A foul-mouthed fisheries kingpin. Undercover cops. Envelopes stuffed with illicit cash. Our latest story, published with Mother Jones, reads like a noir thriller set against the backdrop of the collapsing New England fishing industry.
Ben Goldfarb tells the riveting tale of Carlos Rafael, known as “The Codfather,” who exploited loopholes in the region’s catch-share system to drive smaller operators out of business and perpetrate a years-long fraud. “I am a pirate,” Rafael once told regulators. “It’s your job to catch me.”
Goldfarb writes: “Rafael’s fraud, which he termed ‘the dance,’ was a triumph of vertical integration …. Because he owned both boats and a dealership, he could instruct his captains to misreport their catch, and then he could falsify the dealer reports to corroborate the lie. A corrupt sheriff’s deputy named Antonio Freitas allegedly helped him smuggle the cash to Portugal through Boston’s Logan International Airport.”
It wasn’t supposed to work this way. Over the last decade, catch shares emerged as the primary strategy to prevent overfishing and stabilize a struggling industry. Under catch shares, limits are set for how much of each fish can be commercially harvested in a year, then that total is divided among all the fishing operations in a given fishery. “When each fisherman owns a stake, the rationale goes, he has an incentive to conserve: The more fish in the sea, the bigger the pie and its slices,” Goldfarb writes.
But under these systems, the share that smaller operations get often isn’t enough to support a viable business, so they sell or lease their shares to the larger operators—like Rafael. While most catch-share systems set caps on how much any one fisherman could accumulate, New England did not include this check on consolidation when it established its catch-share scheme in 2010. This allowed Rafael to accelerate his “dance” — he claimed to have been conducting for 30 years — to “hyper-speed.”
By 2013, The Codfather controlled more than a quarter of New England’s groundfish revenue, and 120 of the more than 440 boats competing for those fish had exited the game. You can read Goldfarb’s piece at Mother Jones, or at our website.
Fisheries are an important source of food, not just in the U.S., but globally, which is why we cover these issues. You can support that coverage and more to come, with a donation.
In the meantime, please check out our Ag Insider daily news report. We’re bolstering our coverage in the Trump era, because this is news on food and ag you need to know.
Photograph by Tristan Spinski