Catching The Codfather | 6. It’s Your Job to Catch Me

It's also the source of the strangest Hollywood story you had ever heard.

“I'm Malcolm Godwell, and on my podcast revisionist history we're telling a story that invites”

so much absurd speculation that we're going to have to tell it across two episodes. You will almost certainly feel compelled to see Zutopia 2 for yourself. And if you already have you may need to see it again. This into our Bizarre 2 part series under vision history, wherever you get your podcasts. Support for Catching The Codfather comes from Rogers Fish Company, founded by Roger Berkowitz,

offering an array of New England seafood and entrees shipable anywhere in the US, more at RogersFishCo.com. And also from M&M Skylights, installing and servicing the full range of commercial and residential volux Skylight products.

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Let's recap the investigation into Carlos Rafael so far. In January of 2015, Carlos announced his business was for sale.

“In May, the IRS agents reached out pretending to be potential buyers,”

and in June they met twice to discuss the details of the business. By the end of the summer, it's clear that there's a case that Carlos is doing something illegal involving fish. What's not so clear is where all that fish is going, and where all the money is going. So in the fall of 2015, case agent Ron Mullett instructed his undercovers to go back to Carlos once again. This time with a specific purpose.

This money's got to be somewhere else. I need you to get me the show me the money moment.

Like if there's nothing else that you talked to him about, he's got to show you the money.

This meeting was in a more casual setting, a seafood restaurant, just up the coast from New Bedford. Carlos had been wanting to give his buyers a real taste of what they are getting, and this would be the perfect place to do that. So everyone piled into the agent's BMW 5 series, the sport version with the V8 engine, and went for lunch. One agent told me, "I made sure to drive like a crazy Russian mobster, you know, to keep character." Carlos and his guests were seated in a private room, where Carlos ordered for everyone, seafood of course,

and where he was very much in his element. He had his own wine at the restaurant. Nobody else could buy it. They only had it for him. I'm a guy that I loved to eat.

I love the booze, I love the booze. So he was having his wine. On the tapes, you can also hear Carlos order an espresso with Remi Martin. He does like his cognac. And maybe that contributed a little bit, but he got loose lips.

At this point in the investigation, the undercover agents thought they had plenty of time. The cover story was clearly holding, and there were so many players connected to the fraud still left to explore. Boats, the captains, the auction house, the wholesalers. There was money laundering, tax evasion, false reporting. It could take months and months to unravel at all.

But that day over lunch, the urgency of the situation changed. "I've put it on the day, because sometimes I might be somebody there." The agents brought up the question of where the money goes. And Carlos mentioned that whenever he flies to Portugal, he brings some cash and deposits it in a bank there. "That's where the money is."

This is exactly what Mullet was looking for. "How much cash you can bring there?" "80, 45 to 60,000, maybe that might drown." But it also raised more questions.

“If you fly internationally with more than $10,000, you have to report it to US Customs.”

And it's not like you can easily hide $50,000 in cash from a TSA screener. Somehow Carlos was getting it through. That was pretty mind-blowing. A kind of a person has the ability to walk through security with cash and not declare it. What do you mean?

You can't do that. Carlos paused and got very quiet. Even after everything he had disclosed already, he seemed to sense that this was new and dangerous territory. He was entering. And he said, "I got a friend, Logan Airport that can get money through."

"We have one of the guys in Boston. One of those fucking agents used my friend and gave him a money before I go through security."

How can he use the money to deliver the money?" "Nice." In case he didn't catch that. Carlos said he had an agent inside Logan Airport in Boston, who would get the cash around security.

Then handed off in the bathroom inside the terminal. "It's a manless pocket. He doesn't go through security because he got one of those fucking badges. He's an agent. He's an agent.

He's an agent. He's an agent. He's an agent. He's an agent.

“If you want to pass it on to the other side.”

Absolutely. I'm your carrier. I'll be doing a lot of traffic. I'll be doing a lot of traffic. The IRS agent, here, laughing on the tape there.

Told me this was a turning point in the investigation. On a personal level, he had started working with the feds right after 9/11. So did Ron Mullett for that matter. A lot of people signed up in those years. And now here they were yucking it up with a fishing local about how he dodges airport security.

The undercover agent told me it took a lot of self-control and that moment to keep laughing. To keep playing is hard. Because he now knew that as long as their investigation went on, there was a crooked agent working inside the very same airport where the 9/11 hijackers took off from. So again, I'm still not positive where this cash is coming from.

But it's heading out of the country via Logan. That meant they did not have time to follow every lead and unravel every mystery. They had to close this thing down. Let's go. From GBH news, this is the big dig season three, catching the cod father.

I'm Ian Koss.

The case that the IRS ultimately built was all focused on one man, Carlos Rafael.

But Carlos is just that, one man, one player and a whole port that has been dealing with. That has been dealing with shrinking fish dogs and tightening regulation for half a century now.

“So what happens to that port, to the boats, to the fishermen, and to the fish when the cod father does finally fall?”

This is part six. It's your job to catch me. As we get to the end of the season, I want to extend one more invitation to join our membership program, the HOV line. Once the season wraps, we're going to start doing some members only events. These are going to be mostly virtual, some in person.

So wherever you are, you can be part of it. You can meet other listeners. You can learn how the show is made. So if you've been on the fence about maybe joining up, this will be a great time to do it. You can also give the gift of a big, big membership to someone in your life who you think would appreciate being part of this community.

Again, it's called the HOV line. You can sign up now at wgbh.org/HOVLane. 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.”

There are 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, it's restaurant quality, flash frozen at peak freshness and delivered to your door. Find it at rodgersfishco.com. The first time I heard about Carlos Rafael was standing in the hallway of the U.S. journey's office.

Former prosecutor and U.S. attorney Andrew Leling. There was an agent who worked for the IRS at that time named Ron Mullett. And he's standing in the hallway of the U.S. journey's office with a cardboard box full of tapes. Trying to get someone to listen to him talk about this new case he has, which he thinks is great. And I happened to walk by.

This was in late 2015, just after the undercover agents met with Carlos at the restaurant. So Mullett already had the outlines of a case, and now he needed someone to prosecute it. And he says, "Andy, please let me tell you about this case." I said, "Sure." Andrew Leling was intrigued, like anyone would be. I mean, he've heard those tapes. It's good stuff.

But what really caught Leling's attention was Carlos Rafael's unusual criminal history.

The white collar offenders usually prosecute them once, and they never do that again.

There was, of course, the tax evasion case in the '80s, the price fixed in case in the '90s,

It is very, very rare to have an individual prosecuted by the federal government three times.

And in the same place, you never see them. Never see that.

And all of his cases were related to his fishing business. As Leling studied up on the case, he also read about Carlos' taunting federal prosecutors in the halls of the courthouse. Fuck you, you're an asshole, but, and that walks out. He read about the famous fishery meeting. When Carlos announced to the regulators, "I'm a pirate. It's your job to catch me."

About how he had flaunted the rules, how he had mocked the smaller fishermen as mosquitoes and maggots. I'm believable. So this guy has been untouchable for 30 years. And the more Leling read, the more determined he became to get Carlos. And this time, get him for good.

“Did you want to make an example out of Carlos Rafael?”

100%. To build that kind of case, the IRS agents needed to connect all the dots with hard evidence from the doc in New Bedford to the offshore bank account in the A'sores. And there was still a big link missing in that chain.

What were you doing with a quarter million pounds of fish every day?

Sell it. Where did all that miss labeled fish go? But, I had some deals cooked in a side of some people they couldn't. They couldn't figure out what I did with all their fish. They could just for the life of them is as, "Where does this son of a bitch sell all his fish?"

One of the keys to Carlos' business and ultimately his fraud was the network of customers. Carlos had built up for his product. He had specialty high-end clients who would pick their fish right off the boat. He had grocery wholesalers, he had a company that supplied cruise ships, even military contract at one point. Truly, a customer for every fish.

“And then after Carlos, what do you need?”

No, no, no. Just load the drillers and let it rip. So when Carlos started bringing in loads of his painted fish, which, in fact, were tightly controlled species like Grasel and Flounder, he knew he had just the right buyer for them. Someone who would pay well and pay in cash.

I got to think this one. Yeah, sure. Yellow. Goxaka.

And it just so happened that when the IRS agents first visited Carlos' seafood,

they got a whole earful about this someone named Michael. Michael. Michael, that little fucking whiz of these seven fillets, the one she's full for. On this particular day, Michael and Carlos seem to be off on the wrong foot. Do the back. Do the fucking back.

“But then, as the meeting went on in the secret books came out, Carlos told the agents,”

"You know that guy I was complaining about earlier, Michael?" That's who this secret cash ledger is for. Of course, Carlos put it in his own unique style. We're going to dollar numbers, what is going on? Right, no.

He sent me a fucking bag full of fucking jingles. The bag of jingles. And then I woke it off, like he really liked his salad and fish. If you'd deep back with me back from the back of the street, the most of these. At that time, the bag of jingles was just another throwaway remark, like painting fish.

It didn't make any sense out of context. But a few months later, at the end of 2015, with the agents now under pressure to close out the investigation, they wanted to find the source of the jingles. They wanted to find Michael.

That is the voice of the undercover agent playing the part of the lead buyer, who will call Lenny. I've disguised the voice somewhat, but hopefully you can tell that the Russian accent is very much genuine. So he gave an effect because we were asking what he does, but the extra fish that was quite illegally. Towards the end of 2015, Lenny asked Carlos about this mysterious transaction of jingles, and if they could meet the man who sent it.

Once again, it was the old line, "Well, if we're going to buy the business, we kind of have to understand it." And eventually, Carlos agreed to share Michael's phone number. Michael took the agents call and they made a plan to meet in New York City, where Michael was based.

The Russian buyers could choose the restaurant. Maybe it's funny enough, but we chose the place but in them sparks. That would be Sparks' steakhouse. The agents were looking for a place where the support team could be nearby just in case. But Sparks, as you may know, also had some history to it.

The head of the Gambino organized crime family has been killed there, back in the days, common out of Sparks' or Christmas time. So Sparks is very known restaurant in Manhattan, very high-end, very flashy restaurant.

Sparks has a dimly lit dining room with a low ceiling in no windows.

“The walls are covered with paintings, not decorated, mind you.”

Covered. One picture frame right up against the next one. The group of men found a table, Michael didn't drink and hardly ate. This meeting was all business. It turned out that Michael operated out of a booth at the Fulton Fish Market in Manhattan.

A place that likes Sparks has deep mafia ties. Michael and Carlos had known each other a long time, maybe 20 years at this point.

But for most of that time, they'd only talked on the phone, they never actually met in person.

Until one day in the early 2010s, right around the time the catch share system began. Carlos's daughter was graduating from college in New York, so he spent the night there. And at two in the morning, on a whim, Carlos decided to go down to the fish market to meet Michael. There in person, for the first time, Michael showed him into a back room, filled with cash. How big was that amount of cash?

I had a pitch, but I wiped that out.

“I guess the feds would ever give my phone big.”

Carlos held out both his arms to show me just how big. Crazy, something I haven't thought I would see in my life. I said, son of a bitch. And immediately, the gear started turning. What Carlos realized is that Michael was paying for the fish on a 30-day billing cycle.

But then he was turning around and selling the fish for cash right away. So in business terms, Michael got to keep the float. He was holding on to Carlos's money. And he gets to use my money. Says Michael, from no one.

I want F of what comes in on that cash comes to pop up. Clearly, the two shared an affinity for cash. So they haggled back and forth and landed on a deal that worked for both of them. He meets with them somewhere on the road on a truck stop. Again, the undercover agent, Lenny.

Okay, what happened is that guy just leave him close in a bag of cash to the window. And they just separate and they go their own way. That duffel bag of cash was the bag of jingles. Michael would pay up front now. Hundreds of thousands of dollars out of time.

Then Carlos would work it off, deducting the value of each truckload of fish as he sent it to New York. So now Carlos got to benefit from that cash advance. He says he used it to pay the auction house for unloading all the fish. With, of course, the added bonus of saving on his taxes and avoiding any extra scrutiny.

Michael's own clients were largely high end restaurants. Some specific names were told to me off the record. And I'll just say that if you've lived in New York and are into food, you've heard of some of these places. Those fish you heard Carlos haggling over for $1.30 a pound might well end up in an entree that costs 50 or $100.

And knowing those final dollar values would be crucial to building a case.

“That's how you measured the value of the fraud.”

After that lunch, Carlos called Lenny back to say, "Everything's good. Michael likes you." She likes you lot. She wants to business with you. That's how I remember the words.

The agents now had one more link in the chain. Were there ever any clues where there moments when you got suspicious? Nope. I know, yes. Around this same time in late 2015, Carlos was back on the phone with one of the undercover agents talking business.

And happened to mention that he had just received one of his regular payments from Michael, a Duffelbag, with $625,000. In the same call, Carlos mentioned that he was taking a trip to the A source in November and planned to bring some of the cash with him.

So the agents, desperate now for breakthrough, pushed their luck a little further.

They asked, "Can we come with you?" "When they want to do an approach you'll win me." I said that. My ears was standing up at the back of my neck. I said, "I don't like what's coming down." This trip was for a charitable event that Carlos helped fund, called "Thanksgiving in the A source."

One of many acts of charity, large and small, that helped create his rogue with a heart of gold image around town. Every year, they would send a load of frozen turkeys and canned goods over to the islands and host a big American style meal for people who had been deported from the U.S. as well as widows and orphans.

Federal prosecutor Andrew Leeling was very curious what would happen on this trip.

“Is he putting cash inside the cavity of the turkey or something?”

Yes, that way we were, these are the things you wonder. Why is he sending turkeys to the A source? Okay, so the turkey cash smuggling theory actually did not pan out. The turkeys were just turkeys. But this event did crack open the last mystery of the case because it was put on in part by members of the local sheriff's department in New Bedford.

And that was the inside connection. According to Carlos, it was the sheriff's department staff who got the money passed airport security.

But now Carlos was getting suspicious. He did not want his curious buyers tagging along.

And so we set up surveillance at Logan Airport. Instead, the agents would have to observe the cash smuggling more discreetly.

“Obviously there are cameras everywhere anyway.”

But extremely complex to do that kind of operation at Logan Airport. And some of the individuals involved are themselves trained law enforcement personnel. So that was very delicate. The operation took place at night around 9 p.m. Carlos was traveling along with a group of people, including an officer from the sheriff's department.

Carlos gave the officer five unmarked envelopes, which the officer brought to the men's bathroom and distributed among the group. Meanwhile, case agent Ron Mullett was waiting just outside the security entrance, watching Carlos smoke his last cigarette, then head through the TSA screening himself at about 930. The idea was to let the whole smuggling operation go off without a hitch. But then one of the TSA agents pulled Carlos aside.

It turned out Carlos had kept yet another envelope in his own briefcase with well over $10,000 in cash, more than enough money to catch the attention of a regular TSA agent who, of course, had no idea about Mullett's operation and no idea what they were interfering with. So Mullett watched as Carlos was led away to the customs window, thinking that's it. The operation is a bust. If Carlos is stopped now before he's even entered the airport, they won't be able to document the full smuggling process.

That's when Mullett called the airport staff and told them there was a change of plans, and it needed to happen quickly. By the time Carlos arrived at the customs window, their waiting for him was newly assigned IRS duty agent Ron Mullett. Pretending to be just any old agent working an overnight shift. Mullett rubbed his eyes looking tired. Then asked Carlos a few routine questions asked him to fill out some forms and sent the man on his way.

The crew from the sheriff's department boarded without incident. In two days later, Carlos Raphael deposited a total of $76,000 in a Portuguese banking account. At last, the IRS agents could see the full scope of the fraud from the boat to the plate to a bank account in the nasors. And why Carlos was the only one who could pull it off. He had managed to evade checks at so many points along the chain, on the boat at the dock at the Fulton Fish Market, an airport security,

so that his criminal enterprise could operate almost entirely in the open, all mixed in with his legitimate business. And work that way for years. Now it was time to bring it down. In January of 2016, Lenny and his undercover partner asked for one last meeting with Carlos.

“He did say to him that my clients did want to buy it, but we have to meet one more time, okay?”

The goal this time was to get their hands on the physical documents at the heart of the whole fraud. The falsified reports. The meeting was at night. The fish plant was dark. Everyone was gone except for Carlos and his personal bookkeeper.

So they went upstairs to the same office where they had all met the very first time.

And Carlos had joked about how bad it would be if these guys were here with the IRS. Now we're definitely interested. We have a better hand to on it now. Now over six months later, it seemed like any misgivings Carlos had been holding on to work on. He was ready for the deal to be done.

I said, Carlos, I like your business really to buy, but just pretend to be a fucking retard.

I have no fucking clue what you're doing here. I just don't have a clue. And I said, just explain to me a word by word. The more my language, how this shit works. And believe it or not, he said, I just fucking... Carlos is a bookkeeper who is aware of the fish painting operation when into a sideroom off the office and brought out a stack of papers.

So he showed us the deal reports. He showed us the fishing vessel trip report. He showed us a white line paper, a handwritten. He called it the dance that said, hey, this had it. It's actually gray sole of the medium size and it's this many pounds of this small size.

I called it all hadic on these two reports, but here's what it really is.

So he walked us through, here's an example of last Thursday fishing vessel trip report. The dance sheet, the bill of lading, the invoice to the buyer. Here's how it started as hadic and on the last page, the fifth page and it's really all the graceful. He'll all work, he usually does. We'll call them addicts. We'll call them addicts.

“And they said, wow, I'm not sure I get it. Can you show me again?”

And he pulled another set of documents and he walked them through it again. While Lenny went line by line through the documents, playing dumb, his partner, the guy who's playing the part of the broker, was able to step away and start taking photos around the office with a concealed camera, hard evidence that they could use to get a search warrant. And still Lenny kept on saying, I think we got it one more time. And he brought another set of documents and walked them through it.

See they're probably from 69 to a clock at night, let's pause and that thing. Oh wow. Okay, going line by line. Those three documents, those three transactions, those were the three primary charges that got us, as we say, in the door to do the search warrant. But he came out of there. We met with the cover team including Ron. He said, that's it. He's not. He's done. How did you hear that he was arrested? How did I hear it? It's the fuel guy.

On February 26th, 2016, Paul Valente unloaded 50,000 pounds of ground fish in New Bedford. He had heard the rumors that his boss Carlos was in talks with some Russians about maybe selling the business. But Valente says he didn't talk about that kind of stuff with Carlos. He just talked fish. And I was waiting to find out what my settlement was.

And I never got an answer from him from his phone. I found that odd. And then the fuel guy had just finished fueling me and he goes, "Just see what happened to your boss?"

He says, "No. There's a bunch of feds and cops in the around his building." Oh, Jesus. Here we go.

“And then I drove by and I seen him like, "That's why I'm not getting a settlement today."”

And how many were he was it like a line of police cars and bans and things? Yeah, I think they had more police presence to arrest a fish buyer than they did when they took Donald Chopper. It was that bad, they had helicopters, they had you name it. It was like something in the mob movie. Like they were expecting him to be holed up in there with like Scarface style or the casher guns.

Yeah, it was pathetic actually. To have that much police force down there was pathetic. Yeah, all they had to do was just go in there and say, "You got to come with us." And he would have went. And you know what I mean? He might cost a yell and scream and make some noises out. I'm coming a bunch of nice names, but he would have went and there was no need for all that drama.

No. [Music] Philanth did get his settlement check for that trip.

“But what would happen beyond that was anyone's guess?”

Yeah, insecure, you don't know if you have a job tomorrow. It's clear that everything is going to be tied up and you can't feed your family. You know, all that uncertainty just comes rushing down. And watching as the helicopters circled Carlos C. Food, Philanth also had to wonder, "Who are they coming for next?"

Every captain knows what is happening on the boat. Every captain knows that they didn't catch Hattock, that the captain is lying on the relevant form.

Who else would he prosecute?

This comes down to a philosophical question if you're a prosecutor.

“Do you want every single scalp or do you just want the key scalps?”

None of this fraud occurs, but for Carlos Rafael. Of course he sucks other people into his orbit, like these sheriff's deputies, like these captains. But they are secondary. And so the captains as a category, we just let them go. Lelling also let the book keep her go, as well as another employee at Carlos C. Food who was involved in forging paperwork.

Two officials at the sheriff's office were arrested, but Michael the fish dealer was never prosecuted.

And maybe most crucially, the owners of the auction house, the conastera brothers, were never prosecuted.

“If you come after me, the guy that participated with me and his guy should get nailed to.”

Carlos has always insisted to me that the conasteras were involved, that they knew the fish was being mislabeled, that they would even tip him off whenever regulators or environmental police were snooping around the docks. And there is some evidence to back this up. A few years ago, some new documents emerged as part of a civil case between Carlos and the conasteras business. These documents include a sworn affidavit by the former general manager of the auction house,

who states that the conastera brothers personally instructed him to treat Carlos's boats differently, to facilitate his fraud. I spoke with that manager as part of my reporting. He stands by everything in the affidavit and emphasized to me that he and his staff did record the actual weights and species of all that fish they unloaded from Carlos's boats. The manager told me he shredded that original paperwork. The conastera brothers did not respond to my request for an interview, but they have always denied any involvement and the current manager of the auction house told me they never reported any false information to the government.

So that piece remains contested. The way Carlos sees it, he was singled out and targeted by Noah by the IRS by John Bullard and Andrew Lelling and all the people who wanted him out of the fishery for good. And the auction was just as involved as I was in his deal. I picked them over a million dollars in cash. Cash for the unloading of all that fish I used to do there. With the IRS, we know what was all these guys.

“Where's the Department of Justice? These guys are bunch of assholes. That's what they are.”

Because that operation could have not been done if they were not part of this scam. But somebody was stealth in the scale. For his part, Andrew Lelling told me that he assumed all along the auction house knew what Carlos was doing, that they had to know. Lelling says he just couldn't prove it. So we'll take one criminal and we'll leave the avas behind. That's the way there was set up.

The reason all these choices matter is that over the years since the arrest, regulators, prosecutors, and politicians alike have often described Carlos the way Lelling does. As a lone bad actor who managed to corrupt all the people around him, the one proverbial rotten apple spoiling a perfectly good bunch. And when you tell the story that way, the whole thing becomes a little easier to dismiss. It's just Carlos being Carlos. Now I'm not trying to say the whole waterfront should have been rounded up and thrown in jail over this case, but I do think we have to see Carlos as part of a larger story.

And a larger culture. One of the things that constantly surprised me in my interviews and really would drew me into this story is how many people I spoke with who expressed some sympathy or at least ambivalence for what Carlos did. That includes lifelong fishermen like Bill Blaunt and Rodney Avala, civil servants like Maria Tomazia, as well as academics, journalists, even some Noah officials I've talked to.

The point is this, Carlos may be a pirate at heart who would break the law in anything he did, but he could never have pulled it off for so long.

If there weren't a lot of other people in this port who also thought the system was broken. Taking Carlos down did nothing to change that. Including some loads that passed through the very same auction house. If you ask Carlos, there's a lot more of that going on that the government doesn't know about.

So they'll never stop the bullshit that goes on in a fishing industry, not in a million years.

John Bullard and I talked about this question for a while of whether the cod father case can be reduced to the sins of one man or if it's a sign of something much deeper.

“I think the fact we're talking about it right now is unfortunate and you won't be surprised to hear that as the mayor of New Bedford and then the top local regulator for Noah.”

Bullard has formed a very strong opinion of Carlos. In my mind Carlos is a crock more than he is a fisherman. And as someone who has spent his whole life trying to make the city of New Bedford a better place, I take it personally when someone like that the fames are a city.

I find myself drawn back to the story of Carlos even though in some ways he isn't outlier.

There is this way in which he also represents all of the regulatory changes that came in the last half century.

“Without Magnus and all the economic incentives to build boats, Carlos never buys his first boat. Without catch shares, he may have never consolidated so much control over so much of the catch.”

And so in this weird way, he does feel like a product.

I don't buy that at all. I mean there are thousands of people in New Bedford in the fishing industry from crew to boat owners to processors to electricians.

There are thousands of people who weren't there living in the fishing industry. They all went through the strike. They all went through Magnus and they all went through catch years. All of them went through everything Carlos went through. They didn't all turn into crooks. Only Carlos turned into the biggest crook in America. Just Carlos. He is not a product of catch years. He's not a product of Magnus and act. He is a product of his more own moral depravity.

“Will you be disappointed if this podcast comes out and the story of Carlos Rafael is a big part of it?”

I mean, if someone wants to do a story on Carlos, more power to him. But if someone wants to do a story on the fishing industry in New Bedford and they spend more than 30 seconds on Carlos, then they don't understand the fishing industry and they're telling a story. That is torqued way in the wrong direction. There's too many heroes. There are too many good people. And anything that gives Carlos attention and takes it away from people like that is someone who's grasping at a shiny object and is not seeing the real fishing industry in New Bedford.

For the last 20 years, I hope for the next 120 years because of people not named Carlos. In March of 2017, Carlos Rafael pled guilty to conspiracy, tax evasion, bulk cash smuggling, false labeling and falsifying records. Andrew Lelling told me, he was surprised the swash buckling codfather didn't go to trial. He was expecting a fight, expecting to get cursed out in the hallway, but Lelling got a very different Carlos. The day of his sentencing, Carlos arrived at the Boston Courthouse in a loose fitting dark suit. His lawyer told him to keep his mouth shut and he did.

He knew that the consequences were going to be dire. It was the more muted Carlos Rafael. John Bullard, who is still the regional administrator for Nella, was there for the sentencing as well. Because this was a guy who said, "I'm a crook, you come and catch me," and Andrew Lelling had caught. I wanted to see that. Lelling delivered a 27-page sentencing memorandum urging the judge to give Carlos the maximum possible sentence based on the quantity and value of the misreported fish. He was supported in the hearing by some folks you might remember, the conservation law foundation.

They submitted their own statement, claiming, "This is by far the most significant case of admitted illegal fishing behavior in US domestic fishing history."

“A lot of fishermen showed up, and of course, there were fishermen there too.”

A lot of local fishermen from New Bedford were in the gallery. A group of 40 or so came up from New Bedford to show their support. Paul Valent was among them. "Yeah, mostly the younger generation fishermen started judge could see that it was going to hurt him once a young guy." Then there were other fishermen, the fishermen who came to show their anger to watch Carlos fall.

Some of them had submitted their own victim impact statements, detailing how Carlos's actions had unfairly hurt his competitors,

damaged their fish stocks, and undermined the entire system they lived by.

“One said that Carlos Raphael was, quote, "the worst thing to ever happen to New Bedford."”

"And what really struck me is I chatted with some of them beforehand, and more than one of them said to me, they didn't believe this would actually happen. He would ever actually go to jail, and they had to come see it themselves." Carlos's lawyer delivered a statement on his client's behalf. He told the same story I've told in this series about an immigrant who starts from nothing who builds an empire, and then does what he has to to protect that empire.

"I remember his lawyers explaining to the judge that he was doing it to help the commercial fishermen to help the industry, you know, to keep the boats working." The statement read, quote, "This is the stupidest thing I ever did. I didn't do it to hurt anybody. I did it so my people could keep their paychecks." And then when the judge gave us something, the judge said that it was full of shit. "When the judge finally addressed Carlos from the bench, his voice was sharp. This was not stupid," the judge said.

“"This was a corrupt course of action from start to finish. It's a course of action designed to benefit you, to line your pockets. That's what it is, and why the court has sentenced you as it has."”

The judge gave Carlos 46 months, almost four years in federal prison. Four years may not sound like a lot as sentences go. But for a 65-year-old man who had only committed nonviolent crimes, it was harsh. It was a message.

But the criminal sentence did not settle the most important question for the court of New Bedford.

What would happen to the cod father's business to all the boats, the permits, the quota Carlos had amassed? You know, our number one goal is to get him and his family out of the fish. And in an interesting twist, this decision would not be up to the judge. It would be up to the regulators themselves, up to Noah, and of course, up to John Follard, to decide the future of perhaps the greatest fishing empire his hometown had ever known. But if they feel the because they not be out, I'm the very good, because they wanted to strip me out of every day and work their way.

At the end of the day, they say I saw one. (Music) In 2017, when Carlos was sentenced, John Bullard was hoping that as part of that sentence, the judge would also force Carlos to forfeit his boats. Or at least forfeit a significant number of them. But the judge disagreed. You know, this is not a violent crime. No one's murdered here. You can't take 12 of his boats.

Here in the United States of America, we take our private property very seriously. So even as the judge sent Carlos to jail and imposed a heavy fine, he would not take the man's fleet. In the end, the state took just four boats out of dozens. And everyone in the fishing industry was apoplectic that that was such a small slap on the wrist. We advocated strongly for him to lose everything. Meanwhile, you had boat owners like Maggie Raymond, up the coast in Maine and elsewhere, who were telling Bullard, look, forget about the boats.

And that's what we want to do. Take his permits away. Don't let him sell them.

“Because a fishing permit is like a taxi medallion or a liquor license.”

It's the true asset of the business. In the idea was that if Noah simply dissolved those permits entirely, the fishing quota attached to them could then be redistributed to fishermen all over the region. The fishermen who had been following the rules would have been a message to the people who are compliant. I know now you get a bigger piece of the fishery. And to be clear, the question of the permits was not up to a judge. This was now up to Noah.

So two months after the sentencing hearing, Bullard directed his agency to freeze the permits on about 60 boats that Carlos either owned outright or had some control over. Cruman went on unemployment, business at the ice plant slowed way down, and everywhere you looked, there were the sea green boats with CR on the bow tied up at the docks. That winter the port was eerily quiet, waiting in limbo for a final decision on the permits. But things were not quiet for John Bullard. He was being lobbied aggressively.

He remembers going to meet with Susan Collins, the senator from Maine, and before he could even say good morning, she asked what's happening with Carlos. The feelings on this were that strong.

“Rip the permits out. Let them keep the boats. The boats are useless without the permits. Who cares about the boats, right?”

The thing is, there were people lobbying on the other side who did care about those boats. It was the crewmen who worked on them. It was the ice plant and netmaker that supplied them the auction house that unloaded them and the trucking companies that shipped their product. All those people wanted to keep the boats working and keep them in new bedford. To do that, you had to keep the boats and permits together. The richest fishing port in the nation, more money there than any other port in the entire nation.

So, a lot of pressure from different people from the mayor of New Bedford, Elizabeth Warren. Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to Noah officials urging them to keep the permits in the port of New Bedford. The governor weighed in as well, so did the mayor, and Bullard of course was sympathetic. This was his hometown after all. He had been the mayor once. He had fought to protect those same jobs once. As Bullard recalls, there was no perfect solution that pleased everyone.

But there was a simple, if a little unsavory option for getting Carlos out of the fishing business for good. They let him sell everything and make millions of dollars. Noah barred Carlos from the commercial fishing industry for life and gave him two years to sell his boats, permits, processing facility, the whole enchilada as Carlos would say.

And why I'll never forgive them for that.

Maggie Raymond was stunned because it's a privilege, right? It's a privilege to fish. It's a public resource, so they did not do it, which should have been that.

“How much influence do you think John Bullard had on that decision?”

Oh, a lot. I'm sure he had a lot to do with that. The way Maggie Raymond sees it, Bullard had a choice. He could protect his hometown, or he could punish Carlos Rafael. He could not do both, and he chose to protect his hometown. In a statement Bullard said, "I know there were people who wanted him to have more punishment. I certainly heard from a lot of them.

But the main thing is that he's never going to be part of the fishing industry again, and that his boats will continue to fish and create jobs.

But this time they'll do it following the law." Actually at the end of the day, they did me a favor. Carlos himself was just fine with this arrangement. After all, he'd been trying to sell his business all along. "All the charade they did on the radio and the newspapers and all that, all they did is advertise me for the sale of my vessels. I then have to pay for no advertisement."

And this time, he didn't just get an offer from some phony Russian gangsters. Big money came calling. Corporate money. From his jail cell in Fort Devons, Carlos negotiated a series of deals for the boats and permits,

including a total of about $100 million in cash. So not quite what he had been asking originally,

but also not bad for a man who had just pled guilty to 27 counts of federal financial crimes. "And I'll work away with over $100 million, so I think that a lot more juice out of this deal than all those assholes that investigated me will ever dream to see in a lifetime.

because they never going to be able to just sit back and enjoy the fruits of my work."

“When I first heard about the case of Carlos Raphael,”

it sounded like an intriguing but kind of small story. I looked into it, I interviewed Carlos, and then I put it aside. For all the big talk, this is not the fraud of the century. In dollar terms, it's nothing next to Theranos or FTX or Bernie made off, because fishing in the United States is just not a huge industry.

Most of our seafood is imported at this point, and a lot of coastal towns, it feels like the fishing boats are mostly there as a nice backdrop. So yeah, the codfather was a colorful character in a colorful world that has nothing to do with most people's daily lives. That was the conclusion I came to.

We'll hear argument next in case 22451,

Loper Bright Enterprises vs. Romando.

Mr. Clement. Then in 2024, something happened that changed my mind. Mr. Chief Justice in May it pleads the court.

“This is where our story leaves the port of New Bedford,”

and lands in the Supreme Court of the United States. Maybe you heard about this case a couple years ago, involving a legal principle known by the shorthand Chevron. This case well illustrates the real world cost of Chevron, which simply put the so-called Chevron doctrine

has to do with how federal agencies like Noah turn the vague laws of Congress into the specific regulations we all live with, and just how much latitude those agencies have.

Now, this case could have been brought by anyone who feels

they've been unduly regulated. It could have been a banker, a truck driver, a farmer, a small restaurant owner, truly all of us lead regulated lives. But this case was not brought by any of those people, and it was not brought by Chevron itself.

It was brought by a group of fishermen. Commercial fishing is hard, space on board, but vehicles, vessels is tight, and margins are tighter still. The Chevron doctrine dates back to a case from the 1980s. Back then, it did involve the oil company,

who was challenging what they thought was an unreasonable regulation. And at the time, it was kind of ambiguous, whether the regulation fit within the lines of the law or not. And the courts said, "Look." Susan Dudley, professor of administrative law.

Agencies have expertise in what the law provides. We're going to defer to the Agencies expertise on whether the law allows them to do this. That was the gist of the Chevron ruling. Leave it to the experts.

So from then on, if there was ever a technical question about what an agency could or couldn't do, the courts deferred to the agency, meaning to the regulator. And so the goal of Chevron was to say judges stick to your lane, and we're going to give agencies this lane.

If we take one step back, or maybe two steps back from this narrow legal question, it's really a political question that our democracy has been trying to settle since the founding. The question of who fills in the details.

Like Dudley explained a couple episodes ago, the country is too big and complicated for Congress to truly write all the laws of the land.

“So who should actually decide what safety features your car has to have?”

Or what words you're allowed to say on television? Or where exactly you can drill for oil? Or how many fish you can catch? This is the messy nuanced and often unpopular work of governing that we keep passing around and around between the branches of government.

Chevron seem to end that game of hot potato. For a time, how important is that legal precedent? There are some people, and I'm not an attorney, who think that Chevron contributed greatly to the increase in the administrative state, in the number of regulations that agencies issue,

and the breadth of the authority that agencies have found. As Dudley describes it, after the original Chevron case, for decades, agencies kept expanding their reach, and finding new ways to interpret the law that gave them more and more power. There is no justification for giving the tide of the government

or conjuring agency authority from silence. Then, along came this case in 2024, brought by a group of fishermen working under these same regulations

Listening to the oral arguments,

I immediately thought of all Carlos's ranting about the government, the enforcers, the overreach, the endless infractions and fines. But the agency here showed no such restraint. Because here was that same rant, but sharpened, cleaned up, and directed,

turned into a weapon to slash away at the powers of the administrative state. And the high court said, "You know what? I have the opinion of the court in case 22451." This is all gone too far. The Chevron doctrine has gone too far.

The time has come to leave it behind. Chevron is overruled. That means agencies like Noah and EPA will no longer enjoy the wide difference they had in the past to interpret the law and write the rules of life.

So we have now entered a new era of regulation. But exactly what that new era will look like? That's still hard to say. Most of the fishermen I talked to for the series have given up the hunt for fish.

They've retired, or they've taken a job on land, or maybe they've moved on to working scallop boats, which today are the big money maker and new bedford. The one person you heard from, who still chase his groundfish, is Paul Volent,

the guy who used to captain for Carlos.

The day I first met him, he was just back from an eight day trip to George's Bank.

“So how many hours of sleep do you get in the last day days?”

I get about two hours in 24. Volent didn't follow the Chevron case all that closely. He spends over 250 days a year out at sea. So he has more immediate concerns than a Supreme Court ruling that will take years to filter down into actual day-to-day regulations.

Boats still have to get permits and quota at the start of every season. They still have to use the right gear and avoid the closed areas. They still have to submit to all kinds of monitoring and reporting. For now none of that has changed. The reason this case changed my mind,

is that it reminded me what's truly at stake in this story. Something that can't be measured in dollars and cents. Because if commercial fishing were just about money, everything would be so much easier. The government could decide how many fish can be caught

and a big company could send out a big boat and catch them all. It would be easy to monitor, easy to enforce, with no haggling over tiny slices of quota, no meetings and hotel conference rooms with people spitting in each other's faces. None of that.

The problem is that there's so much more at stake.

It's the culture, the history, the community, the tradition. That is what makes fishermen so hard to regulate.

“And ultimately, I believe that is why they wound up before the Supreme Court.”

That day when Fulant got in, his wife and son and grandson all came to meet him at the auction house, the portal between land and sea. They brought coffee and a box of donuts for the crew, then everyone huddled around to watch the fish

flopped down the conveyor belt, like a little family gathering. You want to be a fisherman when you grow up? Fulant's father took him out fishing when he was eight years old. He took his own son out when he was eight years old. What does the green bully mean?

No water. No water, what about the red bully? That's Fulant's grandson, you hear there. He's only four. And it sounds like he'll be ready if and when the time comes.

Where's the bow? Where's the stern? There you go. He knows what his son says I got on deck. But I asked Fulant later,

if he thought his grandson would actually be a commercial fisherman like him and continue the family tradition that went all the way back to the old country. He told me the way the businesses today I'd rather have him do something else.

Fulant sounded defeated as he said it and having just heard him quiz the kid about buoy colors and boat parts made it that much worse. If you are someone who believes in expertise, who believes in science, who believes in procedure

and rules and regulation as a force to make the world more just,

“then you should also look long and close”

at the friction points where those things actually touch people's lives. Because in the places like New Bedford

the friction is hot and the feelings are raw.

“Many fishermen I met cheered the fall of the Chevron doctrine”

as a symbolic blow against the state. Just as many fishermen once cheered the lawless defiance of Carlos Rafael, those feelings emerge from a similar place. Yes, Carlos may have been greedy. He may have been crafts.

He may have even been cruel. But when our backs were against the wall, he did put up a fight. John Bullard retired from Noah in 2018. He told me every day he was there,

he felt like an old broken down horse getting to run in the Kentucky Derby. The codstocks he worked so desperately to protect have still not returned to their historic levels

and they may never return.

But Bullard has not lost faith in the ocean in regulation or in his hometown. In 2020, Carlos Rafael was transferred to community confinement because of COVID, so he only served about two and a half years in prison.

“Andrew Leling, who by that time was US attorney for the region,”

personally signed off on it. One fisherman in New Bedford told me that if he could make out like Carlos did, quote, "I would do that time standing on my hands." The boats that Carlos once owned

have by now been bought and sold a few times. First, a private equity backed company came in and grabbed a big chunk of the groundfish fleet, but less than ten years later, that company declared bankruptcy.

For Carlos, it was a kind of vindication,

like now you can see why I broke the law.

And in one last strange twist, after the bankruptcy, when the boats were put up for sale again, many of them were bought by the canaster family. The two brothers who also owned the auction house

and who Carlos insists to this day were his active partners in the entire fraud. For many years, you could still find boats out in the harbor, painted in the distinctive sea green,

with the letters "CR" on the bow. One of the last ones was carved up for scrap metal in 2024, another was sunk off the coast of New Jersey to make an artificial reef.

So the cod father fleet is now gone. Carlos, however, is not. Carlos, Carlos, right now. Carlos, Carlos, right now. When I was interviewing Fisherman Rodney Avala,

sitting in his truck in the Dunkin Donuts parking lot, Carlos drove right by us. And this was not the only time something like this happened.

The guy is just always around.

It's funny. Every time I come here, I see Carlos Rafael. He's around the ducks every day. Sunday's every day.

All the days he's around the duck every day. Why? He can't fish. He never fished before. He just owned Fisher boats.

So why does he hang around the ducks? I don't know. Maybe he just looks at Fisher boats. Something about your smile tells me there's more to the story. I don't know.

Okay. I don't know. Carlos is not a loser. He's not a loser. I'll tell you that right now.

“I mean, even the governor, I think that they put about a business.”

He's not a loser. Yeah. But is that the company? I mean, there's a lot of guys. At the very end of our interview.

Carlos Rafael opened up the bottom drawer of his desk once again. This guy had sent a letter. You wanted to talk. They won't write a book. These old people they had sent.

Where he used to keep the secret set of books. He now has a stack of envelopes from all the publishers and production companies who wanted to tell his story. Talk a television now. I'll see what I like to get about.

I don't want to. I don't need an envelope or ship, please, guys. That's it. Don't overweight. So why are you willing to talk to me?

Because a lot of guys try to talk to me. I just didn't have the patience of the time. And they had to call me to really when I came out of prison. I had so much shit to put into place. And when you call and you said, you do this as a freelancer.

You are in your own. I think it's an opportunity if somebody can get something out of the deal.

Not a big producer where these guys already got a lot of money.

No, it's not a bullshit. So I like to deal with a smaller guy. Carlos likes to deal with a smaller guy. Which in this case is me. I should say in full disclosure that since the time of that interview,

I have become an employee with a salary and a boss. All the things Carlos didn't want in life. So I'm not as I record this a freelancer.

But I guess I do still like to think of myself as the little guy.

“I mean, don't we all want to think of ourselves that way?”

As this crappy underdog, making it work with whatever we have, building something from nothing all on our own. That is the American dream, right? So maybe I shouldn't be surprised that Carlos, even after all he has built, all he has done in life, he still likes to see himself fighting for the little guy.

The big guys they already fed, so they don't need any help. Well, whatever your motivations I do appreciate it. You're very welcome. So we can leave it there. Yeah.

[Music] [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.

“As always, if you want to hear more stories like this one,”

produced by the same fantastic 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 Johnny Tobin and Annie Curzon. [Music] There is one person I've been meaning to think all along, who has been a sounding board and a resource through this whole project, the new Bedford-based reporter and writer Ben Burke.

It's not often that you come away from a documentary project like this with a new friend,

“but that's exactly what happened with this one.”

I also want to shout out Genevieve Billia, who is the public affairs officer for IRS criminal investigation, and who responded to all of my many, many requests over the past year. However, you feel about the government or the IRS, know that Genevieve made my job so much easier.

Thank you again to the new Bedford-Fishing Heritage Center, really to everyone we interviewed, but especially to John Carlos Rodney, Paul, Linda and Ron, who all made time from multiple interviews and phone conversations. The artwork is by Bill Miller, our closing song is Viva Viva New Bedford by Georges Ferrera.

The big dig is a production of GPH News and Distributed by PRX. Viva Viva All New Bedford, Hey, I want to make sure that you know this series you're listening to right now is part of an ongoing feed,

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.