After decades of gaming and monopolizing the system governing commercial fishing rights in New England, a crime lord known as The Codfather has been kicked from his throne in New Bedford, Massachusetts, writes Ben Goldfarb in FERN’s latest story, co-produced with Mother Jones. Rafael will plead guilty to fraud before a federal judge in Boston on Thursday, facing 25 years in prison and $500,000 in fines.
The Codfather, a.k.a. Carlos Rafael, was rarely on the right side of the law. He went to prison for tax evasion in the 1980s, was indicted (and acquitted) for price-fixing in 1994, and was caught with an the illegal 881-pound tuna in 2011. “I am a pirate,” he once told regulators. “It’s your job to catch me.” By the time federal agents posing as Russian mobsters arrested him last year, he owned one-fifth of the fleet in New Bedford and was running an operation worth $175 million — eight times what he had reported to the IRS — and had helped dramatically shrink the northeastern fishing fleet.
“Every year, more than $350 million worth of seafood passes through this waterfront, a significant slice of which is controlled by the Codfather, the most powerful fisherman in America’s most valuable seafood port,” says Goldfarb.
As Goldbarb explains, the Codfather’s “fraud, which he termed ‘the dance,’ was a triumph of vertical integration.” The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) requires that fishing boats report the species and weight of their catch each time they dock, while seafood dealers have to report what they buy. But since the Codfather was both buyer and seller, he was able to create fraudulent reports and build an empire in the process.
“Like farming, banking, and a host of other industries, commercial fishing has always been subject to consolidation and concentration, the accumulation of power and capital in the hands of a few at the expense of many,” writes Goldfarb. “In 1996, about 1,200 boats harvested groundfish — that’s cod, haddock, flounder, and a suite of other white, flaky bottom-dwellers — from Connecticut to Maine. By 2013, that number had dwindled to 327.”
By instituting in 2009 a system of “catch shares,” which divvy up fishing rights among boats to curb overfishing, New England regulators actually propelled consolidation by bigger companies — and none was bigger than The Codfather’s. That’s because New England failed to institute measures in the program to prevent consolidation when allotments were set, Goldfarb explains. Small-scale fishermen who receive small allotments “often have no choice but to sell out to larger competitors, who accumulate fishing power like agribusinesses devouring family farms.” And that’s how a man like the Codfather got made. He fancied himself the fishing-industry version of Tony Montana, the cocaine kingpin of the film Scarface, and referred to his small-boat competitors as “mosquitoes on the balls of an elephant.”