Bear Grease - Ep. 222: Paddlefish Wars and Caviar Dreams

Episode Date: June 12, 2024

Prepare to take an unexpected turn in this week's episode of Bear Grease as Clay Newcomb goes on a deep dive into the topic of Paddlefish caviar. This prehistoric creature is cherished as a game species but is also targeted by poachers to produce black-market caviar. Retired Oklahoma game wardens, Jeff Brown and Keith Green, tell the stories of starting the revolutionary Paddlefish Research Center and catching a poacher who turned into a legitimate caviar producer for the State. Additional interviews with caviar expert, Alan Morris, and Oklahoma Fish Biologist, Brandon Brown. Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Yep. On Bear Greece, we've made a living telling the gritty stories of rural America, of backwoodsmen and long hunters, cowboys and Native American leaders, lawmen and outlaws. I hate to admit it, boys, but I've completely turned the helm of the ship

to something bizarrely, off topic on this episode. Caviar. Salted fish eggs of certain species are some of the most expensive per ounce food in the world. They're a status symbol of wealth and luxury, but is that really

why I'm interested? Have I derailed us, or could this be a story where rural America collides with a global caviar trade in a bizarre crime ring? I guess you'll have to wait and see. But this story from the heartland of Oklahoma is full of giant fish, net poachers, undercover agents,

and a region turned upside down by black market caviar. I really doubt that you're going to want to miss this one, if you can even believe it at all. All these wardens converged on them. We had shotguns, and it was... Did you lead the chart? You called the... Yeah, oh, yeah.

What'd you say to them? State game warden. Stay at it. That's not what you want to hear in the dark anytime, is it? Not with a batch of eggs. Yeah. My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is the Bear Grease podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant. Search for insight in unlikely places and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land.

Presented by FHF Gear, American-made, purpose-built, hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. Phil, we're going to have to start from the top. I think we just have to tell him about caviar. There's just not another starting point. Here we go. I'm Alan Morris at Sterling Caviar. We're just outside of Sacramento, California. I'm assuming this is catching the average bear grease listener a little off guard.

Caviar? But I'll tell you, this is a foundational piece of understanding for this story. The history of caviar is generally thought of as based around the Caspian Sea. where the beluga, the et cetera, the sort of old world species live, where folks were catching it. At some point, they realized, hey, if we salt these eggs, they taste pretty good. And then at a point in time, it became fashionable, you know, in the imperial courts of Europe. And that's when it kind of took off with the rich set. But we know people who've been in the business who grew up in that area.

He said, oh, yeah, when I was a little kid, we had caviar for breakfast every day in Russia. And so that's kind of where it started. The Persians first called salted fish eggs caviar, which means cake of strength. Aristotle mentioned sturgeon caviar as being, quote, heralded into banquets amongst trumpets and flowers, unquote. He said that three centuries before the birth of Christ, but it really got its start as a widespread delicacy by the 1600s when the Russian Orthodox Church decided that even though they required fasting from meat for as many as 200 days a year, caviar would be acceptable for people to eat in lieu of meat. Russia was a land rich with giant sturgeon-filled rivers, and similar to the ideas

of Europeans around the American bison in the 1800s, the supply of sturgeon seemed endless. Beluga and a cetra sturgeon, fish native to wider Europe, is the best caviar in the world, period. Baluga sturgeon sometimes only reproduce every 25 years, and after centuries of commercial pressure, sturgeon are endangered in Europe, and today it's illegal to sell beluga caviar in the United States. Who knew Russia was that big into caviar, but why would we? We'll be back for the Russians, so just put them aside for now. In Middle America, eating caviar is about as common as an albino emu. It's just not in the cultural rolodex, but in the ultra-wealthy part of American culture,

caviar is alive and well. It's another dazzling lifestyles of the rich and famous. Thank you for joining us. I'm Robin Leach with those champagne wishes and caviar dreams. Robin Leach hosted the television show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. from 1984 to 1985, and coined the phrase, champagne wishes and caviar dreams. But what's all the fuss about?

Does this stuff really even taste good? Here's Alan. Caviar is a unique flavor and texture that you don't get from any other product, any other food in the world. So the experience, first you put on your tongue and sort of crush it against your palate. And what you want to do is you're feeling those individual beads.

And then as they pop, you'll get a rich, buttery flavor. And then a cascade of flavors. There's going to be some bright acidity to it. I want some minerality. I want a breath of the sea or hint of the sea. And also some earthiness. We call it merwar, just like terroir in wine. You can taste that it's something that came from the earth.

And again, those fats kind of let those flavors cascade. You know, you swallow it and you just got this fog left in your head as it is when you've tasted anything great. It kind of leaves you a little bit dizzy. I'm sitting in the police station in Venita, Oklahoma. I've not been arrested, but rather I've made arrangements to meet someone here that probably knows more about caviar than anyone in Oklahoma. He's traveled to Europe for seafood symposiums and dealt in the global caviar trade. But why does this guy live in Vanita? town of 5,100 people in northeast Oklahoma. Vanita has a handsome main street and a good Chinese

restaurant. This is flat country mixed with thick forests and open grass pastures, good cattle country. The landscape cradles big, slow-moving rivers flowing out of the great plains of Kansas to the north. All these rivers are dammed, creating incredibly fecund lakes like Grand, Keystone, and Eufaula. Does this sound like Caviar Country? I don't know. I'm meeting with retired Oklahoma game warden Keith Green. He's in his early 70s, wiery, full of energy, and grins ear to ear at the conclusion of each sentence.

We'll learn that Keith is a bona fide hero of Oklahoma conservation, a pioneer. I assume this is rare for a caviar expert, but in his prime, he was as good an elk bow hunter as existed. He owns a string of pack mules and nine bird dogs. dogs. Today he does. Keith is also an accomplished fisherman. My dad, when we were in the late 60s, he was loading us up with his boat and going to Mexico to all the old Mexico lakes, bass fishing. And in 73, I won the Oklahoma State

Bass Championship and beat Jimmy Houston. He was second. I was 18, 17 or 18, so we bass fished. Keith is one of those guys when you shake his hand, you know you're talking to a legend. But he's got some foundational information on global trade he needs to share. This is where we'll start to stitch the lifestyles of the rich and famous with Oklahoma rednecks. This is part two of the foundation of our story. Learning about caviar was part one. In 87, there was an Iranian embargo with the United States.

and 90% of our caviar came from Iran, our black caviar. So our caviar quit. We lost it. So they started looking for a substitute. Caviar coming into the United States was gone. Was gone. So the people that were wanting caviar was looking for another source. Absolutely.

And come to find out, paddlefish had dark black eggs. They're akin to a sturgeon. and their cartilage fish. And paddlefish caviar is number three in the world as caviar. Three to four. It can be really, really good. And there's some pluses to it. Sturgeon caviar, you can't freeze it.

Battlestish caviar you can freeze. And you can also pasteurize. Now some of the pieces are starting to take shape. Caviar is extremely sought after in some circles. The supply chain was cut off by Ronald. Reagan's embargo, but lo and behold, Keith mentioned an American species, the paddlefish, Polydon Spathula, also known as the spoonbill, and it has black row and is one of the top caviares in the world. Who knew? The truth is that very few people in Oklahoma knew anything

about it, nor cared anything about caviar. Fish eggs were usually left on the bank. High demand and low supply had begun to create the backdrop for some serious illegal activity. For our final foundational piece to begin to tell this story, we need to understand what a paddlefish is, where they live, and how they've survived on this continent since before T-Rex was leaving tracks. This is retired Oklahoma game warden Jeff Brown, also an incredible man. He'll be a huge player in this story later on. The cattlefish are a very unique fish and that they're prehistoric. The cartilaginous, they don't have any hard bones in them.

The only skeletal structure is their rostrum, which is the long snout. Other than that, they have a cartilage encased spinal cord that runs the length of their body. And other than that, there's no bones in them. They have a thick hide. They have a really big area or a streak that runs through them of red meat. They grow to be real big. World record came out of Oklahoma for several years, but it just recently was broken in Missouri, just as spring, I think.

On March 17th, 2024, first-time paddle fisherman, Chad Williams, broke the world record by snagging a 164-pound, 13-ounce paddlefish in Missouri's Lake of the Ozarks. The former world record was 164 pounds even and came out of Keystone Lake near Tulsa, Oklahoma. The age of natural systems of the earth is bizarre to comprehend from inside the cockpit of the small sliver of time that humans live. And according to the fossil record, 99% of the species that have ever existed are now extinct. So when a species outlasts its peers and critics, it's worth taking a note and tipping your hat. Here is Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Fisheries Biologist Brandon Brown. You know, paddlefish are such a bizarre looking fish.

They're primitive. They're ancient species. They were around, or at least their relatives were around well before the dinosaurs. Probably the most bizarre thing about them is their rostrum, their beal. And a lot of people used to think that they use that to stir up the mud and then then kind of eat what they stir up. But the fact is that's really a specialized appendage. You can really think of that as a plankton.

seeking antenna. Work done at Missouri years ago found that within juvenile paddlefish, they'd put them in a round tank but they glued basically plankton to the end of wires and those little paddlefish could basically detect the electrical

field of one individual plankton. So they're amazing critters. You know, another cartilaginous fish is a shark and paddlefish are related to sharks and you know if you ever see a paddlefish with this Rostrum cut off, really it looks basically like a basking shark.

That's pretty wild. But here's where paddlefish start to stand out as caviar producing machines. One of the really neat things about paddlefish, especially when we start talking about their life cycle and reproduction and especially their management, is when you clean a bass or a cropie, you know, they have eggs in them. And it's maybe a handful of eggs. But when you clean a mature female paddlefish, you might get 15 or 20 pounds of eggs out of her. So she's producing about a third of her body weight sometimes into reproduction. That is a huge metabolic investment to think every year, every other year, whatever it happens to be, that she's literally producing a third of her body weight into eggs.

Cultivars of corn with big ears make for big yields. and giant fish with huge volumes of black eggs create incredible caviar. They're long-lived. They'll live maybe to 50 years old or so. They don't reproduce until they're anywhere between 6 and 12 years old. And they only reproduce when the conditions are just right. So we'll go years maybe without a reproduction. So we have what we call and refer to as year classes.

We'll have a pretty good idea when the fish spawned, and you can mark that on a calendar in about six, seven years. We'll have a good fishery. But then at the same time, all those fish that people are catching are from one year class. And so they can wipe that year class out. Here's Brandon on paddlefish spawning. So we consider paddlefish episodic spawners, meaning they spawn in these big boom or busts. episodes. It's not unusual to see an eight or even a 10 or 15 year gap in between those spawning events, significant spawning events. Episotic spawners. That's an insightful biological

descriptor. I like that. Paddlefish are native to North America. They're native to the Mississippi River system. Oklahoma is actually on the western fringe of the range. We're not in the heart of paddlefish country, so to speak. They once ranged from Louisiana all the way up into Canada in some places. But over the last 50 years or so, paddlefish have declined significantly in the United States, both in range and number. But Oklahoma has been the exception to that. Our paddlefish are doing well.

They're doing very well. We almost certainly have more paddlefish today than we did 50 years ago. They're expanding both in their range. range within the state and also in population size and in numbers. Oklahoma really won the paddlefish lottery, so to speak. And it wasn't anything that we did as a state or as an agency. We just got really lucky. We've got enough river miles between those dams that those fish can move and go and get

a spawn off. And we have very fertile, very fertile watersheds. You know, if we look at that grand system, that water's coming out of Kansas. Well, there's probably not anywhere in the U.S. more fertile, you know, than Kansas. Paddlefish in general are not doing good, but in Oklahoma, they're doing very well. This is really where the human side of the story begins. Here's Jeff Brown. Tell me about the caviar.

The caviar is, it makes a high-grade caviar, the row from the paddlefish. There's a window of time there. The eggs in the paddlefish are viable as far as caviar goes all the way back into November, December. They don't spawn until March, April, but the row is you can make caviar out of it earlier than what they spawn. The beluga sturgeon population in the Russia, the Soviet Union collapsed from overfishing, and that caviar market went away for the most part. And that is one of the reasons, if not the biggest reason, why so much pressure was put on paddlefish caviar.

And I looked online last night of what paddlefish caviar was selling for, and it's about a dollar a gram. So roughly depending on where you buy it from, $25 to $35 an ounce. So that makes one fish worth potentially. quite a bit of money. It wasn't uncommon for a fish to produce 10 pounds of caviar. Let me do the math here. $4,800? Yeah, an average size female that you caught that had 10 pounds of caviar would be worth five grand. Yep. Wow. And that's just the caviar and some people

would would sell the meat on top of that, you know, for another couple of dollars a pound. So a really big fish could potentially be worth, you know, five, six thousand dollars. That's big money for a And coming from the hunting world, it's hard to imagine the meat or consumable products of an animal we hunt being worth that much. We also learned another influence on the global market was the depletion of Russian sturgeon fisheries, additional to the trade embargo with Iran in the 1980s. So here's what we know. Caviar is in demand globally, but most Oklahomans, I know, would starve before they'd eat it. So there was an untapped resource.

Kind of like when the Beverly Hillbillies discovered oil on their land, it was worthless to them, but some other folks wanted it pretty bad. So how did paddlefish caviar get discovered? Jed's oil got discovered when someone shot a gun into the ground. Here's Game Warden, Keith Green. It was a guy in Tennessee named Frank Hale, and he was really one of the very first people that it was legal to net him.

He went up to Missouri and set up a program on the Missouri River. The guy that I caught here in Oklahoma, Billy Wishard, and he's deceased now. And we become super, super friends. But he got hooked in with Frank Hale through muscle picking. And he brought it back to Oklahoma, and there was commercial fishermen on Grand Lake. And he got with that commercial fisherman. and we thought nothing about it. They would always been able to take paddlefish

commercially on Grand Lake with nets. And we started seeing them really targeting paddlefish. They'd never targeted it before because it's not that... The meat's not that good. It's okay. It's really okay if it's taken care of. But it's not like being a flathead or a blue cat. We kind of caught wind of it here in Oklahoma

that there was some stuff going on. and I was the supervisor for this area. And so we started working it. And we ended up catching a bunch out of Illinois coming in. There was some people at Annola, some people at Claremore. And they were pretty well going to the same market that we found out over time. These are just Oklahomans. Yeah, these were, but they were connected for out of state.

Okay. Because of the muscle picking. Okay. And the muscle pickers were the netters. and so it really happened nationwide. This Frank Hale out of Tennessee was one of the first major paddlefish caviar kingpins in the U.S., and he started in the late 1980s. In 2004, he'd be convicted of 11 charges in relation to the Lacey Act.

There was an article written about Frank Hale and his caviar in the New York Times in 1990, and Oklahomaan Billy Wishard was a muscle picker who commercially gave him. gathered muscles and learned about paddlefish caviar from Frank. You got to remember Billy. He'll be a major player in this story. But also know that commercial fishing was outlawed in Oklahoma in 1974. This is also an important part of the story. So there was no legal way to sell paddlefish eggs in Oklahoma.

In Oklahoma, we do not have commercial fishing like they do up and down the Mississippi River, Ohio River areas. and those commercial fishermen will target paddle fish. And in those states, from what I understand, they are tightly regulated, even the commercial fishing. But that is kind of what led the problem. Part of the problem in Oklahoma is that you can come to Oklahoma and catch all the paddlefish you could ever want to catch. And in other states, you can't do that.

So there was no regulation on how many you could take? It's been kind of a progression. When I first moved to this area, And we started really working them hard. We had a three fish limit. Per day? Per day. Okay.

But you had the first three fish you caught, you had to keep them. There was no calling. There was no throwing, catch and release. That in and up itself led to problems. If a person caught a paddle fish and he was just that long, you had to keep him. And once you caught three, you were done. Well, people didn't want to do that, and they would catch and release, and that's kind of what we watched for. And then as we learn more, I say we as the Wildlife Department learn more about the paddlefish.

Some rule changes were made to restrict sport take. You know, all we have is sport fishing. And it's progressed up until today where it's a two fish limit per year. And that's all you can take. It's two fish per calendar year. There are seven states that allow commercial paddlefish harvest. Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, and Mississippi. However, these markets for that caviar is highly regulated.

So that's exactly why a place like Oklahoma without the pressure of commercial fishing became a holy land for black market spoonbill caviar. Now, my friends, we have a solid foundation to understand the dynamics for the early years of this illegal activity. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated. with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen.

But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? that's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts.

Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls dot com. I think you'll be glad you did and you'll find out that the Steve Rinella cut is an easy to use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises

and getting action. I now want to get to know Game Warden, Keith Green, a little better, and here's some stories of busting egg poachers. And not to foreshadow too much, but his law enforcement career would be the backdrop to establish one of the most creative conservation programs ever created. Here's Keith with some family history. The best thing that probably ever happened to me was my game warden career. I loved every minute of it.

My dad was pretty much of a poacher. Really? Yeah. He would, he got to hunt one day a week, and that was on Saturdays, and we'd be quill hunting. We'd start in the morning and quit in the evening. He took advantage of that day. Of that day.

And we hunted the same places for 30 years, you know, and never hurt. He knew what he, the last thing he'd ever wanted to do was would hurt a population. So I was raised on the other side a little bit, so it really helped. helped me when I become a game warden, I got a degree in wildlife ecology from Oklahoma State University. And you think, well, it helped you catch them, and it did that. But it also helped my mental state toward somebody doing a violation. Just because they were doing a violation, they weren't a no-good sorry son of it. And so, and that's what happens to a lot of game wardens. You're lied to by everybody. And you see these guys doing things wrong. And, and, you see these guys doing things wrong,

and they get the mentality that they're a bad person because they're violating the game law. And that's not always, that's not always, sometimes it's true. But that's not always true. And that kept me from developing that. My background kept me from developing that. So I had lots of respect, even the guys that I caught. And you'll find out in this story here, the guy that I ended up hiring with the guy that I'd caught twice doing eggs illegally. And I took a beating from the other game wardens across the state

because I'd work to catch this guy thousands of hours. Night after night after night after night after night. Finally got him. And his brother had done some other stuff and was on probation. He said, if you'll keep my brother out of jail, he said, I'll teach you how to catch these guys. And for two years, anytime I ever called him, he went with me, would spend the whole night with me.

We'd go work together and I felt like I'd completely converted him. The man who Keith would later hire to help him catch Oklahoma poachers was Billy Wissard, the one who initially started the black market trade in Oklahoma. Before 1974, Billy was a commercial fisherman and a muscle picker on Grand Lake and his livelihood was pulled out from underneath him with the law change. So he took to the world of illegal wildlife trade. But by the time Keith caught him, the agency was way behind. And we were so far behind the eight ball, the poachers got on it. Let's say, let's say it started in 87.

Maybe it was 95 before we knew that they were raping our lakes. So in 87 is when the embargo happened and Caviar wasn't coming into the United States. And they look at course. So for like eight years, it was like the Wild West. that wasn't a lot of regulation. That's right. Here in Oklahoma, at that time, I think the limit was five. And you could, there wasn't any limit on how many eggs sets of eggs you could have.

Yeah. You could take it out of, eggs out of state. So there's just, anything goes. For eight years, the black market caviar trade ran wild and pretty much unnoticed in Oklahoma. Then in 1995, the department caught on. And these eggs were being. sold primarily to American buyers selling to American folks. But in the next episode, you'll see that the players and their nationalities will shift.

I want to ask Keith about one of his most memorable egg busts. It happened to be on Fort Gibson Lake. This is the story of catching Billy Ray Wischard. Him and his brother, they had nets out, and they were on Fort Gibson Lake. you know Fort Gibson. Well, they would go in and put in with a little boat out of the back of their truck, a V-bottom with a little 10-horse, 15-horse motor. And he would cross the lake and go to where they had their nets out.

And one guy would run it. The other guy would drive the truck around almost 40 miles to the other side of the lake. And he could watch and see if anybody was following him. He'd stop and start and go down a road to dead end. and there was just no way to follow him without getting caught. And then they would load up on a gravel bar, load that V bottom up, sticking in the back of their pickup. And they left the tailgate up and they would set it in there like that.

With their fish. They'd have their fish in the back of the truck. Eggs. They were throwing the fish away. Just the eggs. Oh, they were just taking the eggs, chunking the fish. Absolutely. And there's a got, they were on.

on a real, rural road down the east side of Fort Gibson Lake. Well, there was one house down there, and the guy got off at 12 to 1 o'clock, and he was coming on, and he called another game warden down in District 2. He said, hey, there's been a boat. I've seen it twice in the back of a pickup, come out of here. So he called me, and I said, well, I'll go down. Now, why was these suspicious of that boat? One a.m., 2 a.m. in the morning.

That wouldn't be unusual for just a cat fisherman or something? No, not a boat stuck in the back of a pickup, not on a trailer. No, it was just, it was out of place. Okay. And so I went down the next night and got in there before daylight, and I had another game warden go with me. We hid the truck off on a road. We're sitting there, and we're on the back tailgate of the truck,

just being quiet listening. I go, you hear a motor? and we sat there and he was idling that little tin horse for about the last mile and his brother

come in with the pickup and he pulled in and he drove all the way down where we hid but he didn't catch our truck we heard the motor we had crawled out through these Cuccober flat

and the cuckaburts were about this tall the guy in Whisked pretty big and this road comes down the circles around just like this right in front of this cuckabur patch and here's this point over here where they're going to load the boat up we didn't know what was going on at the time but so here comes the truck and and we've called we've got to gotten to open and we lay down on those cuckabirds and I know his butt's sticking up above those cuckabirds about that high and we lay there and his pickup lights come across us and he does not see us he pulls on down and and this guy is stopped out about

Water was real shallow flat. He'd stopped out about 75 yards from the bank and was walking, wading the boat to the bank without the motor running. And so we're watching him and we're watching the pickup pull down and they kind of get together. And we've gotten to about, we're about 45 yards from them. And they're getting stuff and loading the boat up and putting the motor in underneath the boat.

And I didn't see anything that I thought were that they could have had eggs in. And the Gordon was with you because you want to get them? I go, no. I said, we're going to let them go. And that's a hard thing to do. And you suspected they were getting eggs, though. No question about it. Yeah.

There's no reason for them to be out. No rods, no tackle. There's no doubt they're knitting. They've got iceboxes, but they didn't have eggs. Boxes, they lifted them, they were light. And we let them drive off. That was really hard. Hopefully you might get some.

something on them, you know. Yeah. So the next night, Jeff, I took, Jeff Brown, you all just talked to, we had about seven wardens there, and I sent Jeff down to where the boat, where I thought it came from, and it was about a half, three-quarters of my walk down the bank.

They come in and unload the boat right there, which they never did. And I find this out later, you know. Something spooked them from the night before. Somehow I know that we spooked them a little bit, but not enough that they didn't go get their nets. They had about, I think they had about seven or eight batches of eggs. And I've called out in, there's a will of tree in the water. It's about this deep, and I've called out in by that willetree,

and you've got to have your walkie-talkie turned off. If it makes a sound, you know. So we're sitting there, and I watch them bring the nets out of the boat. They set them on a big rag, and then they just tie the feet. four corners together. And he reached in and got a nice chest and he could just, this is a big old, these are big old guys. He could barely lift it over the side of the boat.

You know it's full eggs. No doubt. And so I'm just whispering. I turned on the rocked on, whispering. I said, okay, we're going to take them down. And still don't know who it is for sure. These guys, we knew them. If it was them, I didn't feel like they would try to hurt us.

There are some guys that I felt like that would come from out of state that would try. to hurt us. Yeah. So all these wardens converged on them with shot, we had shotguns and it was. Did you lead the chart? You called the, yeah, oh yeah. What'd you say to them? State game warden. Stay at it. That's not what you want to hear in the dark anytime, is it? Not with a batch of eggs. And so I ended up going back, they let us search where they live. They had a no. So, okay, so you confront them and they just gave up. Absolutely gave up. And what did they have? They're sick. I mean, they're just, they're sick. Because we know them. These are the commercial fishermen that I've dealt with for a long time. These are friends, I mean, people you're acquainted with.

Absolutely. And I know them well. So you walk up in the dark and shine your light and you're like, Bill? They knew my voice when I said state game warden. Wow. How much value did the eggs they had right that day? You think they had a couple thousand dollars worth of eggs? Oh yeah. Yeah, at least that. But let's say they had seven or eight fish. 70 or 80 pounds of eggs. So the finished product of that caviar would have been like 35 bucks an ounce, but for them, like the raw caviar would have been less. Be like a farmer, like a... Absolutely.

He harvests of a cornfield. He's not getting the full price. Illegal eggs, so their buyer could kind of rake them over the coal anyway. They wouldn't tell us who their buyer was. Now, how did you interrogate them? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, questioned him. And he wouldn't give up his buyer.

So Keith has now caught Billy Wischard, the Oklahoma Caviar Kingpin, but now he wants to get Billy's buyer, but Billy won't talk. But Keith has a trick up his sleeve. I was dealing with a couple of caviar buyers that we had worked, and there was two women. And this one woman called the other woman and said, hey, said... Now these are illegal caviar buyers. Buyers. Yes. So you're working under.

cover you know them i'm putting word out to somebody that i think they'll get back to them okay and what'd you what'd you want them to hear yeah and i i actually told billy about something and i was at a national symposium in chattanooga and sat down with one of these and i said she was this buyer was there and uh i went over and sat down with her and she goes hey i got a bone to pick with you and she said a lady from chicago called me about saying that we were taking the illegal eggs. It was the exact thing that I told Billy. No question now I know who his buyer is. To be crystal clear, Keith is at a fancy, fancy,ancy caviar symposium representing the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife as they have interest in caviar. And he'd made a unique accusation

about a specific buyer to Billy Wissard. And later, this lady relayed the secretly coded information back to Keith, which indicated to him that she was in contact. with Billy. That's some fancy law work, brother. Here's more with Billy's route to justice and redemption. And so the feds are working on them anyway, and I didn't know this. So we get with them, and I'd fly Billy down to Tennessee. We do a proffer with the U.S. attorney. He goes, and a proffer is that, you tell me everything, and I won't arrest you for any of it. You don't. This is the guy that you caught. Yes, on Fort Gibson. Fort Gibson.

And if you miss something, then we're going to come back on you. So he spilled the beans. He told who was buying the caviar from him. Yeah. And like I say, I got to be really good friends with him. And he changed. Were they making a lot of money like this Billy guy? Okay, I can tell you, when we went down and did the proffer,

Billy, the first question he asked, he goes, the IRS going to come back on me. He goes, well, how much are we talking about? And this was for about half of the spring. He goes, oh, maybe 200,000. Oh, wow. So he had made 200,000 like that year? Half of the spring. Half of the year.

Oh, wow. This is like big money. No, it's a lot of money. Wow. So this is just some old Oklahoma country boy. Absolutely. Making maybe half a million dollars. So he would be very motivated to be a good to get away with it.

Oh, absolutely. And my mouth kind of dropped a little bit because I didn't know it was. that much. The reason Keith is so open about this convicted poacher is they became very good friends, and they work together in more ways than just catching poachers. This part of the story is really more wild than the first. I hope you're ready for this, but later, Billy Wischard would work for the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife in their state-of-the-art paddlefish research center. Yes, that's right. I said they built a paddlefish center in 2008. And guess who was the lead man that pioneered that whole program?

It was our man, Keith Green. The next part of this story is almost unbelievable, and one of the most gutsy conservation strategies I've ever heard. This is the kind of stuff that makes me love Oklahoma. Buckle up for some twists and turns. Here's Jeff Brown. The paddlefish research center, affectionately we called it the paddlefish palace, but the paddlefish research center was something completely independent of enforcement

and our enforcement efforts. But about at the same time, the Wildlife Department wanted to initiate a study on these paddlefish because of their uniqueness, because of their value, needed to know more about it. So Keith Green, who was a gay morden, and him and I worked hand in hand and worked arguably more than anybody on the enforcement end of it to start with. They put Keith in charge of setting up this paddlefish research center. And he's the only person that could have done it. So he built this research center from the ground up. And its sole purpose was to have an opportunity to study these fish.

So when people caught them. So when people caught them in the Grand River system, and it was completely voluntary on the fishermen's part, and when they caught these fish, if they wanted to, they could bring the fish to these paddlefish center, and the guys working the paddlefish center would clean them for them. Well, a byproduct of that is all these eggs, which people can't have.

you know, they can have some, but they can't have a whole lot. So a byproduct was all these eggs. Well, okay, so let's make caviar out of the eggs as a byproduct of this research that we're doing. And we'll sell the eggs, we mean in the Wildlife Department, we'll sell the eggs to pay for the facility and the research. And it was really controversial. To make again crystal clear what's happening here and its significance, here's the layout. commercial fishing is illegal in Oklahoma so you can't sell eggs.

New regulations permit each license holder to only three pounds of eggs per year. Remember that, you can have only three pounds in your possession for the year. However, they've got a huge paddlefish fishery. Catching them is becoming popular, simultaneous to a global demand for caviar. The Wildlife Department had the idea to process the giant fish for free of charge in return for the anglers donating their eggs to the department to be processed into caviar and sold legally on the market by the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife.

This had never been done before by a state agency. Here's Keith on the first year of running the paddlefish palace. We got it built and run the first year and we did it for $550,000. We told him it would take a year and a half. We told the Wall Life Commission that it would probably take about a year and a half to break even on it. Well, the first year it produced $1.5 million. Selling caviar.

From the sale of eggs. And it was a pretty hard deal. The director wanted me to go around to the department employees and explain what we were doing. And it was, boy, it was not like I got hammered. And finally, I tried to bring the point that this is a salvage operation. All these eggs, it's illegal for anybody to sell their eggs. They could use them for fish bait. They could make caviar out of them if they wanted.

This was a volunteer program that they would bring their fish in and donate the eggs to the wildlife department. But while they were doing that, we were going to pull both jaws out of the fish. We're going to get the length of the fish. We're going to get the weight of the fish. With the jaws, we're going to be able to age them, and we can start looking at our population of fish in the lake a lot better. And explained that to them, and it was still that, well, we're the wildlife department.

We shouldn't be selling commercial stuff eggs. And finally, I brought the point up that every penny is going back into the general fund of the wildlife department. It wasn't going anywhere else. Every deer that we have in Oklahoma, we sell it for $20 apiece. You go buy your license for $20. You go buy your turkey tag for $10. And when these people are bringing these fish in or we're picking them up,

we're getting to talk to them. Every angler, we got to talk to him. And that's pretty unusual. Keith and the program took a lot of persecution from all sides. Here's Jeff. it was really controversial. I can imagine. It was really divisive, not only with the public,

but also within the wildlife department. There was a lot of... Because people were like, hey, you're making this illegal for us, but y'all are doing what we can't do. Absolutely. How did that go down? The best way I know to explain that is, look, okay, if you go catch, Clay Newcomb goes and catches a paddlefish

and processes the eggs and sells it, you profit from that. You profit from a fish that everybody owns. The wildlife in Oklahoma under a North American model is all the wildlife is owned by the people. By the people. But it's managed by the state. Okay, so if you process eggs,

but you're pocketing all the money, if the wildlife department processes the eggs and sells them, everybody's benefiting from it. So they take this cat, And every day they're getting all this caviar. So they have got to have like government sanctioned. Yep. Processing facilities.

Like, you know, if they were butcher meat, it'd be the USDA. Yeah. Maybe it's the USDA. And then how are they selling it? They got a little roadside shop out here. No. It was all sent out for bid, just like any other, just like any other state generated commodity. It was, okay, we've got X number or X pounds of caviar.

And we're going to sell it to the highest bidder. So it went up to open bid, and who would buy this? Would it be like some New York caviar house? The Japanese bought most of it. Really? The Japanese? Yep. I think right up to the end.

They were the biggest purchasers of it. So how much, do you have any numbers on like how much caviar and how much money was being generated? I mean, it was like a substantial amount of money. The first year was just, it blew everybody's mine away. It was like just short of 20,000 pounds, I think. Wow. And so all this money goes. back into all that money all that money went back into the into the research like

specifically paddlefish research and and so it the paddlefish research didn't didn't cost that much yeah so with that money they put in access areas for fishermen wow they built boat ramps I mean it went back into the fishermen in Oklahoma this was revolutionary like no one no game agency never been done before with a game agency and And you wouldn't believe the perception how it changed in the Woff Department after three or four years. It saw what we were doing for the public. The public absolutely loved it. It was a hands-on.

They were helping. They wanted to get their fish there so we could get the eggs out of it. They could get the meat. And they were helping the Wollop Department. But it was, hunters and fishermen's money would have been going out to do all this management on these paddlefish. and this way it was free. Yeah. And these fish were being killed anyway.

And after, the people in the department completely changed. Like overall, do you know how much money that generated for wildlife? I heard a figure here a while back that it had produced over 10 million. I know that I had one year that it produced 2.8 million when I had one year that it produced 2.8 million when I I was there. Wow. And another year was over $2 million. The success of the program was undeniable, raising a ton of money for Oklahoma fisheries.

But I still haven't told you the whole story. This thing just keeps unraveling. This is the ultimate boomerang Mike Drop ending. Keith and the Paddlefish Research Center from day one had to have an expert in making caviar, which is a delicate process to make the raw eggs into these caviar dreams because this stuff had to be world-class and worth top dollar on the global market. They needed an expert. So who do you think Keith hired?

Do you remember old Billy Ray Wissard? Here's Keith. This was the deal when we brought him in. I did a nationwide search because we wanted the best eggs we could get. I knew he'd been doing eggs for a long time. and he'd sold eggs in New York but I did a nationwide search and interviewed, I think of four or five people

to come and do our eggs in Oklahoma I knew how to do them but I didn't I didn't I was I wasn't a processor and Billy was the best screener that I So Billy came to work for you at the paddlefish research center Yeah after interviewing all nationwide And he was the best He was the best.

Now, if that ain't a full dose of that Bear Grease redemption that we all love, I don't know what is. This Oklahoma Caviar Kingpin that introduced the black market to Oklahoma ended being the lead egg processor in the state for years. As Keith said earlier, Billy has since passed away that he and Keith were good friends right to the end. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease. On the next episode, we're going to talk about a sting operation in Oklahoma called Operation Russian Snack. It has to do with Eastern Europeans, and it's even more wild than this story. Please share our podcast with your friends and families, outlaws, and in-laws, and tell them about the gritty American stories that you're hearing on Bear Greece in this country life.

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