Catching The Codfather | 6. It’s Your Job to Catch Me

Summary

The Big Dig Presents: Catching The Codfather

Episode 6: “It’s Your Job to Catch Me”

Date: March 18, 2026
Host: Ian Coss (GBH News)
Key Voices: Carlos “The Codfather” Rafael, Andrew Lelling, Ron Mullet, Paul Valent, Maggie Raymond, John Bullard, others

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Episode Overview

This episode is the climactic finale of season three, chronicling the elaborate federal investigation, arrest, and consequences of fishing magnate Carlos Rafael—known as “The Codfather”—as well as the ripple effects on New Bedford’s fishing port and regulatory landscape. The story unfolds from the ingenious IRS sting operation to Rafael’s conviction and its aftermath, raising profound questions: Was Carlos Rafael a folk hero battle-hardened by an unjust system, or simply a conman exploiting it? And did taking him down fix a broken industry, or merely remove its loudest rulebreaker?

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Operation “Show Me the Money”: The Sting That Broke the Codfather

• The Telltale Lunch (02:01 - 06:42):
  Undercover agents meet Carlos in a private room at a local seafood restaurant, with Carlos visibly comfortable and boasting about his lifestyle. When pressed about the money trail, he reveals he smuggles up to $60,000 cash per trip to Portugal—with an inside man at Logan Airport helping bypass customs.
  • “He had his own wine at the restaurant. Nobody else could buy it. They only had it for him.” — Ron Mullet (02:49)
  • “I got a friend at Logan Airport that can get money through.” — Carlos Rafael (04:50)
  • “There was a crooked agent working inside the very same airport where the 9/11 hijackers took off from.” — Ian Coss (06:16)
• The revelation of an inside job at a secure national airport creates urgency for the investigation to wrap quickly.

2. Carlos’s Business Empire: Hiding in Plain Sight

• Rafael’s fraud wasn’t just simple smuggling; his operations peppered legitimate business with illegal activities—“painting” fish (mislabeling species), handing off duffel bags of cash, and leveraging a vast coast-to-coast network, including mafia-linked Fulton Fish Market buyers.
• “That duffel bag of cash was the bag of jingles.” — Lenny, Undercover Agent (18:04)
• Undercover agents meticulously gather evidence, including photographing falsified documents and repeatedly having Carlos explain how the system works.
• “Just pretend I’m a fucking retard...explain to me word by word.” — Lenny, Undercover Agent (25:45, paraphrasing conversation with Carlos)
• “We bought...so he showed us the dealer reports, he showed us the fishing vessel trip report...” — Ron Mullet (26:30)

3. The Fall: Arrest and Aftermath

• The arrest (28:28 - 30:07): New Bedford is abuzz as federal agents descend in mob movie fashion. Fishermen like Paul Valent recall sudden insecurity about jobs, livelihoods, and whether the “feds” would turn on smaller players next.
• “I think they had more police presence to arrest a fish buyer than when they took down El Chapo.” — Paul Valent (29:24)
• Prosecutorial discretion: U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling opts to focus on Carlos as the ringleader, not sweeping up captains or the auction house, despite evidence suggesting broader complicity.
  • “Do you want every single scalp, or do you just want the key scalps? ...Carlos Rafael...they are secondary. And so the captains as a category, we just let them go.” — Andrew Lelling (30:51)
• Debate over accountability: Carlos insists auction house owners were complicit. Documents and affidavits suggest they may have facilitated the fraud, but no charges ever filed.
  • “If you come after me, the guy that participated with me in a scam should get nailed, too.” — Carlos Rafael (31:35)
  • “They think they solved the problem. They haven’t solved shit.” — Carlos Rafael (35:27)

4. Justice or Scapegoating: Was Carlos a Lone Wolf?

• Some, including John Bullard (mayor and NOAA administrator), insist Rafael was an outlier—corrupt by choice, not by circumstance.
  • “There are thousands of people who earn their living in the fishing industry. ...They didn’t all turn into crooks. Only Carlos turned into the biggest crook in America.” — John Bullard (37:35)
• Others, including many in the community, view Carlos’s defiance as symptomatic of a system both unjust and impossible to navigate honestly.

5. Sentencing and The Business After Carlos

• In 2017, Carlos Rafael pleads guilty to multiple counts including conspiracy, tax evasion, and bulk cash smuggling.
  • “He knew the consequences were going to be dire. It was the more muted Carlos Rafael.” — Andrew Lelling (40:08)
• The judge denounces Rafael’s actions as self-serving, not altruistic.
  • “This was a corrupt course of action from start to finish. It’s a course of action designed to benefit you, to line your pockets. That’s what it is.” — Judge, as relayed by Ian Coss (43:01)
• The punishment: 46 months in prison, a lifetime ban from the industry, and a controversial decision NOT to seize his entire fleet—allowing Carlos to sell his boats and permits for ~$100 million.
  • “They let him sell everything and make millions of dollars…And I’ll never forgive them for that.” — Maggie Raymond (48:47; 49:06)
  • “And I walk away with over $100 million...all those assholes...will have a dream to see in a lifetime.” — Carlos Rafael (50:47)

6. Systemic Change…Or Not?

• Was the “rot” truly excised? Many claim illegal fishing persists, with permits and quota consolidating under new owners—sometimes the same auction house allegedly involved in Carlos’s scams.
  • “In the 10 years since his arrest, there have been other documented cases of illegal fishing out of New Bedford…” — Ian Coss (35:31)
  • “If he could make out like Carlos did, ‘I would do that time standing on my hands.’” — Anonymous fisherman (61:21)
• Supreme Court Angle (52:21):
  The regulatory framework faces a shakeup with the Supreme Court overturning the Chevron deference doctrine, a decision spurred in part by fishermen challenging NOAA’s regulatory powers.
  • “Chevron is overruled. That means agencies like NOAA and EPA will no longer enjoy the wide deference they had in the past to interpret the law and write the rules of life.” — Ian Coss (56:29)

7. Legacy: Tradition, Suspicion, and the Next Generation

• The next generation: Will they fish, or is the system too broken? Paul Valent seems doubtful his grandson will follow him.
  • “The way the business is today, I’d rather have him do something else.” — Paul Valent (60:08)
• Carlos today hangs around the docks, unable to fish but ever-present, refusing the label “loser.”
  • “Carlos is not a loser. I’ll tell you that right now…even the government...put about a business, he’s a loser. He’s not a loser, you know.” — Rodney Avila (64:35)
• Rafael prefers telling his story to “the little guy” rather than big media, seeing himself as the underdog.
  • “If somebody can get something out of the deal, then you give it to one person.” — Carlos Rafael (65:39)

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• On smuggling:
  “He had one of the guys in Boston, one of those fucking agents with my friend and give him the money before I go through security.” — Carlos Rafael (04:57) “This was a turning point in the investigation.” — Ian Coss (05:46)

• On regulatory enforcement:
  “It is very, very rare to have an individual prosecuted by the federal government three times and in the same place…And all of his cases were related to his fishing business.” — Andrew Lelling (10:42)

• On business partners and complicity:
  “The auction was just as involved as I was in this deal. I’ve paid them over a million dollars in cash…That operation could have not been done if they were not part of this scam.” — Carlos Rafael (33:10) “I know there were people who wanted him to have more punishment…But the main thing is that he’s never going to be part of the fishing industry again, and that his boats will continue to fish and create jobs, but this time, they’ll do it following the law.” — John Bullard (49:26)

• On legacy and system failure:
  “They think they solved the problem. They haven’t solved shit.” — Carlos Rafael (35:27) “If you are someone who believes in expertise, who believes in science, who believes in procedure and rules and regulation as a force to make the world more just, then you should also look long and close at the friction points where those things actually touch people’s lives.” — Ian Coss (60:59)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Sting operation and money laundering details: 01:17 – 06:42
• Cash handoffs, Michael the buyer, “bag of jingles”: 13:07 – 19:12
• Surveillance and airport smuggling: 21:32 – 24:39
• Gathering physical evidence, the dance sheets: 25:02 – 27:46
• Dramatic arrest: 28:25 – 29:41
• Prosecutorial decisions & auction house controversy: 30:51 – 33:50
• Sympathy and skepticism from the fishing community: 35:27 – 37:35
• Sentencing & aftermath: 40:08 – 43:54
• Debate over fleet and permit forfeiture: 45:18 – 49:03
• $100M windfall from asset sale: 50:09 – 50:47
• Supreme Court and Chevron doctrine: 52:21 – 56:29
• Legacy and the next generation: 59:40 – 60:08
• Carlos’s enduring presence on the docks: 63:48 – 64:35
• Carlos on why he shared his story: 65:39 – 67:02

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Closing Reflections

The episode closes by underscoring the ambiguity left behind—on the one hand, a system that allowed Carlos Rafael to profit handsomely even in disgrace; on the other, a community wrestling with systemic failures that one man’s downfall did not fix. With new legal battles on the horizon, shifting regulatory powers, and the boats that once defined New Bedford sold, scrapped, or acquired by familiar names, the fishing port’s fate remains as contested as ever. The question lingers: Did they catch the Codfather, or just the most audacious symptom of a much bigger problem?

Transcript

[Christopher Kimball]

Hey, it's Christopher Kimball from Milk Street Radio. Sounds like I'm bragging, and I am. We're the number one most downloaded food podcast in America. You know. Milk Street Radio travels the world in search of the very best food stories. You'll hear about smuggling eels on the black market, the secret intelligence of plants, and insider tips to eating in Paris. And every week, listeners call in with their toughest culinary mysteries. Discover a world of food stories by searching your podcast app for Mill Street Radio.

[Ian Coss]

Support for Catching the Codfather comes from Rogers Fish Company, founded by Roger Berkowitz, Offering an array of New England seafood and entrees shippable anywhere in the US [e-mail] this show is supported by Odoo.

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[Ian Coss]

Let's recap the investigation into Carlos Rafael so far. In January of 2015, Carlos announced his business was for sale. In May, the IRS agents reached out, pretending to be potential buyers. And in June, they met twice to discuss the details of the business. By the end of the summer, it's clear that there's a case that Carlos is doing something illegal involving fish. What's not so clear is where all that fish is going and. And where all the money is going. So in the fall of 2015, case agent Ron Mullet instructed his undercovers to go back to Carlos once again, this time with a specific purpose.

[Ron Mullet]

This money's gotta be somewhere else. I need you to get me the show me the money moment. Like, if there's nothing else that you talk to him about, he's gotta show you the money.

[Ian Coss]

This meeting was in a more casual setting, a seafood restaurant just up the coast from New Bedford. Carlos had been wanting to give his buyers a real taste of what they are getting. And this would be the perfect place to do that. So everyone piled into the agent's BMW 5 Series, the sport version with the V8 engine, and went for lunch. One agent told me, I made sure to drive like a crazy Russian mobster, you know, to keep character

[Paul Valent]

doing.

[Ron Mullet]

Great.

[Carlos Rafael]

Thank you. You guys have. Yeah.

[Ian Coss]

Carlos and his guests were seated In a private room where Carlos ordered for everyone, seafood, of course, and where he was very much in his element.

[Ron Mullet]

He had his own wine at the restaurant. Nobody else could buy it. They only had it for him.

[Carlos Rafael]

I'm a guy that I love to eat. I love good booze, I love a good cognates.

[Ron Mullet]

So he was having his wine.

[Ian Coss]

On the tapes, you can also hear Carlos order an espresso with Remy Martin. He does like his cognac, and maybe

[Ron Mullet]

that contributed a little bit. But he got loose lips.

[Ian Coss]

At this point in the investigation, the undercover agents thought they had plenty of time. The COVID story was clearly holding. And there were so many players connected to the fraud still left to explore the boats, the captains, the auction house, the wholesalers. There was money laundering, tax evasion, false reporting. It could take months and months to unravel it all. But that day over lunch, the urgency of the situation changed.

[Carlos Rafael]

I put it over there because sometimes I buy this, I buy that.

[Ian Coss]

The agents brought up the question of where the money goes. And Carlos mentioned that whenever he flies to Portugal, he brings some cash and deposits it in a bank there.

[Ron Mullet]

That's where the money is.

[Ian Coss]

This is exactly what Mullet was looking for. How much cash you can bring now?

[Carlos Rafael]

I think 40, 50, 60,000 every time I travel.

[Ian Coss]

But it also raised more questions. If you fly internationally with more than $10,000, you have to report it to U.S. customs. And it's not like you can easily hide $50,000 in cash from a TSA screener. Somehow Carlos was getting it through.

[Ron Mullet]

That was pretty mind blowing. What kind of a person has the ability to walk through security with cash and not declare it? What do you mean you can't do that?

[Ian Coss]

Carlos paused and got very quiet. Even after everything he had disclosed already, he seemed to sense that this was new and dangerous territory he was entering.

[Ron Mullet]

And he said, I got a friend at Logan Airport that can get money through.

[Carlos Rafael]

He had one of the guys in Boston, one of those fucking agents with my friend and give him the money before I go through security, okay? And then he. Then I go in the bathroom.

[Ian Coss]

In case you didn't catch that, Carlos said he had an agent inside Logan Airport in Boston who would get the cash around security, then hand it off in the bathroom inside the terminal.

[Carlos Rafael]

He doesn't go through security because he got one of those fucking badges. Is he's an AT if we make this deal later, if you want to pass straight over to the other side, Absolutely. I'll be your carrier. I'll be doing a lot of traffic.

[Ian Coss]

The IRS agent you hear laughing on the tape there told me this was a turning point in the investigation. On a personal level, he. He had started working with the Feds right after 9 11. So did Ron Mullet for that matter. A lot of people signed up in those years and now here they were yucking it up with a phishing mogul about how he dodges airport security. The undercover agent told me it took a lot of self control in that moment to keep laughing, to keep playing his part, because he now knew that as long as their investigation went on, there was a crooked agent working inside the very same airport where the 911 hijackers took off from.

[Ron Mullet]

So again, I'm still not positive where this cache is coming from, but it's heading out of the country via Logan.

[Ian Coss]

That meant they did not have time to follow every lead and unravel every mystery. They had to close this thing down fast.

[Ron Mullet]

Let's go.

[Ian Coss]

From GBH News, this is the Big Dig, Season three, catching the Codfather. I'm Ian Coss. The case that the IRS ultimately built was all focused on one man, Carlos Rafael. But Carlos is just that one man, one player in a whole port that has been dealing with shrinking fish stocks and tightening regulation for half a century now. So what happens to that port, to the boats, to the fishermen, and to the fish when the Godfather does finally fall? This is part six. It's your job to catch me. As we get to the end of the season, I want to extend one more invitation to join our membership program, the HOV Lane. Once this season wraps, we're going to start doing some members only events. These are going to be mostly virtual, some in person. So wherever you are, you can be part of it. You can meet other listeners, you can learn how the show is made. So if you've been on the fence about maybe joining up, this would be a great time to do it. You can also give the gift of a Big Dig membership to someone in your life who you think would appreciate being part of this community again. It's called the HOV Lane. You can sign up now at wgbh.org hovlane 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] taking care of your eyes

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[Andrew Lelling]

the first time I heard about Carlos Rafael was standing in the hallway of the U.S. attorney's office.

[Ian Coss]

Former prosecutor and U.S. attorney Andrew There

[Andrew Lelling]

was an agent who worked for the IRS at that time named Ron Mullet, and he's standing in the hallway of the U.S. attorney's office with a cardboard box full of tapes, trying to get someone to listen to him talk about this new case he has, which he thinks is great. And I happened to walk by.

[Ian Coss]

This was in late 2015, just after the undercover agents met with Carlos at the restaurant. So Mullet already had the outlines of a case and now he needed someone to prosecute it.

[Andrew Lelling]

And he says, andy, please let me tell you about this case. I said, sure.

[Ian Coss]

Andrew Lehling was intrigued, like anyone would be. I mean, you've heard those tapes. It's good stuff. But what really caught Lelling's attention was Carlos Rafael's unusual criminal history.

[Andrew Lelling]

The white collar offenders, usually you prosecute them once and they never do that again.

[Ian Coss]

There was, of course, the tax evasion case in the 80s, the price fixing case in the 90s, and the false statements case in the 2000s.

[Andrew Lelling]

It is very, very rare to have an individual prosecuted by the federal government three times and in the same place. You never see that, Never see that. And all of his cases were related to his fishing business.

[Ian Coss]

As Lelling studied up on the case, he also read about Carlos taunting federal prosecutors in the halls of the courthous

[Andrew Lelling]

you, you're an asshole. And then walks out.

[Ian Coss]

He read about the famous fishery meeting when Carlos announced to the regulators, I'm a pirate. It's your job to catch me. About how he had flaunted the rules, how he had mocked the smaller fishermen as mosquitoes and maggots.

[Andrew Lelling]

It's just unbelievable. So this guy has been untouchable for 30 years.

[Ian Coss]

And the more Lelling read, the more determined he became to get Carlos and this Time. Get him for good. Did you want to make an example out of Carlos Rafael?

[Andrew Lelling]

100%.

[Ian Coss]

To build that kind of case, the IRS agents needed to connect all the dots with hard evidence. From the dock in New Bedford to the offshore bank account in the Azores. And there was still a big link missing in that chain. What were you doing with a quarter million pounds of fish every day?

[Carlos Rafael]

Salad.

[Ian Coss]

Where did all that mislabeled fish go?

[Carlos Rafael]

But I had some deals cooked in the side that some people, they couldn't. They couldn't figure out what I did with all their fish. They couldn't. Just for the life of them, they said, where does this son of a bitch sell all this fish?

[Ian Coss]

One of the keys to Carlos's business, and ultimately his fraud, was the network of customers Carlos had built up for his product. He had specialty high end clients who would pick their fish right off the boat. He had grocery wholesalers. He had a company that supplied cruise ships, even military contracts at one point, truly a customer for every fish.

[Carlos Rafael]

And then after Carlo. What do you need? No, no, no. Just load the trailers and let it rip.

[Ian Coss]

So when Carlo started bringing in loads of his painted fish, which in fact were tightly controlled species like greysoul and flounder, he knew he had just the right buyer for them. Someone who would pay well and pay in cash.

[Carlos Rafael]

I gotta take this bowl. Oh, yeah, sure. Yellow cocksacker.

[Ian Coss]

And it just so happened that when the IRS agents first visited Carlos Seafood, they got a whole earful about this. Someone named Michael.

[John Bullard]

Michael.

[Carlos Rafael]

That little fucking weasel. He's selling filets to one. She's 440.

[Ian Coss]

On this particular day, Michael and Carlos seemed to be off on the wrong foot.

[Carlos Rafael]

Do the bet. Do the fucking bet.

[Ian Coss]

But then, as the meeting went on and the secret books came out, Carlos told the agents, you know that guy I was complaining about earlier, Michael? That's who this secret cash ledger is for. Of course, Carlos put it in his own unique style. So is that the dollar numbers? What is the numbers?

[Carlos Rafael]

You send me a fucking bag full of fucking jingles.

[Ian Coss]

The bag of jingles.

[Carlos Rafael]

And then I work it off. I keep failing, I keep selling them fish. I keep deep back, then deep back from disappears.

[Ian Coss]

At that time, the bag of jingles was just another throwaway remark, like painting fish. It didn't make any sense out of context. But a few months later, at the end of 2015, with the agents now under pressure to close out the investigation, they wanted to find the source of the jingles. They wanted to find Michael.

[Lenny (Undercover Agent)]

Yeah, the fish dealer that Is the

[Ian Coss]

voice of the undercover agent playing the part of the lead buyer, who we'll call Lenny. I've disguised the voice somewhat, but hopefully you can tell that the Russian accent is very much genuine.

[Lenny (Undercover Agent)]

So he came in a picture because we were asking what he does with the extra fish. That was

[Ian Coss]

towards the end of 2015. Lenny asked Carlos about this mysterious transaction of jingles and if they could meet the man who sent it. Once again, it was the old line, well, if we're going to buy the business, we kind of have to understand it. And eventually, Carlos agreed to share Michael's phone number. Michael took the agent's call, and they made a plan to meet in New York city, where Michael was based. The Russian buyers could choose the restaurant.

[Lenny (Undercover Agent)]

Maybe it's funny or not, but we chose the place by the name sparks.

[Ian Coss]

That would be sparks steakhouse. The agents were looking for a place where the support team could be nearby just in case. But sparks, as you may know, also had some history to it.

[Lenny (Undercover Agent)]

The head of the Gambino organized crime family has been killed there back in the days coming out of sparks during Christmas time. So sparks is very known restaurant in Manhattan. Very high end, very flashy restaurant. So that's where we decided to have our lunch. Okay.

[Ian Coss]

Sparks has a dimly lit dining room With a low ceiling and no windows. The walls are covered with paintings. Not decorated, mind you. Covered one picture frame right up against the next one. The group of men found a table. Michael didn't drink and hardly ate. This meeting was all business. It turned out that Michael operated out of a booth at the Fulton fish market in Manhattan, A place that, like Sparks, has deep mafia ties. Michael and Carlos had known each other a long time, maybe 20 years at this point. But for most of that time, they had only talked on the phone. They never actually met in person until one day in the early 2010s, right around the time the catch shares system began. Carlos daughter was graduating from college in New York, so he spent the night there. And at 2 in the morning, on a whim, Carlos decided to go down to the fish market to meet Michael there in person for the first time. Michael showed him into a back room filled with cash. How big was that mound of cash?

[Carlos Rafael]

I had a picture, but I wiped it out in case the feds would ever get my phone. Big

[Ian Coss]

Carlos held out both his arms to show me just how big.

[Carlos Rafael]

Crazy. Something I never thought I would see in my life. I said, son of a bitch.

[Ian Coss]

And immediately, the gears started turning. What Carlos realized is that Michael was paying for the fish on a 30 day billing cycle. But then he was turning around and selling the fish for cash right away. So in business terms, Michael got to keep the float. He was holding on to Carlos's money,

[Carlos Rafael]

and he gets to use my money, says michael, from now on, I want f of what comes in. And that cash comes to papa.

[Ian Coss]

Clearly, the two shared an affinity for cash. So they haggled back and forth and landed on a deal that worked for both of them.

[Lenny (Undercover Agent)]

He meets with them somewhere on the road. One of the truck stops again.

[Ian Coss]

The undercover agent, Lenny.

[Lenny (Undercover Agent)]

Okay, what happened is that guy just literally throws him a bag of cash through the window, and they just suffer it. They go their own way.

[Ian Coss]

That duffel bag of cash was the bag of jingles. Michael would pay up front now, hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time. Then Carlos would work it off, deducting the value of each truckload of fish as he sent it to New York. So now Carlos got to benefit from that cash advance. He says he used it to pay the auction house for unloading all the fish, with, of course, the added bonus of saving on his taxes and avoiding any extra scrutiny. Michael's own clients were largely high end restaurants. Some specific names were told to me off the record. And I'll just say that if you've lived in New York and are into food, you've heard of some of these places. Those fish you heard Carlos haggling over for $1.30 a pound might well end up in an entree that costs $50 or $100. And knowing those final dollar values would be crucial to building a case. That's how you measured the value of the fraud. After that lunch, Carlos called Lenny back to say, everything's good. Michael likes you.

[Lenny (Undercover Agent)]

He likes you a lot. He wants to do business with you.

[Carlos Rafael]

That's.

[Lenny (Undercover Agent)]

I remember the words.

[Ian Coss]

The agents now had one more link in the chain. Were there ever any clues? Were there moments when you got suspicious?

[Carlos Rafael]

Nope. I know. Yes.

[Ian Coss]

Around this same time, in late 2015, Carlos was back on the phone with one of the undercover agents talking business, and happened to mention that he had just received one of his regular payments from Michael. A duffel bag with $625,000. In the same call, Carlos mentioned that he was taking a trip to the Azores in November and planned to bring some of the cash with him. So the agents, desperate now for a breakthrough, pushed their luck a little further. They asked, can we come with you?

[Carlos Rafael]

When they wanted to go to Portugal with me, I said, nah, nah, nah. My ears were Standing up in the back of my neck, I said, I don't like what's coming down.

[Ian Coss]

This trip was for a charitable event that Carlos helped fund called Thanksgiving in the Azores. One of many acts of charity, large and small, that helped create his rogue with a heart of gold image around town. Every year they would send a load of frozen turkeys and canned goods over to the islands and host a big American style meal for people who had been deported from the US as well as widows and orphans.

[Andrew Lelling]

This came up during the case. We knew that he did this.

[Ian Coss]

Federal prosecutor Andrew Lelling was very curious what would happen on this trip. Is he putting cash inside the cavity of the turkey or something?

[Andrew Lelling]

Yes. These are the things you wonder, like, why is he sending turkeys to the Azores?

[Ian Coss]

Okay, so the turkey cash smuggling theory actually did not pan out. The turkeys were just turkeys. But this event did crack open the last mystery of the case because it was put on in part by members of the local sheriff's department in New Bedford. And that was the inside connection. According to Carlos, it was the sheriff's department staff who got the money past airport security. But now Carlos was getting suspicious. He did not want his curious buyers tagging along.

[Andrew Lelling]

And so we set up surveillance at Logan Airport instead.

[Ian Coss]

The agents would have to observe the cash smuggling more discreetly.

[Andrew Lelling]

Obviously there are cameras everywhere anyway, but extremely complex to do that kind of operation at Logan Airport. And some of the individuals involved are themselves trained law enforcement personnel. So that was very delicate.

[Ian Coss]

The operation took place at night, around 9pm Carlos was traveling along with a group of people, including an officer from the sheriff's department. Carlos gave the officer five unmarked envelopes which the officer brought to the men's bathroom and distributed among the group. Meanwhile, case agent Ron Mullet was waiting just outside the security entrance, watching Carlos smoke his last cigarette, then head through the TSA, screening himself at about 9:30. The idea was to let the whole smuggling operation go off without a hitch. But then one of the TSA agents pulled Carlos aside. It turned out Carlos had kept yet another envelope in his own briefcase with well over $10,000 in cash. More than enough money to catch the attention of a regular TSA agent, who of course had no idea about Mullet's operation and no idea what they were interfering with. So Mullet watched as Carlos was led away to the customs window, thinking, that's it. The operation is a bust. If Carlos is stopped now before he's even entered the airport, they won't be able to document the full smuggling process that's when Mullet called the airport staff and told them there was a change of plans and it needed to happen quickly. By the time Carlos arrived at the customs window, there waiting for him was newly assigned IRS duty agent Ron Mullet. Pretending to be just any old agent working an overnight shift, Mullet rubbed his eyes, looking tired, then asked Carlos a few routine questions, asked him to fill out some forms, and sent the man on his way. The crew from the sheriff's department boarded without incident, and two days later, Carlos Rafael deposited a total of $76,000 in a Portuguese bank account. At last, the IRS agents could see the full scope of the fraud, from the boat to the plate to a bank account in the Azores. And why Carlos was the only one who could pull it off. He had managed to evade checks at so many points along the chain. On the boat, at the dock, at the Fulton Fish Market, at airport security, so that his criminal enterprise could operate almost entirely in the open, all mixed in with his legitimate business and work that way for years. Now it was time to bring it down.

[Lenny (Undercover Agent)]

My undercover partner placed a phone call, and he said, listen, we have to go one more time before we make an offer.

[Ian Coss]

In January of 2016, Lenny and his undercover partner asked for one last meeting with Carlos.

[Lenny (Undercover Agent)]

He did say to him that my clients, they're good to go. They want to buy it, but we have to meet one more time, okay?

[Ian Coss]

The goal this time was to get their hands on the physical documents at the heart of the whole fraud, the falsified reports.

[Lenny (Undercover Agent)]

We met with him so many times, you know, trying to drag that paperwork out of him, but never happened.

[Ian Coss]

The meeting was at night. The fish plant was dark. Everyone was gone except for Carlos and his personal bookkeeper. So they went upstairs to the same office where they had all met the very first time. And Carlos had joked about how bad it would be if these guys were here with the irs.

[Ron Mullet]

No, we're. We're definitely interested.

[Andrew Lelling]

We have a better handle on it now.

[Ian Coss]

Now, over six months later, it seemed like any misgivings Carlos had been holding on to were gone. He was ready for the deal to be done. We're good.

[Carlos Rafael]

Yeah, but that's what she said. I mean, everything is nice and clean.

[Lenny (Undercover Agent)]

So what I said to him was very simple. I said, carlos, I like your business. Willing to buy, but just pretend to me a fucking retard. I have no fucking clue what you're doing here. I just don't have a clue. And I said, just explain to me word by word, okay? In the normal language how this shit works. And believe it or not, he said, all right, just fuck it.

[Ian Coss]

Carlos's bookkeeper, who was aware of the fish painting operation, went into a side room off the office and, and brought out a stack of papers. I mean, there's so much freaking shit in here.

[Carlos Rafael]

You got permits, you got afq, you gotta be goddamn thing. You got shit that I didn't even know by yet.

[Lenny (Undercover Agent)]

He brings out this book and you went line by line.

[Carlos Rafael]

It was tremendous.

[Ian Coss]

I mean, we bought.

[Ron Mullet]

So he showed us the dealer reports, he showed us the fishing vessel trip report. He showed us a white lined paper, handwritten. He called it the dance that said, hey, this haddock is actually gray soul of the medium size and it's this many pounds of this of small size. I called it all haddock on these two reports. But here's what it really is.

[Carlos Rafael]

I mean, everything is basically if they know what they're doing, because they got everything up to the team.

[Ron Mullet]

So he walked us through. Here's an example of, you know, last Thursday, fishing vessel trip report, dealer report, the dance sheet, bill of lading, the invoice to the buyer. Here's how it started as haddock. And on the last page, the fifth page in, it's really all the gray soul.

[Ian Coss]

But it'll all work out.

[Carlos Rafael]

He usually does.

[Ian Coss]

We'll call him Attic.

[Carlos Rafael]

We'll call him Attic. I'll fix that.

[Ron Mullet]

And they said, wow, I'm not sure I get it. Can you show me again? And he pulled another set of documents and he walked them through it again.

[Ian Coss]

While Lenny went line by line through the documents, playing dumb. His partner, the guy who was playing the part of the broker, was able to step away and start taking photos around the office with a concealed camera. Hard evidence that they could use to get a search warrant. And still Lenny kept on saying, I

[Ron Mullet]

think we got it one more time. And he brought another set of documents and walked him through it.

[Lenny (Undercover Agent)]

We were sitting there probably from 6 to 9, 10 o' clock at night, like four hours in that thing.

[Ian Coss]

Oh, wow.

[Lenny (Undercover Agent)]

Okay.

[Ron Mullet]

Going line by line, those three documents, those three transactions, those were the three primary charges that got us, as we say in the door, to do the search warrant.

[Lenny (Undercover Agent)]

Yeah. When we came out of there, we met with the cover team, including Ron. He said, that's it, he's done. He's done.

[Ian Coss]

How did you hear that he was arrested?

[Paul Valent]

How did I hear it from the fuel guy.

[Ian Coss]

On February 26, 2016, Paul Valent unloaded 50,000 pounds of groundfish in New Bedford. He had heard the rumors that his boss, Carlos, was in talks with some Russians about maybe selling the business. But Valent says he didn't talk about that kind of stuff with Carlos. He just talked fish.

[Paul Valent]

And I was waiting to find out what my settlement was, and I never got an answer from him. From his phone, I found it odd. And then the fuel guy had just finished fueling me, and he goes, did you see what happened to your boss? I says, no, there's a bunch of feds and cops everything around his building. I was like, oh, Jesus, here we go. And then I drove by and I seen him like, yep, that's why I'm not getting a settlement today.

[Ian Coss]

And how many Was it like a line of police cars and vans and things?

[Paul Valent]

Yeah, I think they had more police presence to arrest a fish fire than they did when they took down El Chapo. It was that bad. They had helicopters, they had. You name it. It was like something in a mob movie.

[Ian Coss]

Like they were expecting him to be holed up in there with, like, Scarface style, with a cache of guns.

[Paul Valent]

Yeah, it was pathetic, actually. To have that much police force down there was pathetic.

[Carlos Rafael]

Yeah.

[Paul Valent]

All they had to do was just go in there and say, you gotta come with us. And he would have went, you know what I mean? He might cuss and yell and scream and make some noises at him, call him a bunch of nice names, but he would have went. And there was no need for all that drama.

[Rodney Avila]

No,

[Ian Coss]

Flint did get his settlement check for that trip, but what would happen beyond that was anyone's guess.

[Paul Valent]

Being unsecure. You don't know if you have a job tomorrow here, that everything's going to be tied up and you can't feed your family. You know, all that uncertainty just comes rushing down.

[Ian Coss]

And watching as the helicopters circled Karlov's Seafood, Valent also had to wonder, who were they coming for next?

[Andrew Lelling]

Every. Every captain knows what is happening on the boat. Every captain knows that they didn't catch Haddock, that the captain is lying on the relevant form.

[Ian Coss]

Prosecutor Andrew Lelling now had an important decision to make. Who else would he prosecute?

[Andrew Lelling]

This comes down to a philosophical question. If you're a prosecutor, do you want every single scalp, or do you just want the key scalps? None of this fraud occurs but for Carlos Rafael. Of course, he sucks other people into his orbit, like these sheriff's deputies, like these captains, but they are secondary. And so the captains as a category, we just let them go.

[Ian Coss]

Lelling also let the bookkeeper go as well as another employee at Carlos Seafood, who was involved in forging paperwork. Two officials at the sheriff's office were arrested, but Michael, the fish dealer, was never prosecuted. And maybe most crucially, the owners of the auction house, the Canastra brothers, were never prosecuted.

[Carlos Rafael]

If you come after me, the guy that participated with me in a scam should get nailed, too.

[Ian Coss]

Carlos has always insisted to me that the Canastras were involved. That they knew the fish was being mislabeled. That they would even tip him off whenever regulators or environmental police were snooping around the docks. And there is some evidence to back this up. A few years ago, some new documents emerged as part of a civil case between Carlos and the Canastra's business. These documents include a sworn affidavit by the former general manager of the auction house, who states that the Canastra brothers personally instructed him to treat Carlos Boats differently to facilitate his fraud. I spoke with that manager as part of my reporting. He stands by everything in the affidavit and emphasized to me that he and his staff did record the actual weights and species of all that fish they unloaded from Carlos Boats. The manager told me he shredded that original paperwork. The Canastra brothers did not respond to my request for an interview, but they have always denied any involvement. And the current manager of the auction house told me they never reported any false information to the government. So that piece remains contested. The way Carlo sees it, he was singled out and targeted by Noah. By the irs, by John Bullard and Andrew Lelling and all the people who wanted him out of the fishery for good.

[Carlos Rafael]

And the auction was just as involved as I was in this deal. I've paid them over a million dollars in cash. Cash. For the unloading of all that fish I used to do there. Where's the irs? Where's Noah? Where's all these guys? Where's the Department of Justice? These guys. A bunch of assholes, that's what they are. Because that operation could have not been done if they were not part of this scam. But somebody was tilting the scale.

[Ian Coss]

For his part, Andrew Laling told me that he assumed all along the auction house knew what Carlos was doing, that they had to know. Lelling says he just couldn't prove it.

[Carlos Rafael]

So we'll take one criminal and we'll leave the others behind. That's the way they were set up.

[Ian Coss]

The reason all these choices matter is that over the years since the arrest, regulators, prosecutors and politicians alike have often described Carlos the way Lelling does, as a lone bad actor who managed to corrupt all the people around him, the one proverbial rotten apple spoiling a perfectly good bunch. And when you tell the story that way, the whole thing becomes a little easier to dismiss. It's just Carlos being Carlos. Now, I'm not trying to say the whole waterfront should have been rounded up and thrown in jail over this case, but I do think we have to see Carlos as part of a larger story and a larger culture. One of the things that constantly surprised me in my interviews and really what drew me into this story is, is how many people I spoke with who expressed some sympathy, or at least ambivalence for what Carlos did. That includes lifelong fishermen like Bill Blount and Rodney Avila, civil servants like Maria Thomasia, as well as academics, journalists, even some NOAA officials I've talked to. The point is this. Carlos may be a pirate at heart who. Who would break the law in anything he did, but he could never have pulled it off for so long if there weren't a lot of other people in this port who also thought the system was broken. Taking Carlos down did nothing to change that.

[Carlos Rafael]

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

[Ian Coss]

And in the 10 years since his arrest, there have been other documented cases of illegal fishing out of New Bedford, including. Including some loads that passed through the very same auction house. If you ask Carlos, there's a lot more of that going on that the government doesn't know about, because fishermen are

[Carlos Rafael]

a lot smarter than they are. And now they know what they gotta do not to get nailed. So they'll never stop the bullshit that goes on in the fishing industry, not in a million years.

[Ian Coss]

John Bullard and I talked about this question for a while of whether the codfather case can be reduced sins of one man or if it's a sign of something much deeper.

[John Bullard]

I think the fact we're talking about it right now is unfortunate.

[Ian Coss]

And you won't be surprised to hear that as the mayor of New Bedford and then the top local regulator for noaa, Bullard has formed a very strong opinion of Carlos.

[John Bullard]

Because in my mind, Carlos is a crook more than he is a fisherman. And as someone who has spent his whole life trying to make the city of New Bedford a better place, I take it personally when someone like that defames our city.

[Ian Coss]

Yeah, I do. I find myself drawn back to the story of Carlos. Even though in some ways he is an outlier, there is this way in which he also represents all of the regulatory changes that came in the last half century. Like without Magnussen and all the economic incentives to build boats. Carlos never buys his first boat without catch shares. He may have never consolidated so much control over so much of the catch. And so in this weird way, he does feel like a product.

[John Bullard]

I don't buy that at all. I don't buy that at all. I mean, there are thousands of people in New Bedford in the fishing industry. From crew to boat owners to processors to electricians, there are thousands of people who earn their living in the fishing industry. They all went through the strike, they all went through Magnuson, they all went through cat shears. All of them went through everything Carlos went through. They didn't all turn into crooks. Only Carlos turned into the biggest crook in America. Just Carlos. He is not a product of cat shears. He's not a product of Magnuson Act. He is a product of his own moral depravity.

[Ian Coss]

Will you be disappointed if this podcast comes out and the story of Carlos Rafael is a big part of it?

[John Bullard]

I mean, if someone wants to do a story on Carlos, more power to him. But if someone wants to do a story on the fishing industry in New Bedford and they spend more than 30 seconds on Carlos, then they don't understand the fishing industry and they're telling a story that is torqued way in the wrong direction. There's too many heroes, there are too many good people. And anything that gives Carlos attention and takes it away from people like that is someone who's grasping at a shiny object and is not seeing the real fishing industry in New Bedford. New Bedford is the number one seaport for the last 20 years. I hope for the next 120 years because of people not named Carlos.

[Ian Coss]

In March of 2017, Carlos Rafael pled guilty to conspiracy, tax evasion, bulk cash smuggling, false labeling and falsifying records. Andrew Lelling told me he was surprised the swashbuckling codfather didn't go to trial. He was expecting a fight, expecting to get cursed out in the hallway. But Lelling got a very different Carlos. The day of his sentencing, Carlos arrived at the Boston courthouse in a loose fitting dark suit. His lawyer told him to keep his mouth shut and he did.

[Andrew Lelling]

He knew that the consequences were going to be dire. It was the more muted Carlos Rafael.

[Ian Coss]

John Bullard, who is still the regional administrator for noaa, was there for the sentencing as well.

[John Bullard]

Because this was a guy who said, I'm a crook. You come and catch me. And Andrew Lelling had caught him. I wanted to.

[Ian Coss]

Lelling delivered a 27 page sentencing memorandum urging the judge to give Carlos the maximum possible sentence. Based on the quantity and value of the misreported fish. He was supported in the hearing by some folks, you might remember the Conservation Law Foundation. That was the environmental group that had pushed the government to tighten its fishing rules decades before. They submitted their own own statement claiming, quote, this is by far the most significant case of admitted illegal fishing behavior in US domestic fishing history.

[Andrew Lelling]

A lot of fishermen showed up, and

[Ian Coss]

of course there were fishermen there too.

[Andrew Lelling]

A lot of local fishermen from New Bedford were in the gallery.

[Ian Coss]

A group of 40 or so came up from New Bedford to show their support. Paul Valent was among them.

[Paul Valent]

Yeah, mostly the younger generation fishermen. So the judge could see that it was going to hurt a bunch of young guys.

[Ian Coss]

Then there were other fishermen, the fishermen who came to show their anger to watch Carlos fall. Some of them had submitted their own victim impact statements detailing how Carlos's actions had unfairly hurt his competitors, damaged their fish stocks, and undermined the entire system they lived by. One said that Carlos Rafael was, quote, the worst thing to ever happen to New Bedford.

[Andrew Lelling]

And what really struck me is I chatted with some of them beforehand and more than one of them said to me they didn't believe this would actually happen, that he would ever actually go to jail. And they had to come see it themselves.

[Ian Coss]

Carlos lawyer delivered a statement on his client's behalf. He told the same story I've told in this series about an immigrant who starts from nothing, who builds an empire and then does what he has to to protect that empire.

[Paul Valent]

I remember his lawyers explaining to the judge that he was doing it to help the commercial fishermen, to help the industry, you know, keep the boats working.

[Ian Coss]

The statement read, quote, this is the stupidest thing I ever did. I didn't do it to hurt anybody. I did it so my people could keep their paychecks.

[Paul Valent]

And then when the judge gave a sentence, the judge said that it was full of shit.

[Ian Coss]

When the judge finally addressed Carlos from the bench, his voice was sharp. This was not stupid. The judge said this was a corrupt course of action from start to finish. It's a course of action designed to benefit you, to line your pockets. That's what it is. And why the court has sentenced you as it has. The Judge gave Carlos 46 months, almost four years in federal prison. Four years may not sound like a lot as sentences go, but for a 65 year old man who had only committed nonviolent crimes, it was harsh. It was a message. But the criminal sentence did not settle the most important question for the police port of New Bedford. What would Happen to the codfather's business, to all the boats, the permits, the quota Carlos had amassed.

[John Bullard]

You know, our number one goal is to get him and his family out of the fishery.

[Ian Coss]

And in an interesting twist, this decision would not be up to the judge. It would be up to the regulators themselves, up to Noah, and of course, up to John Bullard to decide the future of perhaps the greatest fishing empire his hometown had ever known.

[Carlos Rafael]

But if they feel good because they knocked me out, I'm good, I'm very good, because they wanted to strip me out of everything, it didn't work that way. At the end of the day, this asshole won.

[Ian Coss]

In 2017, when Carlos was sentenced, John Bullard was hoping that as part of that sentence, the judge would also force Carlos to forfeit his boats, or at least forfeit a significant number of them. But the judge disagreed.

[John Bullard]

You know, this is not a violent crime. No one's murdered here. You can't take 12 of its boats.

[Ian Coss]

Here in the United States of America, we take our private property very seriously. So even as the judge sent Carlos to jail and imposed a heavy fine, he would not take the man's fleet. In the end, the state took just four boats out of dozens.

[John Bullard]

And everyone in the fishing industry was apoplectic. That that was such a small slap on the wrist.

[Maggie Raymond]

We advocated strongly for him to lose everything.

[Ian Coss]

Meanwhile, you had boat owners like Maggie Raymond up the coast in Maine and elsewhere who were telling Bullard, look, forget about the boats. You need to hit Carlos where it really hurts and take away Carlos permits, his precious quota.

[Maggie Raymond]

And that's what we wanted done. Take his permits away. Don't let him sell them, because a

[Ian Coss]

fishing permit is like a taxi medallion or a liquor license. It's the true asset of the business. And the idea was that if NOAA simply dissolved those permits entirely, the fishing quota attached to them could then be redistributed to fishermen all over the region, the fishermen who had been following the rules.

[Maggie Raymond]

It would have been a message to the people who are compliant, you know, now you get a bigger piece of the fishery.

[Ian Coss]

And to be clear, the question of the permits was not up to a judge. This was now up to Noah. So two months after the sentencing hearing, Bullard directed his agency to freeze the permits on about 60 boats that Carlos either owned outright or had some control over. Crewmen went on unemployment. Business at the ice plant slowed way down, and everywhere you looked, there were the sea green boats with CR on the bow, tied up at the docks. That winter, the port was eerily Quiet, waiting in limbo for a final decision on the permits. But things were not quiet for John Bullard. He was being lobbied aggressively. He remembers going to meet with Susan Collins, the senator from Maine, and before he could even say good morning, she asked, what's happening with Carlos? The feelings on this were that strong.

[Maggie Raymond]

Rip the permits up, let them keep the boats. The boats are useless without the permits. Who cares about the boats, right?

[Ian Coss]

The thing is, there were people lobbying on the other side who did care about those boats. It was the crewmen who worked on them. It was the ice plant and net maker that supplied them, the auction house that unloaded them, and the trucking companies that shipped their product. All those people wanted to keep the boats working and keep them in New Bedford. To do that, you had to keep the boats and permits together.

[Maggie Raymond]

The richest fishing port in the nation. More money there than any other port in the entire nation. So a lot of pressure from different people, from the mayor, New Bedford, Elizabeth Warren.

[Ian Coss]

Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to NOAA officials urging them to keep the permits in the port of New Bedford. The governor weighed in as well. So did the mayor. And Bullard, of course, was sympathetic. This was his hometown. After all, he had been the mayor once. He had fought to protect those same jobs once. As Bullard recalls, there was no perfect solution that pleased everyone. But there was a simple, if a little unsavory option for getting Carlos out of the fishing business for good.

[Maggie Raymond]

They let him sell everything and make millions of dollars.

[Ian Coss]

Noah barred Carlos from the commercial fishing industry for life and gave him two years to sell his boats, permits, processing facility, the whole enchilada, as Carlos would say.

[Maggie Raymond]

And I'll never forgive them for that.

[Ian Coss]

Maggie Raymond was stunned.

[Maggie Raymond]

Because it's a privilege, right? It's a privilege to fish. It's a public resource. So they did not do it. It should have been done.

[Ian Coss]

How much influence do you think John Bullard had on that decision?

[Maggie Raymond]

Oh, a lot. I'm sure he had a lot to, you know, to do with that.

[Ian Coss]

The way Maggie Raymond sees it, Bullard had a choice. He could protect his hometown or he could punish Carlos Raphael. He could not do both, and he chose to protect his hometown. In a statement, Bullard said, I know there were people who wanted him to have more punishment. I certainly heard from a lot of them. But the main thing is that he's never going to be part of the fishing industry again, and that his boats will continue to fish and create jobs, but this time, they'll do it following the law.

[Carlos Rafael]

Actually, at the end of the day, they did me a favor.

[Ian Coss]

Carlos himself was just fine with this arrangement. After all, he'd been trying to sell his business all along.

[Carlos Rafael]

All the charade they did on the radio and the newspapers and all that. All they did is advertise me for the sale of my vessels. I didn't have to pay for no advertisement.

[Ian Coss]

And this time he didn't just get an offer from some phony Russian gangsters. Big money came calling. Corporate money. From his jail cell in Fort Devens, Carlos negotiated a series of deals for the boats and permits, netting a total of about $100 million in cash. So not quite what he had been asking originally, but also not bad for a man who had just pled guilty to 27 counts of federal financial crimes.

[Carlos Rafael]

And I walk away with over $100 million. So I think I got a lot more juice out of this deal than all those assholes they investigated me will have a dream to see in a lifetime. All of them, they're left to work until the day they die. Because they're never going to be able just to sit back and enjoy the fruits of my work.

[Ian Coss]

When I first heard about the case of Carlos Raphael, it sounded like an intriguing but kind of small story. I looked into it, I interviewed Carlos, and then I put it aside for all the big talk. This is not the fraud of the century in dollar terms. It's nothing next to Theranos or FTX or Bernie Madoff. Because fishing in the United States is just not a huge industry. Most of our seafood is imported at this point. In a lot of coastal towns, it feels like the fishing boats are mostly there as a nice backdrop. So yeah, the Codfather was a colorful character in a colorful world that has nothing to do with most people's daily lives. That was the conclusion I came to. You'll hear argument Next in case 22451, Loper Bright Enterprises versus Raimondo. Mr. Clement. Then in 2024, something happened that changed my mind.

[Andrew Lelling]

Mr. Chief justice, and may it please

[Ian Coss]

the court, this is where our story leaves the port of New Bedford and lands in the Supreme Court of the United States. Maybe you heard about this case a couple years ago involving a legal principle known by the shorthand Chevron.

[Andrew Lelling]

This case well illustrates the real world cost of Chevron.

[Ian Coss]

Simply put, the so called Chevron doctrine has to do with how federal agencies like NOAA turn the vague laws of Congress into the specific regulations we all live with and just how much latitude those agencies have. Now, this case could have been brought by anyone who feels they've been unduly regulated. It could have been a banker, a truck driver, a farmer, a small restaurant owner. Truly, all of us lead regulated lives. But this case was not brought by any of those people, and it was not brought by Chevron itself. It was brought by a group of fishermen.

[Andrew Lelling]

Commercial fishing is hard. Space on board vessels is tight, and margins are tighter still.

[Ian Coss]

Therefore, the Chevron doctrine dates back to a case from the 1980s. Back then, it did involve the oil company who was challenging what they thought was an unreasonable regulation. And at the time, it was kind of ambiguous whether the regulation fit within the lines of the law or not.

[Susan Dudley]

And the court said, look, Susan Dudley

[Ian Coss]

professor of Administrative Law agencies have expertise

[Susan Dudley]

in what the law provides. We're going to defer to the agency's expertise on whether the law allows them to do this.

[Ian Coss]

That was the gist of the Chevron ruling. Leave it to the experts. So from then on, if there was ever a technical question about what an agency could or couldn't do, the courts deferred to the agency, meaning to the regulator.

[Susan Dudley]

And so the goal of Chevron was to say, judges, stick to your lane, and we're going to give agencies this

[Ian Coss]

lane if we take one step back, or maybe two steps back from this narrow legal question. It's really a political question that our democracy has been trying to settle since the founding. The question of who fills in the details. Like Dudley explained a couple episodes ago, the country is too big and complicated for Congress to truly write all the laws of the land. So who should actually decide what safety features your car has to have, or what words you're allowed to say on television, or where exactly you can drill for oil, or how many fish you can catch? This is the messy, nuanced, and often unpopular work of governing that we keep passing around and around between the branches of government. Chevron seemed to end that game of hot potato for a time. How important is that legal precedent?

[Susan Dudley]

There are some people, and I'm not an attorney, who think that Chevron contributed greatly to the increase in the administrative state and the number of regulations that agencies issue and the breadth of the authority that agencies have found.

[Ian Coss]

As Dudley describes it, after the original Chevron case, for decades, agencies kept expanding their reach and finding new ways to interpret the law that gave them more and more power.

[Andrew Lelling]

There is no justification for giving the tie to the government or conjuring agency authority from silence.

[Ian Coss]

Then along came this case in 2024, brought by a group of fishermen working under the same regulations as all the fishermen you've heard in this series, Congress recognized as much. Listening to the oral arguments, I immediately thought of all Carlos ranting about the government, the enforcers, the overreach, the endless infractions and fines.

[Andrew Lelling]

But the agency here showed no such

[Ian Coss]

restraint because here was that same rant, but sharpened, cleaned up and directed, turned into a weapon to slash away at the powers of the administrative state.

[Andrew Lelling]

Welcome the court's questions.

[Ian Coss]

And the high court said, you know what? I have the opinion of the court in case 22451. This has all gone too far. The Chevron doctrine has gone too far. The time has come to leave it behind. Chevron is overruled. That means agencies like NOAA and EPA will no longer enjoy the wide deference they had in the past to interpret the law and write the rules of life. So we have now entered a new era of regulation. But exactly what that new era will look like, that's still hard to say. Most of the fishermen I talked to for the series have given up the hunt for fish. They've retired or they've taken a job on land, or maybe they've moved on to working scallop boats, which today are the big money maker in New Bedford. The one person you heard from who still chases ground fish is Paul Valent, the guy who used to captain for Carlos. The day I first met him, he was just back from an eight day trip to George's bank. So how many hours of sleep you get in the last eight days?

[Paul Valent]

I get about two hours and 24 hours.

[Ian Coss]

Valent didn't follow the Chevron case all that closely. He spends over 250 days a year out at sea. So he has more immediate concerns than a Supreme Court ruling that will take years to filter down into actual day to day regulations. Boats still have to get permits and quota at the start of every season. They still have to use the right gear and avoid the closed areas. They still have to submit to all kinds of monitoring and reporting. For now, none of that has changed. The reason this case changed my mind is that it reminded me what's truly at stake in this story. Something that can't be measured in dollars and cents. Because if commercial fishing were just about money, everything would be so much easier. The government could decide how many fish can be caught and a big company could send out a big boat and catch them all. It would be easy to monitor, easy to enforce, with no haggling over tiny slices of quota, no meetings in hotel conference rooms with people spitting in each other's faces. None of that the problem is that there is so much more at stake. It's the culture, the history, the community, the tradition that is what makes fishermen so hard to regulate. And ultimately, I believe that is why they wound up before the Supreme Court. That day. When Valent got in, his wife and son and grandson all came to meet him at the auction house, the portal between land and sea. They brought coffee and a box of donuts for the crew. Then everyone huddled around to watch the fish flop down the conveyor belt like a little family gathering.

[Paul Valent]

You want to be a fisherman when you grow up?

[Lenny (Undercover Agent)]

Yeah.

[Ian Coss]

Flint's father took him out from fishing when he was 8 years old. He took his own son out when he was 8 years old.

[Paul Valent]

What does the green buoy mean?

[Lenny (Undercover Agent)]

More water.

[Paul Valent]

More water. What about the red buoy?

[Ian Coss]

That's Valent's grandson. You hear there? He's only 4, and it sounds like he'll be ready if and when the time comes.

[Paul Valent]

Where's the bow? Where's the stern? There you go. He knows more than some guys I

[Ian Coss]

got on deck, but I asked, asked Valent later if he thought his grandson would actually be a commercial fisherman like him and continue the family tradition that went all the way back to the old country. He told me, the way the business is today, I'd rather have him do something else. Valent sounded defeated as he said it, and having just heard him quiz the kid about buoy colors and boat parts made it that much worse. If you are someone who believes in expertise, who believes in science, who believes in procedure and rules and regulation as a force to make the world more just, then you should also look long and close at the friction points where those things actually touch people's lives. Because in the places like New Bedford where regulation rubs hard, the friction is hot and the feelings are raw. Many fishermen I met cheered the fall of the Chevron doctrine as a symbolic blow against the state. Just as many fishermen once cheered the lawless defiance of Carlos Raphael, those feelings emerge from a similar place. Yes, Carlos may have been greedy. He may have been crass, he may have even been cruel. But when our backs were against the wall, he did put up a fight. John Bullard retired from NOAA in 2018. He told me every day he was there, he felt like an old, broken down horse getting to run in the Kentucky Derby. The cod stocks he worked so desperately to protect have still not returned to their historic levels, and they may never return. But Bullard has not lost faith in the ocean, in regulation, or in his hometown. In 2020, Carlos Rafael was transferred to community confinement because of COVID So he only served about two and a half years in prison. Andrew Lelling, who by that time was U.S. attorney for the region, personally signed off on it. One fisherman in New Bedford told me that if he could make out like Carlos did, quote, I would do that time standing on my hands. The boats that Carlos once owned have by now been bought and sold a few times. First, a private equity backed company came in and grabbed a big chunk of the groundfish fleet. But less than 10 years later, that company declared bankruptcy. For Carlos, it was a kind of vindication, like, now you can see why I broke the law. And in one last strange twist after the bankruptcy, when the boats were put up for sale again, many of them were bought by the Canastra family, the two brothers who. Who also own the auction house and who Carlos insists to this day, were his active partners in the entire fraud. For many years. You could still find boats out in the harbor painted in the distinctive sea green with the letters CR on the bow. One of the last ones was carved up for scrap metal in 2024. Another was sunk off the coast of New Jersey to make an artificial reef. So the Codfather fleet is now gone. Carlos, however, is not.

[Rodney Avila]

Here goes Carlos right now. Here goes Carlos Rafael in my truck right now.

[Ian Coss]

When I was interviewing fisherman Rodney Avila, sitting in his truck in the Dunkin Donuts parking lot, Carlos drove right by us. And this was not the only time something like this happened. The guy is just always around. It's funny, every time I come here, I see Carlos Rafael.

[Rodney Avila]

He's around the docks every day, Sundays every day, holidays. He's around the dock every day.

[Ian Coss]

Why? He can't fish.

[Rodney Avila]

He never fished before. He just old fishing boats.

[Ian Coss]

So why does he hang around the docks?

[Rodney Avila]

I don't know. Maybe he just likes looking at fishing boats.

[Ian Coss]

Something about your smile tells me there's more to the story.

[Rodney Avila]

I don't know. I can't. I don't know. Carlos is not a loser. He's not a loser. I'll tell you that right now. I mean, even the government, I think that they put about a business. He's a loser. He's not a loser, you know,

[Carlos Rafael]

but it's his other companies. I mean, there's a lot of guys.

[Ian Coss]

At the very end of our interview, Carlos Rafael opened up the bottom drawer of his desk once again.

[Carlos Rafael]

This. This guy had sent a letter. You wanted to talk. Do you want to write a book? These old people that said where he

[Ian Coss]

used to keep the secret set of books. He now has a stack of envelopes from all the publishers and production companies who wanted to tell his story.

[Carlos Rafael]

Tucker Television, llc. Whatever. Forget about. I don't wanna. I don't need any bubble with these guys. That's it. Done. Overweight.

[Ian Coss]

So why are you willing to talk to me?

[Carlos Rafael]

Because a lot of guys try to talk to me. I just didn't have the patience all the time. And they had called me to really. When I came out of prison, I had so much to put into place. And when you call and you said you do this as a freelancer, you are in your own. I figure it's an opportunity. If somebody can get something out of the deal, then you give it to one person. It just starts in his own. Not a big producer with these guys already got a lot of money and all this other. So I like to deal with a smaller guy.

[Ian Coss]

Carlos likes to deal with a smaller guy, which in this case is me. I should say in full disclosure that since the time of that interview, I have become an employee with a salary and a boss. All the things Carlos didn't want in life. So I'm not, as I record this, a freelancer. But I guess I do still like to think of myself as the little guy. I mean, don't we all want to think of ourselves that way? As the scrappy underdog, making it work with whatever we have, building something from nothing all on our own. That is the American dream, right? So maybe I shouldn't be surprised that Carlos, even after all he has built, all he has done in life, he still likes to see himself fighting for the little guy.

[Carlos Rafael]

The big guys, they are already fed, so they don't need any help.

[Ian Coss]

Well, whatever your motivations, I do appreciate it.

[Carlos Rafael]

Okay. You're very welcome.

[Ian Coss]

So we can leave it there?

[Carlos Rafael]

Yeah.

[Paul Valent]

Sa.

[Ian Coss]

Catching the Godfather 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. As always, if you want to hear more stories like this one, produced by this same fantastic 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 Gerz. There is one person I've been meaning to thank all along who has been a sounding board and a resource through this whole project. The New Bedford based reporter and writer, Ben Burke. It's not often that you come away from a documentary project like this with a new friend, but that's exactly what happened with this one. I also want to shout out Genevieve Bilia, who is the Public Affairs Officer for IRS Criminal Investigation and who responded to all of my many, many requests over the past year. However you feel about the government or the irs, know that Genevieve made my job so much easier. Thank you again to the New Bedford Fishing Heritage center and really to everyone we interviewed, but especially to John, Carlos, Rodney, Paul, Linda and Ron, who all made time for multiple interviews and phone conversations. 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. Hey, I want to make sure that you know this series you're listening to right now is part of an ongoing feed telling stories from the past to help us understand our present. Our first season is all about infrastructure. The second season is about gambling, and we've got more seasons planned. So if you want to stay on top of what the team and I are doing, go ahead and follow or subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen. We've got some really exciting stories coming up and I hope you'll stay with us. Thanks

[Carlos Rafael]

from PRX.