Undercover Sting Shows Us Why We Need Better Monitoring of the Fleet
Allegedly, he had been lying to the feds (falsifying documents) about the size and species composition of his catch for the last 30 years, with the clear intent to evade federal quotas intended to ensure that groundfish fisheries were in fact sustainable.
According to the affidavit, he told federal agents that if there was a constraining quota on a species one of his boats caught, he’d have his captains label it as the more abundant haddock, but then sell it for cash, under the table, for the higher price that the more restricted species commanded, to some shady guy in New York City named Michael Perretti, owner of South Street Seafood. (Note: interestingly enough, Mr. Perretti is same guy who got busted back in 1999 for selling untagged, contaminated striped bass caught in the lower Hudson River). At lot of that cash was laundered by smuggling it to Portugal. All this, of course, is at the expense of the resource itself.
Read the blog conservefish.org
