Catching The Codfather

For decades, Carlos Rafael owned the biggest fleet of boats in the most valuable fishing port in America: New Bedford, Massachusetts. He was so powerful in the fishing industry there, he became known as The Codfather. That is, until an IRS sting brought it all crashing down.

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

• 0:00Dan Pashman?

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• 1:12Dan Pashman?

  This episode contains explicit language.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  They coming back and they says the numbers doesn't justify 175 million. So stupid of me. I go in the bottom drawer.

• 1:25Dan Pashman?

  Of this desk we're sitting at right now.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  And what he did is he opened a drawer.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  And I got another set of books.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  And he put it on the desk.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Right here. Tell me it's not worth 175 million dollars. I regret that for the rest of my life, this son of a bitch. They would have never, never got me.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  But eh, it's over.

• 1:52Dan Pashman?

  This is the Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. For decades, Carlos Rafael owned the biggest fleet of boats in the most valuable fishing port in America, New Bedford, Massachusetts. He was so powerful in the fishing industry there, he was known as the codfather. That is, until an IRS sting brought it all crashing down. Today, we're sharing the first episode of a brand new series from Ian Cosse and WGBH News called Catching the Codfather. Ian previously created the excellent podcast series, The Big Dig, about the most expensive highway project in the US, which completely transformed the city of Boston.

• 2:34Dan Pashman?

  In Catching the Codfather, Ian tells a story about what happens when business, government, and criminal enterprise get mixed up with one of the most valuable commodities in the region. I'll let Ian take it from here.

• 2:50Dan Pashman?

  Can you tell me about how you did ultimately get arrested?

• 2:58Speaker 01

  This all started

• 3:01Speaker 01

  a few years back when I wanted to sell my business.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  See, my legacy, it was to grow this to a point that I would turn it over to my kids. I did it. That's it. I'm done. I wanted to give the business to my, my middle daughter. And I told her, Stephanie, I was 62 at the time. I said, Stephanie, that is tired. I had enough. I'm gonna give you the business. I don't want no money. At the end of the year, the profits you split with your sisters.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  It's yours. So she looks at me and she says,

• 3:45Speaker 01

  "Do you think I want the kind of life you have?"

• 3:50Speaker 01

  And she didn't want a company over 1 million just for them.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  Can you blame her?

• 3:57Speaker 01

  No.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  No. No, because I see what I did to my family.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  I never get to spend time with them. I never get to go to the school plays and all this other shit. You can't buy those things back. It's over. But if you got the American dream, it's a certain amount of sacrifice you gotta make. It doesn't come from heaven. And they say luck, luck bullshit. You have to go luck for luck. Luck doesn't come to you. And by luck is work your butt off in America and you will get ahead.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  I don't want that kind of life. Are you crazy? So that's why I end up getting in a shitter because if I were to get out at 62, none of this bullshit would have happened.

• 4:53Speaker 03

  Carlos Rafael leans back and lights a cigarette, one of many, over the course of our conversation.

• 5:06Speaker 03

  Could you talk about all the Scarface pictures?

• 5:09Speaker 01

  My daughter gave me that one. She bought that one in New York.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  Carlos's office is covered with images from the movie Scarface. There's an actual cigar from the set, a hand-drawn sketch of Tony Montana, the cocaine kingpin, and a still from the film of Al Pacino in the big hot tub. Carlos told me that Netflix once approached him about making a movie about his life and asked who should play him. Carlos didn't need to think about it. It was obvious.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  I said, "Scarface, he'll be the only one who could do the job the right way."

• 5:44Speaker 03

  Al Pacino.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  Al Pacino.

• 5:46Speaker 03

  So you can picture an older Pacino if you want, but with jowls hanging under his chin and totally bald, except for the sides of his head. That's Carlos. And what did the producer from Netflix say?

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Nah, I asked him for... When I mentioned $20 million, the guy said, "Forget it. Look, if I'm gonna... Something's gonna get done. I want money."

• 6:07Speaker 03

  And you'll see, as we go along, there are some parallels, for sure, between Carlos Rafael and Tony Montana. It's the story of an immigrant who has to make his own luck, and is willing to push that luck again, and again, and again. Hunger, opportunity, excess, ruin.

• 6:33Speaker 03

  There's a famous scene in the movie, when Montana is out to dinner and gets in a heated argument. It's at a fancy restaurant. Everyone's very well dressed, lawyers and bankers, and they all fall silent, watching as Montana lunges across the table, spilling wine and food all over the white tablecloth. But then, Montana turns and addresses the crowd directly, calls out their silent judgment of him, saying, "You need people like me."

• 7:03Speaker 04

  You need people like me so you can point your fucking fingers. I say, "That's the bad guy."

• 7:10Speaker 03

  Then he asks, "So what does that make you? Good? You're not good. You just know how to hide, how to lie."

• 7:20Speaker 04

  Me? I don't have that problem.

• 7:24Speaker 03

  When he's done, Montana stumbles out, shouting over his shoulder, "Say goodnight to the bad guy."

• 7:36Speaker 03

  I can hear a little of Carlos in that scene. Even after he was investigated and labeled a crook, after federal agents carted him off to jail and dismantled his empire, he keeps pointing his finger right back at the government that brought him down, saying, "That right there, that is the real bad guy."

• 8:00Speaker 04

  They think this solved the problem. They haven't solved shit.

• 8:06Speaker 04

  Because fisherman are a lot smarter than they are.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  From GBH News, this is The Big Dig. I'm Ian Coss. Carlos Rafael is an American success story. He started from nothing, working in a neglected industry in a neglected city, and he built something real. His business was fish, Carlos Seafood. And by the end of his run, he owned the biggest fleet of boats in the most valuable fishing port in America. So why did it all come crashing down? And why does Carlos insist to this day that he did nothing wrong?

• 9:06Speaker 03

  Welcome to season three, Catching the Codfather. It's a story about work, about dreams, and ultimately about how all of us relate with our government. Part one, Red Lobster.

• 9:34Speaker 03

  Carlos Rafael grew up in the Azores, a string of islands in the Atlantic that are maybe a quarter of the way to North America if you're coming from Europe. So way out there, and small enough that you have to really zoom in on the map in order to see them at all. The Azores are part of Portugal. And in the 1960s, when Carlos was a kid, Portugal was fighting colonial wars on several fronts: in Mozambique, in Angola, in Guinea. Carlos had friends who were drafted off their tiny island and sent abroad, who died in the jungle fighting for a lost and distant cause, a pointless cause. His parents did not want

• 10:16Speaker 03

  that for their son, so they sent young Carlos to study at a monastery.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  That's the way they would keep me off the military fast, in a monastery.

• 10:26Speaker 03

  I have to say, I mean, I've only known you for about an hour, but it's hard for me to picture you in a monastery.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  All my friends says, what a hell of a priest you would have made.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  But once my sister, she told me dad has an American passport.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  Carlos's dad had an American passport. This revelation is not entirely surprising in a place where lots of families move back and forth to the US, but it was news to Carlos, infuriating news, because it meant his dad had an easy out all along and was so comfortable in his island life, he just didn't want to take it and instead sent his son to a monastery.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  I freaked out. I says, "Oh yeah? We're going to America?" Says, "You know you're not going to America because you stayed in the monastery. That's where they put you here." So I did shit, so they could threw me out.

• 11:24Speaker 03

  Every night, the priests in training would have dinner, then go to prayer, and by 9:30, they'll go up to their dormitory.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  So everybody went up to the dorm. I went to the football field and I jumped the fence and I took off.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  Carlos didn't care about actually getting away with this little escape act. He wanted to get caught. He wanted to get punished.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  Didn't look too far. I went for a walk until I was about a quarter of 11. When I come back, I jumped the fence and I come back, I was a little like, no, the priest was upstairs waiting for me. He says, "You'll be expelled tomorrow. I'm calling your parents and we shaping you back home."

• 12:07Speaker 03

  Now Carlos would find out if his gambit paid off. It looked like either way, he was leaving the Azores. Could be for the US, could be for Angola. Which one was up to his father.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  So I was terrified to get home. I says, "He's gonna beat the living crap out of me." My father says, "I'm gonna teach you a lesson. We're not going anyplace. He's the one. He was in the right place. He should have stood there and all that." But there was my mother. She, every day would be ominous. And she says, "You know what's gonna happen? If he goes, he'll probably come in the coffin."

• 12:43Speaker 03

  Carlos was 15 at this point. At 16, he would register for the draft.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  So after she keep battling and battling, they say to come here.

• 12:52Speaker 03

  So you got out just before your 16th birthday?

• 12:55Speaker 01

  I got here in March. June would have been too late.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  Carlos boarded a TWA flight and followed the same route across the sea that people from the Azores had taken for generations to the small coastal city of New Bedford, Massachusetts. The flight attendant gave him a little set of plastic wings he could pin on his shirt. He was proud of those wings, proud to be starting fresh, proud to be in America, finally free.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  When I arrived in the United States in 1968, I always said to myself, "I am not going to be working for anybody else all my life. I'm going to do this for myself."

• 13:46Speaker 03

  And it turned out that Carlos was arriving at the right time, a time of crisis, actually, for the industry that defined New Bedford. But as Carlos himself has told me, a crisis, now that is when you can make a lot of money. And Carlos Rafael would do just that.

• 14:11Speaker 05

  Throughout the world, New Bedford, Massachusetts is best known as the whaling city.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  New Bedford, as you may know, is the port that inspired Moby Dick and where the author Herman Melville set out on his own whaling voyage.

• 14:26Speaker 05

  The first whale ship, the Dartmouth, sailed out of this port.

• 14:29Speaker 03

  But if you stepped off a boat there in the 1960s, when Carlos arrived and wandered into the neighborhoods along County Street or Rivet Street, you'd find a very different world from the one Melville knew.

• 14:46Speaker 06

  That entire area was all Portuguese.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  Maria Tomazia, like Carlos Rafael, came to New Bedford from the Azores.

• 14:54Speaker 06

  It's like every island or every town had their own club. You know, there's the Ponte da Gata Club, there's the Fial Club, there's the Mederes Club, there's a Fisherman Club, Central Luiz Club, Record da Sanch Club. So everybody had their place to socialize.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  There were two Portuguese newspapers. There was a Portuguese radio station, a dedicated Portuguese library with over 3,000 titles in it. This was the capital of Portuguese North America.

• 15:30Speaker 03

  The Portuguese immigration here started in the Moby Dick era, the middle of the 1800s. Whaling ships out of New Bedford would stop in the Azores and Cape Verde to pick up supplies. People got on board as well, and then more people followed, and more people.

• 15:47Speaker 06

  And they saw there was a fishing industry. You lived by the water. You know, once you live by the water, it's very difficult to go anyplace else and not see that water.

• 15:56Speaker 03

  By 1970, Massachusetts was home to one-third of all Portuguese immigrants in the entire country, and most of those people were clustered in the coastline near New Bedford.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  Within the fishing industry itself, there's actually an interesting ethnic divide, historically at least. For many years, the scallop boats tended to be run by Norwegian immigrants, but the draggers, the boats that went after bottom fish like cod and flounder, they were overwhelmingly Portuguese, 80 to 90% by one estimate. They will be the focus of this story. And in the 1970s, when Carlos was still new in town, those fishermen were in trouble.

• 16:43Speaker 06

  I would be mostly as a translator.

• 16:45Speaker 03

  The man the fishermen went to for help was Maria Tomazia's boss, New Bedford Congressman Gary Studs.

• 16:52Speaker 06

  They were concerned about the fact that, you know, there were other people out there.

• 17:01Speaker 03

  Other people out there. Other people competing for the same cod, haddock, and flounder off the coast of New England, but with bigger boats, bigger nets. What the fishermen described was a foreign invasion.

• 17:16Speaker 06

  That's how they would talk about it. They felt that they were taking away what was theirs.

• 17:23Speaker 05

  Okay, coming up, we've got a Russian big-bore tractor. It's about 12 and a half miles off the coast.

• 17:28Speaker 03

  It's a little hard to imagine now, but in the 1970s, foreign fishing boats could come as close as 12 miles off the coast, and they could catch whatever they wanted. This audio is from a coastguard flyover just off Cape Cod.

• 17:43Speaker 05

  Okay, this is a Bulgarian.

• 17:45Speaker 03

  There were German boats, Russian, Spanish, Japanese, all drawn to the rich coastal waters of New England. And because they were so far from port, these ships were essentially floating factories. They filleted, froze, or canned the fish right onboard, working for months at a time on a massive scale.

• 18:06Speaker 05

  Probably averaging somewhere in the neighborhood of, say, 35 to 40 tons a day.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  I used to see miles and miles and miles of these ships. They looked like big cruise ships.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  Rodney Avila was a young fisherman at the time, just starting out.

• 18:20Speaker 02

  And I used to say, "I'm gonna have no fish when I grow up."

• 18:26Speaker 03

  Modern trawling techniques are sweeping everything from the sea. This foreign presence really ramped up over the 1960s, so that by the mid-'70s, if you looked at the total catch on New England's very best fishing grounds, 90% of it was pulled up by foreign boats, 90%. And the fishermen and scientists alike could see the effects.

• 18:50Speaker 05

  Like the haddock had all really disappeared. The butterfishes all disappeared. The fluke is all disappeared.

• 18:57Speaker 06

  And that's how the whole thing came to be, is that they wanted something done about it.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  That's where Congressman Gary Studs came in.

• 19:13Speaker 05

  For several of the reasons that I cited in my brief remarks, I think that the time is right to ask to extend these protections. One, the Canadian--

• 19:21Speaker 03

  Studs was always a bit of an odd fit to represent the working-class Portuguese hub of New Bedford. He was formal, clean-cut, Yale-educated. In pictures of him from the 1970s, he looks like he could be in the 1950s, with black horn-rimmed glasses and plain suits.

• 19:39Speaker 05

  Decisions to make with some resources still available to protect.

• 19:42Speaker 03

  And on top of all that, Gary Studs was also concealing the fact that he was gay. The suggestive term people used for him at the time was a "confirmed bachelor", not a strong political brand in those days. But Studs was driven.

• 19:58Speaker 06

  When I first met him, he introduced himself in Portuguese.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  So when he ran for that seat, Studs took a six-week intensive course in Portuguese, then spent another six weeks traveling around the Azores, Cape Verde, and mainland Portugal.

• 20:15Speaker 06

  Oh Maria, como vais hoje? You know, o que tá passando? Yeah, so that type of thing. It's, you've gotten anything good lately?

• 20:26Speaker 03

  In 1973, New Bedford sent Studs to Washington as their representative. And in that very first term, he also landed a seat on the Merchant, Marine, and Fisheries Committee, which meant he was actually in a perfect position to do something about the whole foreign invasion issue. So that same year, Studs teamed up with Congressman Don Young from Alaska to introduce what they like to call the Young Studs Bill, but was commonly known as the 200-Mile Bill.

• 20:57Speaker 05

  This will probably be something like a 200-mile economic zone.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  It would establish a new ocean boundary that foreign vessels could not cross, an invisible fence exactly 200 miles offshore. And inside that fence, our richest fishing grounds would be reserved exclusively for American boats. A 200-mile extension of US coastal jurisdiction. You would think that bill would be an easy win. I mean, who would oppose kicking out foreign fishing boats? Gary Studs was about to find out.

• 21:31Speaker 05

  The problem, as it has so often been in subsequent years, was the United States Department of State.

• 21:36Speaker 03

  And it turns out the bad guy in this story is the US Department of State, which makes some sense. The diplomats wanted to resolve these fishery issues diplomatically with an international treaty. They did not want to just unilaterally draw a line in the ocean. It could impact trade, military movement, intelligence gathering. Studs was saying, it can't wait. By the time a big international treaty is ratified, the fish will be gone. That's when Studs realized there was a deeper problem underneath it all.

• 22:10Speaker 05

  I discovered that the biggest problem that those of us who represent maritime areas have was that nobody in Washington knew anything about it. And the best example I can think of...

• 22:20Speaker 03

  This is Studs recalling the story in a speech a few years later, where he gave a specific example to illustrate the challenge. For years, Studs had tried to get the American lobster designated as a "creature of the shelf," meaning it lived, as the name implies, on the continental shelf and could be protected from foreign fishing boats.

• 22:43Speaker 05

  We held hearings to find out why the State Department had not designated the lobster to be a creature of the shelf. And the State Department, I kid you not, came in and testified. I can still picture them, three men. There they were, all lined up in very, very fancy three-piece suits, to inform the House Committee on Merchandise and Fisheries that the lobster was not a creature of the continental shelf, because international law defined a creature of the shelf as an animal which never left the ocean floor. And the State Department had verified that when the lobster was excited, it jumped up and down and left the ocean floor.

• 23:21Speaker 05

  Now, I wish I could tell you I was exaggerating to make a point, but I am not. I asked the Department of State if they thought the kangaroo was a creature of the earth. And there was no response whatsoever. I threatened on several occasions to put an unpegged lobster on the witness table in front of them to see if any of them had ever met one. I seriously doubt it. Washington is populated by people who think that lobsters are red, and that is the source, or at least the symbol, of a great many of the problems that we have had over the years in trying to accomplish things.

• 24:02Speaker 03

  If you don't know, lobsters, when they are alive and uncooked, are not red. They're greenish-brown. That year, the bill went nowhere, and the foreign harvest of the seafloor went on.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  Carlos Rafael is in his early twenties at this point. He's been in the country for maybe five years. And while Gary Studs is learning the ways of Washington, Carlos is learning the trade of a fish cutter. What does it take to cut a fish?

• 24:36Speaker 01

  A little bit of knowledge, but you learn as you learn, you get to it. And once you get to it, I mean, the name of the game is sharpening your knife.

• 24:48Speaker 03

  Carlos started out working under a Cape Verdean man who showed him how to hone his blade until it was so sharp, he could shave the hairs off his forearm.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Once you got a gig of it, once you know what you're doing and you got a sharp knife, then it's like ice cream, it's easy.

• 25:03Speaker 03

  In an eight-hour shift, each fish cutter was supposed to fill 16 boxes, 125 pounds each, so 2,000 pounds of fish a day for an average cutter.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  I won't say I was the best one in the city, but I bet you I was the fourth or the fifth best in the city as a fish cutter. I would cut 20, 22, sometimes 24 boxes by 2 to 30 in the afternoon. So I would go into the men's room, the states, I would sit and smoke a cigarette and the boss would come, get your butt to work. I said, "I'm not going to work now, I'm having a cigarette. You've been here for 20 minutes, it's too bad, you're fired." So I must have got fired 50 times working for this company, but he could never fire me because I was almost way over.

• 26:02Speaker 03

  As Carlos said before, he did not come to this country to work for someone else. This was not his American dream, but it was also not a great time to strike out on his own. Even from the floor of the fish plant, Carlos could tell the industry was in trouble.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  You know, not much fish around so far, we were going through a crisis way back then.

• 26:24Speaker 03

  Catches were down, some species had virtually disappeared, and Gary Studs knew all this too. So Studs came back around for another try, this time smarter.

• 26:35Speaker 05

  The presence of the foreign fleets out there who were literally raping the resource, the Eastern Bloc countries, the Soviets, the Japanese.

• 26:41Speaker 03

  This time, Studs mounted a public campaign for the 200-mile bill. He held hearings, he met personally with President Ford, he teamed up with a whole fleet of fishing boats that sailed down the coast and up the Potomac to DC. The foreign fishing activity in 90... And the campaign worked.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  This time, the bill passed. And in 1976, 50 years ago, Gerald Ford signed what became known as the Magnuson Act, after Warren Magnuson, the senator who co-sponsored it. Today, I guarantee you, any fishing captain in the country will know exactly what you mean if you say the name Magnuson. One of Studs' staff members told me that years later, as the Magnuson Act became increasingly

• 27:38Speaker 03

  controversial, Studs would sometimes say, "Thank God they didn't name it after me." Around the time the 200-mile limit went into effect, Carlos Rafael became the foreman of the fish plant, running the whole operation. It was clear that kicking out the foreign boats would be good for the local fleet, and pretty quickly, he made his next move.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  I went to the owner, and I told him, "I'm giving you two months to get somebody to replace me, because I'm gonna do this for myself." "Or you're never gonna make it," he says, "that's your opinion. We will see if I make it or not."

• 28:27Speaker 03

  The rebellious teenager, who ran away from the monastery and cherished his plastic wings, was gonna follow through on his promise, to work for himself in America.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  I went to a friend. I asked him for $5,000 loan. I asked for 10, but he, at the time, he says, "Carlos, I don't have 10, but I got 5 if I could help you." I said, "The 5 will have to do." And I had 27 cents left of my own.

• 28:52Speaker 03

  That was the beginning of Carlos's seafood.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Just with $5,027.

• 28:58Speaker 03

  And truly, Carlos's timing was very, very good.

• 29:05Speaker 04

  Now with extended jurisdiction, the fishing industry is booming again.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  Because after the 200-mile limit went into effect and the foreign fleets were gone, Congressman Studs helped use federal money to usher in a golden age for the New Bedford fleet. The government came now with its

• 29:23Dan Pashman?

  Government guaranteed loan.

• 29:24Speaker 03

  Again, Rodney Avila, New Bedford fisherman.

• 29:27Dan Pashman?

  So if you could prove that you were a fisherman, they'd loan you all the money you wanted to buy a boat.

• 29:33Speaker 03

  Interest rates at that time were quite high. If you were buying a house, you might pay 10%, 15% interest. But if you were buying a fishing boat, it was basically free money.

• 29:45Dan Pashman?

  I had a guy approach me to build 34 boats. He says, all you'll do is sit home and manage the boats, and I'll do all the rest.

• 29:53Speaker 03

  So it almost turned fishing boats into like an investment asset.

• 29:57Dan Pashman?

  Corporations, exactly. Accountants bought boats, lawyers bought boats. I know a dentist that owned boats. I know a used car salesman that owned the boat. And the catching was good because there was a lot of fish around.

• 30:11Speaker 03

  Remember, 90% of the fishing pressure had just been removed in some areas. So at this point, overfishing was not really a concern. How could our dinky little fleet even approach the damage that those floating factories had done?

• 30:30Speaker 03

  So you took that $5,027. What did you buy? What did you set up?

• 30:36Speaker 01

  I would buy fishing at night from the fishing vessels, lobsters, monkfish, scallops.

• 30:43Speaker 03

  At first, Carlos was just a small-time dealer, a middleman scouting for side deals around the docks.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  I would buy during the night. I'd go sell it the next day, get the check, go cash the check, and go pay the fisherman.

• 30:55Speaker 03

  But in those days, if you were making money in fishing, you'd be stupid to not put that money into a boat. So that's what Carlos did. He bought two boats, in fact. And I should clarify, Carlos did not captain those boats. He never captained his boats. In fact, Carlos told me he went out to sea just once, right around this time.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  And I swear, I'll never go again.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  Why?

• 31:18Speaker 01

  Because that's not fit for human beings.

• 31:21Speaker 03

  Carlos got so seasick on that trip. He offered to pay for all the extra fuel if the captain would just drop him off at the closest port. He literally leapt off the boat as it approached the dock. And from that point on, Carlos Rafael was not a fisherman. He was a businessman.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  So I think I did pretty good. But I would work 20 hours a day, 18-hour days. I didn't have no breaks.

• 31:49Speaker 04

  Vast quantities of valuable, healthy protein can now be harvested by the US industry if it expands its capabilities. Many feel that that is...

• 31:58Speaker 03

  From 1976 to 1982, the New England fishing fleet doubled in size, from 600 boats to 1,200 boats. And it wasn't just about the total number. These were bigger boats with more powerful engines. They were made of steel instead of wood. They had new nets, new fish-finding technology.

• 32:20Speaker 04

  The skipper stays close to the cabin during the tow, watching a remarkable collection of electronic instruments.

• 32:28Speaker 03

  If you ever look at footage or pictures of fishing boats, you can spot the differences right away. On the older boats, the pilot house, the enclosed area, is way in the back with the open deck space in front because the crews would haul nets onboard by hand over the side. The modern boats have a pilot house toward the front so they can pull their nets up from the back of the boat with a hydraulic winch.

• 32:55Speaker 04

  Finally, the net comes winding back onto the overhead drum, and the fish are shaken down into the cod end.

• 33:02Speaker 03

  It was like the leap from propeller planes to jet engines, a whole new era, a new generation of technology. Demand for seafood was growing very fast at that time, and so Magnuson offered a chance for the US industry to modernize, to reclaim its ocean food chain. Studs himself called Magnuson "a rebirth for the fishing industry." And locally, at least, he was a hero.

• 33:33Speaker 04

  Please give a rousing New Bedford welcome to Congressman Gary Studs.

• 33:40Speaker 03

  I talked to one congressional staffer who told me that he knew people in New Bedford who would display a picture of Studs in their home, right next to a picture of the Pope.

• 33:52Speaker 06

  And that's what Gary Studs was for them, was their savior, because they loved him.

• 33:56Speaker 05

  This fishing industry has known times in the past when everyone thought all was lost.

• 34:03Speaker 03

  Maria Tomazia remembered that later on, when Studs' sexuality was revealed as part of a congressional probe, when he was publicly censured, and when he chose to run for office again as the first openly gay congressman in American history. Even then, the city and the Portuguese community did not turn on him.

• 34:27Speaker 06

  As soon as they saw him, they would start yelling and applauding, and it was like, unbelievable.

• 34:38Speaker 03

  You have to understand that for coastal communities, the Magnuson Act was like the New Deal, because each new boat employed a crew, each crewman supported a family, and together, they supported a whole waterfront economy.

• 34:55Speaker 05

  And all of its members, we believe that the future of this city, and the future of this fleet, and the future of this industry will match in magnitude its magnificent past. Good luck to us all.

• 35:08Speaker 06

  So, it was just tremendous. In every way, everybody was benefiting from it, and that's what the American dream was about.

• 35:22Speaker 03

  Carlos Rafael and Rodney Avila were part of a whole generation who rode the Magnuson wave. To this day, you can walk along the harbor in New Bedford and see the boats they've built, from 1978, '79, 1980, the boom times.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  But for the fishing industry, Magnusson was always a Faustian bargain. They asked the government to get involved in their business, to formalize what had been informal, to regulate what had been unregulated. They got their wish, but they also got more. And my uncle. Again, Rodney Avila. He said to me, "You don't want the Magnusson Act." And I kept saying, "Why? They're gonna take my fish." And he said to me, "There'll still be enough fish to support you. But once you let the government into your living room, it's like your mother-in-law coming to visit you. You never get them out."

• 36:30Speaker 03

  Coming up, we jump ahead nearly 40 years. The fishing industry has been transformed, and the codfather is looking for a way out. That's when the trouble begins. It's all coming up. Stick around.

• 36:46Dan Pashman?

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• 36:51Dan Pashman?

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• 37:36Dan Pashman?

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• 38:22Dan Pashman?

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• 39:05Dan Pashman?

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• 39:25Speaker 03

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• 39:50Dan Pashman?

  Welcome back to The Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman and I want to make sure you know that we are just a few weeks away from our first live Sporkful taping in the New York area in two years. And it's not just any live taping. We have an all-star lineup featuring the one and only Kenji Lopez Alt and comedy legend Judy Gold. We're going to cover big questions like, what is the state of New York bagels? Is it true that Kenji doesn't eat sweets? And why? And how does Judy like her matzo balls? It's going to be a blast. That's March 19th at the Bell House in Brooklyn. By the way, we also have a Boston show coming up May 1st. Get tickets and info for both shows at sporkful.com/live. That's sporkful.com/live. All right, let's get back to it. Here again is Ian Coss.

• 40:40Speaker 03

  We're going to jump forward in time because I want you to see where all these changes are headed, why they matter, specifically to Carlos Rafael. It's 2015, almost 40 years after Magnuson became law, 40 years after New England fishermen cautiously welcomed the government into their world. Now, the boom times are over. The fishing industry is struggling.

• 41:06Speaker 07

  A disaster is a disaster. And that's true whether we're talking about crops or whether we're talking about fish.

• 41:18Speaker 03

  The years leading up to 2015 had been brutal for New England fishermen. A dramatic 77% cut in the cod catch. The catch quotas set by the government kept getting lower and lower. That's going to be a heck of a number of people out on unemployment. The regulations kept getting tighter and tighter. Prospects are the bleakest they've ever been. That I'm going to be tied up for months. That's the kind of draconian bureaucracy that fishermen are living with and struggling to maintain their. For many fishermen, it meant the end of a career, the end of a way of life.

• 41:51Speaker 02

  We are the most regulated fishery in the world.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  And Carlos is tired of it all. He employs hundreds of people, manages dozens of boats, but his own daughter doesn't want to take over what he's built. So he decides to put the empire up for sale. In May of that year, Carlos got a phone call from a broker, someone who helped very wealthy clients manage their money. This broker had a pair of Russian businessmen in New York who had made an awful lot of money, something involving healthcare equipment. Now they're looking for a place to invest it. Carlos told the broker, everything was up for grabs.

• 42:38Speaker 03

  The boats, the nets, the dredges, permits, property, a fish processing plant, the whole enchilada, as he put it.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  I gave them a silver platter, the whole enchilada.

• 42:50Speaker 03

  The price was $175 million. "No problem," the broker said. "Let's talk." Two weeks later, the Russians drove through the chain link gate and parked in front of the fish plant, a plain, blocky building made of corrugated metal, like a big shipping container, with a sign on the side, Carlos Seafood. The Russians drove a BMW 5 Series, the sport version with a V8 engine. They wore Louis Vuitton shoes and Versace belts, pinky rings, Rolexes. Carlos was in his usual outfit of jeans and a worn-out flannel, the breast pocket stuffed

• 43:33Speaker 03

  with slips of paper, and of course, a pack of cigarettes. He did not look like a man worth $175 million. Carlos led the men through the plant and up a metal staircase to his office, the one filled with pictures of Scarface.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  This is Ezequiel.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  How are you?

• 43:57Speaker 01

  That's the sales manager.

• 43:58Speaker 03

  How's it going? How's it going? Okay, hello. Hello.

• 44:04Speaker 03

  The Russian buyers, however, are not buyers. Those are both names, yes. But they are very curious about the business. And they are recording everything. They're undercover feds. That motherfucker, believe that shit. I ain't know me. Like, I'm picturing you in a white van with headphones on.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  There are white vans.

• 44:26Speaker 03

  Ron Mullet was the case agent with the IRS.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  But I don't recall if on that particular day, white vans were involved. I was certainly somewhere where I could respond if things went sideways in there.

• 44:42Speaker 03

  So how did the IRS first get interested in Carlos Rafael?

• 44:48Speaker 02

  They recognized that he was growing in a time where the industry was shrinking.

• 44:53Speaker 04

  Most boats sit idle, confined by federal rules that limit when they can fish and what they can catch.

• 44:59Speaker 02

  People were having a hard time meeting their loans on their boats. Yet he was succeeding. And he can step right up and has an abundance of cash to buy them out and buy their permits, most importantly. That led to different theories from other law enforcement that he must be involved in some other illicit illegal activity. And it ran the gambit. Some agencies thought he was involved in human trafficking or smuggling. Some people thought it was drugs. People thought there was public corruption. Several different agencies had feelings that it was something, but none of them could figure out what it was.

• 45:34Speaker 03

  The IRS, despite its reputation, does not just investigate tax fraud. As one agent put it to me, "We do everything but crimes of passion. As long as there's money involved, we'll take it." That's why these other federal agencies wanted to brief Mullet on Carlos Rafael. There was obviously money involved here. It was just no one knew where it was coming from.

• 45:59Speaker 02

  I listened to their brief, I thanked them for their time, and I left and put the briefing sheet in my drawer, expecting never to look at it again.

• 46:07Speaker 03

  A few months later, Mullet heard from a source that Carlos was looking to cash out and figured maybe this was his chance to get a peek inside the fish plant. Mullet recruited a pair of undercover agents with Russian accents, then a third agent to play the broker, and sent them in to buy Carlos's seafood. Again, none of them knew what kind of business Carlos was really in. It could be drugs, it could be arms dealing, so they had no idea what the man was capable of. And it didn't help that the building was full of long, sharp knives used to fillet fish. There was an uncertain moment early on when Rafael noticed his three guests were all wearing

• 46:51Speaker 03

  the exact same 18-karat gold Rolex watch, but the leader of the group didn't miss a beat. "Those are Christmas gifts for the boys," he said. So Ron Mullet was listening intently for any signs of trouble and also for any clues as to what Rafael's true business was.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  So this fish release keeps, it's like a fucking yo-yo.

• 47:14Speaker 04

  Like you diversify, right?

• 47:16Speaker 03

  The men got to talking, and Carlos was happy to talk about his business. This was his life.

• 47:22Speaker 04

  Like scallops, you said?

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, we got 12 of them.

• 47:25Speaker 04

  12 scallop belts? Right.

• 47:27Speaker 03

  He talked about scallopers and draggers. He talked about the regulations he had to deal with, the sectors, the quotas, the permits, stuff the IRS agents didn't really understand.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the scope. I gotta take this gold.

• 47:40Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, sure.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  Yellow.

• 47:42Speaker 03

  And more than anything, Carlos talked about the art of buying and selling fish, an obsession he has maintained since his days as a small-time dealer.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Hey, cockat, I told you 500, what? I told you 575. You buy the motherfuckers, then you gotta shed a pack of them, then you gotta freeze the motherfuckers, then you gotta mask them. What the fuck do you want from me?

• 48:02Speaker 03

  But for the undercover agents, who again were pretending they wanted to buy out the whole business, there was a mystery staring them in the face: that asking price of 175 million. As big as Carlos's seafood was, that number seemed like a lot. So the agents asked for some proof that this business was really worth what Carlos said it was worth.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  And he, within probably the first 10 or 15 minutes, he called his accountant.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Get the financial statements. I think I'm not a dog. Just to let him pick.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  To send this stuff over, this financials and tax returns and stuff.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  All right, do that about it. So we'll take her right. She's going to the office. She said about 10, 15 minutes she'll be here.

• 48:46Speaker 02

  But early on, it was, there's a part of the business that she doesn't know about, and we're not going to talk about that.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  About Carlos's food, don't ask that question.

• 48:55Speaker 04

  What do you mean?

• 48:56Speaker 01

  Because she's gonna go to you, la, la, la, la, la. Because she don't know nothing.

• 49:01Speaker 04

  That's what I meant. We want to talk with you separately about it.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  Okay, because.

• 49:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what we're talking about, Carlos.

• 49:08Speaker 03

  So the accountant is on her way over with the financials. She'll be there in 10 minutes. The plan had been to take a break and go down to the docks. But now everyone understands that there is a certain corner of the business that if it comes up, the accountant will cover her ears and go la, la, la, la, la. That's what he means by that. So what to do? These buyers seem serious, and they are clearly smart enough to know that the business on those official financial statements is not worth 175 million, which means Carlos has a decision to make, quickly.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  They coming back and they says, the numbers doesn't justify 175 million. So stupid of me. I go in the bottom drawer.

• 49:57Speaker 03

  Of this desk where they're sitting at right now.

• 50:00Speaker 02

  And what he does, he opened a drawer.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  And I got another set of books.

• 50:03Speaker 02

  And he put it on the desk.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Right here. Tell me it's not worth 175 million dollars.

• 50:14Speaker 04

  There you go.

• 50:17Speaker 04

  There he is, see?

• 50:20Speaker 01

  This is.

• 50:22Speaker 04

  That's where we want to go, the la, la, la, before she gets here.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  This is a Carlos's food.

• 50:27Speaker 03

  This set of books was labeled simply cash.

• 50:32Speaker 01

  This would have been another six, seven thousand dollars of my bottom line.

• 50:36Speaker 03

  However, the lines of numbers on the ledger did not reveal a smuggling operation or a drug business. It was more fish, more prices, more lists of pounds and species. Because while other fishermen had been suffering and protesting under the system of regulations created by the Magnuson Act, Carlos Rafael had figured out a way to break the system entirely, to catch whatever he wanted to catch and get away with it for years. And this was not just about being a rebel and reeling in a few too many fish that he sold on the side.

• 51:19Speaker 03

  This was an operation. Carlos falsified official documents. He manipulated gaps in the enforcement system. He built up a network for selling black market fish to high-end restaurants involving a mafia associate, two corrupt cops, duffel bags full of cash and money hidden in offshore bank accounts. All adding up to millions of dollars' worth of fish. The fishing was not a front. It was not a distraction. The fishing was the crime.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  You will not see it on paper. I watched. I was probably seeing it.

• 52:03Speaker 03

  With the tension broken and all his cards on the table, Carlos joked with these men, who he had only met that day, that he's really trusting them at this point.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  I do not know you could be the fucking IRS any. This could be a fucking clusterfuck. So I'm trusting you.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  We have the same. I feel it before I arrest you, though.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  I regret that for the rest of my life, this son of a bitch. They would have never, never got me.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  But eh, it's over.

• 52:52Speaker 03

  This is a story about one man's choice to break the rules. But I see it as part of a much bigger story. Americans, we've always hated government regulation. That rebellious attitude Carlos has is not unique. It's part of the American dream, really. That desire to be autonomous, to work for yourself, to make your own luck, as Carlos put it. That culture has always been there, but the place we are in now somehow feels different.

• 53:26Speaker 03

  Today, the very idea of government regulation has become polarized. And I mean that on both sides of the political spectrum. It seems like people are instinctively for it or against it before they even know what it is. Like, as a matter of principle, people on the left are mostly focused on the benefits of regulation, how it can be a tool for justice, for safety, preservation. People on the right seem to be mostly focused on the harms and the costs, to the point that there is talk of dismantling the regulatory state entirely, shutting down whole agencies, stripping it down to nothing. Surely, there is some nuance between these extremes.

• 54:11Speaker 03

  But the fact is, most of us don't want to look that close. It's boring, it's complicated, so we look away.

• 54:21Speaker 03

  Fishermen do not have the luxury of looking away, nor for that matter, do truck drivers, or small business owners, or nurses, farmers, a lot of us. And I should be clear here that I am one of the lucky Americans who leads a pretty unregulated life. I make podcasts that go out on the internet. I don't need a permit or a license. I can say whatever I want, including swears. I can make any number of episodes. Anyone can listen to them anywhere. It's a little hard for me to appreciate what it means to have your day-to-day work monitored by the state, to constantly bump up against rules that feel arbitrary. It's hard for me to appreciate

• 55:06Speaker 03

  the anger that someone like Carlos Rafael feels, but that anger is real. And that is why I am telling this story. The details of the operation aside, could you talk a little bit more about your motivations? Why it felt like these rules shouldn't be followed?

• 55:27Speaker 01

  It was not for the money. See, I'm the type of guy that I know the whole thing from the bottom up, because I started as a load and fish boat. I know what it takes, what you need to raise a family and to get ahead in life. And they forced me to do bullshit so I could keep all these people working.

• 55:47Speaker 03

  So you felt like you had to break the law in order to protect the people who worked for you?

• 55:53Speaker 01

  No questions asked. No questions asked. They forced you to do it. They forced me to cheat.

• 56:07Speaker 03

  They forced me to cheat. When I walked out of Carlos Seafood that first day, I was skeptical of what I'd just heard. It all felt pretty self-serving. Of course, Carlos sees himself as the hero, the rogue fighting back against an overbearing state. On its own, he was easy to dismiss. But then again...

• 56:33Speaker 06

  I mean, we have to look at both sides of the story. Every colon has two sides.

• 56:37Speaker 03

  As I've talked with more people who fished out of New Bedford, who worked for Carlos and who knew him, the image I get is not simple. When you first met him, you'd say, oh, this guy's a mafioso. But actually, he had a heart. In the fishing industry, Carlos Rafael remains a deeply divisive figure.

• 56:58Speaker 04

  If he wasn't born crooked, he must have learned it before he could talk.

• 57:03Speaker 03

  Someone who inspires jealousy, fury.

• 57:06Dan Pashman?

  Only Carlos turned into the biggest crook in America. Just Carlos. He is a product of his own moral depravity.

• 57:13Speaker 03

  And someone who, despite all his crimes, all his deceptions, a lot of people continue to root for. Do you blame him for what he did? Do you think what he did is wrong?

• 57:25Speaker 04

  No, I don't.

• 57:26Speaker 02

  No, I don't.

• 57:30Speaker 03

  So who is Carlos Rafael, really? A folk hero? A crook? A righteous rebel? A selfish con man? I believe, in order to judge the crimes of Carlos, you also have to judge the whole system that he chose to break.

• 57:51Speaker 03

  So we're going to cover those 40 years, from the passage of Magnuson to the arrest of Carlos Rafael, to understand that system and the anger that grew up around it. And here is my hope for the series. If you are one of those people who instinctively thinks government regulation is good and necessary, this story will make you question that instinct. If you are someone who thinks regulation is flawed and burdensome and unnecessary, this story will make you question that instinct.

• 58:31Speaker 03

  And if you were someone who, before today, thought lobsters are red, then if nothing else, you are about to learn a whole lot about where your fish comes from.

• 58:47Speaker 03

  Here, police lined up all down the street here, all the way past the gate. In part two, what the government gives, the government can take away. People are being taken into custody left and right here. The last of the dealers are now out of the lot, hit the pavement, please. That's next time.

• 59:14Dan Pashman?

  That's Ian Coss and Good News, episode two of Catching the Codfather is up now. It's in the same feed as Ian's previous series, The Big Dig. So, search up The Big Dig on your favorite podcast app and look for season three, Catching the Codfather. Next week on the show, we talk to the owner of a beloved Mexican restaurant in St. Paul, Minnesota, about everything that's changed since the ICE raids and how her restaurant's transformed into a community hub to help people in need. That's next week. While you wait for that one, check out last week's episode about how a Muslim journalist and Jewish food writer considered the question of impossible pork, the vegan pork alternative that supposedly tastes just like pork. Is it okay to eat it if you're kosher or halal? And if so, would they want to? That episode's up now.

• 59:57Dan Pashman?

  And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app? Yes, the SiriusXM app, it has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage. Does your podcasting app have that? And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more. It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one. And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to siriusxm.com/sporkful. The team that produces The Sporkful includes me, along with managing producer.

• 1:00:28Speaker 07

  Emma Morgenstern.

• 1:00:29Dan Pashman?

  And senior producer. Andres O'Hara. Our engineer is. Jared O'Connell. Music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of SiriusXM Podcasts. Our executive producer is Camille Stanley. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman. Now here's Ian with the rest of the Codfather credits.

• 1:01:02Speaker 04

  Passei por uma cidade que na verdade reconheci que era aquela com certeza a mais portuguesa que jamais eu vi. Tem os seus barcos de pesca que fazem festa ao chegar ao porto. Compro tudo o seu trabalho, tenho a gasalho amor e conforto. Viva, viva a New Bedford, és a rainha dos imigrantes. Viva, viva a New Bedford, a mãe dos filhos das terras dos tandos.

• 1:01:44Speaker 04

  Viva, viva a New Bedford, em ti criei uma emoção. Viva, viva a New Bedford, tu és a dona do meu coração.

• 1:01:59Speaker 03

  Catching the Codfather is produced by Isabel Hibbard and myself, Ian Cos. It's edited by Lacey Roberts. The editorial supervisor is Jennifer McKim with support from Ryan Alderman. And the executive producer is Devon Maverick-Robbins. If you want to hear more stories like this one, produced by the same team, I want to make sure you know, this is the third season we have done together. And if you want to hear the rest of them, just search for The Big Dig wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:02:39Speaker 03

  I talked to a number of Gary Studs staffers for this episode, all of whom helped inform the story. They are John Sasso, Paul McCarthy, Steve Schworden, Mike Forrest, Tom McNaut, and Mary Bresslauer. Susan Dudley, who you will hear later in the series, also provided valuable insights for the episode. For the archival material, we owe thanks to the M.L. Barron Historic Archives, the New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center, and the Portuguese-American Archives at UMass Lowell and UMass Dartmouth. And a special thank you to Roberto and Gianluio Leo. You can find a video version of this episode on YouTube, featuring incredible archival

• 1:03:20Speaker 03

  footage, produced by Joni Tobin and Annie Gerzen. The artwork is by Bill Miller. Our closing song is "Viva, Viva New Bedford" by Georges Ferreira. The Big Dig is a production of GBH News and distributed by PRX.

• 1:03:54Speaker 03

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