Craig Welch - Shell Games: Rogues, Smugglers, and the Hunt for Natures Bounty

| The Hunt

| Snitches

| Larger than Life

| Clam Kings

| The Fed

| Metamorphosis: Life Undercover

| Kingpin

| Its Just a Business Thing

| An Incredible Virus

| A Sea of Abundance

| Crab Men

| The Hunt, Redux

| The Whole West Coast

November 13, 2001

The boat didnt look like much. Aluminum with blue trim. A row of smudged cabin windows. A thick center mast crowded with antennas and loudspeakers. Through moonlight and a light rain, Detective Ed Volz could see a curtain of black rubber cloaking half of the vessels deck like a tent. He couldnt spot the orange glow of a single cigarette and suspected the crew had been ordered not to smoke.

Volz and a partner, Bill Jarmon, were crouched behind Douglas firs and madronas on a wooded bluff overlooking Washingtons Puget Sound. They peered down a sandy cliff, Volz through a spotting scope, Jarmon through binoculars, at the boat idling below. Volz heard little other than the wind and the waves. He knew a pair of aging mattresses stuffed in old cloth sleeping bags had been wrapped around an air compressor, muffling its groan. No one who passed by would suspect the crew fed oxygen through a hose to a diver below.

Volz had never been diving. But he knew what could be found in the regions murky underwater world. In the Sounds web of tideflats, channels, marshes, bays, and deltas, life took beguiling formsparticularly in the dimmest depths. Shovel-nosed ratfish patrolled the cobble flats alongside wolf eels with pinched faces that looked chiseled from granite. Anemones glowed in waggling fingers of lavender or in perfect white cauliflower stalks. Ochre sea stars the size of cow heads curled around rocks and mussels, gauging light through the red dots on each arm. Bubble-gum-pink corals camouflaged the porcupine shields of sea urchins.

Rockfish, perch, lingcod, squid. At one time or another, the detectives had found all of these and more in places they did not belongin nets tied under docks to be retrieved after dark, in aquariums or coolers hidden under tarps in old pickups, on ice in the holding tanks of pirate fishing boats. Thieves hooked, netted, dug, and snatched these creatures and then sold them for food, pets, trophies, even medicine. Some took just a few plants and animals. Others hijacked sea life by the truckload. Volz couldnt recall all the ways hed seen people steal.

Volz made his living policing the theft of wild things. In twenty-five years with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, hed chased elk-antler thieves and smugglers exporting bobcat and lynx to collectors. Hed caught poachers whod hacked off eagle talons for artifact hunters. He carried handcuffs and operated with all the police powers of other lawmen. Here on the western slope of the Cascades, he and his fellow detectives specialized in undercover investigations, mostly involving the regions billion-dollar fishing industry. Theyd tracked permits and bank records and trapped Dungeness crab thieves and snared abalone poachers who pried the fist-size mollusks from rocky crevices. But theyd never pursued anyone quite like this captain.

Volz sprawled on a spongy bed of leaves on the bluff and watched fog roll in through the rain and across the black water and the boat below. He could see the faintest glow through the trees across the channellights from the prison on the far side of McNeil Island. This investigation kept expanding, drawing in other officers. Tonight, he and Jarmon were joined by a third detective, Charlie Pudwill, whod made his way to the pea-gravel beach below. Pudwill stood at the waters edge, a quarter mile north. He was closer to the action, but if the boat pulled anchor, hed have to sprint to his truck and wind up through the woods to the road before he could give chase.

Volz was grateful for the help. It was just after midnight, and the detectives already had tailed the suspect for hours, racing across bridges by land as the boat stole south through Puget Sound. Jarmon was an excellent driver, but he could be a cowboy behind the wheel. Hed cornered the Ford Expedition so fast that Volz had pancaked both hands against the dash trying to keep his head from whipping against the window. The captain had mastered these hidden passages, but Volz and Jarmon found the nearby streets less familiar. Theyd bombed in and out of subdivisions, seeking secluded spots with views of the water that were free from neighbors, lights, and dogs. New waterfront bungalows rose among the trees, and construction cones lined streets. Bulldozers had carved a corner off a plot near the road, but no one had started building on this tiny patch overlooking the surf.

Volz adjusted and readjusted his scope. Eventually he saw what could have been a harbor seal bobbing above the waters surface. Then a black-gloved hand emerged, and someone paddled toward the boat. The diver climbed aboard the vessel empty-handed.

Volz was not expecting this. Hed spent hours discussing this very spot with the biologist on his team. Unlike much of Puget Sound, Wyckoff Shoal, just north of Drayton Passage, rarely reached deeper than forty feet. Coarse-grained sand coated the bottom, and tides swept by at two knots. Other than accordion-fanned orange sea pens and twenty-four-armed sunflower stars, little of consequence hung out above the sandy floor. The real riches were buried below. And while each creature would take a small struggle to retrieve, any discerning thief would gather as many as he could carry. Volz had expected the diver would stay underwater for hours. Then the crew would have hauled up a net carrying a load of seafood large enough to stuff a Volkswagen. Instead, the detectives watched the black shadow peel off his neoprene dry suit.

Within minutes the boat rumbled to life. Hugging the shoreline, it jetted toward Devils Head point, the last hook on the peninsula before the shoreline looped west and back north.

Volz and Jarmon ran toward the road, clambered into the Expedition, and shot south, trying to keep up. The boat was already out of sight. They drove through the night high above the beach, the trucks headlights off, unable to spy the boat or raise Pudwill on the radio. They rolled the windows down and strained to hear the ships diesel engine growl through the mist.

The detectives had lost the captain several times before; he used top-of-the-line radar and night-vision gear and moved unpredictably, as if he knew he was being watched. Theyd finally caught a break two months earlier. An informant had described crew members on the boat forging documents and illegally hauling in several million dollars worth of shellfish. If that was true, Volz was watching one of the countrys most profitable wildlife smuggling ringscertainly the strangest and most sophisticated the Pacific Northwest had seen in decades. The tipster told them the captains top shipboard rules: Dump everything if you see anyone approaching; jet away at top speed; and dont stop unless cops thrust guns in your face.

It was good stuff, but nowhere near enough. The detectives had to catch the thieves in the act. Four times in two weeks, theyd tried tailing the boat from land. Each time, theyd followed until 4 A.M . And each time, the boat had returned to the Fox Island marina empty. No one unloaded what the tipster said the crew was hunting: the worlds largest burrowing clam, known as a geoduck (pronounced gooey duck), an obscene-looking giant mollusk that embodied a sea change in wildlife smuggling, a creature with which Volz shared a long and complicated history.