Catching The Codfather | 4. Mosquitos on the Balls of an Elephant

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Big Dig Presents: Catching The Codfather

Episode 4: Mosquitoes on the Balls of an Elephant
Release Date: March 4, 2026
Host: Ian Coss
Production: GBH News

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Overview

In the fourth installment of “Catching The Codfather,” host Ian Coss delves into the transformation of New England’s fishing industry and the outsized role of Carlos “The Codfather” Rafael. This episode tracks the rise of catch share regulations, the unintended consequences for small-scale fishermen, and Carlos’s strategic maneuvering to dominate the industry. Through personal stories, regulatory history, bureaucratic explanations, and striking interviews, the episode explores whether Carlos is a folk hero, a ruthless opportunist, or both.

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Major Discussion Points and Insights

1. Setting The Scene: Carlos’s Contradictory Nature (00:56–05:58)

• Bill Blount’s Perspective – Old-school fisherman tells a story about Carlos showing surprising generosity to his son after they brave Hurricane Bob together (02:54–04:47).
  • Quote: “He was with me on the trip and went through the storm… that’s Carlos. When you first meet him, you say, oh, this guy’s a mafiaso, but actually, if you get to know him – he’s a really nice guy.” (04:47, Bill Blount)
• Ian Coss notes the conflicting versions of Carlos: a shrewd mobster versus a community man (05:08–05:58).

2. Carlos as Industry Spokesperson & Troublemaker (08:10–11:56)

• 1990s Public Image: Carlos is introduced as a “voice of reason” to national news, respected for his business prowess (08:12).
  • “In addition to being called the Codfather, people also called him the waterfront wizard, the oracle of the ocean.” (08:22, Ian Coss)
• Legal Troubles: Carlos repeatedly skirts and challenges the law; boasts about his resilience and independence.
  • “One of the stories that everyone tells… Carlos got up in a fishery management meeting and declared to the regulators themselves, ‘I'm a pirate. It's your job to catch me.’” (09:50–10:07, John Bullard)

3. Dominating Through Crisis (11:19–12:02)

• Carlos explains how he strategically grew his empire during downturns, buying boats cheap and selling high.
  • “A crisis, that is the best time to make money.” (12:02, Ian Coss)
  • “I bought three vessels for $615,000… and I paid for the boats in one year’s fishing.” (11:44–12:02, Carlos Rafael)

4. Tragedy at Sea: Systemic Pressures Exposed (13:06–17:46)

• Story of the deadly Northern Edge sinking, illustrating how rigid regulations forced dangerous behaviors.
  • “It was like, holy—He knew the Coast Guard would never respond in time…” (15:18, Ian Coss)
  • “The sinking highlighted the flaws of the larger system, how it forced boats to fish at certain times, in certain places, in certain ways.” (17:46, Ian Coss)

5. Evolution of Regional Fishery Management (19:32–22:22)

• Introduction to the New England Fishery Management Council; explanation of why catch shares were introduced.
  • “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. So if you're not there to represent yourself, you're going to get carved up and pay the price.” (19:47, David Gaethel)

6. Lessons from New Zealand: Catch Shares in Action (22:22–27:47)

• David Gaethel and Rodney Avila describe their trip to New Zealand to learn about catch shares—where quotas become commodities.
  • “So they were turning fishing into a commodity.” (23:19, David Gaethel)
  • They discover, off the record, that the system pushed out small fishermen in favor of big companies.
  • “We got an earful. But people were scared. These companies had enormous power. Fishermen and crew were called human capital…” (26:36, David Gaethel)
  • “It was leading cattle into a slot. They was leading us in to where they wanted us to go.” (27:23, Rodney Avila)

7. The Rise of Catch Shares in New England (28:51–36:13)

• Susan Dudley unpacks the history of regulatory authority and delegation through agencies.
• 2007 Magnuson-Stevens Act reauthorization introduces mandatory catch limits nationwide (33:09–33:41).
• The challenge becomes: who gets what quota?
  • “At the time, you had one big owner who had… 25, 30 vessels…” (35:17, Maggie Raymond)
  • Carlos rapidly buys up boats and permits before the new system is finalized.

8. The Quota Game: Winners and Losers (36:13–41:59)

• “Accumulation cap” idea (preventing excessive concentration of quota ownership) is dropped due to time pressure.
  • “If I were to do it all over again, I would have said we’re going to get it done when it’s ready. But I felt like… I got to get this done.” (37:01, John Bullard)
• Final vote on Amendment 16 passes overwhelmingly, despite warnings about consolidation. Only David Gaethel votes no (41:59).

9. Consequences of Catch Shares: A New Order (42:22–47:30)

• Smaller fishermen receive quotas too small to be viable—making it easier for Carlos to buy them out.
  • Quote: “The strong will get stronger and the weak will disappear.” (43:25–43:27, Carlos Rafael)
  • Carlos goes from 10% to 25% control of groundfish quota in New England.
  • The infamous line: “mosquitoes on the balls of an elephant”—Carlos describing small fishermen, himself as the elephant (44:34, Carlos Rafael).

10. Regulatory Response and Carlos’s Pushback (47:30–49:46)

• The council eventually sets a cap—just above Carlos’s existing holdings, effectively grandfathering him in.
  • “If somebody tries to take what I worked for 40 years, I’ll lose it all. But I will prove a point.” (45:33, Carlos Rafael)
  • “He wasn’t shy about dropping a good chunk of money on a lawyer. And so they backed off. The council had to write rules that grandfathered him in.” (45:42, David Gaethel)

11. Dual Nature: Ruthless Businessman vs. Provider (49:46–51:45)

• Contradictory accounts of Carlos: his own interviews (defensive, reasonable) vs. undercover IRS tapes (ruthless, dismissive).
  • “He doesn’t have the money to buy fucking quotas. So he’s fucked either way… it’s just a matter of fucking time for me to pick the rest of these fuckers and get them all out of the picture.” (47:41, Carlos Rafael on IRS tape)
  • “I don’t know if it’s greed or if it’s ambition, but I always had the ambition to get fucking control of the whole fucking thing.” (48:13, Carlos Rafael)

12. Moral and Systemic Ambiguity (51:45–End)

• The regulatory scheme did what it was designed to do: consolidate an unsustainably large and fragmented industry.
• Maggie Raymond: “Things were going pretty well until… Rafael showed everybody that he knew how to break the system.” (51:45, Maggie Raymond)
• Sets up for the next episode: Carlos’s moves under the catch share system open the door to an unprecedented scale of fraud.

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” – David Gaethel (19:47)
• “I'm a pirate. It's your job to catch me.” – Carlos Rafael (10:04, as quoted by John Bullard)
• “A crisis, that is the best time to make money.” – Carlos Rafael (12:02)
• “The strong will get stronger and the weak will disappear.” – Carlos Rafael (43:25)
• “Mosquitoes on the balls of an elephant.” – Carlos Rafael, describing small fishermen (44:34)
• “This is just going to unleash greed, which is the basest human emotion on the planet. And I do not, to this day, understand how greed is going to manage a fishery sustainably.” – David Gaethel (42:07)
• “He wasn’t shy about dropping a good chunk of money on a lawyer. And so they backed off. The council had to write rules that grandfathered him in.” – David Gaethel (45:42)
• “I don’t know if it’s greed or if it’s ambition… I always had the ambition to get fucking control of the whole fucking thing.” – Carlos Rafael (48:13)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:56–05:58 – Bill Blount's story and Carlos as benefactor
• 08:10–11:56 – Carlos’s public image and legal history
• 13:06–17:46 – The sinking of the Northern Edge
• 19:32–22:22 – New England Fishery Management Council explained
• 23:19–27:47 – New Zealand catch shares investigation
• 33:09–33:41 – Magnuson Act’s new mandate
• 38:06–41:59 – Final council debate and vote on Amendment 16
• 43:25–44:34 – Carlos’s view on small fishermen and market consolidation
• 47:30–49:46 – Accumulation cap and Carlos’s legal pushback
• 49:46–51:45 – Contradictions in Carlos’s self-narrative
• 51:45–End – Systemic ambiguity and lead-in to next episode

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Memorable Moments & Reflections

• Carlos the Paradox: Contrasting perspectives—community champion and ruthless consolidator—woven throughout the episode.
• “Mosquitos on the balls of an elephant”: The title phrase, Carlos’s blunt metaphor for small-time fishermen under his dominance, encapsulates the episode’s core theme.
• Regulatory Irony: The intended “fix”–catch shares–created new problems and empowered cunning players like Carlos.
• Ethical Complexity: Is Carlos simply playing a rigged game, or does his ambition cross a moral line? The episode refuses easy answers, instead raising uncomfortable questions about market solutions, power, and fairness.

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Conclusion

This episode uncovers how well-intended regulation, market forces, and individual ambition collided to reshape an industry. Carlos Rafael’s mastery of the system—and its cracks—highlights both the flaws in governance and the human stories lost in the shuffle. The stage is set for Carlos’s descent into even riskier territory, with hints at the systemic weaknesses that would eventually be his undoing.

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For those who haven’t listened, this summary provides a narrative arc following the transformation of fishing regulation, the human toll, and the character study of Carlos Rafael, blending the documentary’s natural, unvarnished tone with a sharp eye for the ironies and humanity at the heart of this maritime saga.

Transcript

[Swindled Podcast Host]

Swindled is a true crime podcast about greed. The anonymous host, who refers to himself as a concerned citizen, tells true stories of white collar criminals, con artists and corporate evil in a dark and deadpan narrative style that will leave you trusting nothing. There are episodes about the disturbing histories and practices of food giants such as Nestle and Chiquita. There are episodes about man made environmental disasters such as the Bhopal gas tragedy and and the BP oil spill. There's even a Swindled episode about Mother Teresa. Nothing and no one is off limits. Critics have called Swindled remarkable and enraging, horrifying and maddening, meticulously researched and true. For the love of money is the root of all evil. 100 episodes are waiting for you. Listen to [e-mail] or wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Ian Cossack]

Support for Catching the Codfather comes From Rogers Fish Co. Founded by Roger Berkowitz, offering an array of New England seafood and entrees shippable anywhere in the US [e-mail] and also from Brightbound Careers aren't one size fits all, and Brightbound helps students as young as middle school identify their strengths and find careers that fit them just right. Learn more at B R I t e bound.org. Bill Blount is the image of an old salt tall, white beard, weathered face, full of stories but also possessed of that Yankee stoicism that makes you wonder if these stories are even more terrifying than they sound.

[Bill Blount]

It was in Hurricane Bob.

[Ian Cossack]

This story is from the summer of

[Bill Blount]

1991 and I was a little slow coming home and I saw the wind switch. It switched too early. The minute I saw that, I said, oops, this thing's coming really fast.

[Ian Cossack]

As soon as the wind switched that day, Blount started steaming west towards the tip of Nantucket, away from the incoming hurricane. He didn't know if he could make it back to New Bedford in time, but he had another idea. Nantucket island is a big crescent with a rounded side facing out to sea, so if Blount could get around the backside, he could wait out the hurricane there, then bring the fish to auction as soon as the storm passed. It was a little risky, but the payoff would be great, since the rest of the fleet would be stuck in harbor. He'd have the only fish in town. So Blount rounded the north point of Nantucket into the lee side. The wind was gusting well over 100 miles an hour, but here at least there was some shelter.

[Bill Blount]

I got as close to the beach as I dare get.

[Ian Cossack]

He hugged the coast, pointed his bow into the wind, and did his best to hold position.

[Bill Blount]

The front. Front windows were just white. You couldn't see out there. You couldn't see anything. And it was hot. Hurricane is hot, and yet you could see the water accelerating right into the sky.

[Ian Cossack]

Occasionally, Blount would throw open the door at the back of the pilothouse just to let out the humid air. But mostly he was enclosed, surrounded by white wind and water, blinded to the outside world, and just relying on his radio navigation unit to keep from running aground. And in this particular situation, a good stoic front was important because Blount also had his 12 year old son, Luther on board with him. Luther later told his mother, I wasn't scared because dad wasn't scared. So father and son rode out the storm together. And three days later, they made their way back to New Bedford to sell the catch and pick up the check from the fish dealer.

[Bill Blount]

Everything was tremendous money. Cause there was nothing behind it. So this was all the fish gonna be in New England for next week. And I looked at my check and wasn't. I said, where'd the sand at?

[Ian Cossack]

The check in his hand was short. In fact, one of the fish species, the Sandabs, was missing entirely from the payment. The man writing the check was Carlos Rafael.

[Bill Blount]

I said, where'd the sand app? He said, sand up for your son. So I said, okay. So I sent my son, go up and see Carlos. So we went up and saw Carlos, and Carlos cut him a check for the sand apps.

[Ian Cossack]

It turned out Carlos had saved the last piece of the payment for Luther, and he handed the kid his own check for $500.

[Bill Blount]

Cause he was with me on the trip and went through the storm and everything, you know, So I mean, that's Carlos. You know, when you first met him, you run over, you say, oh, this guy's a mafiaso in the way he talks and everything. But actually, if you get to know him, I mean, he's a really nice guy.

[Ian Cossack]

I gotta say, when I first met Bill Blount, I thought, this is the last person in New Bedford I expect to rise in defense of Carlos Rafael. I mean, the old salt made his career working a single fishing boat named for his wife. He says grace before dinner. I never heard him swear once. And here he is singing the praises of a man who models himself on the movie Scarface.

[Bill Blount]

If I was struggling, he's the one that would say, I'll give you another 10 cents on your fish. You should be able to make it then, right, Bill? Yep. Okay. I seen him do that.

[Ian Cossack]

He did that for you.

[Bill Blount]

Yeah. A lot of fish dealers had no heart. They're ruthless. But Carlos wasn't like that. He had a heart.

[Ian Cossack]

From GBH News, this is the Big Dig, season three, catching the Codfather. I'm Ian Cossack. Carlos Rafael is a hard man to pin down. In some stories I heard, he comes across as a simple crook, a swindler, someone you could never turn your back on. In others, he's more like a benevolent overlord of the docks, even a pillar of the community. And these two versions of Carlos would collide dramatically in the early 2000s, because just when it looked like the codfather had reached the first peak of his power, the whole game of fishing changed, revealing the true extent of Carlos's ambition, or some would say his greed. This is part four. Mosquitoes on the balls of an elephant. Hey, so if you're curious to actually see what we're talking about in these episodes, coming up on our Big Dig mailing list, I'm going to have a whole photo essay about a trip I took to the New Bedford auction house, where almost all the seafood in the store is unloaded. It was really amazing. I got to watch the whole process unfold from the deck of the boat to the warehouse to the auction floor and everything. You can get all that in your inbox by signing [e-mail] thebigdig so, lots to see and more to come. Thanks so much. It's hard to say when the public image of Carlos Raphael started to shift, when the reverence and charm started to fade. But back in the 1990s, he still had some shine to him. When ABC News came to town for a piece about the closures on George's bank, Rafael was presented as a kind of spokesperson for the industry. A plucky entrepreneur doing his best with his back against the wall. Carlos Rafael, who owns the biggest fish

[John Bullard]

processing plant in town.

[Ian Cossack]

Carlos is shown in a bright blue jacket in his pristine filet plant, doing business on a giant mobile phone and speaking really as a voice of reason.

[Carlos Rafael]

They could have solved the problem if they would have acted in time.

[John Bullard]

The irony is, even the government now agrees. Carlos Rafael is right.

[Ian Cossack]

In addition to being called the Codfather, people also called him the waterfront wizard, the oracle of the ocean. He employed hundreds of people. He supported the local Portuguese clubs. Every year, he would show off his famous fish cutting skills at the local waterfront festival, holding court with his white glove, yellow smock and pile of glistening flounders. The man was a fixture, a local character. But with Carlos, there was always more going on. And by that I mean he was also getting in trouble with the law repeatedly. I told you in the last episode about the price fixing case, but that wasn't even Carlos first legal trouble. Back in the 1980s, he was convicted of tax evasion and spent four months in jail. That time, he simply ran his business from inside.

[Carlos Rafael]

It wasn't easy, but we kept it going.

[Ian Cossack]

Then in the 1990s, federal investigators came knocking again. That time with the price fixing case, Carlos was able to beat that one back.

[Carlos Rafael]

That was it. I pulled it through.

[Ian Cossack]

And it's hard to say if that brush with the law left Carlos more cautious or more emboldened, but it did not teach him to toe the line.

[John Bullard]

Nobody had any doubt about Carlos being a crook.

[Ian Cossack]

One of the stories that everyone tells, including John bullard here, is about the time Carlos got up in a fishery management meeting and declared to the regulators themselves, I'm a pirate. It's your job to catch me.

[John Bullard]

As he said, I'm a crook. It's your job to catch me.

[Ian Cossack]

And they did, repeatedly. In 1999, Carlos was investigated again, this time for lying on a permit application for squid. He pled guilty in that case. Then in 2003, he was sued by the EPA for dumping a derelict fishing boat in a federal cleanup site. Carlos was fined for interfering in a coast guard inspection, for submitting false catch reports for fishing in closed areas, and once had a nearly 900 pounds tuna confiscated from one of his boats. The tuna had been caught illegally, yet none of it really seemed to hold him up. Carlos had his gorilla of an attorney, plus all the money and spite he needed to fight off any legal challenge. He seemed unstoppable, like no amount of legal trouble could slow down his growing empire.

[Carlos Rafael]

So things start to shape up. That was one of the vessels there that this mini vessel in his office,

[Ian Cossack]

along with the scarface posters and that rock a picketing fisherman once threw at his car window. Carlos also keeps a miniature model of one of his prized boats.

[Carlos Rafael]

I bought the vessel at auction for $365,000.

[Ian Cossack]

Carlos was a master at what stock investors would call buying the dip, Even when catches were down or regulations were tight. He was big enough that he could still afford to buy boats, fishing boats, and some scallop boats, too, if his timing was good. A vessel that cost a million dollars to build, he might get for a few hundred thousand.

[Carlos Rafael]

I bought three vessels for $615,000. Things were so bad that everybody said I was a nut case when I bought the vessel. I say, shit, so how bad can things be?

[Ian Cossack]

Then when the fishing picked back up, he'd be ready to make a profit.

[Carlos Rafael]

So I paid for the boats in one year's fishing.

[Ian Cossack]

Like he always says, a crisis, that is the best time to make money. By the early 2000s, Carlos owned or co owned 15 boats, plus his own processing and distribution plant. Many of those boats had names from Greek mythology. The Athena, the Poseidon, the Hera, the Apollo. They all had the same shade of sea green paint and the letters CR on the bow. Everyone knew Carlos had a long rap sheet, but he was also the biggest game in town, at least when it came to groundfish. He was someone you had to deal with. And that was before the big change, the one that set his most elaborate scheme in motion, the one that lifted Carlos to new heights and ultimately brought the entire empire crashing down. I want to set up this change and why it was such a big deal with the story of a fishing trip in 2004.

[Tony Alvarnaz]

This was the Christmas trip, I don't know, four or five days before Christmas.

[Ian Cossack]

That December, Tony Alvarnaz was the captain on a scallop boat. They were far from shore in bad weather, along with another boat called the Northern Edge.

[Tony Alvarnaz]

It was getting rough. I was like, I says, paul, I'll handle the gear secured, the dredges turned around, just headed fair wind so I can eat in calm weather and better weather, you know, Paul comes up, he's like, hey, where'd the Northern Edge go?

[Ian Cossack]

The thing to know about this fishing trip is that given the choice, neither boat would be out this far in this weather the week before Christmas. But because of the regulations we talked about in the last episode, these fishermen didn't feel like they had a choice. Remember, after Amendment five, boats got a set number of days every year to go out and fish. And they were only allowed to fish in certain areas. This area these boats were in had been closed entirely for a while, part of that effort to prevent overfishing. And so when these scallop boats were granted permission for a single trip to this area at a specific time each, they weren't going to miss it. No matter the weather, no matter the danger. It was a chance to bring home a big catch, to put real money in the bank. But now the weather had really picked up and no one could see the Northern Edge should have been off the stern. So Alvarnaz got on the radio and tried channel 68, which he and the Northern edge captain used to communicate Nothing.

[Tony Alvarnaz]

Got on 16. Eight, northern edge, nothing. It's like, I don't know. You ever get that feeling where your brain's spinning, something's. Something's wrong.

[Ian Cossack]

That's when Alvarna is called the Coast Guard.

[Tony Alvarnaz]

So I get on 16 again and says, hey, I think something's wrong with the northern edge. So then Paul, all of a sudden, he says, hey, look, you know, well, fire. And sure enough, off the stern, I don't know, mile or so was just a big glow right off the water.

[Ian Cossack]

It was like, holy. He knew the Coast Guard would never respond in time. So Alvarnaz spun the boat around and headed towards that distant glow. The waves were now 15ft high. The wind was whipping spray off the water, and he couldn't be sure what he was looking at.

[Tony Alvarnaz]

What it was, was the flares.

[Ian Cossack]

As he got closer, Alvarez realized the boat itself was gone. It had taken a couple waves across the deck and quickly capsized. But a single crewman was rolling in the waves. He was barefoot, shirtless, clinging to a rubber lifeboat with a flare.

[Tony Alvarnaz]

So I know now I gotta go into the wind, put him underneath, alongside of me, and then I gotta turn around broadside and let the wind hopefully push me on top of him and grab him.

[Ian Cossack]

Alvernaz had to execute this whole maneuver in a 110foot boat in 15foot seas. The first pass failed. So Alvarnaz came around again, got the

[Tony Alvarnaz]

boat back in position, got him just off my port bow. And a sea comes and basically throws him out of the raft. Paul looks at me. I could lip read, if you will.

[Rodney Avila]

He's.

[Tony Alvarnaz]

He got thrown out. He got. I'm like, this guy's dead. This guy's dead. What the, what the do I do now? Then all of a sudden he's like, he's back in.

[Bill Blount]

He's back in.

[Tony Alvarnaz]

I'm like, I'm trying to. This boat is a twin screw.

[Ian Cossack]

Twin screw meaning two independent propellers, meaning more maneuverable.

[Tony Alvarnaz]

I was treating it as a single screw. So finally I just, you know, hard forward on one end, hard over. Seen Paul walking along the side looking down off the bow. I'm like, shit, now I'm gonna run this fucking guy over. And I jammed the engines in reverse and then put it in idle. And the good Lord he was. He put him on, on the lee side and he used the dredge that was hanging over the side as a ladder.

[Ian Cossack]

Alverna's remembers the young man coming over the edge and then walking across the deck, half naked, cutting up his bare feet on the scallop shells. When they got him inside, he was red as a cooked lobster, barely able to talk. From the crew of six, he was the only survivor. Did you find any other sign of the Northern Edge?

[Tony Alvarnaz]

No, no, no sign at all.

[Ian Cossack]

The sinking of the Northern Edge, just one week before Christmas was devastating in New Bedford and and the deadliest single fishing disaster in the whole region since the famous perfect storm of 1991. Afterwards, the Boston Globe asked Carlos Rafael for his comment on the sinking. He was blunt as usual. It's their fault, they being the federal regulators, the people who had granted those boats a one time opportunity to fish in this area, a chance they could either use or, or lose. And the sinking became one of many events that shifted the conversation around fishing regulation. It's important to note that the Northern Edge was a scallop boat. And they've always had different rules than groundfish boats. But the sinking highlighted the flaws of the larger system, how it forced boats to fish at certain times, in certain places, in certain ways. And it's like imagine if you wanted to regulate air pollution, but you did it by telling people they could only drive on certain days of the year and on certain roads. It was a roundabout way to achieve a simple goal. To the extent that it worked, it worked by making the fishermen less efficient and sometimes less safe. So all around the region, there were fishermen who believed something had to change. When the change came, Carlos would be ready for it and all of New England would find out just how ambitious he truly was. When did you first join the Management Council?

[David Gaethel]

I was nominated a few times, but I was actually appointed in 2004, the

[Ian Cossack]

same year the Northern Edge sank. David Gaethal joined the New England Fishery Management Council, the group that sets the rules for fishing in the region.

[David Gaethel]

And I used to say when I went to these meetings, if you're not at the table, you're on the menu. So if you're not there to represent yourself, you're going to get carved up and you're the one who's going to pay the price.

[Ian Cossack]

Fishing regulation is a little different than most kinds of business or environmental regulation in that the rules actually vary region by region. The this was part of the original vision of the Magnuson Act.

[John Bullard]

So you have a Northeast region, you have a Southeast region, you have a Gulf of Mexico, Alaska, Western Pacific, so on, because every region is different.

[Ian Cossack]

Again, John Bullard.

[John Bullard]

And this was revolutionary. I mean, a lot of environmental legislation was top down. All wisdom resides in Washington and there's a single standard that everyone has to meet in clean air and in clean water.

[Ian Cossack]

Under Magnuson, there are standards like preventing overfishing. But each region can decide for itself how they meet the standards. So that is what David Gaethel became part of in 2004, the regional council for New England. He was on the council when this big change I've been talking about took place. And I want to explain that change through his eyes, because Gaethel represented a very particular perspective on that council. Gaethal is based out of New Hampshire, which has smaller ports with fewer boats than its neighbors Maine and Massachusetts. And he was appointed to the council by his governor in part to be a voice for the little guys. Instead of operating a big fleet of boats that traveled far offshore to hunt fish, Gaethel ran what's called an inshore boat, doing short trips just off the coast of New Hampshire. He's like the equivalent of a small

[David Gaethel]

family farm, not an llc. I'm not anything. I'm just me, myself, and I, you know, my return is to feed my family. That's it.

[Ian Cossack]

So we joined the council in 2004, and pretty soon there were signs that something big was coming their way. It started when a pair of environmental foundations sponsored a trip to New Zealand. For the council members, the goal was to show New England fishermen a whole different system, a different paradigm, really, for managing the ocean.

[David Gaethel]

I knew it was a very different management style, but the proponents seemed to vastly outnumber the detractors.

[Ian Cossack]

Gaethel was curious to see how this system worked in practice.

[David Gaethel]

So he went, that was a very interesting trip.

[Ian Cossack]

Remember that? Up to this point, the New England Council had used a hodgepodge of measures to limit how much fishermen caught. They limited how many days they could fish, where they could fish, what kind of gear they could use. In New Zealand, the government had taken a very different approach. The system was at the beginning of the year, they decided the total amount of fish that would be caught, literally a specific number of tons for each species. Then they let the fishermen decide when, what, where, and how to go out and catch it. So no limitations on how many days people fish, just a limit on the total catch. The key to this kind of system is that the individual fishermen are each assigned a share of that total catch, their personal slice, which they are then allowed to buy, sell, and lease between them. It's called catch shares.

[David Gaethel]

So they were turning fishing into a commodity.

[Ian Cossack]

I wanted to ask you about the trip in New Zealand. Anything that stands out in your mind,

[Rodney Avila]

just that they drove on the wrong side of the road. We tried to rent a car. We almost got ourselves killed.

[Ian Cossack]

Also on that trip, fellow fisherman and council member Rodney Avila from New Bedford.

[Rodney Avila]

It wasn't bad till we go into a roundabout, and I'd always pull to the right. I don't know why. It was instinct.

[Ian Cossack]

So Avila and Gaethal were in New Zealand together to see this catch share system in practice and get a glimpse of a possible future for their own industry in New England. The groups funding this trip, which I should add were big supporters of catch shares, had set them up to meet with some local fishing companies.

[Rodney Avila]

We're going to show you the people who you have to talk to.

[David Gaethel]

And everywhere we went, they'd send along a guy who was. Was like the tour guide.

[Rodney Avila]

Anywhere we went, we went with them.

[David Gaethel]

He wanted you to see how great everything was. And nobody'd say anything bad on the record. But strange things started happening.

[Rodney Avila]

We ran into a couple of fishermen at the local bars, and as soon as they recognized us, they came over. Hey, this is the real story, guys.

[David Gaethel]

You go in the men's room, and some guy would follow you in. And while you're standing there, he'd start spouting off as soon as he was sure there was nobody in the stalls about what he thought was really going on.

[Rodney Avila]

And it was total different story.

[Ian Cossack]

These fishermen did not talk about the wonders of this new management system. They talked about being shut out and exploited by it. So far, these were just scattered stories from strangers. But when Gaethel and Avila tried to get more concrete information down at the waterfront, they kept hitting a wall.

[David Gaethel]

Couldn't confirm it because nobody talked to us.

[Rodney Avila]

These guys would clam right up, just not say anything.

[Ian Cossack]

So one time when they were touring a fishing boat, the two of them hatched a plan.

[David Gaethel]

So the man I was with was quite large. He's a big guy, big Portuguese man.

[Ian Cossack]

The big Portuguese man is Rodney Avila.

[David Gaethel]

He said, I'll detain. We call him the minder by then, the KGB minder. I'll detain the minder. You go talk to the crew. And he just basically backed the guy into the corner of the rail in the scallop bone. He wouldn't let him out. The guy couldn't get by him. He's going like this. He's all nervous, trying to see what was going on. He's trying to look around him. And I called the crewman aside and said, what's going on here?

[Ian Cossack]

Gaethel says that in private. The crewmen confirmed what they'd already begun to suspect a few large companies had bought up most of the fish quota and now controlled the industry.

[David Gaethel]

He said the people who own these companies, he said, they're building and racing America's cup yachts, and we don't get paid a living wage. And that pretty much told me everything I needed to know.

[Ian Cossack]

As David Gaithel looked around the docks, he didn't see a lot of small boat operators like himself. The ones they did find were hanging on by their fingernails. Mostly fishermen had to work for the big companies, since that's who owned the fish quota. They literally owned the fish in the ocean that had yet to be caught.

[David Gaethel]

And we got an earful. But people were scared. These companies had enormous power. Fishermen and crew were called human capital, and they worked whatever hours, whenever the company wanted them to work. And if they complained or tried to unionize or did anything to better their conditions, they'd be fired and replaced with more human capital. It was stark.

[Ian Cossack]

It didn't help that there was a lot of corporate money backing this trend towards catch shares. For Gaethel, the whole system looked like a money grab that would turn fishermen into helpless pawns.

[David Gaethel]

And we came back, at least the two of us came back, with a very jaded view of what we were entering into.

[Rodney Avila]

I could explain it like this. You lead the cattle into a slot. They was leading us in to where they wanted us to go.

[Ian Cossack]

Let me tell you about a personal pet peeve of mine. You order a bowl of clam chowder, get about two spoonfuls in before realizing there are hardly any clams in it. You're basically eating warm cream with potatoes. Fortunately, there is a better alternative from Rogers Fish Company. They do a double clam chowder, which, as the name suggests, is loaded with real Cape Cod clams. And like all Rogers Seafood, it's restaurant quality, flash frozen at peak freshness and delivered to your door. Find [e-mail] I'm hoping that some of you out there remember the classic Schoolhouse Rock song, how a Bill Becomes a Law. I'm just a bill. Yes, I'm only a bill, and I'm sitting here on Capitol Hill. It captures, I would say, the emotional journey of how an idea becomes an actual law, how it has to wind its way through committees, through both chambers of Congress, and all the procedural hurdles along the way.

[Carlos Rafael]

If they vote yes, what happens?

[Ian Cossack]

Then I go to the Senate and the whole thing starts all over again.

[David Gaethel]

Oh, no.

[Ian Cossack]

Oh, yeah. Well, there ought to be a companion song called How a Law Becomes A regulation. Something like, I'm just a law, yes, I'm only a law, but you know, I'm not specific at all. Because really, if you get down into the actual nitty gritty rules that govern day to day life in this country, they're not written by congresspeople, they're written by bureaucrats in what is sometimes called the administrative state, or even more ominously, the fourth branch of government. I'm not going to further attempt to put this whole process into song, but I will attempt to break it down with the help of Susan Dudley, who is a professor of public administration at George Washington University.

[Susan Dudley]

Our Constitution conceives of three different branches of government.

[Ian Cossack]

And yes, we're starting with the very, very basics.

[Susan Dudley]

And it was the legislative branch that was responsible for writing all laws. That's the language of the Constitution. And so early in our government, the idea that Congress could hand over or delegate that authority to the executive branch was unheard of.

[Ian Cossack]

When the country started, there was no epa, no fcc, no faa. If Congress wanted to make a rule about road construction or banking, they had to roll up their sleeves and write the exact rule they wanted, word for word. So what changed? Why did the country then decide that we needed these other agencies?

[Susan Dudley]

As the country got larger and issues became more complex, members of Congress felt it was less able to write the details of these laws. And so they thought it would be important to have expert agencies.

[Ian Cossack]

In effect, Congress wanted to delegate some of its power to the agencies. We give you the general idea and you get into the weeds on exactly how to make it happen. The whole issue came to a head during the New Deal when Congress was setting up a whole bunch of new agencies, the sec, the fdic, the nlrb, the wpa, so on. And that huge delegation of power sparked

[Susan Dudley]

a debate, raging debate between scholars and legal theorists about whether this was constitutional, this delegation of authority to essentially set laws.

[Ian Cossack]

And how is that debate ultimately settled?

[Susan Dudley]

A compromise was reached, and that was with the passage of the Administrative Procedure act of 1946. And that is probably the most significant law affecting the, quote, administrative state today.

[Ian Cossack]

The Administrative Procedure act clarified that yes, Congress can delegate authority to agencies, and yes, those agencies can then write rules that carry the force of law. But as a compromise to the skeptics, the agencies are not free to just make whatever rules they want.

[Susan Dudley]

They can write binding laws as long as A, they do it within the authority that was delegated to them by Congress, and B, they follow certain procedures.

[Ian Cossack]

And this gives rise to some language that might be familiar, like Notice of proposed rulemaking and public comment period. Those are the hoops laid out in 1946 that every agency has to jump through in order to issue a new rule. It's how a law passed by Congress becomes a regulation. And when it comes to our story, the people scrambling through those hoops are. Are the members of the New England Fishery Management Council. So what'd you bring there for reading material?

[Maggie Raymond]

I brought my copy of the Magnuson Stevens act, just in case I need to look up anything.

[Ian Cossack]

Maggie Raymond is a former boat owner in Maine who for many years also advised the New England Council. The copy of the Magnuson act she's holding is from 2007. That's important because Magnuson, just like the Farm Bill and a lot of other legislation, gets reauthorized periodically.

[Maggie Raymond]

And.

[Ian Cossack]

And the 2007 bill had some language tucked into it that would change American fishing forever. And that's. On what page are we on here?

[Maggie Raymond]

76. This is section 109. 479.

[Ian Cossack]

From the very beginning, Magnuson had provided some general guidelines for fishery management, like preventing overfishing. But in 2007, Magnago, the guidelines changed,

[Maggie Raymond]

establish a mechanism for specifying annual catch limits.

[Ian Cossack]

As of that year, all fisheries in the country were required to implement an annual catch limit. That meant all new regulations would have to look something like the system in New Zealand where fishermen received individual shares of the total catch. A lot of US Fisheries had already switched to that model, including, for example, the Alaskan king crab boats you see on the show Deadliest Catch. Now, New England would have to make that switch too. And they had a deadline of two

[John Bullard]

years, and it meant that we needed to move quickly.

[Ian Cossack]

John Pappalardo was the chair of the New England Council, which would have to turn this new law into actual regulation

[John Bullard]

and perhaps not have the luxury of enough time to fully vet a lot of the things that we ended up doing.

[Ian Cossack]

The big challenge in switching to a catch share system is that you have to decide who gets how much quota as a starting point. It's like dealing out the cards at the beginning of a game. The cards have to start somewhere before all the wheeling and dealing can begin. And you've got thousands of fishermen from small boat operators like David Gaithel, all, all the way up to fleet owners like Carlos Rafael, all of whom expect a piece of this new market. So the council started working out a system for deciding how the cards would be dealt out based on who owned what permits and how much fish they had landed in the past few years. But like Any system, it could be gamed.

[Maggie Raymond]

I mean, at the time, you know, you had one big owner who had

[Ian Cossack]

25, 30 vessels again, Maggie Raymond.

[Maggie Raymond]

And there was concern about consolidation of too much quota into. Into too few hands.

[Ian Cossack]

Who was that biggest boat owner at the time?

[Maggie Raymond]

Carlos Raphael.

[Ian Cossack]

Carlos had been buying up boats and permits for decades at this point, so he was already the biggest player in the region. But once he saw what was about to happen with the catch share system, he went into overdrive. According to an interview he gave later, Carlos Seafood spent $10 million buying up boats in the years leading up to the new system. The goal was to make sure that when the shares were dealt out, Carlos received as much quota as possible.

[David Gaethel]

He's exhibit A of why managing fisheries based on economics is a bad idea. He was out to maximize the money for Carlos.

[Ian Cossack]

This again is David Gaethel, the day boat owner who went on that trip to New Zealand.

[David Gaethel]

And my response was, since when is greed good?

[Ian Cossack]

Early on, as the council was developing the catch share plan, it had included what was called an accumulation cap. Basically something to say that any one person can only own so much of the fish quota. But adding even a small provision like that requires public notice and comment and review that whole process of how a law becomes regulation. In other words, it takes time, something the New England Council did not have. So the accumulation cap was scrapped, one of several choices that in hindsight had real consequences.

[John Bullard]

If I were to do it all over again, I would have said we're going to get it done when it's ready. But I felt like, oh man, I got to get this done. Or afternoon, everybody, if you could take your seats.

[Ian Cossack]

In June of 2009, John Pappalardo called the New England Fishery Management Council to order at one of their usual haunts, the Portland, Maine Holiday Inn. Also there was council staffer Tom Neese. Holiday Inn by the Bay, if you've ever been there. No. Can you describe it? No, not politely. The council members were seated at a series of tables arranged in a horseshoe shape. They had name plates, bottles of water, microphones, and before them, a packed audience. Because this was the last chance to make any changes to the to the new catch share plan, a generational shift known as Amendment 16.

[John Bullard]

Ground fish. Amendment 16. How to handle public comment and still get through all of the decisions we have to make.

[Ian Cossack]

Just a few weeks earlier, permit holders had been notified how much of the total quota they would receive as their starting share. The cards had been dealt. So now, for the first time, fishermen across the region could start to glimpse their future. Some were lining up in opposition, some were lining up in support. Was Carlos, one of the people who wanted catch shares? Yeah, again, Rodney Avila, who was on the council for this vote because he knew it'd be good for him.

[Rodney Avila]

I mean, Carlos doesn't do anything that's not good for him.

[Ian Cossack]

Under Amendment 16, Carlos Rafael would get the biggest share of quota, almost 10% of all the groundfish in all of New England. And, and of course, there was no limit on how much more quota he could accumulate.

[Carlos Rafael]

It's just going to drive the industry into consolidation to large operating units.

[Ian Cossack]

A number of speakers rose to share this concern.

[David Gaethel]

Excessive consolidation that would eliminate the day

[Ian Cossack]

boat fishery, including David Gaithel, who was up front at the council table. Right now.

[David Gaethel]

I see consolidation happening the minute you go to any of these systems because once the process is unleashed, you won't be able to stop it.

[Ian Cossack]

As far as I can tell, Carlos Rafael is never mentioned by name, but one commenter says that under this system, every dam ground fish boat in New England will wind up in the city of New Bedford. There are going to be miles and miles of coastlines and communities that never will have access to fishing again. Another concern that comes up again and again is that the region was just not real ready for this change, especially when it came to enforcement. Would the government really be able to keep track of what every boat was catching, that they were actually staying within their slice of the quota?

[David Gaethel]

Without that enforcement, I think there'd be nothing but problems.

[Ian Cossack]

The lack of an accumulation cap and the lack of enforcement would ultimately prove to be a dangerous combination. But after four days cooped up at the the Portland Holiday Inn, in two years of bureaucratic process, the council had truly run out of time. The deadline had arrived. They had to pass something.

[John Bullard]

Okay, we're going to break for lunch here. Be back at 1:30.

[Ian Cossack]

Can you take me to the day of the vote?

[David Gaethel]

Yeah. It was hot. The room was overcrowded and overheated. People spoke passionately.

[Ian Cossack]

Again, David Gaithel.

[David Gaethel]

People got tired. As they get tired, they tend to get more irritable. The public started to become deeply disillusioned that, you know, the fix was in, that they'd wasted their time coming. You know, voices were raised. It wasn't a pleasant day.

[Ian Cossack]

When you're dividing up a common resource into private property, there is no way to do that without benefiting some people and hurting others. So the feelings were strong on all sides.

[Rodney Avila]

When that vote was coming up, you got pressure from the environmentalists. You had pressure from other fishermen that wanted cashiers.

[Ian Cossack]

This vote cut right to everyone's bottom line. And do you remember anything about the final vote? I would like to make one final motion that we submit the Amendment 16 document to the service.

[David Gaethel]

The final vote was the vote for submission.

[Ian Cossack]

Please answer yes, no, or abstain. Frank Blount, Yes. Rip Cunningham. Yes. David Pierce.

[David Gaethel]

Yes.

[Ian Cossack]

Jim Fair, Yes. David Gaethel, no. Mike. Sally McGee. In the final roll call, Rodney Avila, despite all his reservations, voted yes. The lone no vote was David Gaethel.

[David Gaethel]

I was the one.

[John Bullard]

Motion carries 14 to one with one abstention.

[David Gaethel]

This is just going to unleash greed, which is the basest human emotion on the planet. And I do not to this day understand how greed is going to manage a fishery sustainably. And right from the get go, we had problems.

[Susan Dudley]

This month, U.S. fisheries officials implemented more new rules they say will finally bring

[Ian Cossack]

local fishing grounds back to full sustainability. Once the new system went into effect, every permit holder had a certain amount of quota attached to their permit, a percentage of the total allowable catch.

[John Bullard]

With the quota they give my boat, my season will be over in about two months.

[Ian Cossack]

But for some smaller boats, their quota for certain species could be so small, it didn't really make sense to go out and try and catch it, or

[David Gaethel]

making it hard for small fishermen to stay in business.

[Ian Cossack]

And of course, that little slice of quota was. Could be bought and sold. It had real value. So for Carlos, those little guys were now ripe for the picking.

[Carlos Rafael]

Everything that's taking place today was predicted way back then when this shit started.

[Ian Cossack]

This is Carlos recalling that moment to the undercover IRS agents.

[Carlos Rafael]

I told them what was going to happen. I told him, I said, you're going to put all the guys out of business to small guy can never get into this business.

[David Gaethel]

Well, what's the. What's going on?

[Carlos Rafael]

I mean, what's going on? The strong will get stronger and the weak will disappear.

[Ian Cossack]

Remember, there was no accumulation limit, so

[Swindled Podcast Host]

he could acquire as many permits as he wanted.

[Ian Cossack]

Again, council staffer Tom Neese.

[David Gaethel]

And he did.

[Ian Cossack]

Like I said before, Carlos started out with about 10% of the total catch quota. Within a few years, he had 25%. That means he owned 25% of all the groundfish caught between the Long Island Sound and the northern tip of Maine.

[David Gaethel]

By then, I think he pretty much bought up everything you could buy.

[Ian Cossack]

And he was unabashed about saying he was gonna squash all the mosquitoes. You know, he was gonna run things. I think this is when the public narrative of the codfather fully turns from a colorful character to something more sinister, exploitative even. Carlos himself used to call the little fishermen, the guys like David Gaithel, quote, mosquitoes on the balls of an elephant. Carlos, of course, was the elephant.

[Carlos Rafael]

What the government has done so far has put me and a few other guys St. Purdy, because we're making money. We are making serious money.

[Ian Cossack]

The council did ultimately come back to the idea of an accumulation cap on quota. The problem was that by that time, Carlos was already well beyond the initial limit that had been considered, then abandoned. So to put the cap in place now would mean forcing him to sell off his shares. Carlos was furious. He told a reporter that these smaller fishermen who were advocating for a cap were, quote, maggots, screaming from the sidelines. They can scream all they want. Nobody can save them now.

[Carlos Rafael]

They want to go to give you a quarter limit every person can own.

[Ian Cossack]

According to David Gaethel, Carlos rarely came to fishery meetings himself. But when the new ownership cap was being considered, he started showing up.

[Carlos Rafael]

But I don't think it's going to be the case because I will fight this to the dead. If somebody tries to take what I worked for 40 years, I'll lose it all. But I will prove a point.

[David Gaethel]

I'll sue you guys back to the Stone Age. And he meant it. I mean, he wasn't shy about dropping a good chunk of money on a lawyer. And so they backed off. The council had to write rules that grandfathered him in.

[Ian Cossack]

The new accumulation limit was ultimately set just above what Carlos already controlled, and

[David Gaethel]

that was strictly for Carlos. Nobody else came even close.

[Carlos Rafael]

You know, you get the newspapers sometimes they come up with that bullshit that pisses the living shit out of me. They come up and they say, oh, he took advantage of some of these people were going broke when these quotas come in. That was not so.

[Ian Cossack]

Carlos rejects the narrative that he somehow took advantage of the smaller owners who sold him their boats. And quot a lot of the people

[Carlos Rafael]

that I bought their boats, they would come and they would tell me, do you want to buy my boat? Because I'm having trouble. I might lose the boat. I might lose my house. I says, look, how much do you want for the boat? The guy would say, I want 300,000. And I would do the math. I say, a little too steep, but I will give you 270,000. I says, but I'm going to do a much better deal to you. You go and see if you can get 300,000. If anybody gives you the 300,000, sell the damn thing if they Nobody wants the boat for 300,000, you come back to me. My offer still to 70. I'm not going to try to beat you up because nobody wanted to give you the 300,000 in this is. Every deal I did was like that. I love to make money, but I also have a conscience.

[Ian Cossack]

It's a little hard for me to reconcile sometimes. The Carlos that I hear in this interview with the other version of Carlos I've heard, the one on the undercover IRS tapes.

[Carlos Rafael]

The amount of fish he has is not profitable for him to go fish

[Ian Cossack]

where he is, much less charitable towards those little fishermen he was buying out.

[Carlos Rafael]

He doesn't have the money to buy fucking quotas. So he's fucked either way. He's hanging by shoestrings. So this is a matter of fucking time for me to pick the rest of these fuckers and just get them all out of the picture.

[Ian Cossack]

And he's a little hard to understand in this last part, but Carlos says, I don't know if it's greed or if it's ambition, but I always had the ambition to get fucking control of the whole fucking thing.

[Carlos Rafael]

I don't know if it's greed of its ambition. This is from the heart. I always had the ambition. I got fucking control of the whole fucking thing.

[Ian Cossack]

The easy explanation is that the man I talk to is just a farce. And the real Carlos is what you hear on those undercover tapes. But I don't think that's quite right. I think both versions of Carlos are performances to some degree. On the tapes you hear Carlos playing the tough guy for what he believes are a pair of Russian mobsters. I know he's playing up the crime lord drama because there are some numbers in there we can actually check. For example, he told the agents he was facing 20 years in jail for price fixing. He was facing three years. I should also add that I don't have the full audio of those recordings. I have what the U.S. attorney's office chose to enter into the public record. So no question those tapes are cherry picked to present Carlos at his most malicious moments, his most obnoxiously overconfident. In our interview, on the other hand, you hear Carlos playing the nice guy, trying to correct what he sees as an unfair portrayal in the media.

[Carlos Rafael]

The papers twist things the way they want. They make me look like a scumbag and then they keep calling my house, do you want to sign up to get a newspaper? Says, after you worked me over the way youse guys did, you never wanted the truth. You went with everything else, but you never asked me anything. You just write up the bullshit that the government tells you says don't call my ass no more.

[Ian Cossack]

When Carlos was eventually sentenced for his crimes, all these quotes of reference came back to haunt him. The mosquitoes, the maggots, the little guy hanging by his shoestrings. They were used as proof of his vicious contempt. But they can also be read almost as pity. When catch shares came to New England, those little guys were screwed. They were sidelined. They were hanging by their shoestrings. According to Carlos, when the fishing was bad and people were looking for a way out, he was often the only option. The only one crazy enough to keep buying fishing boats. With everything that was going on.

[Carlos Rafael]

They wouldn't go anyplace else because there was no money. People had no money because of all this bullshit with sectors and quotas and all that. Am I kind of saying you're crazy?

[Ian Cossack]

I think maybe the most honest moment I hear in all those recordings is the one where Carlos questions his own motives. I don't know if it's greed or if it's ambition, he says, Greed or ambition. I thought it was telling that when the federal prosecutor quoted that recording in their sentencing document, they omitted that rare moment of self reflection. It's reduced to an ellipse followed by the more eye catching last line. I always had the ambition to get fucking control of the whole fucking thing. The rapid consolidation of boats and permits into Carlos Rafael's hands was a warning. But from a fishery management standpoint, it wasn't necessarily a bad thing. There were after all, too many boats, too many permit holders and not enough fish. Consolidation was to some extent the goal. The system was doing what it was designed to do.

[Maggie Raymond]

I think things were going pretty well in general until, you know, Raphael showed everybody that he, he knew how to break the system.

[Ian Cossack]

But it turned out that Carlos rapid growth had also opened a door for an entirely new kind of fraud unlike anything he had attempted before. It would become by one account the most significant case of admitted illegal fishing behavior in US domestic fishing history. What did that mean on a day to day basis?

[Carlos Rafael]

That was very complicated.

[Ian Cossack]

That's next time. Foreign. Catching. The Codfather is produced by Isabel Hibbard and myself, Ian Coss. It's edited by Lacey Roberts. The editorial Supervisor is Jennifer McKim with support from Ryan Alderman. And the executive producer is Devin Maverick Robbins. If you want to hear more stories like this one, produced by the same team, just search for the big dig wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find videos of every episode with incredible archival footage on YouTube produced by Joni Tobin and Annie Gerson. Thank you to New Bedford Cable Access and the New England Fishery Management Council for generously sharing their archival material for this episode. I also I also want to give a special thanks to Tom Neese who was incredibly generous with his time and shared a lot of information to help me understand the inner workings of the Council. 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 PR Sam, I really hope you're enjoying the show and before I let you go I just want to drop in with that constant podcaster's reminder to please rate the show, leave us a review, subscribe and of course tell a friend. All that stuff really, really does help us keep the show going. Thank you so much

[Carlos Rafael]

from PRX.