The Codfather

8:57Ian Coss:So I met a marine biologist named Linda Desprey, who for many years was a lead scientist on NOAA's trawl surveys. When she started out in the 1970s, by the way, there were basically no women who did this. She was like doing sample counting, like sorting through shrimp larva and stuff like that.

9:18Unexplainable Hosts:And one day I was asked if I wanted to go out on the boat and actually collect the samples.

9:26Ian Coss:And she was all excited. And she showed up at the dock of the boat. And somebody was like, I'm sorry, you can't go.

9:33Unexplainable Hosts:As I was told, what would the wives think of a girl staying on a boat overnight?

9:40Ian Coss:The crew was all men. I'm sorry.

9:43Unexplainable Hosts:And God bless the captain who said, we'll get you out there. So instead of leaving at eight o 'clock at night, we left at one minute past midnight. And so I was technically not on an overnight cruise. And because I had that experience of going to sea, collecting samples, sorting fish just for that one day cruise, that gave me a leg up.

10:13Ian Coss:And that was how she got her foot in the door. So basically the next time she applied for a job, she could say she had that experience.

10:19Unexplainable Hosts:I didn't say it was for one day. I just had experience. I didn't lie.

10:28Ian Coss:So Linda spent, by the end of her career, I think over a thousand days out at sea doing sample collection. And they would catch all kinds of stuff because they would fish in places where fishermen wouldn't go, where nobody would go.

10:42Unexplainable Hosts:You have no idea what's down there. We brought up anchors. We brought up the kitchen sink. We brought up tires. There's...

10:49Ian Coss:Apparently, there are NOAA boats that have found, like, human bodies, that have found unexploded bombs left over from World War II. Whoa. Crazy animals, you know, like a barn door skate. I'd never heard of a barn door skate, but as the name suggests, it's huge. And she did this for years.

11:06Unexplainable Hosts:So they go out, they trawl the ocean floor with this net. Yeah. They randomly select places, they model that across the ocean, and they kind of say, okay, this is about how many fish there are. is that it? Like, why is this more of a complicated question?

11:21Ian Coss:So if you talk to fishermen about the trawl survey, you will almost universally hear the same thing, which is that it's totally wrong. In my opinion, your data sucks. So I met this fisherman named Tony Alvernez, who for many years worked on one of these NOAA boats. Because NOAA, the government, would hire fishermen to come out and work the gear on the research boats. I knew Linda very well.

11:49Unexplainable Hosts:And he had opinions.

11:52Ian Coss:So Tony went out on a number of these surveys in the 1990s, and he remembers just being horrified. This is a joke. Because he realized very quickly that this is the boat that determines how many fish he and his friends are allowed to go and catch. Right. This is the boat that sets the rules. This is like the voice of God. The way he describes it is that net would make scripture.

12:17Unexplainable Hosts:Wow. Okay.

12:19Ian Coss:Yeah. And he found the boat extremely lacking. So I mentioned this is called a trawl survey. Trawling refers to the method of towing a net behind the boat and catching fish, right? And the key to the trawl survey is that you're really trying to measure change over time, right? Like, are there more fish or less fish this year relative to last year? And so to get that clear comparison across the years, you want to keep the fishing gear really consistent so that you can say year to year, oh, OK, we're definitely catching more fish this year. The net's the same. The boat's the same. The tow time's the same.

13:00Ian Coss:Therefore, it's the fish. But the net on this government boat was outdated by commercial fishing standards. You know, once you get to the 90s and 2000s, you couldn't even buy that style of net anymore.

13:13Unexplainable Hosts:Right. So the idea is like it's a bad net. It could be missing a lot of the cod that's out there.

13:18Ian Coss:Exactly. What Tony saw was, you know, the net would go down in the water. It would come up with this small amount of fish. And he would know, know in his bones, that if it were his boat and his net dragging that same stretch of ocean, he would be catching way more fish.

13:35Unexplainable Hosts:He was always suggesting new ways of making the net better, fish better, work better. Anytime I questioned the integrity of the nets and blah, blah, blah, I was wrong. And it's like, we can't do that, Tony.

13:50Ian Coss:And yet this is the net that is setting scripture. This is the net that's deciding how much fish his buddies can go out and catch that they rely on to make their living.

14:00Unexplainable Hosts:Yeah, Tony, we know, we know. But we needed to keep it the same.

14:09Unexplainable Hosts:Was that the only thing that made Tony skeptical of the NOAA surveys?

14:13Ian Coss:Oh, no, that was just the beginning of it for Tony. Oh, okay. The way he described it is that just the whole setup of this boat was done by people who did not really understand and work with fishing gear on a day-to-day basis. This is Tony's opinion, but it was really just this constant series of issues that for him undermined his trust in the whole system. Got it. So the best and most clearly documented example of what Tony's talking about was an incident from 2002 that came to be known as Trawl Gate. Trawl Gate. Everything's got a gate. Everything's got a gate. Yeah. A couple of commercial fishermen were working on the NOAA boat.

14:52Ian Coss:They noticed that the lines that were attached to the net were not the same length. The net was going to turn sideways and maybe even collapse in on itself, it's not going to catch fish. And what they had realized is that these lines had been mismatched for about two and a half years.

15:14Unexplainable Hosts:Whoa.

15:14Ian Coss:So this was, as you can imagine, a huge scandal in the industry because, again, this is the boat that makes scripture. This is the boat that determines people's livelihoods. This was a boat that had been criticized for years and years by fishermen like Tony Alvarez I wanted to make sure those nets fished as proper as they could, yes. At this point, we're not talking about consistency. This is just a mistake. And so I think that one mistake became emblematic of just this larger sense of mistrust within the industry towards the science.

15:56Unexplainable Hosts:Did the scientists respond in any way? I mean, like, what do the scientists say to either the criticisms of Trollgate or the criticisms from Tony in terms of, like, everything's not working on the boat?

16:09Ian Coss:So I talked to somebody who was running the NOAA Science Center in the 2000s about this. And he recognized that Trollgate had ceded all this intense mistrust. So the Science Center tried to update the gear, update the boat, and try and do like a fresh start in hopes of building more trust. Unfortunately, that backfired. They built a new boat, and the new boat, it was much more sophisticated technologically. But because, you know, they'd been doing these surveys on the old boat going back decades, the scientists who were analyzing all this data wanted to find some way of calibrating the new data to match the old data.

16:57Ian Coss:But this whole process of changing the boat, changing the net, developing this formula, it only fed into the mistrust, partly because right around when this new boat is introduced, the fish numbers start to look really bad. And here's where there's like just a really unfortunate confluence of events because you had a few things happening at once. One is you had a few really bad years of fish counting data. You also had this historic warming event in the Atlantic Ocean off of New England. And at the same time, you have this new boat. And everyone's sort of wondering, well, is it the boat? Is it the net?

17:45Ian Coss:Is it actually the fish? One of the scientists I talked to at the NOAA Scientist Center described this period as a perfect storm for mistrust.

18:16Unexplainable Hosts:sleeve black shirt that just kind of fits in a certain way so that I can layer it under one of my sleeveless dresses. Or other times I want a nice short sleeve black shirt that looks a certain way with my favorite pair of jeans. And what I really appreciated about Quince is that they had a whole range of different shirts for me to choose from. I wound up getting three different ones, each with variations in neckline and sleeves and material. And they were all pretty much exactly what I was hoping for. Now, you might not be looking for several different kinds of hyper-specific black shirts, but Quince also has lots of wardrobe staples for spring for you to choose from.

18:57Unexplainable Hosts:Think 100 % European linen shorts and shirts from$34 that are lightweight, breathable, and comfortable, but still look put together. You can refresh your wardrobe with Quince. Go to quince.com slash unexplainable for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. now available in Canada too. That is Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash unexplainable to get free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash unexplainable.

19:31Unexplainable Hosts:Support for this show comes from the Futurology podcast. With so much changing every minute, it can feel silly to think more than a few days in the future, but exploring what could happen in the weeks, years, and even decades to come can reshape how we approach our lives today, which is exactly what futurology is for. This new podcast from the Berggruen Institute can help you get ahead of tomorrow. Futurology isn't sci-fi. Each week, they have thoughtful conversations with scientists, artists, technologists, philosophers, people who illuminate the forces shaping our lives and try to imagine both where they'll take us and also how we can respond.

20:13Unexplainable Hosts:They discuss whether the future is something we have to endure or something we can design. And if we can design it, what will we build? Subscribe to Futurology wherever you get your podcasts or watch full episodes on YouTube.

20:33Unexplainable Hosts:Ready to soundtrack your summer? With Red Bull Summer All Day Play, you choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best. Are you a festival fanatic, a deep-end DJ, a road dog, or a trail mixer? Just add a song to your chosen playlist and put your summer on track. Red Bull Summer All Day Play. Red Bull gives you wings. Visit redbull.com slash brightsummer ahead to learn more. See you this summer.

21:04Ian Coss:Extra, extra, read all about it. The fish are gone. Where'd they go? I don't know. For your listeners who are not New Englanders, like you and I, we should really stress that the codfish has a deep symbolic importance in this region. It is not just a food that you eat. It is the reason why the Massachusetts Bay Colony exists in the first place. It is the reason why Cape Cod is called Cape Cod. It is what built the economy of the state. Really? They made it so that there were powerful merchants here that could rally for independent— Really? Cod? Codfish. Codfish is baked into the history of this region.

21:52Ian Coss:Okay. Yeah, I know. Have you ever been to the Massachusetts Statehouse, by the way? Sure. Yeah. Okay. Have you been to the House chamber in the Massachusetts Statehouse? I have not. Okay. So if you go into the chamber where the legislators sit and they vote, you know, you have this raised, like, platform at the front where the speaker sits and, you know, all the head haunches are. If you sit at the speaker's desk and you look out across the legislature, what you see directly in front of you is a five-foot-long effigy of a codfish. What? That is called the sacred cod.

22:28Unexplainable Hosts:Get out of here.

22:29Ian Coss:It's known as the sacred cod. It was gifted to the legislature years and years and years ago, and it has hung in the Massachusetts Statehouse ever since. So you should have in the back of your mind, it's not about food, it's not about money, it's about something much, much deeper.

22:44Unexplainable Hosts:Wow. So like counting the cod is not just counting fish. This is like counting the soul of Massachusetts.

22:52Ian Coss:It's counting the symbol of our abundance and God-given fortune.

22:58Unexplainable Hosts:So if we go back to where we left off, we're what, like early 2010s? Yes. We got this new boat, new survey, and the cod quota is suddenly dramatically smaller. How do people react?

23:11Ian Coss:It was a shock and a disappointment because, you know, there have been trouble with the fish stocks for years. And there have been, you know, regulations that have, you know, been tightening. And a lot of people felt like we had solved the problem. We fished a little less. And now, you know, the population is going to recover and we're reaching a point of sustainability. And the science actually backed that up for a time. It looked good. And then you get this shock. in 2011, 2012, 2013, where suddenly the data starts to look really bad. So what you see in those years is huge cuts in the amount of fish that fishermen are allowed to catch.

23:55Ian Coss:I'll give you one example. In 2013, they cut the quota for all codfish in the entire Gulf of Maine by 77 % year over year. So if you were catching 1 ,000 pounds, In one year, you're now catching a couple hundred pounds.

24:13Unexplainable Hosts:That's crazy. And I guess I'm wondering, if the scientists say don't catch cod, I mean, the nets are big, right? You can't make a net that specifically has a hole shaped for no cod, right?

24:26Ian Coss:Right. A cod-shaped hole that they all swim out of.

24:29Unexplainable Hosts:Exactly, yeah.

24:30Ian Coss:And this creates a problem that fishermen call the choke species. Because the problem is these fish, they all swim together. You pull up a net and it's a whole mix of different things. And so the problem is, if you run out of your quota for codfish, then that is your choke species. And that means you can't go fishing anymore. So what do you do if you catch cod? So let's say your quota for cod is very small. You go out and on day one of your season, you've caught your entire quota for the year, which could happen, right? You put the net back in the water and you get more cod. What are you going to do now?

25:08Ian Coss:At that point, you have three options. Some of them are legal and some of them are illegal. One option is you could like go to your neighbor at the dock and try and buy their cod quota or buy somebody else's.

25:24Unexplainable Hosts:So then they can't fish for cod.

25:25Ian Coss:Exactly. Got it. But the quota itself is extremely expensive for these limited species. In fact, the quota costs more than the fish is worth. The second option, which from many fishermen I've talked to was pretty common at the time, is you discard the choke species. You just throw it overboard. Because as long as you don't bring it back to shore and sell it, then it's not going to count against your quota for the year, right? To be clear, this is not legal. You're not supposed to discard fish. What's the problem with discarding fish? Well, a lot of those fish will die anyway. Oh, so you're not just like catch and release.

26:05Ian Coss:This is not catch and release. Because we're talking about a net that's dragged through the water for maybe an hour, right? Thousands of pounds of fish packed into this net, dumped on the deck of a boat, sifted through, tossed overboard. So this fish that gets tossed back in the water has been through the wringer. And a lot of what you'll see behind the boat when you discard is just white bellies floating on the surface.

26:36Unexplainable Hosts:So if you discard the cod, then you're actually killing the cod and you're not reporting it.

26:42Ian Coss:Yeah. So this is a lose-lose for everyone. Nobody gets to eat the fish. The fish is not conserved. The fish does not go on to live a healthy life and reproduce and make more fish. Nobody makes money off of it. It is pure waste. This is the unintended consequences of this regulation at that time. But a lot of people were doing that? It was common. I talked to one fisherman who described, he would hear stories about boats that would get a thousand pounds of excess cod on a single toe and shovel it overboard with shovels. That is good. Dead fish. And this, again, this is the fish that we are trying to bring back, the symbol of our abundance and vitality.

27:25Ian Coss:It's the sacred cod. It is literally the sacred fish of the region being shoveled overboard, dead, a thousand pounds at a time.

27:38Unexplainable Hosts:So option one was— You pay for it. —by new quota. Option two is this terrible lose-lose-lose option. Yep.

27:46Ian Coss:Is the third one good? Well, it depends on your point of view. And this is where we connect back to Carlos Rafael. The cod father. The cod father. He brought those fish to shore that he did not have quota for, and he very carefully sold them without anyone ever realizing what they were. He would pass them off as other species.

28:11Unexplainable Hosts:Got it. So, like, a species that, like, had a higher quota or something.

28:16Ian Coss:Exactly. Got it. So, what was going on at the time, again, like 2010s, the cod quota, very low. Gray sole, very low. Flounder, very low. Haddock, pretty high. And so what Carlos would do is fudge the paperwork so that his cod and his flounder and his sole looked like haddock. what Carlos was able to do was misreport the fish at many different stages along the supply chain. So that all along the way, the government sees, okay, Haddock, Haddock landed the dock. Haddock was sold to Carlos Rafael. Haddock went on the truck to New York. But then when it actually lands on the plate at the restaurant, it's your grace hole.

29:10Ian Coss:How was he able to do this? The key was vertical integration.

29:16Unexplainable Hosts:I was a fish buyer. I didn't have to go through what the other people go through.

29:21Ian Coss:So Carlos had been around the docks in New Bedford for a long time. And he had built up this kind of unique empire where he was both the biggest boat owner in the fleet. He owned about 40 boats. And he also ran the biggest fish processing plant in the city. He was like the buyer and the seller, if that makes sense. The way Carlos described it to me was,

29:54He controlled the entire chain.

29:58Ian Coss:He called it painting the fish. He really drew out this metaphor when he was talking with the undercover IRS agents. eventually they got to the point where he was just talking openly about how he went about this fraud. And he would say, yeah, I can paint the fish any color I want.

30:16Unexplainable Hosts:The more rules they put on my ass, I'll keep painting the sun up a picture of a different color. Oh, my God. So he is clearly committing fraud here, right?

30:27Ian Coss:Yes. Unambiguous.

30:28Unexplainable Hosts:And has he been convicted?

30:33Ian Coss:So in 2016, federal agents raided Carlos Seafood. They froze the permits on his boats. And ultimately, he did plead guilty to falsifying documents as well as a number of other financial crimes.

30:53Ian Coss:So where's Carlos now? Carlos is out of jail. Okay. And I first reached out to him a few years after he got out of prison. And at the end of that interview, I left feeling like, yeah, this guy's a very convenient narrative about himself. You know, that he's the hero, that he was doing what he had to do. But I didn't take him that seriously. but then I started going around town and interviewing some other folks who worked in politics who worked in the fishing industry some academics, journalists you know, regulators and the thing that really started to draw my interest in this whole story was how many people I met who, if they didn't express outright sympathy for Carlos Rafael they had at least some ambivalence about him they would say something like Like, well, you know, there's two sides to Carlos.

31:52Ian Coss:You know, yeah, he was crass, but, you know, he did a lot for this industry. And some people I would meet who I would ask them straight out, do you think what Carlos did is wrong? And they would tell me, no. No, he was right.

32:09Unexplainable Hosts:And what do you think that's about?

32:12Ian Coss:To me, it's emblematic of a much deeper mistrust and antagonism towards the government and science. Because the science is what drives the policy, and the policy is what affects these people's lives. New England is like a case study in how trust within that system can break down. You have this changing assessment method, right? The new boat they brought in, the new net, the new survey techniques. You have these changing regulations. There's all this change happening at once in a fishery that has been there for 400 years. And it bred this really intense distrust that whatever side of it you're on, whether you're a policymaker, whether you're a scientist, whether you're a fisherman, I think everyone around it can agree that the relationship is broken.

33:11Ian Coss:And I came to the conclusion, you know, after studying the story and talking to so many people in the industry, that Carlos could not have gotten away with it for so long if there weren't a whole lot of other people around him who shared that mistrust, who also thought the science was questionable and the policy based on that science was unreasonable. And that therefore, you know, if you paint a few fish and it allows you to keep your boats working and keep your people employed, then that is the right thing to do.

33:46Unexplainable Hosts:You spoke to a lot of scientists. I mean, what is your sense of the accuracy of the science here? The accuracy of saying that there is a low cod count?

33:59Ian Coss:I think there are some tremendously smart people doing science in New England about fish. At a high level, I have no reason to distrust the motives and methods of the very professional qualified scientists doing this work. But we just, there's this feeling of it kind of lurching from crisis to crisis, from lawsuit to protest. and it's really hard to actually bring together the stakeholders.

34:30Unexplainable Hosts:It's difficult because the fishermen clearly have an incentive for there to be a larger quota. It's not clear that the scientists have an incentive one way or the other and that doesn't necessarily mean that the scientists are right. But the fishermen clearly are motivated here.

34:45Ian Coss:Yes, there is no doubt that the fishermen have an economic motivation to see fish out in the ocean. But fishermen have this very intense lived experience of the ocean. Some of the people I talk to spend hundreds of days a year out at sea, more days a year out on a boat in the ocean hunting fish than they do standing on land. And that gives them a very intimate understanding of what's out there, but a very particular understanding. And a scientist with a PhD and, you know, surveys and analysis has a very different kind of understanding, a different way of knowing the world. And that is part of what we're reconciling here is different ways of thinking about expertise and understanding and who actually knows best.

35:34Ian Coss:And those are very difficult to reconcile.

35:36Unexplainable Hosts:Is there anything that you have learned about the distrust of science in the fishing community in New Bedford that sheds light on the distrust of science in the rest of the country? Does it help you understand it any better?

35:53Ian Coss:I think the thing that's really nailed home for me is the scientist does not win that argument with logic and data and saying, oh, no, no, no, but look, but we controlled for that. No, no, no, look, but we tested that. When that mistrust is there and it's so deep, you're never going to break through that. You have to get it back to a place of shared understanding and working together.

36:20Unexplainable Hosts:What you're basically saying is that if you want the science to speak for itself in a place where communities have lost trust in science, you have to build that trust back before you present them with the new science, before you try to get them to change their lives in any way. You have to find a way to connect with each other again. Yeah.

36:40Ian Coss:I've watched all this footage of these fishery meetings, you know, where regulators and scientists would present an argument and then fishermen would get up and present their argument. And it just, it always seems like they're talking past each other.

36:56Unexplainable Hosts:There's fish coming in all different sizes, talking from baby codfish to large cod. Take a look at our numbers. That's all we're asking. We're accountable for what we do, and what we do is follow your rules. Where is your accountability?

37:10Ian Coss:It's bullshit. Because you guys are wrong and you know you're wrong, and no one up here has a ball, so admit it. You're going to hang a bunch of people, and you're all putting your heads down because you know I'm right. And I think what I see in that is that if you have difficult science that you're trying to communicate, science that's going to affect people's lives, and they don't trust it, You do not overcome that mistrust by proving that you are right. You need to somehow incorporate their worldview and their understanding, their curiosity, their knowledge into what you're doing. this one moment i still think about from 2014 when the top regulator from the region went to one of these fishery meetings where everybody comes together industry members scientists and he gets up there and he gives this plea really to everyone gathered there that we have to find a way to understand each other i do think it points out the continuing

38:16Unexplainable Hosts:need that has existed for generations to build bridges between science and fishermen. Because you can have the best science in the world, and if there isn't an understanding

38:33Ian Coss:of that, it just simply doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if people don't believe it.

38:51Unexplainable Hosts:If you want to hear how Carlos Rafael became the Codfather in the first place, how he built his empire of fish, and why he thinks he was right to break the law, check out Ian's show, The Big Dig. Season three is called Catching the Codfather. And if you are into infrastructure or gambling, seasons one and two are excellent as well. You can find them wherever you listen. This episode was produced and hosted by Noam Hassenfeld. who also wrote the music. It was edited by me, Sally Helm, and Joanna Solitaroff. Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala. Fact-checking from Melissa Hirsch. Julia Longoria and Jorge Just are our editorial directors.

39:30Unexplainable Hosts:Amy Padula and Meredith Hodnott are the fact that sockeye salmon can navigate using the Earth's magnetic field. And Bird Pinkerton ran off with the Beak Beeper, searching for Flapton. It was beeping all over the place. She needed to find a place far away from the sky, far away from all the birds flying overhead, a place where a beep would mean she was close.

39:58Unexplainable Hosts:Thanks, as always, to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show along with Bird and Noam. If you have thoughts about this episode, we are at unexplainable at vox.com. Please write to us. If you want to support the show and help us keep making it, please join our membership program at vox.com slash members. You will get ad-free podcasts and other perks and unlimited access to Vox journalism. You can also support us by leaving a rating or a review or by telling people in your life to listen to Unexplainable. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we will be back in your feed very soon.

40:43Unexplainable Hosts:The right window treatments change everything. Your sleep, your privacy, the way every room looks and feels. At Blinds.com, we've spent 30 years making it surprisingly simple to get exactly what your home needs. We've covered over 25 million windows and have 50 ,000 five-star reviews to prove we deliver. Whether you DIY it or want a pro to handle everything from measure to install, we have you covered. Real design professionals. Free samples. Zero pressure. Right now, get up to 45 % off with minimum purchase. Plus, get a free professional measure at Blinds.com. Rules and restrictions apply.

41:15Ian Coss:There's a new way to sweet green. Meet Wraps. Handheld, hearty, and made for life on the move. With bold, chef-crafted flavors, fresh ingredients, and over 40 grams of protein, they're built to satisfy without slowing you down. Try Wraps today in the app or at order.sweetgreen.com. Available at all participating locations. Bye.