He pled
guilty on March 28, 207 to 28 separate charges, including false labeling of
fish, tax evasion, smuggling cash and falsifying federal records and received a
prison sentence about a year ago. Last
January, civil penalties were also assessed against him.
Since that was done, his name faded out of the news.
But no one can carry out such broad-based offenses on their
own, even though there has been little mention of Rafael's henchmen, who profited
well from knowingly supporting his scheme, in the news.
The document also increased the number of alleged violations
to 88; such allegations included misreporting of the species caught—which was
the heart of Rafael’s poaching scheme—to fishing gear violations and violations
of various observer requirements.
No one seems to be particularly concerned about stiffer
penalties being assessed against Carlos Rafael, except, most probably, for Rafael
himself. But there is a remarkable
amount of pushback against NOAA going after the captains.
It’s an interesting reaction because, as
John Bullard, the former administrator of NMFS Greater Atlantic Regional
Fisheries Office observed,
“he calls himself the ‘Codfather.’ That’s the name he gave himself. Likening himself to a mafia don. He models himself as the head of the criminal
enterprise. Why anyone would think he is
the only bad actor when he himself molded himself as the head of a criminal
enterprise just defies logic.”
But logic often gets twisted into unrecognizable shapes when
fish are involved.
The Massachusetts news outlet South
Coast Today reported that Jon Mitchell, the mayor of New Bedford, Rafael’s home
port, believes
“NOAA taking action against Rafael’s captains crosses a line.”
It’s hard for anyone outside New Bedford to understand why.
“[F]ishermen are allowed to catch more of comparatively
common species than rare ones. That can
quickly become a problem: You might own a big slice of the haddock pie, but if
your net happens to catch flounder, you must either stop fishing or rent more
flounder quota from your peers. Rafael
simply mislabeled the other kinds of groundfish as haddock, an abundant species
for which he owned millions of pounds…”
For most fishermen, that would be a difficult scam to pull
off, but Rafael’s operation was big enough to facilitate such fraud. Yet he couldn’t do it all by himself.
“[NOAA] requires fishing boats to report the species and
weight of their catch, among other information, each time they return from the
sea. Seafood dealers, meanwhile, have to
submit their own reports detailing what they purchase from incoming vessels,
which NOAA uses to verify fishermen’s accounts.
Rafael, though, was exploiting a gaping loophole. Because he owned both boats and a dealership,
he
could instruct his captains to misreport their catch, and then he could
falsify the dealer reports to corroborate the lie… [emphasis added]”
The captains were thus active and willing participants
in the scheme. After all, when Rafael
made more money, even if from illegal actions, they made more money, too.
But money never stays in one person’s pocket. Rafael’s crimes brought money not only to
himself and his captains, but to the people who crewed on his boats, the businesses
that supplied and supported the vessels, truckers who moved the fish, ice
houses and such. Beyond that, the money
spread out into the greater community, supporting everything from waterfront
bars to grocery stores and gas stations to, in all likelihood, even churches and day care centers.
As a result, to many in New Bedford, Rafael was a sort of
Robin Hood, who fought an oppressive government bureaucracy, stealing fish from the “rich” feds to give to his “poor” community. When
he was sentenced, the Boston Globe reported the reaction of one of his crewmen,
who was largely sympathetic to Rafael, despite his crimes.
“’He kept hundreds of jobs afloat,’ said Shawn Machie, an
Acushnet [Massachusetts] fisherman who works on one of Rafael’s boats. Machie, 47, who has 3-month-old twins, said
Rafael was forced to skirt regulations that prevent fishermen from making a
good living.
“’It wouldn’t be like this if it weren’t for unfair
regulations,’ Machie said. ‘Why does the
government got to squeeze people into a position where they gotta do stuff like
this to survive?’”
The fact that the same arguments could be made in support of
pimps, drug dealers and other species of criminal that haunt economically-depressed
communities, including New Bedford, probably never occurred to Machie. It’s a near certainty that he’d object very
strongly if he heard outlaw fishermen tossed into the same
bucket with more traditional felons, even though someone looking in from the outside might
have a hard time telling them apart.
Machie isn’t alone.
It seems that New Bedford, as a whole, is willing to give an entire
category of criminal—those who helped Rafael poach fish on a wholesale scale—a free
pass. Their
thinking is clearly spelled out in a comment made by the city’s mayor,
Mitchell, who said
“The real culprit is Carlos Rafael. To my mind, it would be overkill to go after
the captains who were doing his bidding and on whose good graces their
livelihood depended. The overall goal
should be to punish Carlos Rafael but not to damage the port. [emphasis added]”
But what if the port, or at least a significant part of it,
was complicit in Rafael’s scheme, as the captains certainly were?
After all, if we were talking about
another sort of crime, no one would question the need to bring enforcement
actions against everyone who directly and intentionally supported the scheme.
In
many ways, his story parallels that of Rafael.
Like Rafael, El
Chapo started out poor and, through a combination of astute business instincts and
a ruthless willingness to crush their competition (although only El Chapo resorted
to murder), ended up at the top of a criminal enterprise. Like Rafael, he was seen as a folk hero by
some.
There is little doubt that some of the money El Chapo spent,
and he reportedly spent quite a bit, went to people who needed it
badly.
But there doesn’t seem to be anyone out there who is making the
argument that, while El Chapo deserves to be punished, the various killers,
drug dealers, smugglers and other assorted criminals should escape punishment,
merely because they did his bidding and depended on him for their livelihood.
Yet Rafael depended on his captains to break fisheries laws,
just as El Chapo depended on his trusted smugglers to get drugs across the Rio
Grande. For both, the entire criminal
enterprise could never have survived, much less grown large, without the
willing help of numerous underlings who knowingly broke the law in return for
financial gains.
Thus, NOAA’s proposed sanctions against Rafael’s captains,
as well as Rafael himself, are an entirely appropriate way to punish those who helped Rafael break the law (and it should be noted that, for the
captains, things could be worse, as the sanctions are solely civil, and bring
no criminal liability at all).
Yes, a lot of people and businesses in New Bedford made some
good money from Rafael’s crimes, and they don’t want their cash flow to end.
But that’s the risk you take when you abet crime.
“I wish every member of our enforcement branch godspeed that
they root out every single criminal that dishonors the honest fishermen I know.”
To that, we should all say, “Amen.”
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