The Codfather

How many fish are in the sea? It's a question that has had enormous consequences for the fishing community in New Bedford, Massachusetts. But one man managed to find a way around it. That man? The Codfather. Guest: Ian Coss, host and producer of WBGH's Catching the Codfather For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:18Noam Hassenfeld?

  OK. It's Unexplainable. I'm Noam Hassenfeld. And how should we introduce you?

• 1:26Speaker 02

  Why don't you introduce me? You're my friend. You're the reason we're here. You're the one who dragged me out of whatever I was supposed to be doing today to come in and tape this.

• 1:33Noam Hassenfeld?

  This is true.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  The least you can do.

• 1:35Noam Hassenfeld?

  Ian Cosse, reporter, producer, host at GBH News in Boston. Is that it?

• 1:42Speaker 02

  Nailed it. And also currently the host of the new series Catching the Codfather.

• 1:47Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, the Codfather. This is what you've been telling me about like every single time I see you recently.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  This is what I tell everybody about when they ask me, hey, so what are you working on lately? Have I mentioned the Codfather?

• 1:58Noam Hassenfeld?

  So, yeah, so who is the Codfather?

• 2:00Speaker 02

  So the Codfather is a very controversial and divisive figure in the fishing port of New Bedford, Massachusetts.

• 2:11Speaker 03

  The American dream, it's a certain amount of sacrifice you gotta make. And they say lock, lock bullshit. You have to go lock for lock. Lock doesn't come to you.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  So his real name is Carlos Rafael. He's a fishing mogul. And about 10 years ago, the fishing industry in New Bedford was really in rough shape. The regulations around fishing were very tight. The science was saying the fish stocks were in poor shape. And yet Carlos, the codfather, continued to thrive. He continued to buy more boats. He continued to make money.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  I gotta do what I gotta do. I'm gonna survive.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  So there was a lot of intrigue around what he was really up to.

• 2:58Noam Hassenfeld?

  With a name like the codfather, I mean, it's all gotta be above board, right?

• 3:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it didn't help that people around town called him the codfather.

• 3:04Speaker 03

  We gonna have to call him the codfather. And this stupid shit stuck.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  So eyebrows are raised. Suspicions are aroused. And this team of IRS investigators, they pose as Russian businessmen and offer to buy the business of Carlos Seafood.

• 3:26Noam Hassenfeld?

  To try and figure out what he's up to?

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, to figure out where the money's coming from.

• 3:31Speaker 03

  Hi. This is Xavier.

• 3:34Speaker 04

  How you doing?

• 3:34Speaker 03

  That's the salesman.

• 3:36Speaker 04

  How's it going?

• 3:36Speaker 03

  How's it working?

• 3:37Speaker 04

  I'm fine. Okay, hello. Hello.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  They show up in their full getup. Rolex watches, pinky rings.

• 3:48Noam Hassenfeld?

  Pinky rings?

• 3:49Speaker 02

  Yep. I talked to the undercover agents. He told me he had a pinky ring. He told me he had a Versace belt.

• 3:55Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh, my God.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  And Louis Vuitton shoes. It's funny, they remember all these details.

• 3:59Noam Hassenfeld?

  Incredible.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  And I also talked with the case agent, who was listening outside as the other agents went into the fish plant with Carlos.

• 4:07Speaker 05

  He took him upstairs into his office.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  And I should just paint a portrait here for you quickly. The walls of Carlos's office are covered in pictures from the movie Scarface.

• 4:17Speaker 05

  Al Pacino from Scarface, sitting in the bathtub.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  The machine gun, the cigars.

• 4:22Speaker 05

  The world is not enough, the whole bit.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  He says. Is that's your favorite act? This is definitely so.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  So they start asking him all these questions like, well, you know, how do you make all this money? Where does the money come from? How is the business worth what you're saying it's worth?

• 4:39Speaker 03

  This is the numbers doesn't justify 175 million. So stupid of me. I go in a bottom drawer and I got another set of books.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  That just says cash. There you go.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  There he is.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  This is.

• 4:58Speaker 04

  Sit down, lady.

• 5:00Speaker 03

  This is at Carlos Seafood.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Turns out there was a whole other side of the business of Carlos Seafood that nobody knew about. That explains how Carlos was able to keep succeeding.

• 5:11Noam Hassenfeld?

  And was it drugs?

• 5:14Speaker 02

  Okay, so here's, here's the twist. The federal investigators were all assuming that it was drugs, potentially arms dealing.

• 5:23Noam Hassenfeld?

  Right.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Human trafficking.

• 5:25Speaker 05

  Several different agencies had feelings that it was something, but none of them could figure out what it was.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  But what's inside this cash ledger is lists of fish.

• 5:36Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's just fish?

• 5:37Speaker 02

  There's no drugs.

• 5:38Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  And so the IRS agent goes back to the Coast Guard and says, I think he's up to something with the fish. And as the IRS agent told me, the Coast Guard were like, no, no, no, it's definitely a drug case.

• 5:52Speaker 05

  They were convinced that that's what it was, but they had nothing to back it up.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  It took them a while to figure this out, but what this cash ledger revealed was that the fish that Carlos was catching and selling were not the fish that the government thought he was catching and selling. And this little sleight of hand was the secret to his business.

• 6:15Noam Hassenfeld?

  Huh. And, and what was behind this sleight of hand? Why did he have to?

• 6:19Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 6:20Noam Hassenfeld?

  Keep a secret folder of fish?

• 6:22Speaker 02

  Well, this is where the, the science comes in.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  So this comes back to an effort to protect the oceans and conserve the fish.

• 6:32Noam Hassenfeld?

  Because scientists are trying to prevent overfishing?

• 6:34Speaker 02

  Exactly. But Carlos had figured out a way to catch the fish that the scientists didn't think he should be catching. Because at the heart of all this is a very, very simple, but also really difficult question. And this is a question that nobody can agree on, especially the scientists and the fishermen. Which is just how many fish are in the sea.

• 7:13Noam Hassenfeld?

  So how do you actually count the fish in the ocean? Like, who does the counting?

• 7:18Speaker 02

  It's more complicated than you might think.

• 7:21Noam Hassenfeld?

  I mean, it seems complicated, to be honest.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  Okay, so maybe it's exactly as complicated as you might think.

• 7:26Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  The problem with counting fish is that they're in the water and they move around.

• 7:32Noam Hassenfeld?

  Two things that I know about fish.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  So, you know, if you wanted to count lobsters, it's much easier.

• 7:40Noam Hassenfeld?

  Right.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  Because they don't move as much.

• 7:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  Right.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  If you want to count trees, it's much easier. They don't move at all. If you want to count birds, they move, but at least they're not in the water. But fish are incredibly difficult to count.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  Take a codfish. It travels hundreds of miles every year, possibly, to spawn, right? So it's not like the fish are all in one place. They're moving around. They're deep in the water. You know, they're all mixed in with other fish. They're hiding in, you know, rocky areas of the bottom of the ocean.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  So in the 1960s, the federal government started this program of what they called trawl surveys.

• 8:25Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  Which was an effort to systematically measure how many fish are in the ocean.

• 8:32Noam Hassenfeld?

  And how does it work?

• 8:34Speaker 02

  What they do is they divide the ocean up into quadrants. And every year, they have a computer that spits out different numbers that tells them which quadrants they will fish. They drop a net, they tow it through the water for a prescribed amount of time, they pull up everything that's in it, and they count. And say, okay, this is a sample of this one piece of the ocean. They do that many, many times for years and years and years to, over time, create a picture of how many fish are out there and whether those numbers of fish are going up and down.

• 9:13Noam Hassenfeld?

  And did you talk to anyone who did this personally?

• 9:16Speaker 02

  So I met a marine biologist named Linda Dispray, who, for many years, was a lead scientist on NOAA's trawl surveys. When she started out in the 1970s, by the way, there were basically no women who did this. She was like doing sample counting, like sorting through shrimp, larvae, and stuff like that.

• 9:37Speaker 06

  And one day I was asked if I wanted to go out on the boat and actually collect the samples.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  And she was all excited, and she showed up at the dock of the boat. And somebody was like, I'm sorry, you can't go.

• 9:52Speaker 06

  As I was told, what would the wives think of a girl staying on a boat overnight?

• 9:59Speaker 02

  The crew was all men, like, I'm sorry.

• 10:02Speaker 06

  And God bless the captain, who said, we'll get you out there. So instead of leaving at 8 o'clock at night, we left at one minute past midnight. And so I was technically not on an overnight cruise. And because I had that experience of going to sea, collecting samples, sorting fish, just for that one day cruise, that gave me a leg up.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  And that was how she got her foot in the door. So basically, the next time she applied for a job, she could say she had that experience.

• 10:38Speaker 06

  I didn't say it was for one day, I just had experience.

• 10:44Speaker 06

  I didn't lie.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  So Linda spent, by the end of her career, I think, over 1,000 days out at sea doing sample collection. And they would catch all kinds of stuff because they would fish in places where fishermen wouldn't go, where nobody would go.

• 11:01Speaker 06

  You have no idea what's down there. We brought up anchors. We brought up the kitchen sink. We brought up tires.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  Apparently, there are NOAA boats that have found like, human bodies, that have found unexploded bombs left over from World War II.

• 11:16Noam Hassenfeld?

  Whoa.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  Crazy animals, you know, like a barn door skate. I'd never heard of a barn door skate, but as the name suggests, it's huge. And she did this for years.

• 11:25Noam Hassenfeld?

  So they go out, they trawl the ocean floor with this net.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:30Noam Hassenfeld?

  They randomly select places, they model that across the ocean, and they kind of say, okay, this is about how many fish there are. Is that it? Like, why is this more of a complicated question?

• 11:40Speaker 02

  So if you talk to fishermen about the trawl survey, you will almost universally hear the same thing, which is that it's totally wrong.

• 11:49Speaker 05

  In my opinion, your data sucks.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  So I met this fisherman named Tony Alvernez.

• 11:55Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Who, for many years, worked on one of these NOAA boats. Because NOAA, the government, would hire fishermen to come out and work the gear.

• 12:03Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  On the research boats.

• 12:05Speaker 05

  I knew Linda very well.

• 12:07Speaker 06

  And he had opinions.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  So Tony went out on a number of these surveys in the 1990s, and he remembers just being horrified.

• 12:19Speaker 05

  This is a joke.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  Because he realized very quickly that this is the boat that determines how many fish he and his friends are allowed to go and catch.

• 12:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  Right.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Right? This is the boat that sets the rules.

• 12:32Noam Hassenfeld?

  This is like the voice of God.

• 12:33Speaker 02

  The way he describes it is-

• 12:35Speaker 05

  That net would make scripture.

• 12:36Noam Hassenfeld?

  Wow, okay.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. And he found the boat extremely lacking.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  So I mentioned, this is called a trawl survey. Trawling refers to the method of towing a net behind the boat and catching fish, right? And the key to the trawl survey is that you're really trying to measure change over time. Right? Like, are there more fish or less fish this year relative to last year? And so to get that clear comparison across the years, you want to keep the fishing gear really consistent so that you can say year to year, oh, okay, we're definitely catching more fish this year. The net's the same, the boat's the same, the tow time's the same. Therefore, it's the fish. But the net on this government boat was outdated by commercial fishing standards. You know, once you get to the 90s and 2000s,

• 13:28Speaker 02

  you couldn't even buy that style of net anymore.

• 13:32Noam Hassenfeld?

  Right. So the idea is like, it's a bad net. It could be missing a lot of the cod that's out there.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Exactly. What Tony saw was, you know, the net would go down in the water. It would come up with, you know, this small amount of fish. And he would know, know in his bones that if it were his boat and his net dragging that same stretch of ocean, he would be catching way more fish.

• 13:54Speaker 06

  He was always suggesting new ways of making the net better, fish better, or work better. Anytime I questioned the integrity of the nets and blah, blah, blah, I was wrong. And it's like, we can't do that, Tony.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  And yet, this is the net that is setting scripture. This is the net that's deciding how much fish his buddies can go out and catch that they'd rely on to make their living.

• 14:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, Tony, we know, we know, but we needed to keep it the same.

• 14:28Noam Hassenfeld?

  Was that the only thing that made Tony skeptical of the NOAA survey?

• 14:32Speaker 02

  Oh, no, that was just the beginning of it for Tony. The way he described it is that just the whole setup of this boat was done by people who did not really understand and work with fishing gear on a day-to-day basis. This is Tony's opinion, but it was really just this constant series of issues that, for him, undermined his trust in the whole system.

• 14:54Noam Hassenfeld?

  Got it.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  So, the best and most clearly documented example of what Tony's talking about was an incident from 2002 that came to be known as Trogate.

• 15:04Noam Hassenfeld?

  Trogate, everything's got a gate.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  Everything's got a gate.

• 15:07Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  A couple of commercial fishermen were working on the NOAA boat. They noticed that the lines that were attached to the net were not the same length. The net was going to turn sideways and maybe even collapse in on itself. It's not going to catch fish.

• 15:24Noam Hassenfeld?

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  And what they had realized is that these lines had been mismatched for about two and a half years.

• 15:33Noam Hassenfeld?

  Whoa.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  So, this was, as you can imagine, a huge scandal in the industry because, again, this is the boat that makes scripture. This is the boat that determines people's livelihoods. This was a boat that had been criticized for years and years by fishermen like Tony Alvarez. I wanted to make sure those nets fished as proper as they could, yes. At this point, we're not talking about consistency. This is just a mistake. And so, I think that one mistake became emblematic of just this larger sense of mistrust within the industry towards the science.

• 16:14Noam Hassenfeld?

  Did the scientists respond in any way? I mean, like, what do the scientists say to either the criticisms of Trogate or the criticisms from Tony in terms of, like, everything's not working on the boat?

• 16:28Speaker 02

  So, I talked to somebody who was running the NOAA Science Center in the 2000s about this, and he recognized that Trogate had seeded all this intense mistrust. So, the Science Center... Tried to update the gear, update the boat, and try and do like a fresh start in hopes of building more trust. Unfortunately, that backfired. They built a new boat, and the new boat was much more sophisticated technologically. But because, you know, they'd been doing these surveys on the old boat going back decades, the scientists who were analyzing all this data wanted to find some way of calibrating

• 17:13Speaker 02

  the new data to match the old data. But this whole process of changing the boat, changing the net, developing this formula, it only fed into the mistrust, partly because right around when this new boat is introduced, the fish numbers start to look really bad.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  And here's where there's like just a really unfortunate confluence of events because you had a few things happening at once. One is you had a few really bad years of fish counting data. You also had this historic warming event in the Atlantic Ocean off of New England. And at the same time, you have this new boat. And everyone's sort of wondering, well, is it the boat? Is it the net? Is it actually the fish? One of the scientists I talked to at the NOAA Scientist Center described this period as a perfect storm for mistrust.

• 18:23Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 19:55Noam Hassenfeld?

  Sonos, love the sound, feel the system.

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• 22:08Speaker 03

  Extra, extra, read all about it. The fish are gone. Where'd they go? I don't know.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  For your listeners who are not New Englanders like you and I, we should really stress that the codfish has a deep symbolic importance in this region. It is not just a food that you eat.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  It is the reason why the Massachusetts Bay Colony exists in the first place. It is the reason why Cape Cod is called Cape Cod. It is what built the economy of the state. They made it so that there were powerful merchants here that could rally for independent, you know? It is codfish. Codfish is baked into the history of this region. Okay, yeah, I know. Have you ever been to the Massachusetts State House, by the way?

• 23:00Noam Hassenfeld?

  Sure, yeah.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  Okay, have you been to the House chamber in the Massachusetts?

• 23:04Noam Hassenfeld?

  I have not.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  Okay, so if you go into the chamber where the legislators sit and they vote. You know, you have this raised like platform at the front where the speaker sits and you know, all the head honchos are. If you sit at the speaker's desk and you look out across the legislature, what you see directly in front of you is a five foot long effigy of a codfish.

• 23:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  What?

• 23:30Speaker 02

  That is called the sacred cod.

• 23:32Noam Hassenfeld?

  Get out of here.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  It's known as the sacred cod. It was gifted to the legislature years and years and years ago, and it has hung in the Massachusetts State House ever since. So just you should have in the back of your mind, it's not about food, it's not about money, it's about something much, much deeper.

• 23:48Noam Hassenfeld?

  Wow. So, so like counting the cod is not just counting fish. This is like counting the soul of Massachusetts.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  It's counting the symbol of our abundance and God given fortune.

• 24:02Noam Hassenfeld?

  So if we go back to where we left off, we're what, like early 2010s?

• 24:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 24:08Noam Hassenfeld?

  We got this new boat, new survey, and the cod quota is suddenly dramatically smaller. How do people react?

• 24:16Speaker 02

  It was a shock and a disappointment because, you know, there had been trouble with the fish stocks for years. And there have been, you know, regulations that have, you know, been tightening. And a lot of people felt like we had solved the problem. We fished a little less and now, you know, the population is going to recover and we are reaching a point of sustainability. And the science actually backed that up for a time. It looked good. And then you get this shock in 2011, 2012, 2013, where suddenly the data starts to look really bad.

• 24:52Noam Hassenfeld?

  Right.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  So what you see in those years is huge cuts in the amount of fish that fishermen are allowed to catch. I'll give you one example. In 2013, they cut the quota for all codfish in the entire Gulf of Maine by 77% year over year. So if you were catching a thousand pounds in one year, you're now catching a couple hundred pounds.

• 25:17Noam Hassenfeld?

  That's crazy. And I guess I'm wondering if the scientists say don't catch cod.

• 25:24Noam Hassenfeld?

  I mean, the nets are big, right?

• 25:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:26Noam Hassenfeld?

  You can't make a net that specifically has a hole shaped for no cod, right?

• 25:30Speaker 02

  Right, a cod shaped hole that they all swim out of.

• 25:33Noam Hassenfeld?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  And this creates a problem that fishermen call the choke species. Because the problem is these fish, they all swim together. You pull up a net and it's a whole mix of different things. And so the problem is, if you run out of your quota for codfish,

• 25:51Speaker 02

  then that is your choke species, and that means you can't go fishing anymore.

• 25:55Noam Hassenfeld?

  So what do you do if you catch cod?

• 25:57Speaker 02

  So let's say your quota for cod is very small. You go out and on day one of your season, you've caught your entire quota for the year, which could happen, right? You put the net back in the water and you get more cod. What are you gonna do now? At that point, you have three options. Some of them are legal and some of them are illegal.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  One option is you could like go to your neighbor at the dock and try and buy their cod quota or buy somebody else's.

• 26:28Noam Hassenfeld?

  So then they can't fish for cod?

• 26:30Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 26:30Noam Hassenfeld?

  Got it.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  But the quota itself is extremely expensive for these limited species. In fact, the quota costs more than the fish is worth. The second option, which from many fishermen I've talked to was pretty common at the time, is you discard the choke species. You just throw it overboard. Because as long as you don't bring it back to shore and sell it, then it's not going to count against your quota for the year, right? To be clear, this is not legal. You're not supposed to discard fish.

• 27:02Noam Hassenfeld?

  What's the problem with discarding fish?

• 27:05Speaker 02

  Well, a lot of those fish will die anyway.

• 27:08Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh, so you're not just like catch and release?

• 27:10Speaker 02

  This is not catch and release. Because we're talking about a net that's dragged through the water for maybe an hour, right? Thousands of pounds of fish packed into this net. Dumped on the deck of a boat, sifted through, tossed overboard. So this fish that gets tossed back in the water has been through the wringer. And a lot of what you'll see behind the boat when you discard is just white bellies floating on the surface.

• 27:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  So if you discard the cod, then you're actually killing the cod and you're not reporting it?

• 27:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this is a lose-lose for everyone. Nobody gets to eat the fish. The fish is not conserved. The fish does not go on to live a healthy life and reproduce and make more fish. Nobody makes money off of it. It is pure waste. This is the unintended consequences of this regulation at that time.

• 28:06Noam Hassenfeld?

  But a lot of people were doing that?

• 28:07Speaker 02

  It was common. I talked to one fisherman who described, he would hear stories about boats that would get a thousand pounds of excess cod on a single toe and shovel it overboard with shovels.

• 28:22Noam Hassenfeld?

  That is just-

• 28:23Speaker 02

  Dead fish. And this, again, this is the fish that we are trying to bring back, the symbol of our abundance and vitality.

• 28:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  The state house.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  It's the sacred cod. It is literally the sacred fish of the region being shoveled overboard, dead, a thousand pounds at a time.

• 28:42Noam Hassenfeld?

  So option one was-

• 28:45Speaker 02

  You pay for it.

• 28:45Noam Hassenfeld?

  Buy new quota. Option two is this terrible lose-lose-lose option.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 28:50Noam Hassenfeld?

  Is the third one good?

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Well, it depends on your point of view. And this is where we connect back to Carlos Rafael.

• 28:58Noam Hassenfeld?

  The cod father.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  The cod father. He brought those fish to shore that he did not have quota for, and he very carefully sold them without anyone ever realizing what they were. He would pass them off as other species.

• 29:16Noam Hassenfeld?

  Got it. So like a species that like had a higher quota or something?

• 29:20Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 29:21Noam Hassenfeld?

  Got it.

• 29:22Speaker 02

  So what was going on at the time, again, like 2010s, the cod quota, very low. Gray sole, very low. Flounder, very low. Haddock, pretty high.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  And so what Carlos would do is fudge the paperwork so that his cod and his flounder and his sole looked like Haddock. What Carlos was able to do was misreport the fish at many different stages along the supply chain. So that all along the way, the government sees, okay, Haddock, Haddock landed the dock, Haddock was sold to Carlos Rafael, Haddock went on the truck to New York. But then, when it actually lands in the, on the plate at the restaurant, it's your gray soul.

• 30:14Noam Hassenfeld?

  How was he able to do this?

• 30:17Speaker 02

  The key was vertical integration.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  I was a fish buyer. I didn't have to go through what the other people go through.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  So Carlos had been around the docks in New Bedford for a long time, and he had built up this kind of unique empire where he was both the biggest boat owner in the fleet, he owned about 40 boats, and he also ran the biggest fish processing plant in the city. He was like the buyer and the seller, if that makes sense. The way Carlos described it to me was-

• 30:53Speaker 03

  It came from the ocean, direct to me. Nobody else put their fingers in the cake.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  He controlled the entire chain. He called it painting the fish. He really drew out this metaphor when he was talking with the undercover IRS agents. Eventually, they got to the point where he was just talking openly about how he went about this fraud. And he would say, yeah, I can paint the fish any color I want.

• 31:20Speaker 03

  The more rules they put on my ass, I'll keep painting the son of a bitch to different colors.

• 31:26Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh, my God. So he is clearly committing fraud here, right?

• 31:31Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 31:32Noam Hassenfeld?

  And has, has he been convicted?

• 31:35Speaker 02

  So in 2016, federal agents raided Carlos's seafood. They froze the permits on his boats. And ultimately, he did plead guilty to falsifying documents, as well as a number of other financial crimes.

• 31:58Noam Hassenfeld?

  So where's Carlos now?

• 32:00Speaker 02

  Carlos is out of jail.

• 32:02Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  And I first reached out to him a few years after he got out of prison. And at the end of that interview, I left feeling like, yeah, this guy's a very convenient narrative about himself, you know, that he's the hero, that he was doing what he had to do. But I didn't take him that seriously. But then I started going around town and interviewing some other folks who worked in politics, who worked in the fishing industry, some academics, journalists, you know, regulators. And the thing that really started to draw my interest in this whole story was how many

• 32:42Speaker 02

  people I met who, if they didn't express outright sympathy for Carlos Rafael, they had at least some ambivalence about him. They would say something like, well, you know, there's, there's, there's two sides to Carlos, you know, he, he was crass, but, but, you know, he did a lot for this industry. And some people I would meet who I'd ask them straight out, do you think what Carlos did is wrong? And they would tell me, no, no, he was right.

• 33:14Noam Hassenfeld?

  And what do you think that's about?

• 33:17Speaker 02

  To me, it's a emblematic of a much deeper mistrust and antagonism towards the government and science, because the science is what drives the policy and the policy is what, you know, what affects these people's lives. New England is like a case study in how trust within that system can break down. You have this changing assessment method, right? The new boat they brought in, the new net, the new survey techniques. You have these changing regulations. There's all this change happening at once in a fishery that has been there for 400 years.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  And it bred this really intense distrust that whatever side of it you're on, whether you're a policymaker, whether you're a scientist, whether you're a fisherman, I think everyone around it can agree that the relationship is broken.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  And I came to the conclusion, you know, after studying this story and talking to so many people in the industry, that Carlos could not have gotten away with it for so long if there weren't a whole lot of other people around him who shared that mistrust, who also thought the science was questionable and the policy based on that science was unreasonable. And that therefore, you know, if you paint a few fish and it allows you to keep your boats working and keep your people employed, then that is the right thing to do.

• 34:51Noam Hassenfeld?

  You spoke to a lot of scientists. I mean,

• 34:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:53Noam Hassenfeld?

  What is your sense of the accuracy of the science here? The accuracy of saying that there is a low cod count?

• 35:04Speaker 02

  I think there are some tremendously smart people doing science in New England about fish. At a high level, I have no reason to distrust the motives and methods of the very professional qualified scientists doing this work. But we just, there's this feeling of it kind of lurching from crisis to crisis, from lawsuit to protest. And it's really hard to actually bring together the stakeholders.

• 35:34Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's difficult because the fishermen clearly have an incentive for there to be a larger quota. It's not clear that the scientists have an incentive one way or the other. And that doesn't necessarily mean that the scientists are right.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 35:46Noam Hassenfeld?

  But the fishermen clearly are motivated here.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  Yes. There is no doubt that the fishermen have an economic motivation to see fish out in the ocean. But fishermen have this very intense lived experience of the ocean. Some of the people I talked to spend hundreds of days a year out at sea, more days a year out on a boat in the ocean hunting fish than they do standing on land. And that gives them a very intimate understanding of what's out there, but a very particular understanding. And a scientist with a PhD and, you know, surveys and analysis has a very different kind of understanding, a different way of knowing the world. And that is part of what we're reconciling

• 36:32Speaker 02

  here is different ways of thinking about expertise and understanding and who actually knows best. And those are very difficult to reconcile.

• 36:40Noam Hassenfeld?

  Is there anything that you have learned about the distrust of science in the fishing community in New Bedford that sheds light on the distrust of science in the rest of the country? Does it help you understand it any better?

• 36:58Speaker 02

  I think the thing that's really nailed home for me is the scientist does not win that argument with logic and data and saying, oh, no, no, no, but we look, but we controlled for that. No, no, no, look, but, you know, we tested that. When that mistrust is there and it's so deep, you're never going to break through that. You have to get it back to a place of shared understanding and working together.

• 37:24Noam Hassenfeld?

  What you're basically saying is that if you want the science to speak for itself in a place where communities have lost trust in science, you have to build that trust back before you present them with the new science, before you try to get them to change their lives in any way. You have to find a way to connect with each other again.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. I've watched all this footage of these fishery meetings, you know, where regulators and scientists would present an argument and then fishermen would get up and present their argument. And it just, it always seems like they're talking past each other. There's fish coming in all different sizes, talking from baby codfish to

• 38:05Speaker 05

  Take a look at our numbers. Someone will ask. We're accountable for what we do, and what we do is follow your rules. Where is your accountability?

• 38:14Speaker 04

  It's bullshit, because you guys are wrong, and you know you're wrong. And no one up here has the balls to admit it. You're going to hang a bunch of people, and you're all putting your heads down because you know that I'm right.

• 38:25Speaker 02

  And I think what I see in that is that if you have difficult science that you're trying to communicate, science that's going to affect people's lives, and they don't trust it, you do not overcome that mistrust by proving that you are right. You need to somehow incorporate their worldview and their understanding, their curiosity, their knowledge into what you're doing.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  This one moment I still think about from 2014, when the top regulator from the region went to one of these fishery meetings where everybody comes together, industry members, scientists. And he gets up there, and he gives this plea, really, to everyone gathered there, that we have to find a way to understand each other.

• 39:16Speaker 03

  I do think it points out the continuing need that has existed for generations to build bridges between science and fishermen, because you can have the best science in the world, and if there isn't an understanding of that, it just simply doesn't matter.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  It doesn't matter if people don't believe it.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  If you want to hear how Carlos Rafael became the codfather in the first place, how he built his empire of fish, and why he thinks he was right to break the law, check out Ian's show, The Big Dig.

• 40:07Speaker 06

  Season three is called Catching the Codfather. And if you're into infrastructure or gambling, seasons one and two are excellent as well. You can find them wherever you listen. This episode was produced and hosted by Noam Hassenfeld, who also wrote the music. It was edited by me, Sally Helm, and Joanna Solotaroff. Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala. Fact checking from Melissa Hirsch. Julia Longoria and Jorge Just are our editorial directors. Amy Padula and Meredith Hodnot are the fact that sockeye salmon can navigate using the earth's magnetic field. And Bird Pinkerton ran off with the beak beeper, searching for Flaptin. It was beeping all over the place.

• 40:49Speaker 06

  She needed to find a place far away from the sky, far away from all the birds flying overhead, a place where a beep would mean she was close.

• 41:03Speaker 06

  Thanks, as always, to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show along with Bird and Noam. If you have thoughts about this episode, we are at [email protected]. Please write to us. If you want to support the show and help us keep making it, please join our membership program at vox.com/members. You will get ad-free podcasts and other perks and unlimited access to Vox journalism. You can also support us by leaving a rating or a review or by telling people in your life to listen to Unexplainable. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we will be back in your feed very soon.

• 41:49Speaker 06

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• 42:32Speaker 06

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