Big Fish

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1:18This episode contains language that may not be suitable for everyone. Please use discretion. Okay. Phoebe, talk to Jason, see if you guys can hear each other. Yes, I can hear him. Jason, you can hear me? I can hear you. Good. Yep. Well, Jason, thank you very much for doing this. Yeah, no problem. Am I always going to be able to hear myself? Would you rather not? It's bad enough hearing me once. This is Jason Fisher. He runs fishing tournaments on Lake Erie, not far from where he lives, outside of Cleveland. These are not full-time gigs. These are just kind of part-time, labor-loved type deal. I grew up competitive, played sports, played some college baseball, so I like to be competitive.

2:04And later on in life, you get old, you get fat, you get washed up, you got to find something else to do. How old are you? I'm 39. You just called yourself old and fat, and you're 30. I'm 40. Well, you know, in sports terms, you're not playing, you know, real good baseball, football, wrestling when you're 39 years old. You got to do something else. But you can hold a rod. Yeah, fishing's pretty low impact on the body. The tournaments that Jason Fisher runs are walleye tournaments. He says about 100 teams usually participate. Lake Erie is the best place in the world to fish walleye right now. Lake Erie is the smallest and the shallowest of the Great Lakes.

2:49But it also has the most fish. Warm water and lots of plankton make it a good place for fish like yellow perch, trout, bass, and walleye. Walleye have sharp little teeth. They grow to be between two and three feet long. And earlier this summer, the Ohio House of Representatives signed a bill naming the walleye the official state fish of Ohio. Our tournaments are five fish. You can weigh any five fish that you catch. And your team, it's a joint five fish. So you bring your five biggest fish to the scales. And at the end of the day, you kind of stack up and see who wins. And what are the prizes?

3:33What are people trying to win? It's always different. Five,$500,$5 ,000. I would say on average, the winner is going to take home about five to$8 ,000. And then the guys always have, you know, like big fish side pots and overall side pots. So that'll generate another couple thousand as well. So, I mean, on an average tournament, if you win and then you, you know, win the bonuses along with it, I'd bet you could win probably 15 to 18 ,000 on a good day. That's a lot of money. It's a solid day's work, in my opinion. At the end of a tournament on September 30, 2022, Jason was weighing in each team's fish.

4:14The winners that day would take home a$5 ,000 prize, and the team that had performed the best over the entire season would take home almost$30 ,000. Each team entered their five biggest fish to be weighed on a small stage in a parking lot. Fishing teams were standing around watching. And Jason was emceeing, telling the crowd the weights for each team's fish. 7.43, 7.43, you got, what is it, two? One of the last teams to weigh in was boat number 12, Jake Runyon and Chase Kaminsky. Were they well-known in the fishing community? Yeah, these guys have been around. They were around a while. They had competed in not only our tournament, but other tournaments for years.

5:00years. So the guys knew them. You know, all of our anglers knew them. They had won, I want to say, the previous two, if not three events. But fishing isn't always about talent. It's luck, too. You know, you can be a good angler. You could be the best angler. But at the end of the day, you still have to catch the fish. And there's a huge variable there. So, you know, we could all be in the same spot using the same bait, doing the same thing. But that doesn't mean that the same person is always going to catch the biggest, best fish of the day. So it drew a lot of suspicion. Jake Runyon went up onto the stage with their five heaviest fish.

5:44He put their biggest one on the scale. And in my head, I'm like, OK, probably, you know, four to five pound fish based on the fish I get to look at every day. And they put the big fish on the scale, and it's 7-9-0, I think. And I'm just sick to my stomach. I'm like, there's no way that's an 8-pound fish. The whole place, and I'm not even kidding you, there's not a single word being said except for, you know, yeah, right, BS, you know, and it was just an awkward silence. Jake Runyon then put all five of their fish on the scale. Jason announced their team's total weight, 33 pounds, five pounds heavier than any other team's catch.

6:30So Jake walks off stage. I'm trying to gather my thoughts as an emcee, so to speak, and just wrap up the event because they now won the tournament. They won the Team of the Year championship. They would win our season-long Big Fish title. There's a lot of things that they won on the day. I'm just trying to do my best with it. And I start to hear, you know, some grumblings in the crowd. And I'm like, I have to do something about this. As Jake started to walk away with the fish, Jason called out to him and asked him to come back to the side of the stage. He looks at me and he's like, are you serious?

7:10I'm like, yeah, you know, I have to check him out. So I pull the fish out and I just look to see if the fish has color, if it looks lively. It might even be alive because these guys all have live wells in their boats. So I take a look at the fish and I'm like, you know, it looks dead, lack of color. So I put my hands on the fish and I kind of like squeeze the fish. And I instantly, with my thumb, I instantly felt that inside one of these fish was just a hard object. Jason asked someone to get him a knife. I'm actually slicing these fish open pretty aggressively because I'm pissed. I know exactly what's going on.

7:52And as soon as I open that fish up, I see these, you know, sinkers, these lead weights fall out of this fish. And right then and there, you know, the reaction is just all emotion. I basically grab the weight and I tell everybody, I tell all my anglers that there's weights in the fish. We've got weights in fish! There we go!

8:17I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal.

8:23It was essentially like a mob scene. I mean, these guys, it went from silence to just, you know, kind of chaos all at the same time. Inside the fish were lead weights about the size of eggs. And also, walleye fillets. A filleted fish. Look it. This is a walleye fillet. What I think is they probably put the fillets inside the fish to pad the heavy lead weights that they had in there. I mean, a 12-ounce weight, if you're holding a fish or feeling a fish, it would be pretty obvious. So I think that the fillets were just padding. So what had they done? Stuffed the stuff down the fish's throat? Yeah, it's kind of, you know, it's sickening.

9:12Still thinking about it, it's sickening. What did the team do? What did they do? Well, Chase ran. He went to his truck. And from what I understand, he basically just got in his truck and shut the door and stayed there. He didn't leave. I don't know as if, you know, there was people around his truck or maybe he couldn't back out. I'm not sure. I wasn't there. But, but Jake, you know, just sat there and just, you know, the anglers just let out all of their frustrations, you know, of, you know, the year or, or years past, you know, just cheaters and, you know, it's over, you're, you know, you'll never fish again.

9:52And, you know, these guys, these guys were, you know, they prided themselves on being the best. And, you know, it was it was a big to do, you know, and they basically just let it all loose and let Jake know exactly how they felt about him. Do you have anything to say, Jake? And then someone called the police. You got it. Call the cops. Call the fucking cops. That's fucking death. Mother's love. Call the fucking cops. We'll be right back.

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11:23Right now is the AI gold rush. And that means everybody who builds an app, a platform, a piece of software, a gizmo that somebody, anything, everybody is trying to put AI everywhere. And for two weeks in a series on the Vergecast, we are talking through what that looks like. We're talking to developers about what they're building and how they're building it. And whether AI actually does make sense everywhere or is just going to ruin everything in the process. That's the AI miniseries on the Vergecast, wherever you get podcasts. This series is presented by MongoDB. In 1984, a man was found shot to death in a boat on the banks of a lake in Grand Prairie, Texas.

12:07His name was Danny Ray Davis, and he was about to appear in front of a federal grand jury. He'd been suspected of cheating in a fishing tournament, where he'd won$50 ,000, and he agreed to testify against several other men, who were also believed to have cheated in tournaments across the state. They were all accused of bringing in big fish from Florida, keeping them in tanks, and then secretly moving them into lakes, in floating cages, the night before fishing tournaments. The Dallas County Medical Examiner's Office ruled Danny Ray Davis' death a suicide, but his family believed he was murdered in order to stop him from testifying.

12:50Another fisherman, who was a witness in the investigation, had told police that he feared for his life, and that he, quote, wouldn't live until sundown if the people in the cheating ring knew that he was cooperating. A few months later, four men involved in the cheating scheme were convicted in federal court for transporting wildlife across state lines. And later that year, Texas became the first state to criminalize cheating in fishing contests. It became a misdemeanor to cheat or help someone cheat. And if the tournament prize money was worth more than$10 ,000, it became a felony. In the 1970s and 80s, fishing tournaments started offering bigger and bigger prizes.

13:35One columnist wrote, It's gotten too big for its britches. A well-known bass fisherman told a reporter that, quote, When you get a$100 ,000 prize, it invites the criminal element in. How big of a problem is cheating in fishing tournaments? I don't think it's very big or widespread. This is these guys' names on the line, and they don't want to be, you know, booted from the society, essentially. These are, you know, these are all their friends. They fish against, you know, the same people, you know, weekend after weekend. And, you know, they don't, it's hard competition, but you're not seeing people blatantly cheat.

14:17I do feel that there are rule violations, whether it's carelessness or ignorance or kind of just, well, that rule doesn't really matter, so I'm not going to follow it. But I don't think cheating is widespread. So when you started running the tournament, you weren't particularly concerned about cheating? No, actually, I was not concerned with cheating. I did, however, enforce the mandatory polygraph testing. Polygraph testing in fishing dates back to the mid-1970s. In 1974, the American Bass Fisherman's World Open in Florida, which offered a$100 ,000 prize, gave polygraph tests to its top ten finalists.

15:02The man who administered the test, named Ben Bennett, said when he heard that a fishing tournament wanted to use his services, I thought it was some kind of practical joke or something. He said he was, quote, Sure, no one in the business has ever been given such an assignment. He asked each finalist four questions and said that he would definitely know if someone cheated. One finalist said, I thought it might make me nervous, but it didn't. He added, it's probably something tournaments need. Everyone passed. More and more fishing competitions started making polygraph tests mandatory. Those tall fish tales may be over, one article read in 1975.

15:46Quote,

15:54But polygraphs are controversial. Many states don't allow polygraph evidence in court. In 1998, in a Supreme Court ruling, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote, There is simply no consensus that polygraph evidence is reliable. And the National Research Council wrote that people can alter their physiological responses during polygraph tests through, quote, cognitive or physical means. But they're still widely used in fishing tournaments today. A writer for Game & Fish magazine wrote in 2016, It is believed that polygraph tests help deter cheaters, much as speed-checked-by-radar signs help discourage speeding.

16:41Many tournaments, including Jason Fisher's, require that winners pass a polygraph test in order to claim their prize. Do you have faith in polygraphs? You know, they're a tool. I do believe that they work. They're obviously not 100 percent. I don't think anything is 100 percent, but they're a deterrent. You know, these are more on the honor system. We don't have people in their boats. So we do polygraph as truth verification. So they'll go out there and ask, did you abide by tournament rules? Did you abide by state rules and regulations, etc.? Did you catch the fish legally? And we basically run that off what the anglers want to see.

17:22And as of right now, the anglers are with polygraph testing and random testing. They'd like to keep it honest. The year before Jason Fisher started running one of his tournaments, a winning team was disqualified after failing a polygraph test. It was their third recent tournament win, and they were set to take home more than$300 ,000 for the year. The team was made up of Jake Runyon and Chase Kaminsky. After Chase failed a polygraph test, their team was disqualified, and the tournament's prize, an expensive boat, went to the second-place team. Jake told a reporter that they were hiring an attorney and that, quote, we would never cheat.

18:07I'm fully aware of his failed polygraph at another competition. However, I basically just treat people, you know, how I would want to be treated. And without any real proof of what went wrong or what was violated, I still allowed them to fish my events despite the failed polygraph. Because, again, like I said, there's a big difference between violating a rule and blatantly cheating. But then, at that 2022 competition, Jason Fisher found lead weights in Jake Runyon and Chase Kaminsky's fish. You know, everybody was chirping, call the police, call the police. So somebody did call the police, and then they basically treated it as, you know, a crime scene, essentially.

18:57Videotaped all the fish and the sinkers, and they took reports on the whole thing. Officers from the Ohio Division of Wildlife prepared a report for the Cuyahoga County prosecutor. He told a reporter, I take all crime seriously, including attempted felony theft at a fishing tournament. Jake Runyon and Chase Kaminsky were indicted on felony and misdemeanor charges of attempted grand theft, possession of criminal tools, unlawful ownership of wild animals, and cheating. In Ohio, cheating is illegal, from bingo to Little League to spelling bees to fishing tournaments. It's a first-degree misdemeanor, unless the potential gain is over$1 ,000.

19:41Then it becomes a felony. Chase Kaminsky and Jake Runyon initially pleaded not guilty, but changed their plea minutes before their trial began in March of 2023. In return, prosecutors agreed to drop the criminal tools charge, as well as the attempted grand theft charge. Both men lost their fishing licenses for up to three years and were forced to forfeit their boat. During their sentencing hearing, both men said they were sorry. I just want to apologize to you, Your Honor. I want to apologize to my family, my friends, my fishing community. So, there's super in pairs. The judge in the case said, At the end of the day, you're convicted felons and cheaters.

20:37And he sentenced both men to a year of probation, a$2 ,500 fine, and 10 days in jail. Were you surprised that these guys were given jail time for cheating in a fishing tournament? Quite frankly, I am surprised. The way things work nowadays, not a lot of people get jail time for crimes other than violent crimes. There's a lot of serious things. And so to see fishing and basically a cheating story take the headlines here in Cleveland was shocking to me. I'm just, I'm glad that the court system and the Division of Wildlife and everybody, you know, took notice of how big of a deal this was to these anglers.

21:20And they wanted to set a precedence that, you know, hey, we take this seriously and this is what could happen to you. So tournament fishing, it's, you know, I'm not going to say it makes the world go round, but with Lake Erie being the wildlife capital of the world, it's big business. These anglers come from all over. They spend money at our hotels, our gas stations, our restaurants. The actual park that we were fishing at that day makes a parking fee. You know, if we were to lose tournament fishing, you know, it's taken away a lot, not just within the bait shops and the tackle shops up and down the lake.

21:55It's the restaurants, it's the hotels, it's the gas stations, which ultimately trickle out and ripple effect into the whole economy of Ohio. Has this whole thing changed the way that you run your tournaments now? We cut open the fish at the end of the day. It's almost comedy because these anglers know that they're not going to find anything in their fish. And they almost want to cut the fish open to prove that they were out there being the best. We do have some metal detectors and things like that. But again, it's these anglers that do this, you know, day in and day out. They know that they're doing it the right way.

22:35Metal detectors. You pass the fish through and you can tell if something's in its stomach. It's not like you're walking into the airport with the TSA check. We have the metal detector wands. It would be kind of cool to have the anglers with that 360 scan you get at the airport to have their fish. but we don't have that kind of a budget. We'll be right back.

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24:18In 2012, a 29-year-old man won a bass fishing tournament in the UK. He turned in a 13-pound fish and won 800 pounds, more than$1 ,000, as his prize. But then, another fisherman noticed something odd about the winning fish. It had unique markings on its head. He'd seen it before, and he said he recognized it from the local aquarium. When he told the tournament organizers, he says they laughed at him. So the next morning, he went to the aquarium and looked at the tank where he thought he'd seen the fish before. The fish wasn't there. The winner eventually admitted that he'd stolen the fish out of its tank.

25:04He pleaded guilty to burglary and fraud charges and was sentenced to 100 hours of community service. In 2018, two men turned in several bass in a fishing tournament at Lake Powell in Utah that also didn't look quite right. What was it that seemed suspicious about the fish that this team was turning in? Yeah, the reason the organizers of the tournament called was because when you're dealing with fish all from the same lake, they tend to look fairly similar. I mean, you have fish that are littler and fish that are bigger, but they're usually in about the same body condition as far as fat and skinny goes.

25:49Hal Stout worked as an investigator for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources for more than 20 years. Fish are an interesting animal because they can grow and then they can shrink depending on their food sources. And so once they've grown large, their head grows with their body. but the head, because it's bony, doesn't shrink. So you end up with sometimes fish with big heads and skinny bodies. And so the fish at the time at Lake Powell were kind of long and skinny with bigger heads. The fish that were turned in by these individuals were fat fish with little heads, and they just didn't match up physiologically with the fish at Lake Powell.

26:36The tournament organizers also noticed that the fish had bright red fins. Which is not normal. They're usually not red at all. When Hal Stout arrived at the tournament, he looked at the unusual fish. He then talked to one of the fishermen who had turned them in. I told him that I believed the fish had been held in captivity. The theory behind the red fins was that the fish were stressed for a period of time. which caused the reddening to the fins. I was thinking that it was likely that the fish had been held in captivity and then transported to Lake Powell and then probably released into the lake in cages so that they could bring the fish back up.