The great geoduck caper
Fifty years of law enforcement between them and this much they'd learned: to catch the kingpin of Northwest poachers they were going to get soaked.
So on a wet November night, fish detectives Ed Volz and Bill Jarmon slogged through high tide along the mainland near McNeil Island, dodging waves and sliding over driftwood — the only way to tail the 42-foot Typhoon unnoticed.
With top-of-the-line radar and night-vision gear, the boat crossed Puget Sound like a shadow — no running lights, not even the orange speck of a cigarette ember. Skipper Doug Tobin, the state's most sophisticated wildlife thief, was in pursuit of a lucrative, ridiculously proportioned clam.
Tobin knew what he was doing, Volz thought. And no wonder: Cops had helped teach him the tricks of the trade.
For months, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife cops had been trying to document the clam bandit's crimes. And on this night the Typhoon was idling just off Devils Head point — a clam-rich area closed to nighttime shellfishing.
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At 5 a.m. Tobin's boat zipped to shore on Fox Island where they watched his crew unload nine milk crates into a van. The agents immediately sent scuba divers into seas below where the boat had idled.
There they found fresh divots in the muck, a telltale sign of what had been stolen: 400 pounds of geoduck, the world's largest burrowing clam — a mollusk so valuable poachers have traded them for heroin.
With a Louisville Slugger-thick neck snaking from a saucer-sized shell, a geoduck (pronounced "gooey duck") resembles nothing so much as the leathery snout of an aardvark. But a single one can fetch $100 as seafood in Hong Kong, and they litter Puget Sound like pennies in a fountain.
Working a few nights a week a stealthy poacher could make a fortune. And this particular poacher was well on his way.
Already Tobin had dragged the fish cops through an underworld of hit men and forgers — and ultimately double-crossed them.
As the case ended this spring, court records, dozens of interviews, internal law-enforcement documents and transcripts of tape-recorded conversations painted a portrait of Tobin as:
A hustler who, when not stealing geoduck, was lobbying state leaders to put an end to poaching; a felon who served time for his role in the contract killing of a woman; a cash-flashing fisherman who wore a wire as the federal government's secret weapon against poaching; and a geoduck smuggler who stole up to $2 million in shellfish — and almost got away with it.
A budding black market
Geoduck are bivalves that burrow shell-first into the seafloor, their spouts stretching 3 feet through the mud. They are found nowhere on the planet in commercial quantities outside the Northwest, and Washington started auctioning off "tracts" of them in 1970.
Despite its tough meat — an early seafood broker tried to tenderize one by driving over it in his pickup — geoduck has become a popular Asian delicacy. "Ducks" are now diced for sushi in Japan or chopped for chowder in China. They are sold in markets and restaurants across the United States.
Legal geoduck harvesting is a $40 million-a-year industry. Wholesale prices that once hovered at a dime a pound had, by the mid-1990s, topped $10.
Fighting tidal currents, scuba divers use a spray gun to liquefy the thick silt and pull the geoduck from its bed. The ducks are shipped live the same day. "It's like being an ambulance driver: You're always on call, hoping the patient doesn't die," said Casey Bakker, an Olympia-based seafood broker.
It's a dangerous, competitive, mostly cash business. Boat operators have even been known to brawl over premium dive spots.
The lure of easy money produced "Clam Scam" in the late 1980s, when prosecutors busted the state's biggest geoduck fisherman, accusing him of manipulating tract bidding, and harvesting outside legal areas. They think Brian Hodgson made off with millions in unreported geoduck in what was then considered the greatest white-collar fraud in state history. Hodgson was sentenced to two years in prison, fined about $350,000 and barred from Washington's fishing industry, according to newspaper accounts.
In 1994, a federal judge granted half the Sound's shellfish to the state's tribes. Tribes saw gold in the ungainly geoduck and started setting their own harvest rules. At the same time, the market blossomed in Asia, and prices shot up.
But regulation was fractured between the tribes and the state — a perfect recipe for poachers. They cut hull sections from boats to cover up air compressors, and pretended to troll for fish while divers hunted geoduck below. One poacher marketed them from the trunk of his Porsche, while another convicted smuggler used a payphone outside court to arrange one last geoduck buy before jail. Cops saw clams traded for untaxed cigarettes and once caught dope dealers swapping narcotics for geoduck.
Detectives Volz and Jarmon often wished they policed illegal drugs. At least the presence of cocaine meant there'd been a crime, but geoduck harvesting was illegal only if done in the wrong place or time. Investigations took years, and cases could appear inconsequential to busy judges.
But the detectives, who carry Glocks and have all the police powers of other cops, hunt only those who steal wildlife. They had tracked sea-urchin smugglers, abalone thieves and salmon poachers and gone undercover to catch anglers illegally selling salmon to restaurants. Jarmon once spent six months running a phony business, covertly buying stolen sturgeon, salmon and steelhead. A third partner, Kevin Harrington, was the guru of geoduck, having broken open "Clam Scam."
What the detectives decided they needed most in the mid-1990s was a geoduck insider — an outlaw with a reputation who could lead them to dirty fishermen.
And in July 1996, a smooth-talking fisherman walked in.
Glib and fearless
Tobin was a Squaxin Island Indian, and, above all, a fisherman. But his single best asset may have been his mouth, which he often employed to get out of jams.
Whether gillnetting salmon or plucking mussels, few were better at bringing home seafood. But in this competitive industry, Tobin was known for bending the rules. He'd baited crab in areas that had been off-limits for decades. He'd netted salmon in a creek and seined illegally for perch. Stopped for a fishing violation, Tobin once whipped out a cellphone and dialed up the tribal police chief.
"He'd play everyone to his advantage," said Rory Gilliland, former Squaxin Island police chief. "And I considered him a friend."
At 6-foot-1 and 270, Tobin was a man of appetites and contradictions. He owned a seafood plant wrapped in chain link on a dead-end road in Fife, where he bought and sold cod, oysters, crab and salmon. He lived in a humble apartment on the plant's grounds, yet owned a $399,000 boat. He dressed in jeans and flannel shirts, unbuttoned to an ample belly, yet the single father sent his youngest daughter to private school and shelled out, by some estimates, more than $100,000 rebuilding a custom Chevrolet Nova. He sometimes went on sprees buying milk and diapers for needy neighbors.
He was arrogant and self-effacing, and told so many stories it was never clear which were true. But a loopy grin and comic rants made him the center of attention. "Whenever he showed up, it was like, 'All right, Doug's here!' " said Jim Peters, the tribe's resources director.
A wood carver who pared signs and masks from cedar, Tobin was once part of a group paid $60,000 to carve a totem pole for the Port of Olympia, and he bragged that his art was displayed in all the world's major museums.
"It's almost like he was Robin Hood, but with this weird dark side," said friend Dino Mangini.
Tobin was a two-time felon, though he often claimed he'd been framed. In 1976, at 23, he was convicted of burglary and second-degree assault, accused of driving a getaway car for his brother, who had used a pipe to beat an ex-college football tackle. After Tobin's release from prison he'd returned to fishing when he heard an Olympia man, David Jirovec, wanted someone to kill his wife.
Tobin put him in touch with a hit man, according to prosecutors, and in March 1986, Joanne Jirovec was shot, her body left in a van in Lewis County. Tobin, who later said he had nothing to do with the killing, was in the van that night, prosecutors say. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and served roughly six years. He was released just as tribes were entering the geoduck market.
Few better understood the new cash crop's potential. Tobin bought gear and learned to dive. He grasped markets and arranged buyers, quickly becoming one of the Sound's best legal geoduck fishermen.
But Tobin knew crime and saw it around him: divers doctoring records, or engaging in illegal "high-grading" — throwing back all but the best geoduck, leaving the rest for flounder and crab to devour. Divers crushed low-quality geoduck into purée, and poured the soup overboard so it wouldn't affect their quota. Some Canadian buyers urged divers to poach from contaminated waters. Others fished at night, when harvesting is illegal.
A partner told Tobin he should talk to authorities, and Tobin agreed. In a recent interview, he said he wanted to clean up the industry: "They could use my past as a shady individual to get into doors they could never, ever get into."
Untouchable
When state and federal wildlife agents needed someone to get close to the country's top geoduck broker, Tobin took to his role like a true Method actor.
One day in 1997 DeCourville was on the phone with Tobin, complaining that a rival broker was undercutting his prices. He'd batted about blowing up rival Casey Bakker's truck but then settled on hiring someone to beat him senseless. "I'd say punch him in the nose, break his (expletive) arm and tell him to stay away," DeCourville said.
Tobin said such a beating would cost $5,000 — an amount that, after grousing, DeCourville agreed to pay.
Tobin didn't tell him the call was being recorded. And federal agents soon knocked on DeCourville's door. He pleaded guilty in 1998 to extortion and buying 33,000 pounds of illegal geoduck. He served more than three years in prison. And Tobin sealed his informant status.
Tobin became good at wearing a wire, and wildlife agents even set up a bank account in his name. They'd meet him at diners, pick a target and set up cameras, and Tobin would then contact fishermen and set up illegal geoduck sales.
Tobin relished his role. Asked to cover up the recorder in his shirt pocket one day, Tobin masked it inside a $14,000 wad of bills he was carrying. He came to meetings with yellow legal pads listing potential suspects (some of whom later proved to be personal rivals). The cops flew him to Las Vegas, to cement a spurious relationship with DeCourville, who rented him a car so he could tour The Strip.
His cover still intact, Tobin continued his own legal geoduck business, maintaining a veneer of normalcy while working for the cops. But he also was learning from the state's smartest poachers, and the fish cops heard rumors Tobin was out to make himself untouchable.
"He put the word out — 'I'm working with the feds,' " detective Harrington said. "He'd tell fishermen, 'Be careful, or you'll be the next target.' "
The insider
The overlords of the state's geoduck industry — the commissioner of public lands, the Fish and Wildlife director, Department of Health officials — gathered around an Olympia conference table. It was spring 2000 and Volz, Jarmon and Harrington were trying to show them the Sound's geoduck were in danger.
The Sound holds some 300 million geoduck, a biomass greater than any other species. Yet much is unknown about the impact of illegal harvesting. So detectives hit highlights — six major poaching cases in the last decade, including a Brooklyn seafood dealer who stole 23 tons. Skokomish tribal harvesters had illegally discarded 30 tons of nearly worthless, low-grade geoduck, and an official from another tribe had admitted taking bribes to let divers surpass quotas.
Regulators pointed out that the crimes affected just a fraction of the Sound's geoduck. Undeterred, the fish cops unveiled their show stopper: a videotaped interview with a "geoduck insider."
The speaker's face and voice were masked to protect his identity, but his presence was commanding: flannel shirt opened to midtorso to reveal a gold necklace, arms stuffed in a jacket covering wrists braided by bracelets. "When I got into this industry, I was as green as a pool table and twice as square," Tobin said. "But I've seen corruption from day one."
Tobin had come late, tired and unprepared on the day he was to be taped, but he detailed on the fly how poachers hid their work. Boat operators stashed clams in skiffs that sped off before the catch was tallied. Brokers forged paperwork to sneak loads in and out of Canada. "In the geoduck industry, there's a terrible virus," Tobin said. "We've seen the demise of old-growth timber. And I'm seeing the same demise with geoduck.
The detectives would later learn why Tobin seemed haggard: He'd poached 1,698 pounds of geoduck just the night before.
The mystery boat
On June 28, 2000, Jarmon was home in west Tacoma, standing at a bay window overlooking the Sound. Scanning the water with a telescope he'd gotten for a birthday, he saw something suspicious: Tobin's boat, the Typhoon, headed north near Fox Island.
No nearby geoduck tracts were open, and Jarmon suddenly remembered a neighbor who'd spoken of a "mystery boat" anchored at night in Nisqually Reach. The neighbor had chatted up the operator and suspected he was stringing illegal crab pots.
So Jarmon grabbed his .40-caliber gun, radio and a notepad. He jumped in his Ford Expedition and sped over the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, hitting Fox Island just as the boat slipped to shore.
He backed into a dead end and trained binoculars on the Typhoon. Men set damp burlap on plastic garbage pails bloated with stolen crab to keep them wet before loading them into a waiting van. Jarmon tailed the men to Fife, where they backed into Tobin's plant. He relayed the information to Volz and wondered: What now?
The detectives were swamped, so they handed the tip to their marine-patrol officers, who then passed it to Squaxin Island tribal police. After looking into it — "my guys didn't really get it together," former tribal Chief Gilliland said — the tribe mailed Tobin a citation, which he ignored. Tobin settled the matter by making a small cash donation to the tribe.
To Volz and Jarmon, the message couldn't have been clearer: Their informant had gone rogue, the ultimate betrayal, and no one else had the resources or inclination to stop him.
Ratting on a rat
They put the Typhoon under surveillance and spent hundreds of hours undercover, in places like the brush of McNeil Island, or trees near a Fox Island landing. Finally, one of Tobin's own boat hands put them on the right track.
In August 2001, the man called authorities to complain Tobin had stiffed him on wages, and unloaded details of his boss's illegal operation. He described motoring with Tobin at night to steal geoduck, and watching him forge health certificates to show they weren't taken from contaminated areas. He said they'd idle in wee morning hours on Nisqually Reach to drop dozens of illegal doghouse-sized crab pots. He said Tobin had told him to dump everything overboard if approached by cops, and not to stop the boat unless a gun was in his face.
Tobin had "learned the ins and outs of the industry as an informant," Volz said. Now, "he was getting away with so much it was getting hard to stomach."
Tobin was even poaching the geoduck he sold on undercover stings — then calling detectives demanding to be reimbursed.
But still they needed him.
One fall day in 2001, Jarmon was on his knees, hiding in the loft of Tobin's warehouse, watching as Tobin was working undercover, setting up a Canadian smuggler.
Jarmon also was keeping an eye on his informant.
Tobin opened the warehouse doors and waved in a Mazda minivan. The driver unloaded empty geoduck crates near a series of holding tanks. Tobin said he could sell the man more clams but reminded him it was illegal. "No problem," the man said, adding he was making up to $20 a pound, and just last week had unloaded 5,000 pounds. He showed Tobin a wallet stuffed with $100 bills.
After Tobin made the sale, detectives nabbed the smuggler and found a surprise — a small baggie of marijuana mixed in with illegal geoduck, planted, they believed, by their informant. Now it seemed Tobin was trying to weed out competitors.
In November 2001, Volz and Jarmon sloshed along the shore near McNeil Island, documenting Tobin's thievery: from the water to a truck, to a packing plant, and the airport. They were close.
Then by accident one night other marine officers on routine patrol stopped to question Tobin's crew. Tobin called Harrington to ask why cops were "snooping around." Tobin said he'd heard rumors he was under surveillance, and asked: Are you investigating me?
Harrington said he'd have to get back to him.
The fib
By early 2002, they were ready for an arrest. They'd visited Sea-Tac International Airport, reviewed Tobin's air-freight bills, and had seen he was shipping more geoduck to Canada and California than he had legally harvested.
Meanwhile, Tobin was calling Harrington, trying to set up a meeting, promising to deliver an illegal operation that could bring down the "whole West Coast."
When the two finally connected, Harrington took a gamble and lied: "You're not going to believe this," Harrington said. "But ... they're sending all our enforcement officers and detectives to Spokane for training. There won't be anyone watching Puget Sound." The Typhoon was out every night that week.
On March 17, detectives, patrol officers and cops from other agencies gathered in a Gig Harbor motel. The take-down was on for the next morning, and Tobin's crew might be armed.
At dawn, officers swarmed the Typhoon on Fox Island. A skiff and a crew that had off-loaded the geoduck were taken on Vashon Island. A broker was arrested in South Seattle. Volz had filled out 25 search warrants, which were served from California to Washington. Officers smashed Tobin's apartment door in Fife, where he sat watching "Shrek" with his youngest daughter. They handcuffed him and started away, when Tobin asked for Volz.
Volz took him aside, and Tobin offered to squeal on another poacher. Volz gave him a stare, and said, "Too late for that, Doug."
"I've seen it all"
Thirteen months later, Tobin sat crumpled at a table, wearing a gray jumpsuit and undershirt that sagged at the neckline. His eyes were wet, his hands buried in his silver mane.
It was April 8 and Tobin was jailed in Pierce County, awaiting trial on more than 140 Fish and Wildlife violations, counts of first-degree theft and criminal racketeering. Because of his two previous felony convictions, he faced a life sentence for the most unusual of crimes: stealing 200,000 pounds of geoduck and 85,000 pounds of crab.
His lawyers had urged him that morning to plead guilty in exchange for a lighter sentence, but first the silver-tongued fisherman wanted to talk. In a jailhouse interview that afternoon, he poured out his life story, of learning to carve by watching elders while other kids went to movies, and refining his artwork during earlier stints in prison. He lamented that his notoriety caused the Port of Olympia to refuse to raise his totem pole.
"This much I can tell you with 100,000 percent accuracy: I can only think of one or two people who are on the same level I'm at in this geoduck industry. I've seen it all — everything from prostitution to dope to contract killings. Everything you can imagine."
Tobin sighed, suddenly looking drained.
He insisted he was innocent and dismissed the videotaped surveillance, the affidavits from his crew, and the more than 10,000 pieces of evidence leveled against him.
Asked why the fish cops would maintain he was a poacher, the fast-talking fisherman buttoned up like a clam. He pondered for several minutes and looked at his jailhouse slippers: "I really don't know."
Days later, Tobin pleaded guilty to more than 30 crimes and is scheduled to be sentenced Aug. 13. The 51-year-old faces from seven to 20 years in prison.
In a courtroom skirmish leading up to the plea, Tobin's lawyer approached Volz outside the courtroom. "That's an awful lot of time for a bunch of fish, don't you think?" he asked.
Volz twirled a toothpick and shot back. "It wasn't about fish. It's always been about money."
Craig Welch: 206-464-2093 or cwelch@seattletimes.com