Caught Fishing -- The Trials Of A Sturgeon Pirate On The Columbia

Law enforcement can be like fishing: You try to do everything you can to improve your chances, and then you wait and wait and wait and sometimes the river surprises you. The FBI wasn't looking for fish theives. They wanted bank robbers.

Two white males had entered a First Independent Bank branch in Dollars Corner, a wide spot in the road near the Washington-Oregon border, and relieved the vault of several stacks of cash and one explosive dye pack. Soon after the robbery, currency with what at first glance appeared to be traces of red dye stains was traced to a Vancouver, Wash., motel just off the interstate.

The stained bills came from the two white males in Room 124.

They were renting a two-bedroom apartment-style unit for the whole month. They paid their $968 in advance. They kept strange hours, sometimes driving off at night in a pickup truck towing a small aluminum boat. They refused maid service.

The FBI watched Room 124. On day one they saw one of the men chuck something into the motel Dumpster.

An empty container of Morton salt. To the agent untrained in fish-related detective work, it meant nothing.

On day two the FBI tailed one of the men to the local Federal Express office, where he shipped several packages to New Jersey.

Meanwhile, employees at the motel had been noticing a strange odor seeping from beneath the door of Room 124. The manager thought "drug lab" and let herself in. She found poles, an outboard motor, some fishy-smelling slop in a bucket, and a supply of empty plastic jars with screw-on lids. Not a meth lab, but what then?

That stained currency was beginning to look less and less red. The FBI decided to surveil elsewhere for their bank robbers, and handed over information about the men in Room 124 to the agency they thought might be interested, the Washington State Department of Fisheries. Thus did come to light what would turn out to be the biggest caviar poaching case in the history of the Northwest, perhaps the country.

It involved thousands of pounds of caviar and hundreds of thousands of dollars, which changed hands at the expense of an ancient, imperiled, shockingly ugly fish; it tested the guile of a crack wildlife crime investigator with a fondness for James Bond; it tarnished one of the titans of the Eastern fancy food establishment; and it exposed one of the greatest fish-crime masterminds of all time to be a handyman from rural Washington who, had he not chosen the path of a poacher, would have been able to spend more time on his inventions, such as a hygienic toilet-seat lifter.

A SOLUTION TO THE toilet-seat problem could turn out to be a gold mine. Historically, though, the big money has always been in salted sturgeon eggs.

In the Roman Empire, caviar arrived at the table accompanied by a blast of trumpets. In 1964, when the Soviet newspaper Izvestia bought an excerpt from the autobiography of Charlie Chaplin, it paid the Little Tramp with 9 pounds of caviar.

A New York mail-order company, Caviarteria, sold about 4 tons of caviar last year, a smidgen of which was a rare platinum-colored variety it calls "Ultra." It comes from Caspian Sea Beluga sturgeon that happen to be albino; a 14-ounce tin sells for $1,000, plus shipping.

The only other edibles that approach the cost of caviar are saffron and truffles; the eating of them does not compare with the caviar sacrament.

If the caviar gods smile on you, a blessed tin of "black diamonds" will appear at your table nestled in a shallow bowl of crushed ice, chilled to exactly 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

"The eggs must arrive in your mouth unbroken," commands Peter Mayle, in the sybaritic tone that caviar-lovers are wont to adopt. "Only then, as you crush them between your tongue and your palate, do you experience that tiny savory explosion that all the fuss is about." Even the matter of the proper utensil to convey eggs to tongue cannot to be taken lightly. Mayle swears by disposable plastic deli spoons; others recommend mother-of-pearl, gold, ivory or ram's horn.

Most caviar comes from what used to be the Soviet Union, and also from Iran. The next largest world power, you may be surprised to learn, is the United States.

In this country, fish eggs of any type can be called caviar, as long as the word is preceded by the name of the fish: e.g., salmon caviar. If it is just plain caviar, though, it must be from sturgeon.

In pursuit of caviar, we have nearly loved the sturgeon to death.

A British traveler to the colonies in 1675 wrote that the bottom-feeding behemoths were "in some rivers so numerous that it is hazardous for canoes . . . to pass to and again." Sturgeon once clogged the waters of the Hudson, Mississippi, Missouri, Sacramento and Columbia rivers. Seven different species of the fish inhabit U.S. waters; the white sturgeon, found in the Columbia in greatest abundance below the Bonneville Dam, is the largest freshwater fish in North America. The most gargantuan one on record to be caught in the Columbia weighed 1,287 pounds.

At that size, a sturgeon's only natural enemy is man, which is enemy enough. When refrigerated rail cars were introduced in the 1880s, it became feasible to ship the fish's flesh and caviar to the urbane palates of San Francisco and New York, and on to Europe. Thence began the sturgeon strip-mining. In five years, the catch on the Columbia River withered, from a peak of 5.5 million pounds (in 1892) to a mere 100,000 pounds.

The first limits on sturgeon fishing were enacted in Oregon and Washington in 1899: "Chinese gang lines" - long ropes strung with unbaited hooks that snag a sturgeon as it swims by - were outlawed, as was the taking of fish under 4 feet. Practically nothing was known about the basic biology of white sturgeon, though, until the late 1940s. A research biologist named Alexander Bajkov discovered that the female white sturgeon becomes sexually mature, on average, at age 23. In light of Bajkov's findings, in 1950 Washington set a maximum size limit of 6 feet.

Upper size limits are designed to prevent the catch of egg-bearing females. Some legally taken fish do happen to contain roe, but the roe can only be sold, still in the sturgeon, to a licensed fish buyer, who is allowed to turn it into caviar - removing the fat and egg skein and adding salt. Roe from sturgeon caught by sport fishermen cannot be legally sold.

Now, with the succulence of sturgeon flesh being rediscovered, the pressure between sturgeon fishers and state regulators has grown more acute. Commercially, sturgeon can be netted only during salmon season, and must be between 4 feet and 5 feet 6 inches long; last fall the state cut off the year's commercial sturgeon harvest on the Columbia altogether when it realized the harvest had exceeded the Department of Fisheries' expectations by more than 30 percent. Licensed sport anglers on the Columbia go looking for sturgeon more than any other fish, even salmon, but as of January, each angler can keep only 10 sturgeon instead of 15 for the entire year.

Meanwhile, in the Caspian Sea, where caviar is still the biggest cash crop, the sevruga, osetra and beluga sturgeon are being fished, dammed and polluted into oblivion. The number of sturgeon returning to spawn in the Volga has dropped threefold since 1991, moving one Russian scientist to lament: "Our hearts ache for human stupidity."

IN RUSSIA, STEPHEN Gale Darnell would be called a brakanieri, a "fish pirate."

The criminal indictment handed down last April drew Darnell as an outlaw of Blackbeard-like scale. Here was a mercenary who plied the Columbia River, cooly plundering a prehistoric species of fish for more than 3,000 pounds of caviar. Here was a flouter of the Lacey Act, which makes it a federal offense to traffic across state line in fish products that are taken or sold in violation of state law. Here was a villain against nature.

The state's senior sturgeon biologist, John DeVore, estimated that about 2,300 adult sturgeon would have had to have been killed to supply the roe that went into Darnell's caviar; that number of fish could represent as much as 20 percent of the adult population in the Columbia between the mouth and McNary Dam, the fourth dam up.

"I was flabbergasted," said DeVore. "I'm always sadly disappointed by the enormity of human greed."

The court papers didn't specify how, exactly, Darnell acquired his booty. I imagined him pulling in Chinese gang lines under a moonless sky, slicing egg sacs from the bellies of still-finning sturgeon (the finest caviar is extracted from fish that have been knocked unconscious, so their eggs remain untainted by the hormones released when the fish dies), then sliding the 200-pound carcasses back into the water's inky caress.

I imagined him with a peg leg, an eye patch, and, in place of his left hand, a gaff hook.

The fish pirate lives in Electric City, which is almost close enough to the Grand Coulee Dam to hear the tailrace and is a city only in name.

The fish pirate lives in a baby-blue house in the high part of town. Down below somewhere is a shop that sells plaster seagulls, and a bar with electronic darts, and a cinderblock city hall that looks as though someone picked it up a few feet and dropped it.

The fish pirate's wife, Marilyn, was his high-school sweetheart; they lost touch and then found each other after five bad marriages. She collects antique bottles that she digs up, guided by maps pinpointing the location of old outhouses. She also paints pictures of her husband fishing. Acrylics.

One painting includes his father, Lenly, who drove the bulldozers that set boulders on the banks beneath the dams, and taught his son to catch sturgeon. Lenly rigged up a little remote-controlled boat, with bicycle handlebars and a Cadillac starter motor. The boat carried a baited sturgeon hook from the bank to the center of the river, farther and more accurately than a man could cast, to the deep holes where the fish wait for the current to bring them something edible. The fish pirate believes his father's boat, christened Sputnik, may have been the first of its kind, which the state has since outlawed.

He has lived his whole life, except for some time in the military, near the Columbia River.

The fish pirate was charged with illegally selling caviar over 5 years in exchange for cash payments of roughly $247,000. In requesting a court-appointed attorney, the fish pirate listed his assets as: the baby-blue house (valued at $48,000); a car and a pickup truck, each with more than 100,000 miles on the odometer ($5,000, combined); his job as an electrician ($700 a month, gross); and a checking account with a balance of $57. He did not list his 12-foot aluminum boat or his 16 rods.

I visited the fish pirate, and can report that his arms and legs do not end in prosthetics, and his two blue eyes are both his own. He is 47, and wears the same size jeans to his job as an electrician that he used to wear to high school, and would not be caught dead, nor at his own trial, in a coat and tie. He is handsome in a way that might remind you of a slim Hal Linden, the actor from "Barney Miller." Real cities make him tense. There is nothing of the real city in his voice, no loud crowd of words. He talks as if always aware that talking can scare the fish.

The fish pirate took me on the river to look for walleye. Even though he found only a couple, which he released, and even though we stood a better chance of catching frostbite, the outing seemed to relax him. Back at the house he showed me a collapsible tent he devised for ice fishing, and the tab for lifting a toilet seat without touching the seat's scary underside. He also gave me a copy of what may be his most unsettling invention: the "fart muffler," which looks like a hybrid of a plastic rifle bullet, ear plug and cigarette filter.

He consulted a Minnesota physician ("the king of flatulence," he boasted) but field-tested it himself, after eating a plate of pinto beans and an entire can of cashews. "I was about exploding," he said. "I played a whole game of cards with my family. They couldn't tell a thing."

The fish pirate admits he is no marketing genius. What he knows is the water between two banks. He fished for a living, briefly, but mostly he has lived for the fishing. "Sturgeon," the fish pirate said, "has been my real love all my life."

Shortly before he was indicted for sturgeon poaching, he wrote a letter to the editor of the Skamania County Pioneer. The letter carried the heading, SAVE THE STURGEON! It implored the state to "restore the sport in sturgeon fishing" and decried what he (and others) saw as the state's policy to look out more for the interests of the commercial fisherman. "Put a price on (sturgeon's) heads," he wrote, "and no matter how you set the seasons these fish are in trouble."

He loved finding sturgeon and fighting them and filleting them. The eggs, though, he never much cared for the eggs. "Poor people don't eat caviar," he said. "It's just salty fish eggs. They throw it away or feed it to the dogs."

Such a waste, when there was a caviar dealer in New Jersey willing to pay $100 a pound.

STURGEON LIKE TO EAT smelt and herring, but they are not finicky. Hooks sprayed with WD-40; leaky cans of baked beans; sacks of onions; dead cats; hog's heads - all have been said to be sucked into the fish's toothless, Hooverlike maw. Such indiscriminate feeding, combined with ugliness, makes sturgeon a bit creepy. Ever since an 11-foot, 670-pound dead sturgeon was found floating in Lake Washington several years ago, I have found it hard to swim there without overreacting to anything that brushes against my ankle. (Now it turns out that the grainy photo of the Loch Ness monster probably showed the snout of a large sturgeon.)

And yet the definitive "Jaws"-like sturgeon thriller remains to be written.

To meet Andy Cohen is to forget about working on the manuscript and instead start thinking about pitching a TV series called "Fish Cop."

"This is the dirty, bitter end of the ecology business," Cohen told me when I visited his office. I admired the framed sheet music from the James Bond movie "Thunderball," and a publicity photo of Roger Moore in his 007 tuxedo, arms crossed, hand cradling his Walther PPK. Cohen kept talking.

"When Greenpeace doesn't work and editorials don't work and something really needs to be done - I mean, these guys are criminals - that's where we take over."

Cue "Fish Cop" theme music.

Cohen's mother sits on the board of directors of the New York Audubon Society; Cohen's father teaches the history of whaling and leads trips to the Galapagos Islands. They are proud of their son. At 37 he carries a business card embossed with a gold foil badge and the words SPECIAL AGENT UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE NATIONAL OCEANIC & ATMOSPHERIC ADMIN. NATIONAL MARINE FISHERIES SERVICE LAW ENFORCEMENT DIVISION - in short, fish cop.

Several years ago, he helped crack a high-seas poaching ring that tried to launder 1,200 tons of illegal salmon through Japan, Taiwan, Canada, St. Pierre Et Miquelon, the U.S. and South Africa; Cohen at one point posed as a shady fish buyer and found himself on a refrigerated cargo ship in the middle of the ocean, sending coded radio messages to shore. In another case, Cohen chased two Canadian crabbers near Bellingham, leaped from his boat into their boat a la Bond, and disarmed one of the men who menaced him with a meat cleaver.

He liked complicated cases, but they were rarely sexy. The caviar case looked rare.

Cohen flew east in April 1991 for his first, unannounced, visit to the recipient of Steve Darnell's Federal Express packages: the Hansen Caviar Co.

One of the cars in the parking lot was Arnold Hansen-Sturm's BMW. It bore the New Jersey vanity plate BELUGA.

Arnold Hansen-Sturm is 54 years old and likes to point out that he is a fifth-generation caviar merchant. His great-grandfather negotiated with the czarist Romanov family for the right to haul sturgeon out of the Caspian Sea. Arnold has spent all his adult working life buying and selling caviar. He first tasted caviar at age 2. Before he turned 40, he had been profiled by People magazine, which photographed him preparing caviar omelets for his family. He presided over the National Association for Specialty Foods, which represents dealers in delicacies including, but not limited to, smoked meats, foie gras not limited to, foie gras and smoked meats.

Also, he perspires heavily when nervous. When Cohen asked him for records of caviar shipped from Steve Darnell, the caviar merchant started sweating.

Cohen left the office with records of 13 shipments, and the impression of having been lied to. By the end of Cohen's investigation, 54 more shipments would surface.

He examined telephone logs, purchase journals, memos. He found someone who could read Hansen-Sturm's sloppy handwriting. He visited Caviarteria's warehouse to sample caviar.

The caviar pirate, meanwhile, was doing his best not to scare the fish. Cohen visited him, too. The fish cop knocked on the door of the baby-blue house and carried in a stack of Federal Express records and certified mail receipts.

"Do you remember getting this envelope?" said the fish cop.

"Well, I get a lot of mail," said the fish pirate.

"What was in it? Was it $2,600 cash?"

"You tell me."

"Was it for caviar?"

"You're the investigator. You seem like a pretty smart guy. You don't need me to work it out."

ON THE SEVENTH day of the trial of the great Northwest caviar caper, shortly before the lawyers rested, one of the prosecutors looked at the jury and said:

"A trial at its heart is a simple thing: a search for the truth."

It struck me as a poetic thing to come out of the mouth of a lawyer who wasn't on television. After seven days in court, it also struck me as less simple than it sounded.

On the day before the trial began, Steve Darnell jumped into the government's boat, switching his plea to guilty and agreeing to cooperate in the prosecution of Arnold Hansen-Sturm. In return, the government agreed not to drag Darnell's wife into the case, and to drop the chargs against Darnell's roommate at the Value Motel, a fishing buddy with buggy eyes and a cane, named Lawrence Tracy. In the plea bargain's afterglow, Tracy would comment: "That's what it means to be friends."

There was also some relief in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Seattle.

Suddenly, the government found itself with a witness - the only witness - who would testify that Hansen-Sturm knew the caviar he was buying was illegal (knowledge made the violation of the Lacey Act a felony; a lesser standard - that he merely should have known - would bring down the crime to a misdemeanor).

Here was the not-so-simple part of this trial, though: The new star witness for the prosecution was an admitted felon, and the defendant was a nervous wreck who, under pressure, could recite the alphabet and make you have your doubts whether it started with A.

The courtroom was chilly - problems with the pipes - on the morning Darnell stuck his left hand in the pocket of his stiff blue jeans and raised his other hand and swore to tell the truth.

It seems like a good idea to put all fishermen under oath at least once in their lives. Under penalty of perjury, Darnell testified the biggest sturgeon he ever caught was 10 feet 4 inches long.

He also testified he learned caviar-making from library books, and that he bought the roe from fishermen whom he knew sometimes only by face.

Soon, Darnell was recounting his first telephone call to Hansen-Sturm, how he agreed to send a sample of his wares, and how he told the caviar merchant: "This was not a legal transaction."

Darnell's wife, Marilyn, sat in the gallery, chewing gum and clutching a bag of crocheting.

He said he never told Marilyn what he was up to, or about all the cash. He hid some of it in jars and buried it in the back yard. He spent every penny. Marilyn needed a hysterectomy; they had no insurance. "I had kids with crooked teeth, hackin' their fingers off, things like that. I was raisin' a family."

The pipes started to knock. The courtroom warmed up as the cross-examination began. Hansen-Sturm's attorney fought the fisherman.

"Have you lied a lot in your life?"

"Probably no more than the average person."

"You've lied to agents, to accountants, to the IRS. You've lied a lot, haven't you?"

Darnell stared straight at him.

"Nothing you did or said to Arnold Hansen-Sturm suggested it was illegal."

"That's not hardly true."

The attorney was not ready to let this line of questioning go slack.

"The first time you told this story was when you needed it, when you told it to" the U.S. attorneys on the case.

"I didn't go blabbin' it around, for obvious reasons."

The attorney reminded him of his less-than-candid encounter with agent Cohen. "I don't remember being under oath," Darnell said. The attorney reminded him that he had told Cohen he was at the motel working on a "self-opening toilet seat."

"I'm still working on it," Darnell said. "It came to me, being married, arguing back and forth about leaving the seat up."

More than a few of the jurors smiled. Marilyn giggled.

Next on the stand was Arnold Hansen-Sturm. He raised his right hand, then told the jury that Steve Darnell was a liar and that he never knew he was buying illegal caviar. The caviar merchant sweated and cried.

When it was all over, the jury went to a room furnished with numerous coffee makers and a pack of cards and a painting of the ocean and deliberated for two days. Here is what they agreed to be the truth:

That the caviar merchant tried to obstruct the grand-jury investigation. That he did not know the caviar he was buying from Steve Darnell was illegal, but that he should have known.

The caviar merchant was sentenced to 18 months in prison and a $4,000 fine (with another $20,000 fine against his company); he planned to appeal.

STEVE DARNELL SPENT THE last few months of last year wiring houses and fishing for walleye and waiting to be sentenced for his crime.

His jeans were softer, but still dark blue, when he returned to the courtroom. His wife was with him, wadding up a tissue and sniffling softly.

His attorney said he "did what he did, your honor, out of economic desperation."

The government attorney called him "a stand-up guy" who, once he pleaded guilty, never tried to shift the blame.

The fish pirate said he started out as someone concerned about the overharvesting of sturgeon, then wound up as part of the problem.

The judge listened to it all and then sentenced Darnell to eight months in prison and a $2,500 fine.

Darnell stood there, worrying that the judge might say something horrible: No more fishing. "That'd be like a death sentence," he thought, but the judge only told him to turn in his hunting rifle. He could keep his poles and reels.

The smelt were starting to run in the Columbia and the sturgeon were growing less sluggish when Darnell began serving his time. Except for his hitch in Vietnam, the prison is as far from the river as he has ever lived. It is a minimum-security place, outside Spokane, in a converted Air National Guard camp, with tennis courts and a softball field but not, as the fish pirate hoped, a bluegill pond.

The state Department of Fisheries, meanwhile, was considering banning the sale of locally caught caviar entirely, to make it easier to eliminate the black market. Special Agent Andy Cohen was between investigations. And the mail-order business Caviarteria, with retail stores in Manhattan and Beverly Hills, was bracing for another record-breaking year of sales, with a waiting list of customers desiring $1,000-a-tin eggs from a large albino fish.

Kit Boss is a Pacific staff writer. Harley Soltes is Pacific's staff photographer.