of the sea. We want you to raise the quotas. Well, I don't think we should.

“I think we really need to rebuild those stocks.”

John Bullard was now the face of fishing regulation in the region. Last week, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Mo Cowan Senators and Congressman criticized him for implementing these quota cuts too quickly. The attorney general of Massachusetts even sued his office on behalf of the fisherman. But Bullard felt like he had watched this slow motion car crash for too long. He had heard all the criticism of the science, all the emotional appeals of the fisherman.

And he was determined that he would not just stand back and do nothing.

I realize I'm making a big deal here about the cod quota, which is ultimately just one species

out of about a dozen groundfish common off New England, a historic species. Yes, but you've still got your haddock, Pollock, Dabbs, Flounder, Hake and so on. But the real problem here is that when you severely limit the quota for a single species, it puts the fisherman in a bind. Fish, mingle, oddly enough, right? Once again, this is Council Stafford, Tom Neese. I mean, when you drop a net in the water, you don't just catch one thing. You catch groups of things.

If one of those species has a very small quota, that can be a problem because when you're quota for that species is caught, you can no longer go fishing again. That fish with the lowest quota is called the choke species. And this is where the disconnect

“between what the scientists see and what the fisherman see becomes so crucial.”

Because if there were truly no cod to be caught, then the choke species would not be an issue. You wouldn't be able to catch them anyway. But in 2013, the fisherman were catching cod. Sometimes it was like they couldn't escape the cod. Cod, unfortunately, is one of those things that's pretty widespread and it's easy to catch, and it mingles with other species. So when the cod quota goes down, it becomes very difficult to go

For many fishermen, impossibly expensive, or you can stop fishing all together, like Tom Neese said,

“or you can break the rules. Now, the way most fishermen would break the rules”

is by discarding the choke species. Just throw the cod overboard and pretend it never happened.

To be clear, this is not allowed. But according to several fishermen, I spoke to, it was pretty common at the time. I mean, they'll catch in too much cod and too much dabs. Fishmen, Bill, Blount, remembers hearing about these huge discards. And with sometimes discard, a few fish himself, when no one was looking, he was horrified by the waste. And they had to shovel it over the side. They were shoveling like thousand pound every toe,

over the side, all this good fish, because the natural and fishy service got the numbers wrong. So they screwed up. When you discard fish, they don't all just swim away. At that point, they've been

compressed in a net, maybe for hours, dragged out of the water, dropped on the deck, tossed overboard.

So what you see behind the boat is a mass of white bellies, floating dead on the surface, then slowly sinking to the bottom. This was the law of unintended consequences, hard at work. And this is also why a lot of fishermen, including Bill Blount, don't blame Carlos for painting fish. It was another way out of the bind. Yes, it was fraud. Yes, it was unfair to all the fishermen who did respect the rules. But at least this way, someone got to eat all those fish.

What would you do? Okay, you haul back and you're going to every toe, you shoveling a thousand pounds of dabs and cod over the side. And this stuff's worth a lot of money. Two bucks a pound for cod, shoveling two thousand dollars a cod over every toe. It's nuts. So what would you do? When should we tempt it at least?

“Then in 2014, there was the secret stock assessment. I don't know if anybody's mentioned that to you.”

But for the jaded and beleaguered fishermen of New England, there was one more surprise still to come. For many, it felt like the death blow. The so-called secret stock assessment. Calling it a secret is a little bit of a misnomer. It was an unplanned assessment. Typically, a full assessment of a fish stock is planned and conducted over several years. But the scientists were getting new data all the time. So in 2014, with all this pressure and

attention around the cod stock in particular, one scientist quietly tested what the new data would look like in their population model. When they did it, I don't think they ever intended to release it until they saw what the results were and they said, we can't sit on this. The results showed that once again, the cod population was even lower than everyone thought. And then once it's done, it's like you can't suppress it, right? So it's out there.

Maggie Raymond, a boat owner and advisor to the New England Council, heard about this new assessment along with everyone else. After it was complete. I asked the science director, how did this happen? And he said, I knew about it about 10 minutes before you did, and everyone was shocked. Many fishermen were incredulous of this new assessment. Because again, their boats were catching cod. One man at a meeting told John Bullard, you haven't been out there,

you can't get away from the cod. I want to stress that it's entirely possible, both things were true, that the cod population was crashing and that the fish were also abundant in certain areas. One possible explanation for the disconnect was a theory of fish behavior. That once the cod population got low enough, the remaining fish would start to gather in

“clumps. Bullard believed that the fishermen were finding those clumps. That's why the cod seemed”

abundant. And if they caught those clumps, it could be game over. A total collapse of the stock.

My feeling was always, we have to not think about today. We have to think about tomorrow. This

fisheries been there 400 years. It's going to be there another 400 years. It's going to be there another 25 years. And if so, how are we going to make that pass? Bullard believed this situation called for more than just another cod. And many on the council agreed that some kind of emergency action was necessary. The question was, what? There was a series of meetings where

and it would be a tie vote. And then there'd be another person put forth an answer and was a tie

“vote. Bullard got increasingly frustrated with the lack of action. More than it does in motions,”

a dozen votes, but no clear plan of action. Like I said before, the administrator does not typically step in and just make regulation on their own. But this was getting ridiculous. One tie vote after another, after another, after another, made it damn clear that the New England Council wasn't going to act. As I remember, he threatened the council to evolve for an emergency action wrong and do it anyway. David Gaethel, the small day-boat fisherman, was at this meeting, too. And they didn't,

they wouldn't vote for it. Nobody had proven to anybody that it was warranted. The council said, ah, when I do in this, you do it. Somebody's got to do it. The only person left is me

to zoom out for one second. Bullard's dilemma takes us back to one of the founding principles

of fishery regulation in the Magnus an act. Part of the idea was that power would be distributed to these regional councils pushed down to the local level that fishermen would be involved that it wouldn't just be federal bureaucrats deciding their fate. Bullard believed in that

“system. But he also believed he had to do what was right to protect the fishery. That's what he”

told his staff. First, figure out the right thing to do. Then figure out how to make it legal. I have to take an emergency action because something has to happen. Maggie Raymond told me that every week she used to read the federal register, the full list of all new government regulations and executive actions, just to keep an eye on what was happening. When she saw what Bullard and his staff had done, she was shocked. That's like, what are you thinking?

This time it was more than a quota cut. It was a full moratorium on all cod inside an area the size of the state of Maine. Bullard was acting alone here without the council's approval and he told press, we're trying to absolutely shut down fishing where there are concentrations of cod. So there will be zero cod caught. Okay, good afternoon everyone. Welcome to Newport for

“three and a half day council meeting with a whole lot of ground fish on the agenda. Just after the”

emergency action was announced, the full council gathered for its last meeting of the year. Thank you for your hospitality. These council meetings rotate around the region and this one was at one of their Swank Year low cows. The Marriott Hotel in Newport, Rhode Island. It's all brick right on the water surrounded by docks, but the council was not there to either pretty sailboats.

They had serious business. First is related to our management action timelines.

This was in mid November, just a couple weeks before Thanksgiving and David Gates told me he had been saving his cod quota all year for this moment when the cooler water brought the fish down from farther north to places he could reach in his dayboat. Suddenly, that patience was being punished. The quota he had been saving was now useless. And so I was hot under the collar. Obviously, everybody there was already hot under the collar. Gates all had spent the last few

days studying that unplanned stock assessment, trying to get through 500 pages of math in between toes on his boat. And from what he could see, there were some assumptions baked into the numbers that didn't feel quite right. Stuff about fish mortality, spawning rates. And I know these are kind of technical terms, but small issues with every one of them, cumulatively, they turn into a big math or at the end. Did you confront John Bullard at that time? I don't say confront

as the right word. We had heated discussions. I want to state unequivocally that the last two cod assessments have drastically underestimated the spawning stock biomass of Gulf of Maine cod. The heated discussions went on for almost two hours that day and then into the next day. This fish come in all different sizes. Talking from baby cod fish to large cod. Take a look at our numbers. Where accountable for what we did and what we do is follow your rules.

Mr. Bullard, where is your accountability? Mostly Bullard just sat there silent at the front table. Looking down over the top of his glasses at his critics as they came up one by one to the public microphone close enough to feel their spit. How many of you people have taken a pay reduction like we have? Who folks ought to know that this is the end of it for us. It's bullshit because you guys are wrong and you know you're wrong and no one up here has a ball so admit it. You're going

John John Bullard. Eventually Bullard did respond. So several people have he began

by talking about accountability and it's obvious that Bullard was bothered by the suggestion that he has some kind of disconnected bureaucrat, unfailing, uncaring. By this time, Bullard had been in public life for three decades. He'd faced voters, he'd faced hearings, he'd been sued and mocked, called an unfrozen Neanderthal. On the radio, no less. I see you there. Our motives are

“questioned, but I think we are accountable as we sit up here. And he ended his statement with a plea”

to find a new shared path out of this crisis. To build bridges between science and fishermen because you can have the best science in the world and if there isn't an understanding of that, it just simply doesn't matter.

The whole purpose of regulation, the reason we started making law this way in the first place,

was to put the law in the hands of experts, the people who know best, to get the politics out of it. And the idea of catch shares is exactly that. Remove the politics, remove the discretion,

“whatever the data says, that's what the rule is. But sometimes it feels like the more pressure we”

put on science to be the policy, the more the science itself becomes political. And I don't think that's just true, affishing. You can see it in public health, you can see it in climate, you can

see it in any number of issues where science and expertise take a beating. Because when it's an

issue, people care about, then the regulation around it, no matter how technical or scientific it is, cannot live outside the world of politics. It's political like everything else. Linda DePray, the marine biologist from earlier, retired in 2013, just as her data and her colleagues data were being tugged and torn at from all sides. Once our interview was over, she told me that after 40 years of doing this work, she really thought things would get better, that we'd reach

some kind of common understanding about how many fish are in the sea. And yet to this day, the same debates rage on. It's like, what is that, Kasem, how can we bridge that Kasem by talk? Because there's a resource out there that is not unlimited. And we're trying to save it for future generations. And it was, it was sometimes you have a boat payment now when you've got insurance to pay and you've got

ice and gas is going up. And I understood, I could understand their reasoning, but we wanted to keep

“it for future generations too. So how can we have some pain now so that their kids have a resource?”

Because again, they don't own the resource. That's that terrible tragedy of the comments that no one owns it, but everybody, everybody that's a fisherman wants it. A few months after the cod moratorium went into effect, Carlos Rafael, the cod father himself, reached the conclusion that he was ready to cash out. He was done with the business that it defined his life. On January 4th, 2015, a notice went out in the local paper. Carlos C. Food was

for sale. The problem was that his business now depended on an elaborate fraud and the longer that fraud went on, the more suspicious the regulators became. Nobody had any doubt about Carlos being a crook. If no one was suspicious, everyone knew, absolutely, let me put my home mortgage on the table. He's a crook. It is just can we catch him. That's in our final episode. They wanted to strip me out of

[Music] [Music]

Catching 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,

produced by Joni Tobin and Annie Gerson. There's a terrific film about the cod moratorium

“that I highly recommend if you want to go deeper on that topic. It's called Sacred Cod.”

I want to recognize GBA's reporters Emily Rooney and Adam Riley who he heard throughout this episode and also in the last episode. Things also to build carp, the former science director for Noah and the Northeast who I spoke to but who you do not hear and of course to my fantastic statehouse tour guide Eli Arsdale. Any questions before we move on? The artwork is by Bill Miller, our closing song is Viva Viva New Bedford by George Ferreira. The big dig is a production

of GBA's 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.