F R O M   T H E   C R O W E ’ S   N E S T

You Watch My Back: Season 40



The recent decision by N.H. fisherman Dave Goethel to take his case against the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to the Supreme Court could have implications in another case stumbling to a close in federal court in Boston.

A lifelong ground fisherman, multi-term New England Fishery Management Council member and defender of the rights of small vessel fishermen, Goethel has had his case brought forward pro bono by Cause of Action, a Washington, D.C., public interest law firm. A petition has been filed to have the Supreme Court review the case, which claims the Department of Commerce and NMFS do not have the authority to require fishermen to pay for at-sea monitoring, a cost that will continue to drive many fishermen to sell their permits and boats.

The NMFS goal has been consolidation. It’s a policy that has sanctioned greed, enabling the agency’s poster fisherman for their policy to also be the choice for their most-wanted poster—Carlos Rafael, aka the “Codfather.” Rafael has had no need to consider pro bono legal counsel. Consolidation encouraged and enabled Rafael to amass the largest bundle of permits and port-load of vessels in the U.S. Rafael had reached a level in the cash flow pyramid where his courier for suitcases full of cash used his Middlesex County, Mass., sheriff’s credentials to bypass airport security on the way to European banks.

Rafael’s high-end attorney is now attempting to leverage an effort to have Rafael’s permits and vessels stay in New Bedford against the sentence that’s expected at the end of September. Some think NMFS would like to have this case end there, rather than have it go to court, where NMFS’ limited understanding of the industry, which it has been tinkering with for four decades, might be revealed.

Should the Supreme Court allow Goethel’s case to be heard, and a favorable decision result, and if Rafael’s criminal case were to go to court, there might be some interesting made-for-bureaucratic-TV dramas unfolding. Who OK’d fishermen paying for at-sea monitors and the time lapse in implementation? Who OK’d looking the other way when Rafael publicly gave the finger to NMFS while submitting false landings slips for decades? Who at NMFS actually knows anything about the post-landings end of the fishing industry?

“You watch my back, I’ll watch yours”: Season 40